Remove ads

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.
 
Hmm I like it when stories don't just have monarchies but monarchies with unsual selection methods.

Give me pulling swords out of as stone, the ruler being picked by a mystic beast or stone, that would be rulers be taken to a high tower where they become a ruler automatically but if the crowd below cries bring them low then they are thrown off the tower and so forth.
 
FeigningGrey said:
"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.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
We've finally reached SV peak. Its time to pack it all up gamers.
 
FeigningGrey said:
"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.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

hard to believe Shakespeare copied this bar for bar with merchant of venice but that's what the modern evidence shows
 
Aineko said:
This is the part that seems like the worst, out of a story that I think I'd overall call a highly literate troll post.

Omelas is shit-stirring that 'asks provocative questions' but doesn't actually have anything to say about them. It makes the argument about the text instead of the ideas, because the ideas are obfuscated and chimerical - first it seems to be calling out the audience for even reading the Child part, then it delivers its title bit that it seems so proud of about walking away. And it hypes up the fact that it's not saying anything about what they're walking to, but less so that it's successfully made it unclear what they're even walking from. The narrative suggests the Child, but the metanarrative suggests that treating the Child as a secondary world material fact isn't the right reading.

If you want a prompt to blather about any number of philosophies, it clearly works. But there's neither a message communicated nor a story told.


In conclusion, I've convinced myself that Those Who Walk From Omelas itself deserves to be pelted with vacuous memes.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

hghwolf said:
Omelas is genius because it gets your brain going in a way few other things do, and an abject failure because it does not actually have a internal conclusion.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The point is to get your brain going in a way few other things do. It leaves what conclusions someone draws from it up to the reader.

Mandemon said:
Let's be honest, Omelas is actually a typo of "Omelettes" and Le Guin was too embarassed to admit they made a typo so they just kept going until their Seinfield fanfic ran into a wall.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Actually it's Salem, O(regon) backwards.
 
Kymme said:
Seriously, I've seen like one meme about how insane the parkour cow is. Has nobody else watched that far?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It's honestly incredible how Parkour Civilization swings between brain melting revelatory twists and then bits like 'parkour pros only eat beef from cows that clear parkour courses' or 'I can only get into my house by dropping a hundred metres from above.' Or even the persistent bit with evbo never really working out how the economy works.
 
The set up an payoff with 'actually I think I might have created Parkour Civilization' is legitimately incredible writing, he was cooking.
 
parkour civ is like distilled brainrot

the vocal intonations
the subject matter
the short clips forcing it to reiterate 'previously on parkour civ' every 2 minutes
the overexplanation of what's literally happening on the screen while conspicuously failing to address the real question of what the fuck is going on

fent might make for safer consumption
 
Queshire said:
I have no idea what parkour civilization is and I'm not sure I want to know.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
A series of videos made by Evbo on Youtube, about a Minecraft map where all blocks outside buildings are spaced at least one block apart to make you jump everywhere (and homes have gaps in them to force you to jump, too). It's pretty entertaining, mostly thanks to how deep Evbo goes into the stratified society and the worldbuilding that caused such a weird society.
 
Queshire said:
I have no idea what parkour civilization is and I'm not sure I want to know.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Too bad, I'm going to tell you anyway! Very basically it was a series of Minecraft videos about an extremely clueless guy trying to survive in Parkour Civilization, a dystopian society suspended over an infinite void and were parkour is everything and you have to do parkour just to get around your house (which you have to buy by doing parkour). It follows him as he cluelessly and cheerfully attempts to achieve his impossible dream of rising from parkour noob to parkour pro.

And how in the process he overturns the heavens.
 
Bah, kids these days. Why, I remember when a minecraft series was about serious things like sending a dwarf to the moon!
 
The scripts for God of War 4, Ragnarok, and Valhalla were written by people who have not the slightest clue of what actual redemption is or looks like, and thus the stories for those three installments are an increasingly complete waste of time with no actual redemption arc, as well as a waste of the base mythology and the potential options for un-fucking Kratos from the first four games.
 
CanYouMeme said:
The scripts for God of War 4, Ragnarok, and Valhalla were written by people who have not the slightest clue of what actual redemption is or looks like, and thus the stories for those three installments are an increasingly complete waste of time with no actual redemption arc, as well as a waste of the base mythology and the potential options for un-fucking Kratos from the first four games.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm curious on how they did redemption wrong and what should actual redemption look like.

