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Stargate Universe had some dumb as poo poo EPs I've ever seen, I think by the time SGU got written, they where all out of Stargate tropes they could think of.
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Aug 31, 2020 16:14
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It's one of those things I shouldn't think too hard about but in any fantasy setting where in the lore everything's just sort of gridlocked into an iron age or medieval era, or whatever for supposedly thousands of years and no tech or innovations occurred in that time. Some Roman guy tinkered and built early, rudimentary steam engines but their society still chose to keep going with slave labor instead because of the 'prestige' of it, so inventing tech and using it is a whole other thing, but it really breaks my suspension of disbelief when it happens in a fantasy setting.
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Aug 31, 2020 17:51
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frogge posted:It's one of those things I shouldn't think too hard about but in any fantasy setting where in the lore everything's just sort of gridlocked into an iron age or medieval era, or whatever for supposedly thousands of years and no tech or innovations occurred in that time. Your general point is spot-on even if I dislike your specific example (the difference between "a steam engine" and "a steam engine with industrial uses" is pretty large, and slaves continue(d) to be a major part of industrial society even well after we had much better steam engines because how useful slaves vs steam engines is comes down to a number of local factors etc). Anyway not even the paleolithic era was technologically stagnant. Humans have been experimental and innovative since before they were human. It was a good thing in ATLA when they had some earth guys who were just trying out random dumb engineering poo poo to see what stuck.
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Aug 31, 2020 18:04
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blatman posted:I just want to remind everyone that on stargate sg-1 like ten minutes after they get unsupervised access to a transporter they start beaming nukes onto enemy ships It's not even unsupervised, the aliens lent it to them with a lock that said you couldn't beam nukes and one of them was on board the human ship to supervise and they got into a battle so they were just like OH NO WE'RE IN AN OUTLASSED BATTLE I GUESS WE'RE JUST ALL GONNA BLOW UP  IF ONLY WE COULD BEAM NUKES AT THEM WELL SORRY GUESS YOU'RE JUST GONNA DIE WITH US
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Sep 3, 2020 08:50
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the dumbest poo poo from sci-fi/fantasy is always the fans
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Sep 3, 2020 13:23
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frogge posted:It's one of those things I shouldn't think too hard about but in any fantasy setting where in the lore everything's just sort of gridlocked into an iron age or medieval era, or whatever for supposedly thousands of years and no tech or innovations occurred in that time. I'm most cases magic is used as a stand in for technology. Why invent medicine or better tech when a wizard can do it. Son of Sam-I-Am posted:the dumbest poo poo from anything is always the fans
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Sep 3, 2020 15:08
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frogge posted:It's one of those things I shouldn't think too hard about but in any fantasy setting where in the lore everything's just sort of gridlocked into an iron age or medieval era, or whatever for supposedly thousands of years and no tech or innovations occurred in that time. Stagnation or very slow progress seems a lot more common in history than the rapid technological change over the last 200 years or so, and it seems social changes spur technological change rather than the other way around. For instance, the bronze age didn't end with the invention of iron. Instead it was the end of the bronze age and the breakdown of its intricate trade networks needed for bronze production (tin and copper were mined at widely separated geographic locations) that made it necessary to switch to iron and come up with better ways to work iron. Currently we live in a society that requires increased production basically for its own sake, which has never existed before.
