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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.
 
Night said:
You might notice the '80s nostalgia it is literally coated in. And not a single coat. There's '80s nostalgia primer, '80s nostalgia basecoat, '80s nostalgia topcoat, '80s nostalgia detailing, and an '80s nostalgia wash.

This should probably have clued you in that it's not, in fact, a children's movie, as people who were children during the '80s or even the '90s are not and have not been children for at least a decade.
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It's a childrens movie, aimed at 40 year old white males.
 
Valmond said:
It's a childrens movie, aimed at 40 year old white males.
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They call that a "Manchildren's Movie". Other examples include the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, the MCU, the Michael Bay Transformers movies or the Fast & Furious movies.
 
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GretelOstrich said:
I thought you'd say that you got roped into it by friends or family or something, jesus christ

stop hatewatching shit, go listen to a podcast or play world of tanks or something
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That was years ago, I was still a teenager at that point. Besides, that was the moment I realised hatewatching wasn't good for me.
 
Night said:
You might notice the '80s nostalgia it is literally coated in. And not a single coat. There's '80s nostalgia primer, '80s nostalgia basecoat, '80s nostalgia topcoat, '80s nostalgia detailing, and an '80s nostalgia wash.

This should probably have clued you in that it's not, in fact, a children's movie, as people who were children during the '80s or even the '90s are not and have not been children for at least a decade.
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I wasn't alive in the 80's and didn't get any of those references when I watched it. Imagine if they switched out the 80's references for fictional properties or original challenges but kept the same characters, plot, romance subplot, etc. My perspective is that it would be a fairly typical YA type of film. National Treasure but with videogames and teenagers.
 
Hawkatana said:
I was experiencing nothing but pain when I was forced to watch RPO. The only reason I didn't pull out the monitor is because it was on a plane to Auckland and I'd get in trouble with Qantas.

Like, you know it's bad when TJ fucking Miller isn't the worst part of your movie.
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Didn't they have anything else? When I flew with Qantas I got a good range.

Hawkatana said:
They call that a "Manchildren's Movie". Other examples include the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, the MCU, the Michael Bay Transformers movies or the Fast & Furious movies.
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(Glances at the stream of manchild rage about the Sequels, quirks an eyebrow) I mean actually, I do think that there is something of a conversation to be had around who each of those films is aimed at, but you know what I mean.
 
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I could have enjoyed RPO. But the solution of the car race enigma was so bad, that I feel insulted as a gamer and for all the people who likes to find things or solutions in videogames.

And the rest of the movie is not enough to compensate this.
 
I feel as though the enduring legacy of Spielberg's adaptation of Ready Player One is the sequel to the novel needing to really awkwardly reference Sword Art Online in order to cover up how derivative the plot of a hypothetical film that will likely not be made would be.
 
This may be the opinion of like, a handful of people, but it's enough to get me to notice it and talk about it. Apparently, people really dislike magical healing, which I have to ask the rhetorical; but why? If it can't do wondrous things, it's not very magical, IMO.
 
Astrid Fornhoff said:
This may be the opinion of like, a handful of people, but it's enough to get me to notice it and talk about it. Apparently, people really dislike magical healing, which I have to ask the rhetorical; but why? If it can't do wondrous things, it's not very magical, IMO.
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A lot of people have a hard on for consequences, and magical healing is all about removing them.

No I don't really get it either.
 
I like healing magic, but it can be complicated if you want to get the most story potential out of it.
 
Astrid Fornhoff said:
This may be the opinion of like, a handful of people, but it's enough to get me to notice it and talk about it. Apparently, people really dislike magical healing, which I have to ask the rhetorical; but why? If it can't do wondrous things, it's not very magical, IMO.
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It could be about the world building.

Bodies are complicated. In some settings magical healers need to know how the body works, diagnose issues and apply specific treatments like a traditional doctor. They use magic like a scalpel or other medical tool.

In some settings magic healing is just plug and play. The healing magic automatically determines what it considers to be injured or unhealthy and decides how it will be fixed.
 
Astrid Fornhoff said:
This may be the opinion of like, a handful of people, but it's enough to get me to notice it and talk about it. Apparently, people really dislike magical healing, which I have to ask the rhetorical; but why? If it can't do wondrous things, it's not very magical, IMO.
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Speaking personally I have two views on it: the first is that if there's a very easy solution to any kind of injury it takes a lot of impact out of those injuries, the second is that the human machine is extremely complicated and nuanced and it feels way too much like fakery if you can wave your hands and piece a shattered scapula back together or rebuild a bunch of burst capillaries. The latter you can generally write around if you're clever about it, the former can really limit the scope of narrative possibilities by essentially making the only serious consequence of a dangerous situation death.

