RPGnet Forums

[Screw Danlon]

has anyone posted this yet? Because L O L

 

[Reverend]

The Magnificent Seven is the most triumphal example of the beautiful back and forth between American Westerns and Japanese Samurai films and I will not hear it slandered in my presence. Hell, they recently Remade unforgiven with Ken Watanabe.

This looks beautiful and it actually came out:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2347134/

 

[Wallace]

I think you hit the nail on the head when you referred to them as YA novels in disguise. The focus seems to have shifted away from using the fantastical as escapism to using the fantastical as commentary on real world issues. I don't have a patient zero for this either but I think a good example would be NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy (Hugo Award Winning) where all the discussion is about how the mc is a representation of the abused and exploited female POC in the real world and the sole big worldbuilding conceit (always just one) is a metaphor for climate change in the real world. Is the worldbuilding compelling? Are the characters memorable? Who cares, it won a Hugo, it must be good!

Not... easily, but I'll try. It'll be kind of rambling, bear with me.

Lots of what I see in modern novels is... very personal issues. Family issues, ennui, social strife, displacement, finding your place in things, etc.

Not that these issues were never found in fantasy and sci fi before, but you're seeing a lot more of them now. And when you did see them, they were usually in romantic fantasy. And hey, I like romantic fantasy, but it's a different sort of thing, with different expectations.

And on the flip side, the stuff that would usually be the plot, in older, more traditional works, almost takes a back seat to the personal journey. They don't share equal space. It's... The A plot and the B plot, to use a television term, have gotten switched around.

This makes it sound like another arm of the hipster/SocJus octopus. People like something because it's hip and trendy, meanwhile the original culture of sci-fi has been gentrified out of existence.

 

[Vaclav]

We must've been in different places on Usenet. I know some (hell, many) Usenet mods could be tinpot dictators, but they were at least consistent.

This bunch couldn't be consistent if you put a gun to their heads.

There were moderated Usenet groups, weren't there? Most of them weren't and I remember Usenet as a glorious unmodded pandemonium. If any RPG.net mods hung out on Usenet, I suspect they were crying themselves to sleep night after night because someone mocked them and swore they'd get revenge on all the bullies one day.

 

[AnOminous]

We must've been in different places on Usenet. I know some (hell, many) Usenet mods could be tinpot dictators, but they were at least consistent.

The vast majority of newsgroups were not moderated at all.

There were moderated Usenet groups, weren't there? Most of them weren't and I remember Usenet as a glorious unmodded pandemonium.

There were but they had to be created as such and this required a lot of bureaucratic fuckery. Some people tried to "retromoderate" with cancel messages but the vast majority of sites ignored those anyway. And the alt hierarchy was pretty much a free for all. About the only stuff that most nodes dropped were newsgroups nearly exclusively used for CP.

Well moderated groups were super high signal to noise as Usenet went, but people didn't have to put up with shitmods. If a mod went retard, someone would just create an alt group and everyone would go there instead.

 

[Syaoran Li]

This makes it sound like another arm of the hipster/SocJus octopus. People like something because it's hip and trendy, meanwhile the original culture of sci-fi has been gentrified out of existence.

Is there any way we can bring it back?

 

[Vaclav]

Is there any way we can bring it back?

1. Practice the art in a place where hipsters don't congregate. Create things that interest people in communities where the rot hasn't touched; believe it or not, there are many of these, but most of them are in small out-of-the-way places where the mainstream geek pop culture doesn't have much reach. Don't expect to get famous; most old-school F/SF writers were obscure. People wanting to be famous and relevant is what led to the current situation.

2. Wait for the hipsters to move on. They can't create anything, only copy, and anything they take over will fall into ruin. People directly opposing them feeds into their gestalt, so ignore them and operate on a completely different wavelength. Once the things they took over aren't cool anymore, you can start picking up the pieces.

 

[Shaka Brah]

1. Practice the art in a place where hipsters don't congregate. Create things that interest people in communities where the rot hasn't touched; believe it or not, there are many of these, but most of them are in small out-of-the-way places where the mainstream geek pop culture doesn't have much reach. Don't expect to get famous; most old-school F/SF writers were obscure. People wanting to be famous and relevant is what led to the current situation.

2. Wait for the hipsters to move on. They can't create anything, only copy, and anything they take over will fall into ruin. People directly opposing them feeds into their gestalt, so ignore them and operate on a completely different wavelength. Once the things they took over aren't cool anymore, you can start picking up the pieces.

You can also find a lot of enjoyment in things they're unable to touch. Anything with strong "chauvinistic" overtones or sympathetic authoritarian cultures like Warhammer 40k, Dune, or Legend of the Galactic Heroes tends to send these people packing since they can't like the things they're told are evil.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

You can also find a lot of enjoyment in things they're unable to touch. Anything with strong "chauvinistic" overtones or sympathetic authoritarian cultures like Warhammer 40k, Dune, or Legend of the Galactic Heroes tends to send these people packing since they can't like the things they're told are evil.

Someone clearly isn't familiar with the current state of 40k.

 

[Shaka Brah]

Someone clearly isn't familiar with the current state of 40k.

Ah fuck is it pozed now? I haven't played Warhammer in a long while.

 

[Syaoran Li]

You can also find a lot of enjoyment in things they're unable to touch. Anything with strong "chauvinistic" overtones or sympathetic authoritarian cultures like Warhammer 40k, Dune, or Legend of the Galactic Heroes tends to send these people packing since they can't like the things they're told are evil.

Problem is that they tend to brigade and crusade hard against the things they can't touch (anime, metal, WH40K) and seek out anyone who likes it to brigade against as well.

I just want to enjoy what I like.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

Ah fuck is it pozed now? I haven't played Warhammer in a long while.

