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Dragon Ball: After the End

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My working hypothesis is that someone or something came along and ate all the Garenhulders who did not huddle in their houses, creating a huge collective mythological push to huddle in houses and avoid anything weird-looking.

Gore17 said:
They usually carefully constructed building that use sunlight to heat themselves up, and then concentrate that heat. Or utilise magma to heat things up. Or they possess some sort of plant which allows them do so.
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All of which raise still further implications- the solar ovens suggest very specific statements about their architecture, the ready access to geothermal heat suggests pecific statements about the kind of place they live, and plants that spontaneously release enough heat to bake bread with have implications for a lot of things like "how do people stay warm in the absence of fire?"

But all of that is a side issue and not really the point. The real question is, at what point am I looking for excuses to justify not changing a contradiction in my own backstory? At what point would it be less... silly, for lack of a better term, less pointlessly obstinate, to simply back up and say "well, okay, CLEARLY the guys who have been master bakers for three thousand years must have at least had the ability to use fire for all that time."

I mean, at some point you're just adding epicycles to your backstory in an attempt to patch holes created by the previous epicycles, which were in turn patches for holes created by the epicycles before those. Faced with so many epicycles, the sensible course of action is to do as Alfonso X was said to have suggested, and just back up and rethink things.

Honestly, this reminds me of interesting fact about the Ben 10 universe years and years ago. As it turns out, in that universe, Earths technological development is distinctly non-standard, where Universal Translators are usually invented concurrent with the steam engine, and radio is discovered and implemented after nuclear technology and anti-gravity has become widespread.

More generally, Tv Tropes calls this Aliens Never Invented the Wheel and Schizo Tech.
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See, the trouble with things like that is that they are really, really good at sounding superficially plausible to someone who does not know how the relevant technologies work. Things like "radio after nuclear power" just plain do not work, because of how physics itself works. Nobody who doesn't understand electromagnetism is going to do a good job designing and operating a nuclear reactor. They'll kill themselves unless all they do is ignorantly push the buttons in accordance with preprinted instructions from a third party, and if they do push the buttons thus, they'll kill themselves as soon as anything about the nuclear reactor goes wrong and they don't understand why.


And this is problematic for extra reasons, compared to cases where the aliens have a weird social structure that defies our understanding of history (i.e., having cultures that discourage innovation persist and survive and even thrive without being outcompeted by cultures that encourage innovation). Because weird social structure is pretty easily explained by "alien minds are alien."

But if the aliens nominally live in a universe sort of like ours, then they live in a universe where radios and nuclear reactors work the same way ours do. And in which radios are much much easier to build at a much lower level of knowledge and sophistication than nuclear reactors. And it winds up taking some of the most twisted, tortured, blatantly motivated reasoning imaginable to explain how you get nuclear reactors before anyone figures out radios.
 
Simon_Jester said:
But if the aliens nominally live in a universe sort of like ours, then they live in a universe where radios and nuclear reactors work the same way ours do. And in which radios are much much easier to build at a much lower level of knowledge and sophistication than nuclear reactors. And it winds up taking some of the most twisted, tortured, blatantly motivated reasoning imaginable to explain how you get nuclear reactors before anyone figures out radios.
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*ponders* What would the reactions be if we discovered intelligent, advanced alien lifeforms who had never invented the radio/wireless transmissions?
 
Gore17 said:
*ponders* What would the reactions be if we discovered intelligent, advanced alien lifeforms who had never invented the radio/wireless transmissions?
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Either what Sucal said, or you'd be begging the question "define advanced." What technologies do you attribute to them?

Why do they lack radio? If they lack radio because, say, they live on a planet where the atmosphere is basically radio-opaque over long distances, that's one thing. They might have all kinds of cool stuff and just not bother using radio, even though they could totally design and build one if they wanted.

Otherwise, well, the same knowledge that allowed/caused us to build radio was ALSO the knowledge that allowed us to do most of the key important things in almost every aspect of 20th century technology. Everything involving electricity, everything involving a coherent understanding of light, MUCH of everything involving advanced chemistry, much of cellular and molecular biology using instruments developed via our understanding of electricity and light, and so on.
 
Simon_Jester said:
See, I'm okay with that, I'm not here to sneer. The thing is, I'd kind of like it if technology inconsistencies in the backstory could be resolved in a way that points towards "consistent backstory," not towards "add new technological inconsistency to patch old inconsistency." If I don't actually know how a thing works, making firm declarations about how it works differently is likely to open more plot holes than it closes.

I want to help do the worldbuilding, not hurt it, but worldbuilding goes better when everything is intended as part of a consistent whole, instead of being a mass of patches sewn into place to paper over existing plot holes. As we've seen by counterexample in the works of Toriyama. :p
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I resent that last remark! Toriyama-sensei's works are a consistent whole,it is just that they are a consistent formed by all his works! Any and all inconsistencies to be found can be explained by following three simple rules:

1- All of Toriyama's works happen in the same universe
2- Believe what you see, not what you are told since people can be wrong or deceive you
3- They are probably Arale's fault.

The exception is neko majin Z because it is a parody of another workand crossovers with other authors. It even works on derivative works not done by him like the movies.