What I mean by this is that danger in a given story is just a matter of narrative construction, but danger only works with audience buy in. If you put a character in a dangerous situation the audience reacts appropriately by imagining what might happen to them, the pain or injury or what have you that might occur. But if you establish that a broken bone is at best a temporary inconvenience then only death poses any real danger. And is the writer going to kill a major character? In most cases the answer is obviously not.

It's still possible to make this work if you're good, and there's ways you can take it. An example of this is My Hero Academia, where early on Deku often avails himself of the services of Recovery Girl, who can accelerate the natural healing process. But this isn't treated as free: apart from the fact that it's the specific ability of a specific character, Recovery Girl fairly quickly threatens to withhold her services if Deku is reckless, because he is operating under the impression that he can get any injury fixed. Additionally despite this healing superpower Deku still ends up with a totally fucked up right hand with permanently bent fingers and visible scarring.

But not every writer goes to that length to ground otherwise magical healing. You can get similar problems with regeneration abilities, too.
 
Put another way, it's generally pretty unsatisfying when a character just waves a magic wand and solves their problems, and an injury isn't really any different to any other narrative challenge.
 
People are sleeping on offensive oriented healing abilities, say you want about Naruto but the several of the most dangerous Shinobi in that franchise were medical ninja, especially some techniques were good enough to mess up the human bodies in ways such as ruin ones nervous.

Also you could have healing techniques have their limitations. Wounds might be healed but the pain could still exist and it might your body's nervous system some time to adjust. Maybe too much 'unnatural' healing can mess up one's body in small ways, maybe having a limb regrown, has it feel a little odd at times, perhaps psychologically. Healing is only a drama killer, it's used as a magical fix every wound, save people from death tool.
 
I have spent some time tinkering with a story about a Necromancer in a world where magical healing and even resurrection is widespread and affordable, but controlled by the church. The stinger is that repeated resurrections progressively deaden a person's emotions and empathy, eventually rendering them perfect psychopaths, a fact which the church uses to recruit for its militant wing.

The Necromancer is essentially an unlicensed doctor who provides both magical and mundane healing outside of the church system, while tinkering with alternate methods of resurrection and preservation of life. The undead that they create at first are more like constructs assembled from dead tissues and animated with magic and chemistry, but their goal is to achieve perfect resurrection without side-effects.

The idea grew out of a discussion about the possible psychological effects on DnD style adventurers who become wealthy enough to afford repeated resurrections and begin viewing death as merely the cost of doing business.
 
The 'oh bodies are complex' thing is a red herring unless all your magic requires that depth of knowledge, and frankly press X to doubt on that one. The 'magic solves narrative problems' is the actual issue with healing magic, but all that means is you need to come up with new and interesting narrative problems that aren't just 'this character is injured'. Maybe the injury means they failed to achieve their goal; maybe the healing costs money so that's a different problem; maybe their relationship with the person healing them provides dramatic tension.

When you're writing, every 'solution' is just a problem in disguise, if you want it to be.
 
MrCogmor said:
I wasn't alive in the 80's and didn't get any of those references when I watched it. Imagine if they switched out the 80's references for fictional properties or original challenges but kept the same characters, plot, romance subplot, etc. My perspective is that it would be a fairly typical YA type of film. National Treasure but with videogames and teenagers.
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I haven't seen RPO and don't intend to, but having a slew of detailed references to fictional properties would be extremely atypical and kind of fascinating for its outlier nature at least. (I expect it would be very hard to land characters solving trivia challenges about trivia that the reader cannot possibly know and which isn't really part of the plot otherwise. But it would be a bold effort...)
Astrid Fornhoff said:
This may be the opinion of like, a handful of people, but it's enough to get me to notice it and talk about it. Apparently, people really dislike magical healing, which I have to ask the rhetorical; but why? If it can't do wondrous things, it's not very magical, IMO.
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I definitely don't dislike magical healing, but. Plots driven by medical situations (acute definitely, and maybe chronic too) have a lot of potential that either is cut off by 'yes we have a healer who fixes that' or isn't for what are almost certainly tortured reasons why this problem is specially forbidden from being fixed that way.

Some people want, or at least say they want, characters to face the dire physical consequences of participating in the dangerous activities which (in most genres) they're definitely going to, and healing gets in the way of that. I'm super not with that position.
 
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