Asking this as someone whose interested in redemption stories and have ideas in head for one.
 
Sometimes, simpler is better. I don't need a villain with three hundred pages of backstory. Just say that the guy wants to scare snooping teenagers away from the abandoned castle he wants to purchase the land rights to so he can build a failing mini-mall.
 
BlackCat-055 said:
I'm curious on how they did redemption wrong and what should actual redemption look like.

Asking this as someone whose interested in redemption stories and have ideas in head for one.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Fair enough. It's a good question, but it's going to take a bit to properly answer, so bear with me.

In order to correctly tell a redemption story, we first need to do away with two common misconceptions with the following corrections;
---Redemption and forgiveness are not related and have no connection. Somebody does not need to be forgiven to be redeemed, even if it does generally reflect well on someone that they seek forgiveness.
---Redemption is not an act of substitution. A person is not redeemed just because "they do good now".

Redemption is nothing more and nothing less than a single question, usually spun one of two different ways; Are you the same person you were back then/If we turn back the clock and put you back there, will you do it again? If the heartfelt answer is a Yes, then you are not redeemed. If it is a heartfelt No, then you are. That's it.

The story of redemption isn't in the question and the answer. The story is in how the question and answer are related, and how that affects the characters.

To give an example of a recent redemption story done right, I present to you the following. Couldn't find a video of just the segment I wanted, so go to timestamp 14:00

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl7zD6yEP0I
I present to you Thom Rainier. He was a coward who murdered innocent people for his own convenience, and made others complicit in his crimes. But when you meet him at the beginning of his introduction to the story, he is a man struggling to be better, teaching peasants to fight so they might survive a battle they cannot escape - and prepared to die with them, if it comes to that. And at the timestamp I gave, he is a man who will die to save the innocent where once he would have killed them. It really doesn't matter if the Inquisitor executes, exiles, forgives, or pardons him as far as Thom the Man is concerned - he is redeemed, because someone asked him the question "Will you kill innocents for convenience again?" and he said "I will not do it again, even if it should be my death".
-----------------------
You asked about redemption stories in particular, so lets turn back time a while to Kratos of the first four games.

Kratos of those games and Thom of 9:37 are different in degree and that's a distinction worth discussing in a longer essay, but at heart they are the same in kind; people who kill for convenience and only care when it becomes "their problem". For four games (incuding that one spin-off), Kratos consistently kills people just because he can, some who "deserve" it and some who do not. Much like Thom, he even ruins people who trusted him, and served with him, and helped him.

So GoW 4 rolls around. There are several opportunities where Kratos could prove himself different than he was, but for the sake of brevity let us discuss Baldur as he is the largest example. Again, couldn't find just the part I wanted, so timestamp 26:50;

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZP3tpZrBJM
For one brief, shining moment, Kratos holds redemption in his hands. And he takes it. He lets Baldur live. He refuses to kill for convenience.

But then he fucks it up and pisses it away, because the script writers aren't willing to commit to what that means. He knows Baldur is unstable, but he doesn't act accordingly. He wants to save Baldur's life even when Baldur himself orders Kratos to kill him, but only so long as it's convenient. And when Baldur does as he said he would, and proved he would, and tries to kill Freya, Kratos kills him. And with it, his redemption arc.

See, Kratos won that fight, and in doing so he had so many options. He could have told Freya to fuck off and stop antagonizing the man she broke. Wouldn't that be something, Dad-tos inadvertently becoming the single father Baldur never really had? A broken, misfit family of three wandering the realms getting into shenanigans as they try to patch themselves back together?

He could have subdued Baldur again. Wouldn't that be a legend - Baldur and Kratos, fighting on and off again for a century o'er hill and dale, only to finally come to terms when the former realizes he doesn't need to kill Freya to be free of her with the curse gone, and Kratos' commitment to being a redeemed man finally pays off?

Or maybe some combination of the two, or some other story I haven't thought of? How many games could you have spun out of those possibilities? At least two, I would think.

