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So which is better? Obviously everybody smells a bit like wee in a fantasy setting but the boys all have such beautiful hair. Which is the better to show off a fine leg you are somewhat vain of: britches or a silver jumpsuit? Are spaceships cooler than dragons? STATE YOUR CASE
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Feb 23, 2021 22:01
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it's all fantasy OP
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Feb 23, 2021 22:46
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In scifi technology makes everyone a wizard, but in fantasy there's people who aren't wizards that can beat wizards in a fight. QED.
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Feb 23, 2021 23:40
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What lame fantasy are you seeing where a wizard loses?
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Feb 23, 2021 23:59
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Some Goon posted:What lame fantasy are you seeing where a wizard loses? UM, CONAN THE BARBARIAN YOU DINK 
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Feb 24, 2021 00:09
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If anything it's the sign of good fantasy if the wizard loses. Conan, Big Trouble In Little China, Adventure Time - all great stories where the wizard(s) gets their butt whipped. Meanwhile the big "wizards win" fantasy is Harry Potter.
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Feb 24, 2021 01:58
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That's wizard vs wizard, that doesn't count.
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Feb 24, 2021 02:33
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Wizard v Wizard can also have the wizard getting the butt whipped the focus - think about the best scenes in Lord of the Rings.
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Feb 24, 2021 02:35
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Gandalf (wizard) gets pwned by Balrog (demon) and King of the Nazgul (witch) as well as Pippin (hobbit).
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Feb 24, 2021 03:11
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The Witch King is the least Wizard Wizard outside of Adventure Time and he pwns Gandalf, the Most Wizard of All Wizards, thus proving that Lord of the Rings is high art.
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Feb 24, 2021 03:12
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Gandalf fuckin rules. remeber when he conks Denethor on the head and sayd "Prepare for battle" like a BOSS
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Feb 24, 2021 03:15
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indigi posted:Gandalf fuckin rules. remeber when he conks Denethor on the head and sayd "Prepare for battle" like a BOSS I remember when he tricks the guard into letting him keep his staff and then gives Aragorn a saucy wink, and then he owns Sarumon's dumb rear end when he be like YOU HAVE NO POWAH HERE only to reveal he's stolen that traitor's color. Or... lack of color.
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Feb 24, 2021 03:19
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I mean we settled this back in world war two when technology killed magic in multiple different fictional timelines.
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Feb 24, 2021 04:38
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reignofevil posted:I mean we settled this back in world war two when technology killed magic in multiple different fictional timelines. Another thing Nazi's ruined! 
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Feb 24, 2021 06:09
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Wizards are usually either somehow limited or stupid, because otherwise they'd focus their efforts on making their setting not-medieval because being surrounded by poo poo sucks.
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Feb 24, 2021 06:26
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Kirk is basically a Dragonrider of Pern WRT The Enterprise if you think on it
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Feb 24, 2021 06:38
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fantasy: patronized by dweebs who imagine they'll get transported to a fictional world where they have magic powers and can bang hot elf chicks sci-fi: patronized by dweebs who imagine they'll get transported to a fictional world where they have psionic powers and can bang hot alien chicks
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Feb 24, 2021 07:25
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Cobalt-60 posted:fantasy: patronized by dweebs who imagine they'll get transported to a fictional world where they have magic powers and can bang hot elf chicks I remember a time when scifi was patronized by dweebs who had the entirely realistic and grounded fantasy of being cryogenically frozen into a utopian future where hot alien chicks would want to bang them just because of societal progress toward more free love dagnabbit!
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Feb 24, 2021 07:45
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Just cause the love is free doesn't mean theres any available for you. Wizard on Wizard violence is a constant, ongoing problem. Less than 1% of the population are wizards but they commit 100% of the crimes against god and decency.
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Feb 24, 2021 07:47
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I'm about to enter into my zone.
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Feb 24, 2021 15:09
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Undoubtedly sci-fi is better. You can have dragons and wizards and whatever poo poo you want in sci-fi plus basic hygiene to clean up all that poo poo too. You could even have dragons that fight spaceships with lasers in space. That is impossible in fantasy because it would become sci-fi then. By contrast if you don't have dragons and elves and all that tired poo poo in your fantasy people will be all "this is bullshit i wanna gently caress ELVES". Plus you gotta invent a "system of magic" which is stupid as hell and the most efficient way to take all the magic out of magic. Oh and the only universe where the Witch King could own Gandalf is in PJ's hosed up mind.
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Feb 24, 2021 19:14
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fantasy: no internal plumbing sci-fi: ADVANCED future plumbing!