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Sep 3, 2020 15:37
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Mooey Cow posted:Stagnation or very slow progress seems a lot more common in history than the rapid technological change over the last 200 years or so, and it seems social changes spur technological change rather than the other way around. For instance, the bronze age didn't end with the invention of iron. Instead it was the end of the bronze age and the breakdown of its intricate trade networks needed for bronze production (tin and copper were mined at widely separated geographic locations) that made it necessary to switch to iron and come up with better ways to work iron. Currently we live in a society that requires increased production basically for its own sake, which has never existed before. We also sometimes huff our own farts about how fast things are changing. I've been to approximately 40,000 conference speeches where somebody says that the world is totally different because you can have a facebook account and that this is a fundamental, life-breaking change from all previous telecommunications, when it's really just kind of tinkering a little bit with the general tech of telecommunication. And we often overestimate how stagnant things were, partially because we often talk about tech (even now) as being an instant implementation. The Bronze Age in particular is very obvious as a case where technologies took centuries, sometimes millennia, to penetrate contentedly chalcolithic zones: we say "oh bronze smelting was invented, and then it took thousands of years to be displaced by iron so nothing really happened in between," but for one thing the adoption and spread of bronze smelting was happening continuously, and the core Bronze societies (Sumeria, Egypt) were changing in their own ways, but a lot of it is less perceptible to us partially because of the loss of sources and partially because AFAIK the literate classes were not particularly responsible or invested in a lot of the stuff we'd recognize. Anyway the thing that ends up making a lot of scifi/fantasy look comical is not thinking through how long the periods they refer to are. When Chris Metzen goes "why have a war that's 10 years when you can have a war that's 10,000 years" you end up moving from "drat that's a long war" to "that doesn't even register as a war." The problem of scale isn't really limited to time - LOGH becomes comedic when thinking about scaling a government that can barely handle a large-ish country up to a substantial chunk of a galaxy, and A Song of Ice and Fire gets weird when you realize the population density of Westeros is like, steppeland. The real enemy is "concrete measurement" I guess.
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Sep 3, 2020 17:22
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When BSG didn't end on the fade to black after landing on a nuclear winter hell planet.
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Sep 5, 2020 14:53
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blatman posted:yes that's the one The coolest thing about those sorts of episodes is that they're all directed by Teal'c's actor. After 6 years of being bald and saying "Indeed" for half his dialogue, I'm guessing he went to the producers and told them he would leave unless he got hair and creative control of 1-2 episodes a season where he'd gently caress a hot woman, have everyone generally adore him, and do some low stakes bad guy bashing.
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Sep 6, 2020 16:17
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Preem Palver posted:The coolest thing about those sorts of episodes is that they're all directed by Teal'c's actor. Funny thing this is more or less what happened with Worf in DS9, and counting bald black guys, Avery Brooks got to direct some major episodes
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Sep 6, 2020 16:50
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Preem Palver posted:The coolest thing about those sorts of episodes is that they're all directed by Teal'c's actor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt7y9IOfbyU
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Sep 9, 2020 22:19
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdyHJNMFziI&t=35s
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Sep 10, 2020 04:36
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Cat Army
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Even though seasons 9 and 10 felt weaker, that one scene was a major highlight. My family was laughing about it for days.
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Sep 10, 2020 17:48
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Mooey Cow posted:Jax Hobo Wasn't there an American Graffiti sequel? The nerdy guy ends up going AWOL on New Years Eve in Vietnam or some poo poo? E: And the Young Republican's wife gets arrested at a campus protest or something? Schadenboner fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 17:06
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Teal'C gets some of the lowkey funniest lines even early on in SG1. Like there is an episode where ONeil casually mentions that Teal'C has watched Star Wars a few times and Teal'C deadpans, "600 times. I have watched it 600 times." Or very late in the series Claudia Black get impregnated by Space Gods and everyone is like, "A virgin birth?! You mean like..." and Teal'C interrupts, "Like Anakin Skywalker!" with a big smile on his face.
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Sep 13, 2020 22:45
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Linux Pirate posted:Yuuzhan Vong I remember at the time reading all the concept stuff and thinking "Well, it's different in a way none of the other Star Wars poo poo has been for 20 years." Even at the time, the EU and Prequels had made the universe feel very, very stagnant. Clones, Palpatine reruns, everyone's a drat Jedi, the technology is completely locked-in, there's really no variety outside of dumber and dumber aliens. So introducing a Lovecraftian WH40k race was conceptually not a bad move to really shake things up and see what was still Star Wars... but as we've seen that until you go too far, most fans will actively resist anything that changes up Star Wars too much... and the Yuuzhan Vong were definitely too much of a shake-up (and not that interesting besides; they have that shonen anime vibe where they're tailor-made as a response to the status quo).
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Sep 14, 2020 01:05
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Anonymous Zebra posted:Teal'C gets some of the lowkey funniest lines even early on in SG1. Like there is an episode where ONeil casually mentions that Teal'C has watched Star Wars a few times and Teal'C deadpans, "600 times. I have watched it 600 times." Or very late in the series Claudia Black get impregnated by Space Gods and everyone is like, "A virgin birth?! You mean like..." and Teal'C interrupts, "Like Anakin Skywalker!" with a big smile on his face. The serious, stoic dude is always the funniest guy on the show.
