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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.
 
Mostly, as someone who's currently studying Physics (with an interest in Astrophysics), I've become more uncaring when it comes to inaccuracies in that space in fiction. Not entirely, there are some cases where I get more annoyed, but on the whole, unless the work is, well, being confidently incorrect while also positioning itself as an authority (or rather, having "I'm not like OTHER sci-fi" energy), I don't think it's going to bother me if the numbers on the travel times are a bit wacky, or if the effects of relativity didn't apply themselves properly to the passengers or whatever.
 
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I don't get why so many works of fiction portray characters being fucking miserable in the heat during summer and trying desperately to fight it off and then present it as a somehow nostalgic and pleasant memory.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
I don't get why so many works of fiction portray characters being fucking miserable in the heat during summer and trying desperately to fight it off and then present it as a somehow nostalgic and pleasant memory.
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I think they are usually not actually that miserable. They are being melodramatic or exaggerated for effect. Nostalgia may be for a simpler time with fewer responsibilities or for the camaraderie of shared suffering.
 
Gwyn was not a villain for linking the first flame. He was a villain for the other stuff he did but overall linking the first flame might have been his first selfless act in his life. The dark in Dark Souls is actually really awful and linking the flame for as long as possible was a net good in that setting, even if it did start to have diminishing rewards towards the end.
 
It's also natural to die one day, but you don't blame people for taking medicine to live just a little bit longer. When the fire fades, existence as we know it ends. Humans won't even be humans and everything we see of the dark isn't particularly pleasant. By the time they needed to link the fire Gwyn had already doomed humanity with the dark sign. Linking the flame gave everyone another 1000 years at least.

Edit again (This is actually also added in in post after the proceeding reply) We see lots of different manifestations of the dark in Dark Souls, particularly in the final game. You have the Abyss, the Deep and the Locusts. Even if you blame Manus's torture for the Abyss, every emissary for the dark is all about predation/consumption and quite cruel indeed. To be fair the same could be said about the Light as well but we don't really see it run wild besides the Chaos flame, and even then Gwyn's and Nito's flames don't do anything particularly objectionable.

Edit: To be clear, with the 'natural to die one day' I realise it's a bit hyperbolic but what I mean is that not all that is natural is good.
 
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Rumlo said:
It's also natural to die one day, but you don't blame people for taking medicine to live just a little bit longer. When the fire fades, existence as we know it ends. Humans won't even be humans and everything we see of the dark isn't particularly pleasant. By the time they needed to link the fire Gwyn had already doomed humanity with the dark sign. Linking the flame gave everyone another 1000 years at least.
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Sometimes people do in fact want to die instead of hanging on as their health continues to deteriorate, and Gwyn made that choice for everyone in existence not for their sake but because he was terrified of what would happen outside of the Age of Fire he ruled. We don't ever actually see what the full Age of Dark is like for people, but it's framed as a genuinely hopeful ending in DS3 which is for all intents and purposes the end of Dark Souls and it's not like the Age of Fire couldn't produce some horrific shit by itself.
 
It is true that we never really see an age of dark until dark souls 3, but I always felt that that ending was more hopeful in the sense that the treatment was no longer worth the effects - it had been having such diminishing returns and enacted such costs that at that point it was the right thing to do.

However, for Dark Souls 1 and 2, I don't believe this to be the case necessarily. The gods are essentially gone and humanity gets to do whatever they want for what seems like millenia while still living in a world with like, actual light and not a pitch black world full of ravenous bugs and such. I suppose it's a bit anthropocentric but I'd rather live in that sort of world personally.

Edit: Also, I don't think making a great personal sacrifice to keep the world you know going is exactly something to be condemned. I don't doubt Gwyn was scared of the future, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a good thing to do.

Edit2: Sorry about all the edits. I keep on thinking of extra arguments to add when I hit submit. I've never actually had a discussion on a forum before.
 
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Sometimes people want to die.
And sometimes people want to live.
The undead were not the majority (atleast in Dark Souls), and there were whole nations out there, just living their lives.
What happens to those nations if/when the fire goes out?

I feel that Dark Souls as a lesson on how sometimes it is best to let things end rather gets lost in the fact that it is also, in narrative, a whole world, and telling people living in it that it is time for the world to end, feels rather callous and misanthropic at best.
 
Rumlo said:
It is true that we never really see an age of dark until dark souls 3, but I always felt that that ending was more hopeful in the sense that the treatment was no longer worth the effects - it had been having such diminishing returns and enacted such costs that at that point it was the right thing to do.

