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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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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.
 
Maugan Ra said:
My hot take is that people need to get over themselves and stop performatively hating on Age of Sigmar.

It's been ten years.

End Times was dogshit but Age of Sigmar is its own thing, its own setting with its own story and themes, and I genuinely do wish we could discuss it in SV-adjacent spaces without people declaring how much they hate it and everything it stands for.
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It isn't really performative for me, in all honesty, they wiped my army from existence and the replacement (The Rune Lords) are fine but took forever to come out. It isn't really hatred even it is just kind of a general desire to not engage with it. Might give something a go later, but for now I am content to take a step away from it.

Also I think they are way too reliant on Old World nostalgia, bringing back Gotrek and other famous characters. If the setting wants to stand on its own it should stand entirely on its own with mostly new creations, that is my opinion there.

Like to expand I do like the Rune Lords. I like that they are really cool good guys that are basically the Paladins of the setting, I like their giant nature spirits that help them out, their models are really cool...but they just aren't as cool as the High Elves of Ulthaun to me. Also Age of Sigmar keeps treating my guy Tyrion like garbage and I'm just never going to like that.
 
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yrsillar said:
I do agree with this, I don't particularly like it compared to the actual warhammer fantasy setting, but people are overwrought about it. Though frankly I place that blame fully on GW deciding that they needed to completely blow up and actively maliciously shit on a thing a ton of people liked in order to launch their new spin off. When your business model is all about getting people deeply invested in your setting emotionally and financially through their pile of extremely expensive, meticulously self painted mini's, maybe don't do that lol.
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Yeah I file that under "End Times was dogshit" - both the lore that got produced, and also how the how the transition was handled from a business side. God knows I'm not going to defend it.

I'm also not going to insist that people treat it as an entirely separate thing either, because I think there's actually quite a bit to be said about Age of Sigmar and how it exists in dialogue with other warhammer settings. People like to go "oh look it's just the God Emperor and his Great Crusade again" but there's actually a lot of meat to a discussion about the similarities and differences between them - for example, how Sigmar sets up his Cities as self-governing enclaves with strong democratic traditions and how tensions with both the local humans and the other powers are handled etc etc.

But those discussions don't generally happen, and I kind of wish they did.
 
Maugan Ra said:
Yeah I file that under "End Times was dogshit" - both the lore that got produced, and also how the how the transition was handled from a business side. God knows I'm not going to defend it.

I'm also not going to insist that people treat it as an entirely separate thing either, because I think there's actually quite a bit to be said about Age of Sigmar and how it exists in dialogue with other warhammer settings. People like to go "oh look it's just the God Emperor and his Great Crusade again" but there's actually a lot of meat to a discussion about the similarities and differences between them - for example, how Sigmar sets up his Cities as self-governing enclaves with strong democratic traditions and how tensions with both the local humans and the other powers are handled etc etc.

But those discussions don't generally happen, and I kind of wish they did.
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Yeah, I have seen snippets of interesting ideas though I last looked in on the setting years and year ago so maybe they have fleshed out the world given it back some of the 'living world' vibe that old world had at this. I want to get involved at mini painting and physical wargames someday if finances ever allow but I just don't know if I want to invest that in GW at this point
 
I think in general it would be healthier to just not talk about Old World in relation to Sigmar. I have a lot of issues with how they utilize the setting (has most of the failings of HH and 40k without the decades of structure that help bind that together) alongside a lot of love for the models I've spent god knows how many hours on, but we should let it live and breathe on its own. If you're still mad about the Great Squatting go play TOW or Conquest.

On the topic of Space Wolves, part of why I loved them when I was young was that most Marines tended to get a nice dose of irony in them; the Space Wolves were Berserk Vikings but rather than being crazy assholes in terms of their relationships to others were actually cool himbos that stood up to the Inquisition and rest of the Imperium when it came to humanity until their protection.
 
Mutton said:
I think in general it would be healthier to just not talk about Old World in relation to Sigmar. I have a lot of issues with how they utilize the setting (has most of the failings of HH and 40k without the decades of structure that help bind that together) alongside a lot of love for the models I've spent god knows how many hours on, but we should let it live and breathe on its own. If you're still mad about the Great Squatting go play TOW or Conquest.

