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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.
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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.
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"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.
 
Opaline Dreams said:
Thank you god yes. Same feelings abound. Ursula K. Le Guin, take it away:
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Ursula K Le Guin is being a bit hypocritical there. I've often said similar things about her own Tales of Earthsea. Not that she's wrong about Harry Potter, she's right, but she needs to spend more time in front of a mirror.

Tales of Earthsea was stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.

That being said, both were entertaining, which is probably the most important part of fiction, even if 'messages it carries' is also an aspect to consider.
 
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Tyran said:
40k is over all things a game setting that pretty much only exists to give some flavor to people that are throwing dice at their overcosted plastic toys.

99.99% of the playerbase know it is just a game, and pretty much all of them will agree the IoM is a horrible place and that is the joke.
In fact, I would argue you are more likely to find Chaos/Ork/Tyranid* apologism than Imperial one amongst people that actually play the game.

*That's me, I'm the Tyranid apologist.
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In a lot of the fluff it's also pretty clear that most of the stuff the imperium does is like, almost totally counter productive. Like slaughtering an entire planet's worth of guard for maybe having heard of a demon one time. It's total Fanon to suggest that 40K has to be as fascist as it is.
 
The one thing keeping me away from W40k, besides the fact that I don't have the patience for tabletop gaming. Is how there isn't at least like a true neutral faction to play, 40k only lets you play as the villainous factions because the entire setting consists of seemingly only villainous factions. Even the Tyranids aren't just a mindless bug hoard, apparently they have some sort of malicious intelligence guiding them, making them also a villainous faction when they could have been a neutral one.

IDK just dislike playing as the villain, so 40k isn't really for me.

Apparently the Tau were supposed to be 'the one good faction' when they were made, but they swiftly changed it to make them also awful.
 
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personally as a person who is not into warhammer, doesnt that kinda just feed into chaos?
 
LunaMoth said:
The one thing keeping me away from W40k, besides the fact that I don't have the patience for tabletop gaming. Is how there isn't at least like a true neutral faction to play, 40k only lets you play as the villainous factions because the entire setting consists of seemingly only villainous factions. Even the Tyranids aren't just a mindless bug hoard, apparently they have some sort of malicious intelligence guiding them, making them also a villainous faction when they could have been a neutral one.

IDK just dislike playing as the villain, so 40k isn't really for me.

Apparently the Tau were supposed to be 'the one good faction' when they were made, but they swiftly changed it to make them also awful.
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What about the Craftworld Eldar?
 
LunaMoth said:
On another somewhat unrelated note, I've heard that Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, something I'd expect to deconstruct why and how the HP world works the way it does in-universe: doesn't live up to its title at all.
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You can't deconstruct how and why the HP world works the way it does in-universe because HP worldbuilding doesn't make sense. It'd be like explaining how Willy Wonka can make his wondrous chocolate inventions.

That HPMOR makes a lot of original worldbuilding isn't really a flaw. The making other people really dumb so Harry can look smart by doing the obvious thing is a flaw. Harry's wild armchair theories continually turning out to be correct, The lessons on power thing, the hyped up but obvious final puzzle.
DoobleDeeDooble said:
As a project, it seems bound up more with trying to show a specific view of "rationality" and breaks and changes the original rules of the world as suits it, in order to better showcase that, rather than being primarily an exploration of Harry Potter's world.
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The whole point of it was to direct people to Less Wrong.
Aineko said:
Libright is a baffling description, which I guess makes sense if you never read it.

I am not sure how much it is into politics as such but its power relations preference seems to lean to the odd LessWrongian science-oriented mystery cult. (I don't know whether that's still in fashion in that sphere, I only read that context briefly.)
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I've read it and I don't think it is a baffling description. It is very "The smart and great but constrained by the stupidity of the common people / government. If only they didn't have to listen to them". It has some resemblance to Randian ideas.

Different people might label it differently but the substance is what people typically find as objectionable.

I don't think describing LessWrong as a mystery cult is accurate. Yudkowsky has just sometimes fantasizes about being in a mystery science cult with the robes, secret meetings, etc.

DoobleDeeDooble said:
They're not really a united bloc as it comes to politics, are they? There's a libertarian subset for sure, though I couldn't tell you how large it is. But like, most of the things that they all agree on to my knowledge aren't (or at least aren't directly) political, so you can't paint them with one brush. And even where they are libertarians, they're weird compared to other libertarians, because they're... LessWrong people.