However, for Dark Souls 1 and 2, I don't believe this to be the case necessarily. The gods are essentially gone and humanity gets to do whatever they want for what seems like millenia while still living in a world with like, actual light and not a pitch black world full of ravenous bugs and such. I suppose it's a bit anthropocentric but I'd rather live in that sort of world personally.
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I don't think the gods were gone, though. They were still there for large parts of it and still fundamentally in charge, just declining as with essentially everything else.

I don't think I can really be sympathetic to Gwyn for it when he was explicitly a violent tyrant who made the sacrifice he made because he wanted the Age of Fire, the age where gods like him and his family reigned supreme, to last forever and ever. The fact that humanity was made of the Dark and the Age of the Dark is consistently called the Age of Man suggests to me it'll probably be like, fine once things actually settle in as opposed to massive concentrations of the Abyss in the Age of Fire.
 
Yeah definitely don't be sympathetic for Gwyn. I do maintain that the gods were basically 'gone' after he linked the fire though. You've got Nito doing basically nothing. The bed of chaos can't really be said to be ruling over anything. Of Gwyn's family the Nameless King is hiding away in the corner of the world in a hollowed form, Gwynevere has vanished and Gwyndolin is puppeting Anor Londo.

Looking back at things I think you're probably right that the age of dark likely won't be too bad. I'd forgotten how understated the DS1 age of dark ending is.

I do think I've sort of lost my main argument in all of this though - we don't actually know for sure what the age of dark will look like. We can only guess what we've seen in the age of fire which hasn't been promising. There's a tension between going with what you know and rolling the dice, and I can't blame anyone for deciding to not roll those dice.

Edit: You know I never really wondered what the giants, or the dwarves, or the other kind of giants think of the whole ages thing.
 
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The other aspect to it is that as time went on and we got more Dark Souls, things kind of shifted from the presentation in 1, which was shady for certain but not quite "Gwyn tricked the pygmies into accepting the Ringed City as a gift then had them all branded with the Darksign to contain the power of their Dark Soul because he was terrified of the Age of Dark and in doing so caused the curse of Undeath".

Dark Souls 3 makes the whole thing quite clear, but way back in 1 things were unclear enough given Kaathe's untrustworthiness and the way the Dark was presented in that game comparatively, even if the whole thing was quite understated.
 
That's true. I think Dark Souls 3 really weakened the narrative of the series. Though, when I'd only played Dark Souls 1, I was actually a lot more pro age of dark than I am now. It's only after 2 and 3 and meeting the locusts and the deep, and King Vendrick that I started to be a bit less harsh on linking the flame.

I hadn't really considered the darksign branding to be part of the same line of actions exactly. I'd always just thought of that as part of Gwyn's lust for power and control and seizing the opportunity to suppress a rival power rather than an aspect of his fear of the Dark in a cosmological sense.
 
Perhaps this sort of attitude is well-founded with regards to Star Wars (I've watched The Phantom Menace, A New Hope, read a book adaption of the trilogy, and came away with impression that it was only just alright, but beyond that basic impression I know it may be silly of me to say much else), but I really do think that the general sentiment of "screw rules, don't think too hard about it, etc, etc" is a bad one. It leads shallow, incoherent, undefined works that prioritize flashy presentation over substance.

You are, of course, perfectly welcome to your own preferences and to do as wish - however, I would recommend trying to look past your grievances with the genre, as there many wonderfully interesting stories found in it (some of which even are those that you spoke of as being annoyingly wrong about stuff they claim are scientifically accurate). I personally tend to do so by "head-cannoning" that everything is in it's own unique cosmology, which might be a useful mindset for you, too.

Again, I am not saying you "have to" or "should" do the above, just giving a suggestion since you might be pleasantly surprised.

Anyway, my contribution to the thread is that it is really, really irritating that a good chunk of fiction presents as it's grand moral dilemma some oversimplified, warped version of pseudo-deontology vs consequentialism as it's grand moral conflict, for a number of reasons that are listed below:

- Without fail, the narrative will rule in favor of former.
- The manner in which the narrative rules in favor of the former often feels very contrived. A consequentialist villian may have a Nobel-prize winning speech given in support of worldview, complete with a world that seems to match it, but all the protagonist of principles needs to do is affirm that they are in the right and violia, they will be.

I am slightly biased and didn't think too hard on this, so I could be wrong.

Also, as an aside, I had a lot more reasons, but I forget them. I do hope that will be forgiven.

Edit:
My apologies for this silly little mistake, but would anyone happen to know why using the quote button to respond to various peoples did not work?
 
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Rumlo said:
That's true. I think Dark Souls 3 really weakened the narrative of the series. Though, when I'd only played Dark Souls 1, I was actually a lot more pro age of dark than I am now. It's only after 2 and 3 and meeting the locusts and the deep, and King Vendrick that I started to be a bit less harsh on linking the flame.