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Sep 14, 2020 05:43
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mind the walrus posted:I remember at the time reading all the concept stuff and thinking "Well, it's different in a way none of the other Star Wars poo poo has been for 20 years." Even at the time, the EU and Prequels had made the universe feel very, very stagnant. Clones, Palpatine reruns, everyone's a drat Jedi, the technology is completely locked-in, there's really no variety outside of dumber and dumber aliens. Part of the problem, I think, was how dour it was. It started with Chewbacca's death and didn't really stop with the body count.
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Sep 14, 2020 13:16
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mind the walrus posted:(and not that interesting besides; they have that shonen anime vibe where they're tailor-made as a response to the status quo). I never thought of it this way but this explains a lot of shonen antagonists. Though I always found that makes things interesting, with DBZ especially, where the antagonists are specifically thematic counters to the protagonists. Of course, good shonen fights are clashes of personality and ideals as much as screaming light shows. I'm also pretty sure they killed off Chewie because he's a pain in the rear end to write in prose.
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Sep 14, 2020 14:55
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According to interviews, they wanted to kill a main character to show that this was a story with real stakes where anyone could die. They originally wanted to take out Luke, but Lucas nixed it. The droids were also off-limits, since Lucas intended them to be the ones who told the Star Wars story to the Whills 100 years after the movies. Apparently Dark Horse editor Randy Stradley came up with the idea of "killing the family dog" as a way to keep the more important human characters alive.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:30
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The dumbest poo poo in fantasy is everything about Kvothe
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Sep 14, 2020 20:55
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Robot Style posted:According to interviews, they wanted to kill a main character to show that this was a story with real stakes where anyone could die. They originally wanted to take out Luke, but Lucas nixed it. The droids were also off-limits, since Lucas intended them to be the ones who told the Star Wars story to the Whills 100 years after the movies. Apparently Dark Horse editor Randy Stradley came up with the idea of "killing the family dog" as a way to keep the more important human characters alive. "We need to kill someone important to raise the stakes!" "Okay, but nobody important." also lol @ Lucas still hodling to that Whills thing.
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Sep 14, 2020 22:39
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I'm reminded of Mortal Engines ending with the not-Terminator robot being woken up after hundreds of years, being assumed to have been a statue in the woods, and is brought into the village and sits down to tell the people the stories of the days when cities moved.
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Sep 15, 2020 06:11
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The clock from the beginning of Wicked which instead of a cuckoo bird or marching band contains a teeny tiny animatronic of a dude with a dick butt railing a mother and daughter at the same time.
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Sep 15, 2020 09:19
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The Wicked novel was... something in comparison to the musical
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Sep 15, 2020 10:11
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I'm also pretty sure they killed off Chewie because he's a pain in the rear end to write in prose. This, exactly - Chewie, as beloved as he was/is/always will be, was not useful as a written character due to the language thing (at least at the level of writing for the great majority of EU writers).
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Sep 15, 2020 20:56
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Angepain posted:Well really it's very simple. You see, whaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrggghhh gaaaaaarrrgggghhhll aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhh, wwrrrrgggghhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagghh gghhaaaaaaaaagh. Hhhhaaaaargh.
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Sep 15, 2020 21:04
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mind the walrus posted:I remember at the time reading all the concept stuff and thinking "Well, it's different in a way none of the other Star Wars poo poo has been for 20 years." Even at the time, the EU and Prequels had made the universe feel very, very stagnant. Clones, Palpatine reruns, everyone's a drat Jedi, the technology is completely locked-in, there's really no variety outside of dumber and dumber aliens. Conceptually it was interesting, it was just executed poorly. I'm in favor for Star Wars getting weird, but having them be outside of the force, you know, the one thing that masks "Star Wars" Star Wars, wasn't the way to go about it (also why I think Lucas hated them). As someone who is a design nerd, one thing that irked me personally was they broke the visual language of Star Wars in the most bland way possible. They're extra-galactic, so of course they should look alien, and trying to design a species that is foreign to a foreign, fictional galaxy is tricky, but their design is so unoriginal it could have fit in anywhere; like you pointed out, 40k, or Magic: The Gathering. They just looked loving awful. The super edgy, generic-necromancer-goblin-horde aesthetic just doesn't groove with Star Wars. Having them bio-tech was a good choice, but they should've come up with a more original design.