I've stayed away from the place because a lot of the things LessWrong is interested in are things I am interested in; AI, decision theory, and the like. And stuff I've seen evidenced that I disagree with them, that they have major groupthink and some dumb ideas dressed up in a lot of arguments, so I just didn't want to get suckered into arguing against LessWrong "rationalists" for a million billion years. Knowing now more about how they're sorta, well, a mystery cult, makes me very glad I did that. But whatever they are isn't exactly libertarians, whether one means libertarians in the general political sense or libertarians as in the conservative movement in the USA (and probably some other countries?) who generally aren't really libertarian in their philosophy as practiced.

I'm apparently misinformed or at least out of date on their politics, though, if they have something about how the intellectuals should be in charge of everything. ...Wait, is that where all the stuff with friendly AIs ended up going?
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LessWrong people in general don't necessarily share Yudkowsky's particular political views.

There are a lot of different things called Libertarianism.
en.wikipedia.org

Libertarianism in the United States - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

The point of the stuff about AI is so that you donate to Yudkowsky's organization so they will somehow work towards making a safe friendly world conquering AI before someone else accidentally creates Skynet. I think it is scammy but I wouldn't describe it as a mystery cult.
 
its not a scam, there just not very smart and think there geniuses. witch is fine, aside from all of the sexual abuse.
 
Tyran said:
99.99% of the playerbase know it is just a game, and pretty much all of them will agree the IoM is a horrible place and that is the joke.
In fact, I would argue you are more likely to find Chaos/Ork/Tyranid* apologism than Imperial one amongst people that actually play the game.
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As the old joke goes:

Ask a Star Trek fans if they want to live in the setting, and they say "Hell yeah!"
Ask a Star Wars fans if they want to live in the setting, and they say "Hell yeah!"
Ask a WH40K fans if they want to live in the setting, and they say "Hell no!"

Like you said, 99.99% of fanbase recognizes taht IoM is a shitshow. Entire setting is a shitshow. It's cool to read about, but nobody wants to experience it.
 
MrCogmor said:
You can't deconstruct how and why the HP world works the way it does in-universe because HP worldbuilding doesn't make sense. It'd be like explaining how Willy Wonka can make his wondrous chocolate inventions.
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Depends on the part you're looking at. Sure, if you want to examine how the magic works then you're pretty much stuck making things up, but there's some interesting stuff you can do just with the elements of society we're shown.
 
like the project moon setting.
although i do feel like people can end up wanting to live in an objectively worse world becuase at least the problems and there solutions would be obivous.
 
MrCogmor said:
The point of the stuff about AI is so that you donate to Yudkowsky's organization so they will somehow work towards making a safe friendly world conquering AI before someone else accidentally creates Skynet. I think it is scammy but I wouldn't describe it as a mystery cult.
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If you actually read a lot of LessWrong writing (I do not advise this, though some of their writing is factual and some of it is even both intended to be entertaining and also entertaining) you will definitely come across mystery cult stuff.

The AI stuff is at least half scam though, yeah.
 
Sotek said:
If you actually read a lot of LessWrong writing (I do not advise this, though some of their writing is factual and some of it is even both intended to be entertaining and also entertaining) you will definitely come across mystery cult stuff.

The AI stuff is at least half scam though, yeah.
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honestly it feels less like a scam and more like a self orgenizing high control group vulnerable to scams.
 
The ruling Ethereal caste at least of the Tau were always extremely shady from what I can recall which shouldn't have been surprising given that beings referred to as Ethereals being shady and or evil in fiction was fairly common even before the Tau were introduced.
 
From its very inception, the Tau Empire was an Empire, that is an expansionist, autoritarian and imperialistic organization. So you know bad guys.

The twist was that they are smart enough to actually use diplomacy and sane enough to actually want to conquer people instead of the 20 different flavors of insanity and genocide everyone else is running with, so morally dark grey compared to the edgy vantablack that is everyone else.
 
DoobleDeeDooble said:
Now this might seem like pedantry on my part, an unnecessarily high-faluting line of reasoning to show why this obivously stupid and terrible idea is stupid and terrible. But the thing is... I think that LessWrong people legitimately believe that future actions can in a meaningful sense motivate past ones? That the basilisk has to do the basilisking in order to motivate its own existence? I gave up trying to read about Timeless Decision Theory because it doesn't make sense, so I could be wrong, but I think that's what's up with that. Which is real wild.
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Of course future actions can motivate past ones. It is how blackmail works.