On the topic of Space Wolves, part of why I loved them when I was young was that most Marines tended to get a nice dose of irony in them; the Space Wolves were Berserk Vikings but rather than being crazy assholes in terms of their relationships to others were actually cool himbos that stood up to the Inquisition and rest of the Imperium when it came to humanity until their protection.
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The Emperor's Gift is probably my favorite book from ADB, in part because the Space Wolves rule so much in it. Actually a funny unpopular opinion (Or hot take? Idk the difference between "Unpopular" and "Hot" escapes me) is that I generally prefer ADB's work with the Imperium over his work with Chaos, which is funny since Chaos is what he is famous for in the sphere of Black Library fiction.
 
yrsillar said:
Yeah, I have seen snippets of interesting ideas though I last looked in on the setting years and year ago so maybe they have fleshed out the world given it back some of the 'living world' vibe that old world had at this. I want to get involved at mini painting and physical wargames someday if finances ever allow but I just don't know if I want to invest that in GW at this point
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In the same way that most of the actual "living world" lore for WHF came from the rpg sourcebooks, I would recommend the Soulbound rpg for the lore side of AoS.

Greywater Fastness for example has a whole thing about, like, the demands of constant war against an implacable foe and how the war economy is used to prop up the industrial barons who use "Line goes up = Patriotism" in their electoral campaigns, how that reflects in the cultural makeup of the city, and how easy it is to frame rampant pollution and destruction of the environment as a necessary sacrifice and a hard but necessary decision when you have a great enemy to point to instead of acknowledging that the line could stand to go up a little slower. That's basically all in the Blackened Earth AP, in the same way as a lot of WFRP adventures included a close look at the different cities, states and faiths of the Empire (Terror in Talabheim, Forges of Nuln etc).
 
My pet peeve has kore to do with fan fiction bu from what I heard about certain 40k writers it might also apply to normal fiction.

What I despise is someone coming into a setting and going all power wank and 'um akshually IRL…' completely undermining it. Yes in Star Wars people use blasters and turbo lasers instead of guns, yes they don't use networked computers, have exposed bridges and every naval engagement is a knife fight. No your super special MAC or IRL gun won't suddenly become the new revolution and allow you to one shot anything in the setting.

Yes in Battletech the giant war robots are the supreme weapon on the battlefield and everything evolves around it. No authors being stupid doesn't take away from the fact there are good reasons Mechs are the weapon of choice and not artillery or tanks or why drones and beyond-horizon missiles aren't a thing.

These are central conceits of the settings, it's how the setting works and was always intended to work. Just because it came out in the 80s or 90s and technology progressed in ways the authors couldn't foresee doesn't mean you can use an example from 2023 to invalidate 50 years of lore. Deal with it.
 
Maugan Ra said:
My hot take is that people need to get over themselves and stop performatively hating on Age of Sigmar.
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It could have the best lore and the best rules ever for the kind of game it is but it still would not matter because it is the wrong kind of game. GW replaced a rank and flank game with a skirmish one. There are many other better skirmish games I could play if I wanted to. Not many rank and flank games out there with any real popularity where you can charge spearman blocks against each other and also shoot a dragon with a cannon.
 
Part of it was, from what I hear, Warhammer Fantasy sales were absolutely abysmal (and even if they weren't hen you need like a gorillion models to play, people are gonna get turned off).
 
Axslashel said:
It could have the best lore and the best rules ever for the kind of game it is but it still would not matter because it is the wrong kind of game. GW replaced a rank and flank game with a skirmish one. There are many other better skirmish games I could play if I wanted to. Not many rank and flank games out there with any real popularity where you can charge spearman blocks against each other and also shoot a dragon with a cannon.
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Might I preach the good word of Conquest, where you can even have Dwarves riding Dragons firing cannons at Dinosaurs with Orcs on top?
 
Mutton said:
Might I preach the good word of Conquest, where you can even have Dwarves riding Dragons firing cannons at Dinosaurs with Orcs on top?
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Looks intriguing but I am currently getting back into TOW and do not have the time for another. Conquest looks interesting but from what I saw I am a bit worried that having a lot of ranks in a unit looks to be uncommon.

Edit: I actually liked 8th edition and the focus on big units of infantry whacking away at each other. Terrible for getting players into the game but the aesthetic of huge blocks of infantry lined up in wide and deep appeals to me. Sadly even TOW is being a bit of a monster mash right now.
 
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Maugan Ra said:
In the same way that most of the actual "living world" lore for WHF came from the rpg sourcebooks, I would recommend the Soulbound rpg for the lore side of AoS.

