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Cliches you can't stand

Thozmp said:
Some mention that lion turtles are even a thing would have been nice. Not necessarily that they taught bending or anything, but I don't know something like "and people used to think lion turtles just wandered around" or something.
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Yeah, some reference, something to establish WTF this thing is.

As it stands, this never before seen or mentioned thing just appears from nowhere, goes "Oh you don't want to kill? Here, have a pepper spray new type of bending" and leaves.

Honestly, the forbidden library would have been a perfect place to drop some hints. Like, when they are going over the records, see something about lion turtles and "great wisdom and spiritual connection", but dismiss it as "Eh, lion turtles are not real" or "Lion turtles died long time ago".
 
Mandemon said:
Honestly, the forbidden library would have been a perfect place to drop some hints. Like, when they are going over the records, see something about lion turtles and "great wisdom and spiritual connection", but dismiss it as "Eh, lion turtles are not real" or "Lion turtles died long time ago".
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Big ol' Wall Mosaic would have been perfect. Adjusting some of the Guru's lines to kind of give an early warning about the dangers of bending another person's energy would have also been a good move.

I think the thing that magnifies the problem of the lack of foreshadowing is that by the time Aang was in a position to energy bend him, Ozai was also already finished as an immediate threat. Aang had him imprisoned in solid stone and the Comet was departing which meant Ozai would soon by nothing more than a really strong fire bender again. Dangerous, especially politically, but entirely within the ability of the Avatar world to contain by throwing him in a big fridge under Ba Sing Se.

Taking his bending drastically weakened his political power, making his defeat total. And it was great from a thematic perspective, but it WAS weakened by that lack of foreshadowing.
 
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Too many people still consider males being the "default" gender. And that being female is, in itself, is a special character trait.

"You have the straight man, the cool guy, the big guy, the kid and the female"

Same with "white," "straight," "cis," etc.

It reminds me of how "purist" fans of "The Hunger Games" claimed that Rue and Thresh got "Black-washed" in the movies when they were explicitly Black in the books, too without the books explicitly saying "Black" and instead descriptors like "dark-skinned."

What makes it extra-stupid on their part is that District 11 is a plantation analogue, hence Thresh's constant association with the fields because he's essentially a field slave.

White straight Cis Able bodied male is seen as the default or replace "White" with dominant ethnicity in what ever country it comes from.

With characters only deviated from the expected norm if their is a reason in story.

I've seen Breaking Bad fans speculate that Walter White Jr/Flynn was a thalidomide baby. Despite the impossibility of it. Because a disabled person being disabled needs a narrative reason.
 
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I noticed that in many (but not all) foreign media (especially Japanese, but American too) the Russian mafia is often filled with former military/G-men and is generally extremely militarized. Although there are people with military backgrounds in Russian criminal groups, this is not quite typical, and the order there is perceived as prison, not military. Roughly speaking - this is what the Russian mafia looks like in anime:


But in reality it looks closer to this:



It's not that I hate it, but I find the difference confusing. And I would be interested in describing Russian organized crime according to Russian expectations, but in an American setting.
 
It's mostly a reflection of the Shock Therapy era when, due to the Societ military and intelligence apparatus falling apart, a lot of skilled men ended up without jobs and did what usually happens: turn to banditry. Just a more organized form.

If you look at more recent depictions, or earlier ones, it's much less like that.
 
Night said:
It's mostly a reflection of the Shock Therapy era when, due to the Societ military and intelligence apparatus falling apart, a lot of skilled men ended up without jobs and did what usually happens: turn to banditry. Just a more organized form.

If you look at more recent depictions, or earlier ones, it's much less like that.
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This is true, but still - the members wore sports and leather jackets, while the authorities dressed in jackets of stupid colors (one of the symbols of "Shock Therapy" is a raspberry jacket).



Nevertheless, a former military man or KGB agent as the head of an organized crime group is not quite a typical phenomenon for the nineties.
 
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I think the misunderstanding comes from the fact that people don't quite realize that this sort of "militarized organized crime group" does exist, but in the exact wrong place. They're not in organized crime. They took the government itself.
 
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Konradleijon said:
I've seen Breaking Bad fans speculate that Walter White Jr/Flynn was a thalidomide baby. Despite the impossibility of it. Because a disabled person being disabled needs a narrative reason.
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Aren't they like 20 or so years off about that? I thought thalidomide was given to pregnant women in the 60s/70s, and they pretty much immediately stopped once the birth defects came along.
 
