MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin

Must I, really?

> > Really? Batman is fantasy. You start by breaking the rules.
>
>
> People have swallowed this 'breaking rules' catfish, hook line and sinker. As a tech,
> you should aspire to dispel it in entirety, across Culture. Bach and Beethoven
> 'broke' rules of voice-leading - but those were conditional upon diatonic
> sensibility. The resulting orchestration was not fantastic, but merely more complex.

It's fantasy, not science. The rules I'm talking about breaking therein are that such things as super-powered humans can exist, or that non-terrestrial intelligences can act within the scope of our lives. These things are integral to the DC and Marvel universes; without them, the framework of the shows cannot exist, and so go the shows themselves. A show possibly similar to Gotham (I haven't watched it yet) could exist without the multitude of heroes and villains shaped by convenient and wholly unrealistic survivable industrial accidents and supernatural training, but it would not be a show within the DC universe, and so not "Gotham."

All the show has going for it, really, is that. Remove the promise of those twisted, tortured souls, and it becomes any other cop drama you care to name. You can only hope that the resulting program refrains from turning single pixels into legible license plates, firing 100 rounds from a 10-round magazine, having hackers simultaneously share a keyboard, or any of the other sins those shows commit.

> The earliest science fiction shows used fantastic (rather than sensational) elements
> to explore exciting concepts. But the testament that the average human is still of a
> tribal mind is shown in the scifi that overshadowed those early shows, and that has
> borne into current times.

Discussion of just what shows you have in mind for each period, and if they are science fiction, can be set aside for now.

I prefer the mundane scientific fiction of such things as Bones or House (when they don't break the rules of technology), to the monsters and supernatural dramas of things that are clearly fantasy, but each genre has its own tropes, and I've no problem with the base "this is a world in which X exists" that they start with, provided they maintain a grasp on reality otherwise. That basis is where pretty much all science fiction writing stands, analyzing the mind of humanity in light of a single "what if...?" proposal. These things stand entirely separate from the "TV tropes" that mar nearly every program, regardless of genre.

The last is what ruins shows. How much of a violation of reality the remote hacking of an offline system or the timed tracing of a GPS-enabled cell phone call is, and how central that might be to the resolution of the plot, is where the writing succeeds or fails, and essentially MG's gripe that spawned this branch.

Hmm... I've no interest in reviewing this post for clarity and cohesiveness, so I must be done.