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Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

"Let's go! open up, it's time for Unpop!"
Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
"You're late. You know the deal. You can Omelaspost for a Funny, or you can make an interesting post for an Insightful."
Here in Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation, no one chooses to make interesting posts. It's better to make the one joke everyone knows for the Funny, rather than risk your entire life for just one Insightful rating.
"Tomorrow you better not be late, or I'll have you posting for Informative reactions as punishment."
"Yes sir, sorry, I won't be late next time."

Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.
 
If you're around my age then book Snape is probably your first exposures to an asshole that's still ultimately working for the good guys or has a motivation slightly more complex than cartoon villainy.

That leaves an impact on people.
 
Queshire said:
If you're around my age then book Snape is probably your first exposures to an asshole that's still ultimately working for the good guys or has a motivation slightly more complex than cartoon villainy.

That leaves an impact on people.
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Really what everything around Harry Potter boils down to. It was a ton of people's first and we live in a society that makes it all-to easy to mire yourself in your first obsession forever and ever.
 
prometheus110 said:
I think people tend to make make every character too smoothly professional and too on the ball.
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The problem with trying to weight more towards realism is that it's not as dramatically/narratively satisfying for things to just go wrong without any particular cause. Like, the IRL sinking of HMS Sheffield occurred partly because of random glitches in British radar systems that made the task force not trust warnings of inbound missiles, but I don't think that'd be a particularly satisfying way to complicate things in a similar sci-fi scenario.

That being said, I do think there's a pretty common trend in fiction of characters being less than smooth, making mistakes, etc. -- because of events in their personal lives or flaws in their character leading them to get careless or slip up.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
For most people it was either Harry Potter or Bionicle.
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The fuck you mean 'or'? :V

Tho currently my take is that while it's been initially healthy for more widespread criticism of the HP series to see sunlight... the emotional motivation a lot of people have gained to need it to actually be all terrible in every way has turned a lot of it into much less useful discourse.

There's a widespread subconscious association of good art with good people, and IMO more people could stand to accept that terrible people can make good art or vice versa. And that good art can still have flaws.

Whether or not HP is any good is essentially irrelevant to the fact that Rowling is a TERF who actively supports TERF causes, and there is no threshold of artistic excellence that would make giving her money morally any different. But, it seems to comfort a lot of people to suddenly aggressively feel that the art is the ultimate final form of bad and not just with unexamined or less examined flaws.
 
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The Englanderish said:
The fuck you mean 'or'? :V

Tho currently my take is that while it's been initially healthy for more widespread criticism of the HP series to see sunlight... the emotional motivation a lot of people have gained to need it to actually be all terrible in every way has turned a lot of it into much less useful discourse.

There's a widespread subconscious association of good art with good people, and IMO more people could stand to accept that terrible people can make good art or vice versa. And that good art can still have flaws.

Whether or not HP is any good or not is essentially irrelevant to the fact that Rowling is a TERF which actively supports TERF causes, and there is no threshold of artistic excellence that would make giving her money morally any different. But, it seems to comfort a lot of people to suddenly aggressively feel that the art is the ultimate final form of bad and not just with unexamined or less examined flaws.
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Yeah that is honestly a very fair point. Like I do sometimes need to take a step back and examine if my antipathy toward Harry Potter is entirely genuine (I was never really the biggest fan in all honesty) or if it is just hindsight and a desire to be mad at it talking. Ultimately I think even without Rowling's turn I just wouldn't be that into it. Read and seen way better as I've gotten older, you know, and I was kinda done with it after the last movie.
 
Look, the Harry Potter series are good books. Maybe not the literal best ever, but very solid. Rowling became an awful person after her brain got melted by TERF ideology, twitter, and too much money. These are not mutually exclusive things.
 
birdmaster01 said:
Time travel is an indispensable pillar of science fiction genre and I think it shouldn't be treated like this just because bunch of people decided that doppelganger stories suck now
Because time travel and multiversal stories are essentially doppelganger stories with a central theme of "person vs fate".
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Yes, and that's still very much the story being built AROUND time travel. Again, you really have to think it through.