Comrade Future said:
I noticed that in many (but not all) foreign media (especially Japanese, but American too) the Russian mafia is often filled with former military/G-men and is generally extremely militarized. Although there are people with military backgrounds in Russian criminal groups, this is not quite typical, and the order there is perceived as prison, not military. Roughly speaking - this is what the Russian mafia looks like in anime:


But in reality it looks closer to this:



It's not that I hate it, but I find the difference confusing. And I would be interested in describing Russian organized crime according to Russian expectations, but in an American setting.
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I think it's because it's due to a perceived view of the Russians during the cold War. A very good, organized, militarized group that just so happens to be a gang.

I don't see the harm of still viewing them like that though.
 
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Kingcrusader said:
I think it's because it's due to a perceived view of the Russians during the cold War. A very good, organized, militarized group that just so happens to be a gang.
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What? No, that was not how the Soviet Union was viewed. They were seen as despotic and ruthless but deeply ideological. The "Russia as a gangster-state" view of them was a product of the post-Soviet kleptocracy. It's a decidedly post-Cold War phenomenon.
 
Ophelia said:
Aren't they like 20 or so years off about that? I thought thalidomide was given to pregnant women in the 60s/70s, and they pretty much immediately stopped once the birth defects came along.
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Also it was never sold widely in America thanks to the FDA. Walter White giving his chemist background could theoretically make Thalidomide from scratch and give it to Skyler. But even for Walter White that sounds to far
Kingcrusader said:
I think it's because it's due to a perceived view of the Russians during the cold War. A very good, organized, militarized group that just so happens to be a gang.

I don't see the harm of still viewing them like that though.
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In general organized crime is way more pathetic and gritty in real life then it's potrayed in fiction
 
Thalidomide could be made in a completely safe form by a reasonably skilled chemist. The reason it caused the birth defects is because it's a chiral molecule, which wasn't known at the time, so it was produced and sold as a mixture of both isomers. One of these isomers did what Thalidomide was intended to do. The other is the one responsible for the widespread birth defect problems.

The reason Thalidomide isn't used today is essentially because the association and scandal. It could be produced and used completely safely with modern scientific understandings and processes.

If Walter White is a sufficiently intersecting combination between arrogant and ineptitutde that he would attempt it and fuck it up, is something someone who watched or had any interest in Breaking Bad would have to answer.
 
The Englanderish said:
Thalidomide could be made in a completely safe form by a reasonably skilled chemist. The reason it caused the birth defects is because it's a chiral molecule, which wasn't known at the time, so it was produced and sold as a mixture of both isomers. One of these isomers did what Thalidomide was intended to do. The other is the one responsible for the widespread birth defect problems.
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As a chemist, I would like you to justify that claim. I have experience with attempting to separate chiral synthesis products with very similar physico-chemical attributes and it is, in fact, not easy. Most of us would say that it can actually easily be the next best thing to impossible, unless you get lucky and the molecules actually have some kind of obvious divergence like solidifying at different temperatures or concentrations and such.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
What? No, that was not how the Soviet Union was viewed. They were seen as despotic and ruthless but deeply ideological. The "Russia as a gangster-state" view of them was a product of the post-Soviet kleptocracy. It's a decidedly post-Cold War phenomenon.
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The main thing is that Russians can only fight and suffer. No romantic comedies, no melodramas - Russians appear only in action films and tragic dramas.

(Off-topic - but I hate my big mouth)
 
Arden said:
As a chemist, I would like you to justify that claim. I have experience with attempting to separate chiral synthesis products with very similar physico-chemical attributes and it is, in fact, not easy. Most of us would say that it can actually easily be the next best thing to impossible, unless you get lucky and the molecules actually have some kind of obvious divergence like solidifying at different temperatures or concentrations and such.
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Also qualified chemist. :p (Although it's been a few years since I did any chemistry) I didn't say it would be easy, but that it could be done. We covered it back when I did my degree and the understanding was that due to The Incident is one of the more studied chiral syntheses, but also because of The Incident it's flatly banned in most places to produce or sell it.

I could probably dust off my old notes from a box somewhere but essentially how the lecture theorised it would be done today is with a synthesis method designed to target the centre so that you only produce the one isomer (the point of the lecture was to cover targeted synthesis methods like stucking a multidentate ligand on to force the right shapes to happen and then getting it off later, stuff like that). As I recall the isomers were also relatively easy to separate, but producing it and then separating is hilariously wasteful.

