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I don't know, wouldn't the Cathedral want control over superhumans? Wouldn't they make a power-grab to centralize control over these dangerous rogue elements lest they overthrow the empire of finance and paperwork with personal power? Wouldn't they want to divide and undermine any would-be Caesars? We saw in another universe the superhumans are in complete control, the 'Illuminati' rule.
However, I 100% agree that Marvel movies are stupidly written and don't make sense. The superheroes are weak in relative terms. A couple of Stryker brigades could demolish Thanos's army. Iron Man is worth maybe five to ten jet fighters. None of them could handle tactical nukes. All superhero movies seem to adore Bronze age tactics: mass charges and 1v1 duels.
DC did better I thought, Superman takes on seriously powerful beings who are fast and strong enough to overmatch human forces. He does tank nukes. It makes sense for people to fear him. But DC also had a lot of ridiculous plot decisions and some silly character interaction (your mother's name was Martha too, I guess we're best friends!)
You could have an interesting movie about the struggle for political, economic and military power between capes and mortal men. But scriptwriters aren't smart enough to write that or don't want to. It's as if they're taught in movie school 'who cares about having a plot that makes sense, we need to affirm these saccharine character moments where the power of love, cameraderie and family triumphs over all odds'. I think only the 5% of the population in the INTJ/INTP area really cares about having plots that make sense.
I could be wrong, but I believe that scriptwriters at the level of actually writing scripts are professionals who produce the script they're being told to produce by the person paying them to do it. The plot, characters, etc. are decided on by directors and producers.
Yes. Whedon said the list of required character vs character fights or interactions was so large it took up all of the run time for The Avengers. To the point where he had no time to conclude the story and simply decided that all the aliens would fall over dead at the end to instantly wrap things up. Which he thinks is a bad ending, but he had no choice given the constraints.
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Good luck making a show about tactics like the survability onion the thing is that modern tactics make terrible movies. You can't talk to the villan when all your weapons move at mach 2 and a lot of defensive tactics are based around stealth, evasion and recon. The staple trope of superhero movies of the villan/hero discussing the villan's plan doesn't work at all when the entire conflict strategy is to not be seen heard or detected and the fighters can't even see each other.
Unless you're one of the weird nerds who wants their shows to seem "real" it's typically accepted to do completely irrational actions so that the movie can actually be good. (Otherwise you get the Saga of Tanya the Evil where the magical characters actually do use rational tactics but the show has little character)
If you were a skilled artist, surely you could make such a film entertaining. Imagine a band of heroic scouts discovering some deception operation, that the enemy was trying to outflank them or that a seemingly huge army was actually just balloons and dummies. What about a duel between cyberpunk drone operators, scrabbling around a ruined megacity as their drones hunt eachother's weak flesh and blood body? That's just extending what we see in Ukraine a few steps.
What about using clever tactics to get around superior firepower by fighting in close quarters? Or basic things like fire and manoeuvre, characters working together?
Tanya the Evil was well-liked IIRC.
You could, but then it would be a War Movie, not a Summer Blockbuster, and would appeal to fewer potential audience members.
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I can imagine certain types of shows working with those sorts of premises, but the key there is there would be no dialog between our pro/antagonists except before and after action sequences. So our cyberpunk drone operator sequence would be cool but it would have to be a thing where all the talking happens by characters that aren't our drone operators, maybe observers in a meeting room or something.Can't have them communicate via comms since that would cause them to get caught by the other operator.
The only other example I know of is The fan animation astartes which you know isn't even a real show. Reading /r/combatfootage sort of shows just how hard it is to even come close to making modern weapons interesting storytelling, you walk around in a trench and then boom an artillery round killed you. No drama between you and the antagonist, just nothing nothing nothing dead.
As for the saga of Tanya the Evil, it's a decently popular show, but definitely not some major franchise like the MCU or something. The author of the novels is clearly some guy who played a lot of Hearts of Iron 4 and also clearly read a lot of World war history novels before making the original books. Unlike live action, the animation actually can make explosions ect that "look" real because in spite of the cartoons not being real this means the stupid cartoon can have the bullet actually go through the persons head. According to imdb it's probably about in the top 15% of shows ratings wise. Now I will admit the show really does use rational tactics for the mages, having them provide cover fire, spot for artillery and engage in aerial bombardments, even though it's a show about magical girls. (heck one of the main villains is called Mary Sue :D) But it's a major exception, and one I'm a big fan of.
Tolstoy did a good job of it where Prince Andrei was just walking around, pacing somewhere, and then boom, a cannon ball, then, because it's Tolstoy, FEELINGS, Universal Love, loss of consciousness. But that has probably never translated well to screen. Also the scene where (someone who's name I've forgotten) is in the middle of a battle, and it suddenly occurs to him that the other fellows are actually trying to kill him -- whom everybody loves! But it's really difficult to pull off inner monologues in movies. But, also, Tolstoy makes it pretty clear they weren't using much in the way of tactics, just throwing men at the problem, so it might not count. A relative has been watching drone footage from Ukraine, and it really just sounds depressing.
Oh War and Peace is great but was a terrible movie precisely because so much of the book does not translate to the big screen.
I watched some drone footage of Russians fighting drones and it's a really depressing scene, lots of footage of drones flying not seeing anything then transmission ends via shotgun blast. (you often see the shotgun shells just before impact).
I can imagine at some point a video game where you are using drones shotguns and artillery to fight your opponent with drones shotguns and artillery in a trench, maybe even some Rifles and machine guns placed in for more trench warfare. Clearly you being the player would have to control drones, but small drones dropping mortar round after mortar round would be a fun game maybe idk.