MysticKnightJoe said:
Also in all honesty I firmly believe the Harry Potter movies are a major reason this extremely overrated pieces of media are remembered even remotely fondly.
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This is also why I'm rather 'whelmed' to see the tv series. I'm sure the actors will all put in great performances. I'm sure the writing will be good. And I'm sure modern effects will hold up better than the early movie's CGI . . . No shade at all thrown on the people working on this . . . except for Rowling.

But the movie series was just about the best adaptation we could have realistically hoped for and I don't know if a series is going to be better enough to justify itself.

Of course, at this point Harry Potter is the boy who cannot die because Universal Studios has pumped way too much money into an entire bespoke land to sell Wizarding World merch.
 
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Jenny said:
The problem with trying to weight more towards realism is that it's not as dramatically/narratively satisfying for things to just go wrong without any particular cause. Like, the IRL sinking of HMS Sheffield occurred partly because of random glitches in British radar systems that made the task force not trust warnings of inbound missiles, but I don't think that'd be a particularly satisfying way to complicate things in a similar sci-fi scenario.

That being said, I do think there's a pretty common trend in fiction of characters being less than smooth, making mistakes, etc. -- because of events in their personal lives or flaws in their character leading them to get careless or slip up.
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I think it rather depends on the kind of story you're trying to tell. That scenario would work pretty well in any sort of space cold war or tragedy, but less well in any one of those stories where America (or American expies) save the day.
 
Parzival said:
Look, the Harry Potter series are good books. Maybe not the literal best ever, but very solid. Rowling became an awful person after her brain got melted by TERF ideology, twitter, and too much money. These are not mutually exclusive things.
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Eh, personally I do think there was a drop in quality as the series proceeded, even ignoring all the things that look weirder with retrospective knowledge of Rowling and her politics. For instance the third one got kind of silly with the time travel and it caused problems for the narrative that got ignored until the plot contrived to simultaneously break every time travel device in existence. More generally I just don't think that Harry's formulaic life at Hogwarts really had enough to it to keep carrying things for six books, especially when the books kept getting longer.
 
The seventh book always felt like it was written to be nice and cinematic for the movies more than focusing on being a book first to me.
 
I do kinda agree, though I place that now on something I saw as a good thing as a teenager, which was the books trying to 'grow up' with Harry, when that just badly clashed with the whimsical vibes of the early book and frankly with later knowledge Rowlings... close minded incuriousness not serving very well at exploring anything mature.
 
I would genuinely be willing to part with a finger joint or two to cast the entire "fantasy/sci fi but set in a school" premise into the Shadow Realm for like 30 years. I would hold up my finger stump to people and say "you know how we haven't seen a shitty Harry Potter or Percy Jackson knockoff in a while? Yeah. You're welcome!".

It's not even about wanting premises that are more "adult" or don't involve children. Gimme the Fantasy Goonies or Stand By Me. Or if you absolutely need a magic school go in the polar opposite direction and make it like a Fantasy version of Filmore where the school genre is just an alternative backdrop for another genre entirely.

Exceptions for anime I guess for the ton of Japanese kids who know nothing but school. But any culture where smoking weed under the bleachers is standard tween-teenager behaviour ought to do better. (Note I mean anything in which school is the primary focus, if it's an ancillary element or b-plot generator then fine whatever.)

EDIT: Fantasy university stuff can be even worse sometimes because they're often handled as an excuse to do the school premise but with Young Adults. Which mean the characters will still be invested in doing all the class and school politics shit instead of getting krunk every night.
 
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prometheus110 said:
I think it rather depends on the kind of story you're trying to tell. That scenario would work pretty well in any sort of space cold war or tragedy, but less well in any one of those stories where America (or American expies) save the day.
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Eeeh. You can have snafu and gung-ho coexist. It's pretty common I think, if only as an easy way to write your protagonist out of being able to solve your otherwise not so well constructed problem the correct, insufficiently exciting way.
 
