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SubstantialFrivolity  I'm not even supposed to be here today  2yr ago (text post)   2535 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 14, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The developers, and many of the fans who have argued about it in the forums and discord, believe in some green radical social change is the only way to deal with climate change and have inserted that view into their advanced sci-fi setting.

It's a general trend I notice that those who have some extremely strong ideological convictions about a topic, especially those who have almost no nuance in their worldview and can't steelman and inhabit alternative points of view, are almost never able to craft realistic worlds and narratives when it comes to their topic of interest. This is not necessarily a stock "politics in entertainment is bad" position, rather it's more that worldbuilding and the politics in it have to be handled carefully and can't feel like you are being aggressively force-fed a position or point of view. It's especially bad when the writers are tackling very different settings with very different material and technological conditions from ours and yet still feel the need to shoehorn Current Year politics into things.

It's for that reason that I think it's a good rule of thumb to politically disengage as much as possible when one tackles fiction, and if they do have politics one should make sure they organically arise from the groundwork they've set instead of trying to create allegories and messages that pertain to our current environment. The latter approach to things simply does not work, in my opinion, and ends up feeling ridiculously out of place and quite preachy.

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