Greywater Fastness for example has a whole thing about, like, the demands of constant war against an implacable foe and how the war economy is used to prop up the industrial barons who use "Line goes up = Patriotism" in their electoral campaigns, how that reflects in the cultural makeup of the city, and how easy it is to frame rampant pollution and destruction of the environment as a necessary sacrifice and a hard but necessary decision when you have a great enemy to point to instead of acknowledging that the line could stand to go up a little slower. That's basically all in the Blackened Earth AP, in the same way as a lot of WFRP adventures included a close look at the different cities, states and faiths of the Empire (Terror in Talabheim, Forges of Nuln etc).
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Yeah that sounds about right, the interesting things I heard did come from reviews of the ttrpg line, and most of my love for old fantasy is definitely rooted in the 2e ttrpg lorebooks
 
Virtually nobody gets children right in fiction, and I think that's fine.

Most actual children are a very bizarre mix of boring (because in a lot of things there's very little difference between them and adults) and annoying (because undeveloped language skills and lack of knowledge make it really annoying to read) so the way most fiction scrubs out one or the other usually makes for better prose.
 
Here's an actual good one: Unless they're very intentionally bucking against the trend (and typically doing so in a way that goes too far in the opposite direction), I think people tend to make make every character too smoothly professional and too on the ball.

I was reading The Hot Zone the other day, and it struck me that the people handling the outbreak of Ebola among lab monkeys in Reston, Virignia were all serious professionals trained in biowarfare defence... and they were nonetheless forced to transport ebola-infected monkey corpses by wrapping them in three layers of garbage bags, they missed entrances to areas they needed to make 100% secure, and dropped dirty needles in grass, just to name a few fuck ups. They immediately moved to fix these issues the moment they became apparent and were totally professional and very clever otherwise, but very rarely do writers strike the right balance between serious professionals and humans when creating characters and plots, and it does get a little irritating.
 
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I don't understand why we had multiple pages of argument about the whole "cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable" thing, it's hyperbole don't read too much into it. Obviously we could all imagine an even crueler and bloodier regime but like the point of the Imperium is to be bad enough to meet our grimdark quotient but not be so bad that we can't enjoy stories from the perceptive of Imperial aligned characters. Whether or not that goal is being met is a whole other question.
 
I don't think it's right to say that it's intended as hyperbole. It's a statement of intent on the part of 40k's authors. That we, with the benefit of something to compare against, can think up things like a government that puts everyone in the penis explosion chamber or which makes everyone step on lego all the time isn't really relevant to the message the authors were trying to impart about the Imperium of Man.
 
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Rat King said:
Part of it was, from what I hear, Warhammer Fantasy sales were absolutely abysmal (and even if they weren't hen you need like a gorillion models to play, people are gonna get turned off).
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WFB had a bunch of issues that made a high bar to entry, but most of them could have been salvaged in my opinion if GW had been willing to put in time and work to fix the game, alter some rules here and there, change some elements of play. A bunch of oldguys would have bitched because that's what oldguys do, but I think the game could have survived. The game was fading in prominence compared to the ascendant 40k and worry was high that GW would just end support for WFB in favor of their growing cash cow, but the game could still have kept going.

What really killed WFB was Storm of Chaos. That event basically destroyed GW's relationship with WFB players and nothing was going to bring it back. The barrier to entry went from high to impossible because people just stopped playing and the refrain became 'don't bother, they're just going to squat the setting' a sentiment that wasn't helped by the way WFB releases went from slow to tepid. Once your playerbase is actively telling people to look elsewhere you're fucked. It's a great example of the trust thermocline.
 
There is only so much GW can or is willing to show in the sheer horrors that would require a regime like the Imperium to drag along, and honestly they show plenty. The rest is subtext.
 
MysticKnightJoe said:
There is only so much GW can or is willing to show in the sheer horrors that would require a regime like the Imperium to drag along, and honestly they show plenty. The rest is subtext.
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At some point this is just the reality of a bunch of nerds taking the conceit for their plastic miniatures bashing each other to bits entirely too seriously.
 
I don't think WHFB was really salvageable as a system; mass rank and flank was just on the way out and they were totally empty on interesting ideas for making it work. They had just had a great big beautiful line release with Tomb Kings and it failed to move product. The line was dead; they could have handled it with far more grace but business wise those were dark times.
 
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