That said, this entire conversation probably illustrates that someone insufficiently skilled but also sufficiently arrogant may be foolish enough to actually try it at home. Insert Dunning-Kruger graph here.
 
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The Englanderish said:
We covered it back when I did my degree and the understanding was that due to The Incident it's one of the more studied chiral syntheses, but also because of The Incident it's flatly banned in most places to produce or sell it.
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Well, when the consequences of fucking up are as severe as that, it can be better to be safe than sorry. Looking at the configuration of that glutamine ring on the finished product, steric inhibition with a ligand seems like it would work, although that sounds a bit like a lab-scale kind of technique to me. My old synthesis prof was pretty big on emphasizing that just because you can find a way to do something that works in your lab space doesn't mean the atom economy or other overhead involved makes it a feasible production method on an industrial scale. Using a polydentate ligand to inhibit the formation of S-enantiomer would take a lot of separating out the ligand and whatever they introduced to induce it to separate from the product in a subsequent step, which tends to be a pain to do cleanly. Depending on the costs and availability of the ligand and their ability to recycle it after separation, it might not be economically viable.

I've also had some experiences with steric requirements being supposed to inhabit the formation of the isomer and then just failing to do that properly, because organic chemistry is always a bit of a crapshoot that way, but that's neither here nor there.
 
Arden said:
Well, when the consequences of fucking up are as severe as that, it can be better to be safe than sorry. Looking at the configuration of that glutamine ring on the finished product, steric inhibition with a ligand seems like it would work, although that sounds a bit like a lab-scale kind of technique to me. My old synthesis prof was pretty big on emphasizing that just because you can find a way to do something that works in your lab space doesn't mean the atom economy or other overhead involved makes it a feasible production method on an industrial scale. Using a polydentate ligand to inhibit the formation of S-enantiomer would take a lot of separating out the ligand and whatever they introduced to induce it to separate from the product in a subsequent step, which tends to be a pain to do cleanly. Depending on the costs and availability of the ligand and their ability to recycle it after separation, it might not be economically viable.

I've also had some experiences with steric requirements being supposed to inhabit the formation of the isomer and then just failing to do that properly, because organic chemistry is always a bit of a crapshoot that way, but that's neither here nor there.
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Yeah I wouldn't recommend anyone ever acually try it outside a lab or R&D situation, but I was just noting that in terms of the chemistry it isn't necessarily that different to various other drug syntheses worked on in modern chemistry. Which then creates the question on if Mr. White could think himself able to do it.
 
The Englanderish said:
Yeah I wouldn't recommend anyone ever acually try it outside a lab or R&D situation, but I was just noting that in terms of the chemistry it isn't necessarily that different to various other drug syntheses worked on in modern chemistry. Which then creates the question on if Mr. White could think himself able to do it.
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Yeah, fair enough. Considering that he decided to start selling meth to pay for his cancer treatments in the first place, I'd say he's at least arrogant and heedless enough of harm done to others to try.
 
Admittedly the US has had a long history of being on poor terms with Russia. Even excluding the cold war, the US spent the late 19th century early 20th century hating the Russian empire to the point of cutting off trade relations and refusing to join World War one if it meant being on the same side of the Tsars, only joining after the Tsar got overthrown.
 
Alane1 said:
Admittedly the US has had a long history of being on poor terms with Russia. Even excluding the cold war, the US spent the late 19th century early 20th century hating the Russian empire to the point of cutting off trade relations and refusing to join World War one if it meant being on the same side of the Tsars, only joining after the Tsar got overthrown.
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There was considerable tension in Britain too, partly over the idea of the nation of Shakespeare fighting the nation of Schiller, but also the Tsarist regime was seen as very backward and brutal across much of Europe
 
Alane1 said:
Admittedly the US has had a long history of being on poor terms with Russia. Even excluding the cold war, the US spent the late 19th century early 20th century hating the Russian empire to the point of cutting off trade relations and refusing to join World War one if it meant being on the same side of the Tsars, only joining after the Tsar got overthrown.
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Interesting - considering that the Russian Empire helped the States at various times (and even sent a division to help the North during the Civil War.) Sounds like part of the "Ungrateful Neighbors" mythologem.


bluntblade said:
Tsarist regime was seen as very backward and brutal across much of Europe
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And in many ways this was true.
 
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