I hadn't really considered the darksign branding to be part of the same line of actions exactly. I'd always just thought of that as part of Gwyn's lust for power and control and seizing the opportunity to suppress a rival power rather than an aspect of his fear of the Dark in a cosmological sense.
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I think they're pretty inextricable, though I will say I think that DS3 strengthened the narrative by being a pretty firm argument for why letting something end is okay. Ultimately it calls back to Kaathe's dialogue in DS1 that Gwyn intentionally blurred the history of humanity to prevent them from understanding anything about their connection to the Dark Soul, and while obviously you shouldn't take anything that either Kaathe or Frampt say at face value because both are untrustworthy, the idea that Gwyn would have gone as far as to create the brand of the Darksign out of fear of the Age of the Dark inevitably rising isn't too far fetched to me. After all, despite his many rivals and enemies, the Ringed City and Darksign were unique among his solutions.
 
Exhale said:
- The manner in which the narrative rules in favor of the former often feels very contrived. A consequentialist villian may have a Nobel-prize winning speech given in support of worldview, complete with a world that seems to match it, but all the protagonist of principles needs to do is affirm that they are in the right and violia, they will be.
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I mean, that's simply the nature of debates between moral theories that have different bases. You can't really rationally persuade someone to the other side, because your starting points are completely different (unless you manage do something like proving that your preferred theory follows directly from rationality itself). Non-rational forms of persuasion can just be ignored by someone sufficiently committed to their stance.
 
SturmOgre said:
I mean, that's simply the nature of debates between moral theories that have different bases. You can't really rationally persuade someone to the other side, because your starting points are completely different (unless you manage do something like proving that your preferred theory follows directly from rationality itself). Non-rational forms of persuasion can just be ignored by someone sufficiently committed to their stance.
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Even so, there is a marked difference between two sides who feel equally justified by their own dogma with there being at least some feeling that in the story there is a real contest or dilemma between them, and what I'm referring too, where it feels like all too often there's no real struggle of ideas.
 
Rumlo said:
Gwyn was not a villain for linking the first flame. He was a villain for the other stuff he did but overall linking the first flame might have been his first selfless act in his life. The dark in Dark Souls is actually really awful and linking the flame for as long as possible was a net good in that setting, even if it did start to have diminishing rewards towards the end.
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In Dark Souls 1, particularly, before they added a bunch of extra stuff that was not in the first game, I am pretty much of the opinion that going with the Dark is pretty much a villain route.

From the information you get in that game, pretty much everything that exists in the world is of Fire, except for Humanity, which is of the Dark. Everything we see of the Dark is basically inimical to almost everything else, and honestly Oolacile makes it clear most humans ain't going to be having a great time either. You are functionally ending the world, and going "burning down the world is okay because humans (read: I) get to rule the ashes". And honestly, nah.

Basically the feeling I got from DS1 was, sure the world will end eventually. Nobody can stop the end forever. But here and now we're alive, and letting people have one more turn before everything goes poof is a good thing.
 
Drascin said:
In Dark Souls 1, particularly, before they added a bunch of extra stuff that was not in the first game, I am pretty much of the opinion that going with the Dark is pretty much a villain route.

From the information you get in that game, pretty much everything that exists in the world is of Fire, except for Humanity, which is of the Dark. Everything we see of the Dark is basically inimical to almost everything else, and honestly Oolacile makes it clear most humans ain't going to be having a great time either. You are functionally ending the world, and going "burning down the world is okay because humans (read: I) get to rule the ashes". And honestly, nah.

Basically the feeling I got from DS1 was, sure the world will end eventually. Nobody can stop the end forever. But here and now we're alive, and letting people have one more turn before everything goes poof is a good thing.
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I do think that it's very important to emphasise that the plot of DS1 involves the Chosen Undead, and indeed every Undead, being tricked by Frampt into believing that they're going to be the new king of the world when in fact they're instead going to burn for a thousand years, losing their mind and eventually being slain by the next sucker who will then take their place. In Frampt's ideal world (maybe, since he does show up in the Age of Dark ending too) he can keep tricking suckers into never realising there is any other alternative—he literally never mentions that Gwyn is still alive and you have to kill him—and that's something that I really thing has to be considered when discussing the games.

I don't really see it as a villain route to be told that you're going to be a Great Lord who succeeds the previous god of the world and then to realise that while that's technically true the practical reality of it is a thousand years of hell you got volunteered for and swindled into while potentially never knowing you could do anything else. It's not an act of evil to look at that circumstance and choose to walk away instead, and while we can't trust either Kaathe or Frampt completely, Kaathe at the very least is upfront about the fact that Gwyn is still alive and killing him is the only way to change anything at all, and his argument about Gwyn resisting the natural order is provably true even in DS1 itself, so he's more honest (or at least more upfront) compared to Frampt.
 
