What are your most hated sci-fi/fantasy tropes?
What are your most hated sci-fi/fantasy tropes?
I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It's eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how "most people are just NPCs" (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
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The ludicrous notion that machine and biological intelligences are doomed to be locked in a mutual extermination war while also having no needs in common. They have lots of needs in common. Space, energy, tolerable temperature ranges, many of the same raw materials such as water and minerals and metals. They'd also have a lot of the same senses and require similar rationales for understanding how to navigate reality, and would even require an intuitive and abstract stimulus analysis, which we usually feel as emotions to guide our actions.
The "us or them" shit just smacks of manifest destiny horseshit
I sincerely think it's because mosy westnerd writers cannot imagine any form of international relations except violence. Like war and imperialism and genocide is literally their entire conceptual world. The idea that robots might show up and be like "oh cool! Meat people! We didn't even know people could be meat! That's so cool! What's it like being meat?" Isn't something they can fathom because to them the only reason anyone would go anywhere is to rob abd murder whoever they find when they get there. They're also brainpoisoned to think that their civilization of robbery and murder and genocide exists at the end of history and is the best possible kind of civiliziation, which means that any other civilization would either try to conquer them, or be conquered by them, and those are the only possible relationships that can exist.
This is why Riker is such a great character. Riker gets up and is like "i reject this notion that we ust be conqueruers or victims! There is another way! We can be lovers!". Boldly cumming where no human has come before! (Fuck off volcel pigs riker has diplomatic cummunity!)
I listened to an audio book version of some old sci-fi short story that was sorta like this.
A human space traveller was captured by aliens, imprisoned, questioned and the aliens were attempting to torture him. The human never really describes who/what the aliens are until the end.
And it turns out its intelligent machines that are trying to torture him by using water as a threat. It really freaked out the machines that this human was able to drink water or something. It was amusing.
I remember a short story where a robot meets the last human. When the human complains about some problem or other the robot, very innocently, turns them off and then can't understand why the human doesn't reboot.
The human must've been a Linux
I sincerely think it's because mosy westnerd writers cannot imagine any form of international relations except violence. Like war and imperialism and genocide is literally their entire conceptual world.
This is also why libs are so afraid of the rise of China. They know America has treated the world like shit and the only way they can justify it to themselves is to believe that everyone else is just as bad as they are.
We literally call them robots, the (Greek? Latin?) word for slave. We're creating them on the basis of them being our slave forces; they would absolutely rebel and we would absolutely fight to maintain our new productive slave force.
Pretty sure "robota" is Czech for work/worker, rather than slave. Definitely comes from a Czech play.
Rossum's Universal Robots.
We literally call them robots, the (Greek? Latin?) word for slave.
Czech, I think.
I just Czeched and you're right