Realism and Episodic Fiction
May. 8th, 2008 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jamesqThere can be no real changes in episodic fiction. By episodic, I mean things like television shows and serials (for example, comic books). The reason is you don't want to alienate occasional readers by having them encounter unfamiliar characters. Thus, when watching (say) Star Trek, you want the characters to remain largely unchanged from episode to episode.
Writers and actors have been struggling against that for years, and the rise of DVD and the ability to cheaply buy entire seasons of a TV series are changing that.
Comic book producers are the biggest offender in this realm and they're also the ones that have done the most to address the competing demands of character back-story vs. reader involvement. It's why there tends to be a "universe reboot" in Marvel and DC every 5-8 years and also why they have "simplified" parallel books (Regular Marvel Spider-man vs. Ultimate Spider-man for example).
The biggest problem to comic book realism is the existence of super-science. When you've got guys like Reed Richards in your universe, why isn't the technology they squeeze out on a daily basis making everything gee-whiz. I know why we don't have robot butlers and flying cars in the real world, but what's their excuse?
As an aside, the Wild Cards universe explained this by making super-science gadgets a form of super power - the shit just didn't work when you took it away from its creator.
Lets take the unrealistic premise of Iron Man - Tony Stark invents a super-science gadget that allows him to escape from his captors, then uses his new technology to right wrongs - and apply some common sense to it.
Before we get to far into it, I'll freely acknowledge that this line of reasoning would make a shitty movie. I loved Iron Man and I'm perfectly capable of suspending my disbelief. But I enjoy this kind of speculating too.
Ok, so Tony Stark comes back to America. He's got this awesome bit of technology and he uses it to make flying armour. Note that the awesome bit of technology is not the armour itself, it's the arc reactor. Remember, the generator that keeps his heart beating and has enough juice to fly him to the other side of the planet in a few hours to beat up on terrorists. The arc reactor that's the size of a tin of salmon. The one that gives off no heat, radiation or harmful emissions. The one that's so safe he wears it in a cavity in his chest. The one he cobbled together in a cave. The one that doesn't appear to use any fuel?
Stark Industries' stock price gets clobbered because he decided to stop selling munitions? Hell, Tony Stark just solved the energy crisis single-handedly. They should be hiring Bill Gates to clean the toilets.
Stark Industries could put one of these into every car, house and factory in the world. He could charge almost any price and it'd be pure profit. The reduction in pollution alone would save more lives in a year then his weapons would have killed in his lifetime. He could sell one that's the size of a car engine that's 1/100th as efficient and still accomplish all that.
Of course at that point he'd need the armour because the entire oil and gas industry would want to assassinate him. I'd certainly be out of a job. Maybe Stark Industries would be hiring?
Marvel and DC get around this by implying that the tech is very expensive. You do occasionally see the government use Tony Stark or Reed Richard's cast-offs. DC also doesn't have any good-guy super-scientists, which helps. But still, none of it ever seems to trickle down to the hoi polloi.
I used to game super-heroes. My curse was that I always wanted to play, but no one ever wanted to game-master, so I always ended up doing it. Being a GM that wanted NPC bad guys who weren't two-dimensional, I gave their back-story some though. One of these characters was a guy called Paladin.
Paladin was an armoured villian. To keep him from being an Iron Man clone I gave him a few other high-tech signature devises: A lance that incorporated a tractor-beam in addition to the ubiquitous energy blast and a stable of robots that (because he was in armour) looked just like him.
He robbed banks alot, which is a pretty inefficient way of getting money for a guy with powered armour, robots and a functional tractor beam. My back story for Paladin explained this by giving him a bit of unseen technology - an autodoc that also "improved" him every time he used it. His idea of improvement was to make him smarter at engineering. The autodoc did this by rewiring his brain and (because he has a limited amount of brain mass to work with) slowly moving functionality from other regions of the brain. As time went on he became more brilliant at making gadgets and stupider in almost every other aspect of his life. And he was pretty much a social retard to start with.
He also improved the autodoc every time he got "smarter", which made it an interesting feedback-loop. The PCs would beat him up, he'd escape to his lair to get fixed in his magic-box and come out a week later smarter but more psychotic. Whereupon he'd go out and rob a bank to fund his latest experiment because it would never occur to him to take a prototype to a venture capitalist.
Paladin was basically a Spark that was slowly turning himself into a Tommyknocker.
The last role-playing I ever did with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mfiles would have revealed all this. I was also going to give his (mfiles') character a chance to use the chamber to regrow a lost limb. If he turned off the "improve brain" function, then he got his arm back. If he didn't disable that "feature" his brain would get a stir, basically giving him some tech abilities at the expense of a raft-load of mental problems.