I would like for something in a fantasy setting to not transplant a modern school system, but instead use an apprenticeship system.
 
Reveen said:
I would genuinely be willing to part with a finger joint or two to cast the entire "fantasy/sci fi but set in a school" premise into the Shadow Realm for like 30 years. I would hold up my finger stump to people and say "you know how we haven't seen a shitty Harry Potter or Percy Jackson knockoff in a while? Yeah. You're welcome!".

It's not even about wanting premises that are more "adult" or don't involve children. Gimme the Fantasy Goonies or Stand By Me. Or if you absolutely need a magic school go in the polar opposite direction and make it like a Fantasy version of Filmore where the school genre is just an alternative backdrop for another genre entirely.

Exceptions for anime I guess for the ton of Japanese kids who know nothing but school. But any culture where smoking weed under the bleachers is standard tween-teenager behaviour ought to do better. (Note I mean anything in which school is the primary focus, if it's an ancillary element or b-plot generator then fine whatever.)

EDIT: Fantasy university stuff can be even worse sometimes because they're often handled as an excuse to do the school premise but with Young Adults. Which mean the characters will still be invested in doing all the class and school politics shit instead of getting krunk every night.
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Huh, I agree broadly with your conclusion but disagree absolutely with your reason.

But then, one of my common problems with the genre is how rarely "actually learning things in class" is a factor.
 
Reveen said:
I would genuinely be willing to part with a finger joint or two to cast the entire "fantasy/sci fi but set in a school" premise into the Shadow Realm for like 30 years. I would hold up my finger stump to people and say "you know how we haven't seen a shitty Harry Potter or Percy Jackson knockoff in a while? Yeah. You're welcome!".
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Well, you got a Percy Jackson not-knockoff, does that count?:V
 
Pathfinder 2e recently came out with a book all about different magic schools, though the closest to a bog standard magic academy comes from the setting's Africa equivalent. Gives it a different vibe than your Hogwarts-alikes.
 
Look you should learn magic from your local eccentric old hermit who lives in a shack in the woods that's the way it is supposed to go. Ok.
 
ShyPerson said:
I would like for something in a fantasy setting to not transplant a modern school system, but instead use an apprenticeship system.
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The mancer books by Don Collander had people learning to be wizards via apprenticeship under another wizard complete with contracts involved as a Journeyman phase and having to prove your mastery before a panel of master wizards.

But then the whole master and apprenticeship with magic used to be fairly common in fantasy even in stories that also had magical schools before Harry Potter became big.

Of course, it used to be that fantasy stories had no problems with women being wizards but that is another thing you don't seem to see much of anymore.
 
There was a series I read where it was mentioned that they used to have a master - apprentice system, but it lead to the masters mostly focusing on teaching the skills they thought were important. After enough generations it resulted in apprentices graduating without some basic skills.

I mean, sure, you can throw fireballs with the best of them, but you can't even manage a basic divination spell? What kind of self respecting wizard is that?
 
Magic the gathering had a set focus on a magic university. It had a lot of the usual tropes, but the focus was on the philosophies of the five colleges that made it up, and how the students needed to engage in active study and use of their magic to develop as spell casters. It was a fun twist on the usual magic high school.
 
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One of the more fun things in Forgotten Realms is that there's literally a guy who's divinely mandated job is to promote the study of magic. The Magister goes around handing out starter spellbooks to bright young people, sneaking into towers and leaving research notes like Wizard Santa, and murdering the shit out of wizards who go around killing other wizards for their spells. Of course he gets all sorts of powers in exchange so the position most frequently changes hands in formal duels (the gods personally protect the winner while he recovers, after the time where there were like 7 in one night)
 
Alane1 said:
Of course, it used to be that fantasy stories had no problems with women being wizards but that is another thing you don't seem to see much of anymore.
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...really? The only settings that comes to mind where wizard is a title excluding women are Harry Potter plus cases intentionally painting a bullseye on a sexist establishment.

...admittedly I am having trouble thinking of recent notable stories using the title of wizard at all.
 
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