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Feb 24, 2021 19:21
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Cobalt-60 posted:fantasy: no internal plumbing 
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Feb 24, 2021 19:24
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Mooey Cow posted:Oh and the only universe where the Witch King could own Gandalf is in PJ's hosed up mind. Gandalf wasn’t allowed to own the witch king. he wasn’t really allowed to own the balrog
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Feb 24, 2021 19:55
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indigi posted:Gandalf wasn’t allowed to own the witch king. he wasn’t really allowed to own the balrog The Witch King is a little baby compared to the balrog
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Feb 24, 2021 20:12
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 Gandalf is an angel anyways.
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Feb 24, 2021 20:17
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Mooey Cow posted:The Witch King is a little baby compared to the balrog no duh but he's not supposed to be fighting them, that's why Manwe nerfed the Istari by tying so much of their power into their staff and making them old dudes. they're just supposed to help and inspire the people of Middle Earth to do it themselves. Gandalf could have owned Smaug too but that's not his jurisdiction
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Feb 24, 2021 21:34
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SlothfulCobra posted:Wizards are usually either somehow limited or stupid, because otherwise they'd focus their efforts on making their setting not-medieval because being surrounded by poo poo sucks. Joe Abercrombie's explanation was that the wizard(s) want things to suck poo poo because everybody living in misery enables them to more easily leverage power over the people around them and thus grow institutional power to their benefit. Matt Stover's books had "smarter people than any of the characters have tried to come up with explanations for why wizards haven't just made the world not suck and they're wrong cuz they're dumb nerds, but this is not a book about nerds this is a book about dudes trying to assassinate gods and capitalism." I think in Ars Magica, wizards don't make the world meaningfully better because they're too petty and conservative to care about anything other than making GBS threads on each other. Checks n balances baby. Mooey Cow posted:Undoubtedly sci-fi is better. You can have dragons and wizards and whatever poo poo you want in sci-fi plus basic hygiene to clean up all that poo poo too. You could even have dragons that fight spaceships with lasers in space. That is impossible in fantasy because it would become sci-fi then. By contrast if you don't have dragons and elves and all that tired poo poo in your fantasy people will be all "this is bullshit i wanna gently caress ELVES". Plus you gotta invent a "system of magic" which is stupid as hell and the most efficient way to take all the magic out of magic. Any setting that has FTL is fantasy anyway. But also fantasy settings shouldn't invent "systems of magic" hard agree on that. I've had seen too many discussions with star wars nerds who try to figure out the power levels of Yoda vs. the Emperor and how its "unrealistic" that somebody who wasn't already deemed significantly force sensitive enough was able to use x amount of force power and just man, the force is about how smoking weed and listening to strawberry alarm clock will end with your dad loving you.
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Feb 24, 2021 21:37
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Tulip posted:Joe Abercrombie's explanation was that the wizard(s) want things to suck poo poo because everybody living in misery enables them to more easily leverage power over the people around them and thus grow institutional power to their benefit. Juvens seemed to want to make things better generally. unrelated but I always thought the time span in those books was off, there really should have been more than ~500 years between the fall of the Old Empire and the ascendancy of The Union, that's not really enough time for Bayaz to have built that empire. should have been closer to 1k years
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Feb 24, 2021 21:46
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Even if wizards just have no interest in improving the world and magic just can't provide basic sanitation, if magic is just a thing that can be taught, all the kingdoms in the world would be investing into big universities to fill their armies with fireball machines. You wouldn't want people to be powerful freelance wizards like D&D seems built on. Or maybe you'd send secret assassins after any powerful wizards who go wandering off like in Dark Souls. Tulip posted:Any setting that has FTL is fantasy anyway. But also fantasy settings shouldn't invent "systems of magic" hard agree on that. I've had seen too many discussions with star wars nerds who try to figure out the power levels of Yoda vs. the Emperor and how its "unrealistic" that somebody who wasn't already deemed significantly force sensitive enough was able to use x amount of force power and just man, the force is about how smoking weed and listening to strawberry alarm clock will end with your dad loving you. Power levels are such a dumb concept because they were originally introduced as part of Dragonball trying to dip into sci-fi after being mostly fantasy and power levels were the way that aliens measured all this magic poo poo. And then it turned out that scouters just didn't loving work, earth fighters had wildly variable power levels that bounced up and down and everybody could just reduce their signature to nothing or just rocket off the scale. The entire concept was entirely meaningless on purpose. Although as Dragonball Z went on, all the concepts that were initially subversions wound up getting played straight after a while. It turned out that a lot of people got really into that scene of a character being amazed at a guy powering up to some hitherto unknown level.
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Feb 24, 2021 22:14
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Tulip posted:Any setting that has FTL is fantasy anyway. I think it would be foolish to make "wrong or improbable by current concensus" the criteria to make something one or the other. By that measure "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was fantasy when it came out because giant squids were questionable, and then became sci-fi decades later when whole specimen were found. And then it becomes fantasy again when you read it in French because there it's an octopus, not a squid.