But no. Kratos kills Baldur, Fimbulwinter kicks off, and we get the utter travesty that is GoW Ragnarok, where Kratos never gets his redemption arc because the script writers carefully remove every chance for him to be a better man. Doesn't want to start Ragnarok? Nah, it'll be fine, secret prophecy says it's a targeted ICBM that will only hit the bad guys in Asgard. Doesn't want to be a general in another war? Wouldn't it be interesting to leverage all this arcane wizardry you've collected into...I dunno, a grand sleeping spell so all the poor meatshields on the Asgardian side don't have to die? Nah, just kill your way through them, the PDI don't matter to the story.

But hey, here's Freya abandoning her oath to torture and kill Kratos so we can have some poorly disguised maybe-maybe-not sexual tension. It's not like one of the defining hallmarks of Norse mythology is that words have weight and oaths are binding, even when they're poorly considered and you regret them later.

So much setup, so many options, so many different ways Kratos could have had the best damn redemption story in half a century. All of it wasted, because for whatever reason the scriptwriters either don't understand or don't care that redemption requires you to be a different person, not merely a caricature of a "better" one.
-----------------------------------------
EDIT: Minor correction on my part - I said you do not need to be forgiven, and while that's true for the purposes of storytelling and general living, it's going to cause some issues if you try to apply that in a religious or legal context. As always, take some time to learn more about redemption beyond what I've stated and pay attention to circumstance.
 
Last edited:
This is incredibly well put, and gives me a new perspective to redemption.

CanYouMeme said:
---Redemption and forgiveness are not related and have no connection. Somebody does not need to be forgiven to be redeemed, even if it does generally reflect well on someone that they seek forgiveness.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I'm surprised, I always thought that for a redemption to be done, forgiveness has to be earned. That if you can't make amends at best you're just still on the path but not fully truly redeemed.

But I didn't know you can just change without their permission.

Well that sounds wrong and hindsight it probably was eh, but I still assumed it was like that.

CanYouMeme said:
--Redemption is not an act of substitution. A person is not redeemed just because "they do good now
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I thought that for a redemption to work you needed to do good deeds to offset the bad actions you've done. Otherwise the redemption is wrong or flawed.

Although I guess that concept doesn't conflict directly about your next point

CanYouMeme said:
Redemption is nothing more and nothing less than a single question, usually spun one of two different ways; Are you the same person you were back then/If we turn back the clock and put you back there, will you do it again? If the heartfelt answer is a Yes, then you are not redeemed. If it is a heartfelt No, then you are. That's it.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

That is succinctly put and interesting. I guess I could ask about then about if a person intends not to do it but also is afraid they'd do it. But then again it wouldn't be a proper redemption since the examples you made with Kratos in regards to Baldur, he doesn't want to go back to God killing but he does it anyways.

Honestly the talks about him being a single dad to Baldur was an interesting story and I would like to see something like that but I have a weakness for stories with good dads.


I hadn't played the GoW games so I only have your word to go for it, but it does sound like the writers made excuses for Kratos to go back fighting.

Normally I'd point out what if there was no other way, for example with the army part. But you've noted there was an actual alternative solution that could've been done. So I understand that.


All in all it was nice to hear about your points about redemption and will tentatively integrate it maybe.


I am curious of your thoughts on limits of redemption, like is there a barrier when you've gone "too far" and can never be redeemed, and is there like a quota of time and effort that needs to be done. Obviously I can infer that redemption needs true change instead of meaningless attempts at flattery or good peepo points but figure I'd ask for more thoughts even if what's already available is much appreciated.

I always figured you needed to fulfill a karmic quota and requirements before a redemption can be truly official. I still think it is tbh, if not for how it should be, but more rather that's the natural state of things. But the alternative insight was something I enjoyed reading.
 
CanYouMeme said:
Redemption is nothing more and nothing less than a single question, usually spun one of two different ways; Are you the same person you were back then/If we turn back the clock and put you back there, will you do it again? If the heartfelt answer is a Yes, then you are not redeemed. If it is a heartfelt No, then you are. That's it.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

By this logic then Kratos is actually redeemed. The Kratos seen at basically any point in the Norse saga games would not have done the things that Kratos did in the Greek era. Speaking personally I don't really think the Norse games are about redemption in any case, Kratos has had exactly one real opportunity for redemption and it was in God of War III, and to some degree the whole original trilogy was Kratos trying to make up for his mistakes with Lysandra and Calliope. He failed. The Norse games are more about coming to terms with what you've done and learning to live.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top