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Astartes was universally beloved though, it's the platinum standard for 40K fanworks. The guy who made it was clearly super talented but it proves that it can be done. 'Show don't tell' is great!
I think you could have a film with a nailbiting, dialogue-free action finale between drone operators. Or maybe they do psy-ops to taunt eachother with pre-recorded messages on their drones? If you can send a signal from your person to the drone, you could send a message too. Occasionally there are these scenes where soldiers bait drones to attack and then dodge. Or that Bradley-BTR duel from the other day, these crazy moments are rare but do happen.
Tanya the evil novels were fun, I liked all the autistic stuff they put in about how Russian air defences were so shit a random Finn landed a light aircraft in Moscow, so they could do a deep strike there and get away with it.
Ahhh I see you're like "the few examples of actually good uses of military action are incredible and I want more of it."
Sadly I just agree, The Saga of Tanya the evil was the best war show of all time in spite of it involving fucking magical girls. The levels of thinking in those books/shows was just off the charts. I get a lot of the same vibes as when I hear Skullagrim review mary the virgin witch somehow by having higher variance the animated shows can have some of the best depictions of conflict.
I really liked the Saga of Tanya the evil and am looking forward to season 2, Season 1 was so good and while the books are ok, the animated version really sells you on the "this is what war is like" doctrine (except for mary sue fuck mary sue)
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/r/PoliticalCompassMemes of all places tipped me off about an entertaining animated short movie depicting two mercenary groups in realistic urban combat: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OTLGWNruuOE
Very inferior in quality to Astartes, but still quite nailbiting while dialogue-free.
That was a cool video, liked the fire-and-manoeuvre plus hand signals.
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The superheroes are weak, which is actually a double penalty because the armies/countries have to be weak for them to matter. So Asgard's army has to be useless outside of flashbacks, and let's not even get started on any battle in Wakanda. And the bad guys basically have to be incompetent hordes literal children can fight.
Say what you want about Snyder but you actually get why people with modern armies would actually keep his superheroes around.
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Well, Watchmen kinda exists. And so does The Boys. The TV show Watchmen does too, though it goes in a crazy different direction which I can't help but wonder how this forum would feel about it. It takes place in some alternate reality where they pass massive reparations for Black Americans and the show is set in Tulsa (deliberate echoes of the Tulsa race massacre) and there's a neighboring white slum/trailer park trash place locals call Nixonville. A white supremacist group starts targeting police officers and so cops start to wear masks to protect their identities -- in a country where masks and vigilante superheroes are explicitly illegal, and hunted down. The main character is a cop but also a closet superhero, and also tortures people, and it turns out at least one other cop is a closet KKK member. And then there's other wild Watchmen stuff that happens. Not exactly what you're describing, but it was interesting.
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I regularly get told to stop thinking so much when I point out plot holes in movies. I'm probably not the only one here.
I run into this issue with plot holes, where I can see them if the show/movie is "thinky" or is trying to make you think, but when the show is just trying to be fun you can easily ignore the plot holes because the show isn't trying to do this. Books are typically the domain where you can have stories that have thinking and work well. Stuff like to Kill a mockingbird works because it's in book form. The television show Attack on Titan was like this, the first few seasons were a pure spectacle, there was no real deep plot going on and no need for one, but once they started having a major plot in the last 26 episodes+2 1.25 hour long television specials, the holes in the story started to show.
I don't know what to call this it isn't "suspension of disbelief" it's more like "suspension of thinking rationally about the plot". Like the issue is that these stories have 1 writer only and you have to write both a plot and the characters. Most people actually care more about #2 than the plot and most plots kinda blow. The spectacle of most shows is more important than the actual story for good reasons, (Books typically are a much better medium for pure storytelling, but a lot of the best books tend to fall in the "books you read in high school" category, which if you really pay attention the grand narrative of them is mostly trash). The only exception was this tiny weird niche space opera called Legend of the Galatic heroes which I swear is like if star wars was written by a Neoreactionary. Breaking bad is also good but it is more of a "character driven narrative". I should watch house of cards someday
LotGH is far above the average for stories when it comes to caring about the plot and world making sense, but even then it has a few things that seem poorly explained/motivated. Off the top of my head:
Everyone's insistence of following Commodore Fork's invasion plan regardless of how retarded it was
Trunicht's motivation for letting the child emperor live in alliance territory and form a government in exile
Almost everything surrounding the Reuental Revolt, though I feel like the author was starting to run out of steam at that point
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The novels behind LoGH were quite good too. I think the English translations were released a few years ago.
Translations of the first two books were ok (not amazing). They changed translators for book 3 onwards and they were pretty awful, it would have been almost impossible for me to follow if I hadn't already seen the anime.
Blah. Thanks for the correction. I stopped at two when grad school got really busy, planned to get back to it... guess that's out.
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I think this forum is about 60-70% INTJ or INTP. But in broader society the ratio is much lower.
INTJ is just Myers-Briggs for autist, I guess.But seriously, another INTJ reporting in. If I recall correctly, it’s among the rarer MBTI types. I wonder if you’re right about your assessment of this place as having massive overrepresentation.
Have we ever done surveys or tried to get a handle on the demographics here? Given the amount of wrong think/number of witches, it might be interesting. Or people might not want to participate and we’d see skew as a result.
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I wrote a fucking book because I'm tired of plot holes and shoddy world building, it grates like diamond dust beneath my eyelids.
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