Also, since I am on phone, I will skip the usual rant and jump to the conclusion. Seriously, fuck Fusion Reborn.
 
Gore17 said:
A question: by all indications, in the DB universe the speed of light is faster then in ours, time is objective and independant of velocity, ftl simply requies more energy as opposed to infinite energy and sound is ftl.

How would that affect things?
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Since the evidence is more in favor of ki having massive physics-warping effects that only benefit ki users, and less in favor of the physics itself being different, my answer is "I don't think light and sound actually work differently."

I DO think FTL travel is relevant, and I suspect that the defining feature of a DBZ-verse "spaceship" is that it has some kind of exotic-physics drive that can be used either for sublight or FTL travel. However, for the sake of even being able to talk coherently about the DBZ universe, we pretty much have to assume that things physically work more or less the way they would in our world IF we remove the things that don't exist in our world. As in, a cell phone that works in our world would work in their world, a nuclear reactor designed to function in their world wouldn't blow up in ours, and so on.

The Fourth Monado said:
Higher, post-Cell-games fighters rely on sound and eyesight just as much as Ki sense.
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Which to me signals that one of the many, many ways they use ki to cheat and perceive events that could not normally be perceived, due to sound or light not having reached the user.

Just like they use ki to do other impossible things like "get slammed through a mountain with literally not a hair out of place" and "tank a planet-disintegrating energy blast, WITHOUT reflecting or re-radiating enough energy to vaporize everything within a hundred kilometers."
 
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As would phasing.

We frequently see combatants who aren't THAT far apart in power level 'phase' relative to one another, as though they suddenly teleported despite not actually using Instant Transmission. I feel like it's easier to explain this as "I managed to spoof your ki-enhanced senses so that you had to fall back on the Mk 1 Eyeball to track me, and your Mk 1 Eyeball can't track me" than as "Despite being less than twice as powerful as you, I can move so much faster than you can that you can't even see me doing it."

It's like, if you met a human being with double speed, who was twice as fast but ONLY twice as fast as an normal human, you'd still be able to perceive and detect their movements. You'd be going "wow that guy is fast" not "how did that guy just magically teleport from 100 feet away into punching range." You'd at least see them coming.
 
I kind of assumed we were using the physics explanations from the BoD fic? Not that I can explain it, one of the authors studied that for a living so what ki was and why it interacted with the world as it did went way over my head. I do remember they correlated it to some form of energy that supposedly already exists? Or something like that?
 
Bakkasama said:
I kind of assumed we were using the physics explanations from the BoD fic? Not that I can explain it, one of the authors studied that for a living so what ki was and why it interacted with the world as it did went way over my head. I do remember they correlated it to some form of energy that supposedly already exists? Or something like that?
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...No, we aren't using the explanation for Ki used in BoD, mostly because it's 50% bullshit and 50% Doing In The Wizard, and poptart likes neither of them.
 
Wait, you know what explains the techbase? Garenhulders being minor seers.

That, or they're actually incredibly human robots who came to be after the robots rose up and destroyed humanity, but to their horror eventually realized that humanity was the core of their existance, and so mostly destroyed themselves, but not before creating a new version of humanity, with the techbase encoded in their DNA if it was ever necessary for it to be used, but with an aversion to technology and expansion(which would make a need for technology) so as to keep events from repeating themselves.
 
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Or they have sparks that are stealing everyone's creativity for themselves. The possibilities are endless.
 
It would be awfully fast, but the scouts were here to infiltrate, disrupt, and if possible conquer the planet. Starting a nuclear war would be a good way to undermine the defenders and reveal any hidden surprises.
 
Another possibility is that someone built something like a Fate Engine.

Garenhulders are conceptually locked into something like a gigantic timeloop ala Wheel of Time. They get better tech, expand, devolve into war, escalate, fall, contract, begin again. The Engine/Curse probably built right before the losing side was obliterated in the cataclysm, so as to 'rise again'. They didn't fully think this through.

So Garenhulders expand so slowly because it's the people that resisted Progress the most over the several loops were the ones that would most manage to have kids.

The Loop is currently slowed nearly as much as possible. Or, was until the Exiles got here. Oops. The nukes are a direct result of us moving along the timeline. On the brightside, the Saiyans aren't necessarily locked into the pattern.


Just trying to think of more disturbing reasons for why Garenhulders are the way they are.
 
They realized they are from the same universe as Dr Slump in which the characters were conscious that they were part of a gag manga thus as a strategy for survival they chose to embrace that nature and exaggerate existing flaws into the grotesque. They began slightly against progress and by episode 150 they had panic attacks when trying to make new sandwitches. Unfortunately, the fast advance caused by the exiles is causing a shift in perceived flaws to be exaggerated and a tone shift so we are about to face a generation of mad scientists.

Edit: Basically, the trait became meme
 
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I'm of a mind that says whatever left this world not only in a huge swath of dead space, but also utterly bereft of a Guardian, or even the hints of one, is what probably left the Garenhulders so scarred when it comes to innovation. A wound not fully physical or mental or cultural, but also spiritual.
 
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