If the victim can predict the blackmailer will not follow through on the threat then the victim won't comply so the blackmailer has to follow through even if the victim doesn't comply.

On the other hand if the blackmailer can know that the victim won't be swayed by the threat of blackmail then there is no point to the blackmailer going to the effort of using the blackmail.

It is like a weird atemporal game of chicken.
 
Tyran said:
From its very inception, the Tau Empire was an Empire, that is an expansionist, autoritarian and imperialistic organization. So you know bad guys.

The twist was that they are smart enough to actually use diplomacy and sane enough to actually want to conquer people instead of the 20 different flavors of insanity and genocide everyone else is running with, so morally dark grey compared to the edgy vantablack that is everyone else.
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I'm reminded of an AU where almost everyone else is flipped in their alignment, i.e. the Imperium of Mankind is only nominally a Feudal Empire due to the Emperor while otherwise being democratic, the Orks like to scrap but only consensually and also really like chess, the Old Ones were imperialistic assholes who got angry when the Necrontyr actually figured out immortality, the Gods of Chaos are now Gods of Order and their main fault is being a bit too uptight, the Craftworld Eldar are zealots of the old order...

But the Tau were kept exactly the same lol.
 
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Tyran said:
From its very inception, the Tau Empire was an Empire, that is an expansionist, autoritarian and imperialistic organization. So you know bad guys.

The twist was that they are smart enough to actually use diplomacy and sane enough to actually want to conquer people instead of the 20 different flavors of insanity and genocide everyone else is running with, so morally dark grey compared to the edgy vantablack that is everyone else.
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I remember someone saying that in any other space setting, Tau would be the evil invaders the plucky heroes try to resist.

In Warhammer 40K they get dubious honor of being "least genocidal assholes".
 
On the warhammer thing, the Tau were, according to the writers, originally intended as a NATO pastiche, though I 100% agree that the move to make them just as bad actually sucks

On HP, I didn't really get into it as a kid since I was a Percy Jackson partisan, but my main takeaway is that the first few are alright if nothing spectacular, and she really needed an editor for the later books, badly. Also eternal frustration at the state of HP fanfic of course, stop shipping Draco with Hermione, he's the leader of magic Hitler youth what the fuck

Really I just want to see Hermione kill all the death eaters and their enablers but people seem to much prefer "what if Dumbledoor was the devil actually and the death eaters were cool and hot and let's ship the main muggleborn character with one of several wizard hitlers" for some reason


For my hot take, I think 1984 is just not a good book, it's boring and badly written. People always tell me "oh you just didn't get it" when I say that, but no, I did get it, it's just not a good read
 
My opinion is kind of exactly the opposite. There should be a work of fiction in the Warhammer universe that involves absolutely no humans. No Imperium presence, no other human remnants, nothing, only the other parts of the setting.
 
Mandemon said:
Personally got mixed feelings of SPEW arc. On one hand, yeah. House slaves are functionally slaves. If they could leave if they wanted it would basically delete all the complaints, but since they are bound to household they are effectively slaves. Which is bad.

But there is also element of House Elves (mostly) liking their situation, and outside of Dobby most elves don't want to be freed. So Hermione coming in and trying to impose her will on clearly unwanting people feels like White Savior Complex.
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Again, the problem is the Thermian argument. Rowling specifically created the house elves as "they're slaves and they like it," and it's not a case where she had high artistic goals of exploring the moral implications of such a thing. She just wanted there to be a magically hypercompetent permanent underclass of servants around to do all the boring chores, and for anyone who objected to these servants being enslaved to be, officially, silly and impractical and all the stereotypes she held in her head of the proto-"SJW."
 
DestinyPlayer said:
My opinion is kind of exactly the opposite. There should be a work of fiction in the Warhammer universe that involves absolutely no humans. No Imperium presence, no other human remnants, nothing, only the other parts of the setting.
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The Valedor novel (Eldar vs Tyranids) has no humans... maybe the recent Lelith novel (Dark Eldar vs Dark Eldar).

There are other books with xenos protagonists in which humans have a small role, but well still have humans.
 
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