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TheFairTyrant said:
Apologies, but could you elaborate on this (asking as an amateur paleonerd)?
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The Allosaurus Hatchet bite hypothesis is a bizarrely persistent proposal that the Allosaurus actually had an incredibly weak bite through some quite frankly dubious modelling that gave Lions a bite force that would shatter their skulls and kill them instantly to use and Allosaurus at around the bite force of a monitor lizard 1% of its size. This, combined with the wide gape that the animal was capable of, over 90 degrees according to this model as well as the skull being more reinforced than it would need to be for a bite this weak, lead to the researcher proposing that instead of biting like a normal animal it would instead do an open mouthed peck with the upper mandible.

Despite the very, very many forensic and simple practical issues with this, it keeps on being brought up by paleomedia every now and then and also requires you to believe that every sort of bite in the animal kingdom needs to be a bonecrusher or is useless which is just being daft. In actuality Allosaurus while lacking the bone shattering force of the Tyrannosaurids, was still perfectly suited for carving out massive chunks of flesh and thus causing enormous blood loss and tissue randomisation and the hatchet bite would just endlessly break its lower jaw every time the prey item thrashed even slightly.

And of course, Allosaurus was an incredibly violent and aggressive predator to a degree seen in basically nothing else but shrews. Its bite and claw marks are on literally every other animal it shared habitats with and all evidence points to them breeding and maturing fast and their groups just absorbing the casualties that came from picking fights with anything that moved during lean times. If it so much as breathed in its range and they were hungry enough, they were going to take the sort of risks that their competing ceratosaurids and megalosaurids wouldn't. Yet despite this there are precisely zero fossilised injuries on literally anything that would correspond to the sort of wounds that the hatchet bite would create.

Even simple practical demonstrations before we look into how Allosaurus' neck was not at all designed for rapid pecking motions show flaws in the hypothesis. The idea is slamming the top jaw teeth first into the target like an axe, but as I hinted at earlier the bottom jaw's very presence makes this an awkward, dangerous motion with a high risk of self-harm against a non-immobile target. Too much lateral movement means that the bottom jaw is now taking significant impact and is at risk of fracture, and furthermore when we look at Allosaurus' blade like teeth, we can see that these are not the sort of teeth one would expect for such an impact, they're not sturdy enough for this sort of impact to be done every time it makes a kill.

Furthermore, on the subject of teeth and forensic evidence, we do not find teeth fossils showing signs of wear consistent with this sort of high impact kinetic kill, and given that dinosaurs were polyphodonts who replaced their teeth constantly throughout their lives, the lack of so much as a single allosaurus tooth that demonstrates this kind of damage is very damning. This was a very successful macropredator that was a prodigious breeder and attacked just about anything from sauropods to stegosaurids to other theropods when hungry enough and at the very least was gregarious enough to congregate, perhaps even outright pack hunting. If it hunted like this, we should have found lots of teeth worn in a way consistent with the hypothesis but we don't at all. Instead all tooth wearing is suggestive of a much more conventional laceration and flesh removal sort of bite.

I am passionate about paleontology since it was my hoped for career path to the point of going through years of study before I realised that the pay was simply not worth the time away from family, the labour, or the cliques in the field. Nevertheless I still follow it closely, so it really grates my gears when media claims to be paleoaccurate and yet gets things very confidently wrong instead of being more honest about being awesomebro oriented. I don't mind artistic license, I'm very much in favour of it actually, I do mind claiming to not use it but being very blatantly wrong anyway while still presenting oneself as realistic.
 
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TheFairTyrant said:
My thanks for the enlightenment, and yeah wow that theory does sound daft.
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You can try testing it out with nothing but your hands. Try holding your fingers out straight and turn your thumb downwards so its making a ninety degree gape. Now try slamming your hand onto hard surfaces or ones moving a lot and see how often you accidentally hit your thumb or hurt yourself with vertical or horizontal movements. Now remember that the Allosaurus is moving around something much bigger than your hand, its head. And its head also happens to contain its field of view and proportionately, its lower jaw is much bigger compared to the upper jaw than your thumb is to your other four fingers and palm.
 
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Hard sci fi is hilarious. Soft sci fi will just say, "yeah there's like, a hyperdrive or whatever. maybe some people have robot bits." Some hard sci fi will look you deadass in the eye and go "the firmament of the cosmos itself is a machine for god and god is a glitch in the universe which we can exploit by hacking our neurologies. This is plausible and sensible. " I love that shit.
 
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