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Feb 24, 2021 22:27
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indigi posted:Juvens seemed to want to make things better generally. unrelated but I always thought the time span in those books was off, there really should have been more than ~500 years between the fall of the Old Empire and the ascendancy of The Union, that's not really enough time for Bayaz to have built that empire. should have been closer to 1k years poo poo, I really didn't keep track of how long the time spans were once I caught onto Bayaz being biblically old. And yeah I think it's fair that mages other than Bayaz may have had an interest in making things better (if Khalul is trying to improve things its in ways that I don't get, and I know Zacharus is trying to improve things but is also a dumb jackass, while the rest of them are just kind of weird shut ins). SlothfulCobra posted:Even if wizards just have no interest in improving the world and magic just can't provide basic sanitation, if magic is just a thing that can be taught, all the kingdoms in the world would be investing into big universities to fill their armies with fireball machines. In fairness to the boring rear end medieval fantasy tropes, it's a major feature of medieval society that the state capacity and bureaucracy is really, really loving weak. It's doubtful that medieval kings wanted to have their entire existence be a balancing structure between a dozen competing centers of power (in Europe, including a transnational intellectual bureaucracy), a decent number of whom can just defect with their land and population to your rivals. Scott Lynch's setting went in on their explanation for why wizards were not all just big state assets: the wizards unionized and murdered the gently caress out of every wizard who wasn't part of their union, so there's just one big independent wizard union/mafia you have to go through. Mooey Cow posted:I think it would be foolish to make "wrong or improbable by current concensus" the criteria to make something one or the other. By that measure "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was fantasy when it came out because giant squids were questionable, and then became sci-fi decades later when whole specimen were found. And then it becomes fantasy again when you read it in French because there it's an octopus, not a squid. A fiction where the maximum speed isn't the same as it is in this universe isn't a "what if an odd species existed" kind of thing, it's a "what if the basic way that we interact with the physical world was an illusion" kind of thing. And I'm pretty comfortable with "fantasy effectively subsumed the entire scifi genre."
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Feb 24, 2021 22:55
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Captain Nemo in fluidic space.
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Feb 24, 2021 23:01
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Tulip posted:A fiction where the maximum speed isn't the same as it is in this universe isn't a "what if an odd species existed" kind of thing, it's a "what if the basic way that we interact with the physical world was an illusion" kind of thing. And I'm pretty comfortable with "fantasy effectively subsumed the entire scifi genre." Haven't we discovered at least one subatomic particle that we've measured moving at faster than light speeds? I feel like I read an article about that in college. I guess it could be measurement error, but I dunno.
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Feb 24, 2021 23:02
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Sanguinia posted:Haven't we discovered at least one subatomic particle that we've measured moving at faster than light speeds? I feel like I read an article about that in college. I guess it could be measurement error, but I dunno. They thought Neutrinos, but they'd hosed it. They'd biffed it large style.
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Feb 24, 2021 23:05
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Sanguinia posted:Haven't we discovered at least one subatomic particle that we've measured moving at faster than light speeds? I feel like I read an article about that in college. I guess it could be measurement error, but I dunno. we haven't observed anything with mass moving at or beyond light speed in a vacuum and it's incompatible with most physical theories of the universe. even workaround solutions to this limit don't function unless you find theoretical poo poo like exotic matter with negative mass, or they learn something about the casmir effect that allows it to fulfill the same role. that said I don't think it's necessarily in the realm of fantasy to imagine this will always remain true, whether through a scientific discovery, breakthrough, or something really weird like the false vacuum collapsing to a slightly lower energy state where the only thing that changes is the speed of light. but even that would probably only propagate at the speed of light so you'd still be limited in how far you could travel that quickly.
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Feb 24, 2021 23:20
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Tulip posted:A fiction where the maximum speed isn't the same as it is in this universe isn't a "what if an odd species existed" kind of thing, it's a "what if the basic way that we interact with the physical world was an illusion" kind of thing. And I'm pretty comfortable with "fantasy effectively subsumed the entire scifi genre." It's a "our knowledge of physics is incomplete" kind of thing, but that doesn't change that science that happens to be wrong can still be science.
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Feb 24, 2021 23:30
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Can magical anti-vaxxer's block super-luminal inoculations?
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Feb 24, 2021 23:34
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Cobalt-60 posted:fantasy: no internal plumbing or alternative Sci-fi: There is no internal plumbing, but there are three shells.
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Feb 25, 2021 01:07
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gently caress plumbing, I want a tiny wormhole at the exit of my butt that transports all poop away
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Feb 25, 2021 02:00
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