Not officially, not yet.

The fandom, however, is.

 

[Vaclav]

Someone clearly isn't familiar with the current state of 40k.

40K is too close to the geek culture mainstream. Dune is a good example of something that isn't. The series addresses complex questions about the evolution of societies and it's hard to use it to prop up the left's simplistic narrative of "evil cishet wypipo vs. everyone else" so they ignore it. I can't imagine how you'd try to create a woke take on the Dune universe.

Dune is also an "auto-gatekeeping" franchise because people below a certain intelligence level simply cannot get into it. Getting through the books is a challenge and if someone can discuss God-Emperor of Dune and make interesting points you know that person has a level of dedication to the franchise. SJWs don't like effort, they like trendy things that they can quickly pick up and declare themselves fans of. Star Wars takes little effort to understand. 40K has a financial barrier to entry but once you've crossed that there's not much more to it, and it's not like hipster tourists care much about playing the actual game anyway.

 

[Shaka Brah]

I can't imagine how you'd try to create a woke take on the Dune universe.

The Golden Path and the idea of freeing one's species from the web of fate would cause people's brains to leak out of their heads if they attempted a postmodern critique of the franchise.

Even just addressing the overt influence of Islamic philosophy on the Fremen and the rule of Paul and Leto II Atreides would be troublesome for them.

 

[Flexo]

Not... easily, but I'll try. It'll be kind of rambling, bear with me.

Lots of what I see in modern novels is... very personal issues. Family issues, ennui, social strife, displacement, finding your place in things, etc.

Not that these issues were never found in fantasy and sci fi before, but you're seeing a lot more of them now. And when you did see them, they were usually in romantic fantasy. And hey, I like romantic fantasy, but it's a different sort of thing, with different expectations.

And on the flip side, the stuff that would usually be the plot, in older, more traditional works, almost takes a back seat to the personal journey. They don't share equal space. It's... The A plot and the B plot, to use a television term, have gotten switched around.

Ah I gotcha. Shamus Young calls it the "details-driven" plot vs the "character-driven" plot. Some might also describe it as the "looking outward" vs "looking inward" type stories.

I think a friend of mine once used the star wars saga to describe the change. Look at the original trilogy. How does the story go? Luke goes out, he struggles, he learns something, he applies what he learned to overcome (or just survive) a challenge at the climax of the story. The Disney Wars movies, how do they go? They almost all end up revolving around giving a passionate speech that "inspires" others to go do something. You could replace Rey or Jyn with a teleprompter and change nothing in the story. Conversely, you can't replace Luke at all without drastically changing the story.

Is there any way we can bring it back?

Look up "pulprev" around sometime. There's some authors working to try and bring back the pulp era feel.

Dune is also an "auto-gatekeeping" franchise because people below a certain intelligence level simply cannot get into it. Getting through the books is a challenge and if someone can discuss God-Emperor of Dune and make interesting points you know that person has a level of dedication to the franchise. SJWs don't like effort, they like trendy things that they can quickly pick up and declare themselves fans of. Star Wars takes little effort to understand. 40K has a financial barrier to entry but once you've crossed that there's not much more to it, and it's not like hipster tourists care much about playing the actual game anyway.

Which is so ironic because as I recall, GEoD is actually a pretty SJW book with Leto II spending long paragraphs going on about why his all female army is superior to any alternative army. Heck the whole thing as I remembered it was like a big long Tumblr "debate" where the other person declares that you're having a "conversation" and by that they really mean you're going to sit there and hear a lecture from them. Whereas on Tumblr they are right because of their oppression points, Leto II is right because he has the whole of his ancestral memories. The problem is... trying to write a preachy book with the preacher supposedly being above normal people in intelligence sets the author up for a hubristic fall.

I do wonder sometimes... I read that book right before I really started getting into internet culture. Maybe my hatred of it helped inoculate me to a lot of the SJW insanity.

 

[Screw Danlon]

Not officially, not yet.

The fandom, however, is.

Matt.Ceb being a prime example.

...does he also have a lolcow thread I don’t know of? Because he should.

mentioning him reminded me of this. This post was Pre-GG, but was, ironically, the reason I decided GG must be the good guys when it did happen.

 

[PancakesPancakesPancakes]

Fuck Ceb, he thinks he owns the fucking forum and is grand high arbiter of all things. He was perma banned for it, appealed, and just kept doing it.

 

[Hugbox Kommissar]

You can also find a lot of enjoyment in things they're unable to touch. Anything with strong "chauvinistic" overtones or sympathetic authoritarian cultures like Warhammer 40k, Dune, or Legend of the Galactic Heroes tends to send these people packing since they can't like the things they're told are evil.

Find something like that+relatively obscure and you're all set. Check out the Black Company series by Glen Cook for a good time.

Fuck Ceb, he thinks he owns the fucking forum and is grand high arbiter of all things. He was perma banned for it, appealed, and just kept doing it.

Only on rpg.net would you get a 40 year old goth gatekeeping other people's taste in media.

 

[Creepuscular]

Ironically, as much as I thought he was an asshole, I think the day they banned Curt is the day they proved that they didn’t know wtf they were doing.

Isn’t the shit that got Curt banned pretty much the same shit that’s now regular mod behavior?

Maybe my memory is off, but I thought his big problem was he’d go nuclear on anyone without “woke” opinions about being gay.


I must admit, I liked his avatar.

 

[Screw Danlon]

Isn’t the shit that got Curt banned pretty much the same shit that’s now regular mod behavior?

Maybe my memory is off, but I thought his big problem was he’d go nuclear on anyone without “woke” opinions about being gay.

Pretty much. There was slightly more nuance, but yes.