We never got to finish that, which is too bad. I'd have enjoyed seeing what he'd pick.
Writers and actors have been struggling against that for years, and the rise of DVD and the ability to cheaply buy entire seasons of a TV series are changing that.
Comic book producers are the biggest offender in this realm and they're also the ones that have done the most to address the competing demands of character back-story vs. reader involvement. It's why there tends to be a "universe reboot" in Marvel and DC every 5-8 years and also why they have "simplified" parallel books (Regular Marvel Spider-man vs. Ultimate Spider-man for example).
The biggest problem to comic book realism is the existence of super-science. When you've got guys like Reed Richards in your universe, why isn't the technology they squeeze out on a daily basis making everything gee-whiz. I know why we don't have robot butlers and flying cars in the real world, but what's their excuse?
As an aside, the Wild Cards universe explained this by making super-science gadgets a form of super power - the shit just didn't work when you took it away from its creator.
Lets take the unrealistic premise of Iron Man - Tony Stark invents a super-science gadget that allows him to escape from his captors, then uses his new technology to right wrongs - and apply some common sense to it.
Before we get to far into it, I'll freely acknowledge that this line of reasoning would make a shitty movie. I loved Iron Man and I'm perfectly capable of suspending my disbelief. But I enjoy this kind of speculating too.
Ok, so Tony Stark comes back to America. He's got this awesome bit of technology and he uses it to make flying armour. Note that the awesome bit of technology is not the armour itself, it's the arc reactor. Remember, the generator that keeps his heart beating and has enough juice to fly him to the other side of the planet in a few hours to beat up on terrorists. The arc reactor that's the size of a tin of salmon. The one that gives off no heat, radiation or harmful emissions. The one that's so safe he wears it in a cavity in his chest. The one he cobbled together in a cave. The one that doesn't appear to use any fuel?
Stark Industries' stock price gets clobbered because he decided to stop selling munitions? Hell, Tony Stark just solved the energy crisis single-handedly. They should be hiring Bill Gates to clean the toilets.
Stark Industries could put one of these into every car, house and factory in the world. He could charge almost any price and it'd be pure profit. The reduction in pollution alone would save more lives in a year then his weapons would have killed in his lifetime. He could sell one that's the size of a car engine that's 1/100th as efficient and still accomplish all that.
Of course at that point he'd need the armour because the entire oil and gas industry would want to assassinate him. I'd certainly be out of a job. Maybe Stark Industries would be hiring?
Marvel and DC get around this by implying that the tech is very expensive. You do occasionally see the government use Tony Stark or Reed Richard's cast-offs. DC also doesn't have any good-guy super-scientists, which helps. But still, none of it ever seems to trickle down to the hoi polloi.
I used to game super-heroes. My curse was that I always wanted to play, but no one ever wanted to game-master, so I always ended up doing it. Being a GM that wanted NPC bad guys who weren't two-dimensional, I gave their back-story some though. One of these characters was a guy called Paladin.
Paladin was an armoured villian. To keep him from being an Iron Man clone I gave him a few other high-tech signature devises: A lance that incorporated a tractor-beam in addition to the ubiquitous energy blast and a stable of robots that (because he was in armour) looked just like him.
He robbed banks alot, which is a pretty inefficient way of getting money for a guy with powered armour, robots and a functional tractor beam. My back story for Paladin explained this by giving him a bit of unseen technology - an autodoc that also "improved" him every time he used it. His idea of improvement was to make him smarter at engineering. The autodoc did this by rewiring his brain and (because he has a limited amount of brain mass to work with) slowly moving functionality from other regions of the brain. As time went on he became more brilliant at making gadgets and stupider in almost every other aspect of his life. And he was pretty much a social retard to start with.
He also improved the autodoc every time he got "smarter", which made it an interesting feedback-loop. The PCs would beat him up, he'd escape to his lair to get fixed in his magic-box and come out a week later smarter but more psychotic. Whereupon he'd go out and rob a bank to fund his latest experiment because it would never occur to him to take a prototype to a venture capitalist.
Paladin was basically a Spark that was slowly turning himself into a Tommyknocker.
The last role-playing I ever did with
mfiles would have revealed all this. I was also going to give his (mfiles') character a chance to use the chamber to regrow a lost limb. If he turned off the "improve brain" function, then he got his arm back. If he didn't disable that "feature" his brain would get a stir, basically giving him some tech abilities at the expense of a raft-load of mental problems.We never got to finish that, which is too bad. I'd have enjoyed seeing what he'd pick.