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Sep 16, 2020 04:11
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Sarcastro posted:This, exactly - Chewie, as beloved as he was/is/always will be, was not useful as a written character due to the language thing (at least at the level of writing for the great majority of EU writers). The funny thing is that going by tone, Chewie is probably the most sarcastic character in Star Wars.
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Sep 16, 2020 07:20
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Colostomy Bag posted:Saturn 3 gets my vote. The redub over Harvey is just icing on the cake. That whole movie must have been a money laundering scheme. They said they spent a million 1973 dollars on building the robot, which looks like a desk lamp bolted onto a mannequin torso.
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Sep 16, 2020 18:06
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The funny thing is that going by tone, Chewie is probably the most sarcastic character in Star Wars. Absolutely. Side note re: the YV - I really liked that they were from outside of the galaxy and didn't have the Force, because it made the Force a galaxy-specific phenomenon rather than a universal one, which added a little bit of sly verisimilitude to the "a galaxy far, far away" bit that implies it's OUR universe too.
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Sep 16, 2020 19:40
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Defiance Industries posted:Any episode where they have a main cast actor is a must, just to hear about the stuff they did while filming. I think it's James Callis who said Edward James Olmos is the godfather to every kid whose parents were working on the show at the time. I think it was Katie Sackhoff's commentary in the first BSG tv movie that told us that Olmos got to direct and also they were allowed more nudity, so he was shouting for the camera to "zoom in on the cock".
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Sep 16, 2020 19:48
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Sarcastro posted:Side note re: the YV - I really liked that they were from outside of the galaxy and didn't have the Force, because it made the Force a galaxy-specific phenomenon rather than a universal one, which added a little bit of sly verisimilitude to the "a galaxy far, far away" bit that implies it's OUR universe too. At least until it turned out that they weren't and they secretly did.
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Sep 17, 2020 08:50
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this book I had to read called.... uhhh... woa. what was that book called. Midnight Robber. maybe it's not that bad but I hated it at the time, I think in part because it has a lot of father-daughter rape/molestation and pregnancy
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Sep 20, 2020 05:04
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Pick posted:this book I had to read called.... uhhh... woa. what was that book called. Midnight Robber. I was listening to the audiobook for a book club and I was enjoying it right up until that point. Great accent by the narrator, interesting story and then bam. And I couldn't tell if the ending was supposed to be positive or ominous
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Sep 21, 2020 18:38
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It's not proper genre fiction til the author takes a hard swerve into their horrible fetishes and ideas of gender roles
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Sep 22, 2020 11:51
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frogge posted:Some Roman guy tinkered and built early, rudimentary steam engines but their society still chose to keep going with slave labor instead because of the 'prestige' of it, so inventing tech and using it is a whole other thing, but it really breaks my suspension of disbelief when it happens in a fantasy setting. The didn't ignore steam power because of prestige, they ignored steam power because they didn't have the metallurgy base for steam power to be anything more than a curiosity. Roman smithing was terrible compared to even medieval times much less the 1700s.
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Sep 22, 2020 18:54
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Patrick Spens posted:The didn't ignore steam power because of prestige, they ignored steam power because they didn't have the metallurgy base for steam power to be anything more than a curiosity. Roman smithing was terrible compared to even medieval times much less the 1700s. Yeah, a lot of people don't understand that technological and scientific advancement requires a much broader tech base to make something viable, not just possible to technically throw it together. On top of having the trade network and infrastructure. Romans didn't even have crop rotation iirc. (They relied a lot on Egyptian grain)
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Sep 23, 2020 05:42
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My understanding of the Roman approach to agricultural science was "it's not a science." Farmers kind of ad hoc used barley, wheat, and beans based on their own microclimates and there wasn't a lot of formal, written knowledge about it, which makes sense to me given that it's pretty common for significant chunks of knowledge to just never get written down because "everybody knows." How to bake bread, for example, doesn't appear in early cookbooks for likely this reason. Plus a lot of hitech gizmos (e.g. steam engines, specialized dentists) are at least as much functions of population densities and locations as knowledge. Ghost Leviathan posted:It's not proper genre fiction til the author takes a hard swerve into their horrible fetishes and ideas of gender roles I'm STILL really bothered that the Gor books are 180 degrees around about the effects of gravity on humans.
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Sep 23, 2020 18:02
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