According to Poul Anderson (and I cannot recall the titles at the moment), Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar was set in an alternate history where the Industrial Revolution took place during the time of the Roman Republic. He had a story in the series exploring the consequences of the actions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Good point; this’ll be my only reply to this thread.
Augmentation: “… on its own very Roman Catholic terms.” Which I suspect is why I, at the time in a Catholic school, didn’t see any problem with it.
Or the eagles couldn’t do it because the trilogy would’ve ended after the first chapter, in which Gandalf gives an eagle the ring, he ditches it in Mordor, and Middle Earth lives happily ever after.
Well, yeah, that too.
His objection isn’t to the material that fans like. His objection is to how the fans like it. It’s not that people like Battlestar: Galactica, it’s that people don’t like it in the right way.
Oooh…I get it now. I don’t think much of it, but I get it.
SF fans didn’t start this - the Sherlockians did. But I see this kind of thing as an extension of Harry Stubbs’ game. In hard sf, you get points for finding bugs in the world building. In sf universes, you get points for finding inconsistencies, and, like in Holmes, it is even more fun finding explanations.
I always think anachronisms like those in the OP don’t matter IF the film/show/book is any good.
If I’m engaged in the plot, care about the characters, etc., then I don’t care that there are huge logical or scientific flaws in the plot. If on the other hand it the plot sucks, the characters are 1 dimensional, etc. then the flaws are a big deal.
I don’t mind overlooking a few small details if they are things that would be tedious to explain, but the major stuff needs to make sense. If you are going to have a movie involving time travel, I won’t question whether time travel is possible, but the time travel rules need to be logical.
And don’t tell me the only difference between a time machine and a particle accelerator is the software. “Plug and play right?” (I’m looking at you ‘A Sound of Thunder’)
I can forgive tiny things or adjustments necessary for production but suspension of disbelief only goes so far. It can be snapped a dozen different ways and once its gone then I’m going to be looking at the whole with a more critical eye.
And if there’s one attitude that makes me angry it’s the idea of “turning off your brain and just enjoying it” which appears to be what the OP is espousing.
No, I am saying exactly the opposite. I am saying that internal consistency does not require:
(1) An adherence to literality. We can believe that someone is speaking an alien language even if it looks and sounds exactly like English.
(2) An adherence to real world facts, such as that Bob Dylan is a 20th-21st century Earth composer and that the similarity between the song heard by Colonel Tigh and the song composed by Bob Dylan must somehow be explained. Things like this in a drama are symbolic. We are not necessarily being told, “see here they hear a Dylan song.” They hear a song, and its similarity to a Dylan song is to be disregarded.
(3) An explanation for one actor playing different roles.
These are part of the rules of a drama, that you are being presented a performance by actors in your real world. Do you go questioning why, for example, Colonel Tigh seems to be exactly the same as a real person called Michael Hogan and go looking for an explanation for that?
If they just wanted a song, they could have easily done so. They chose a Dylan song instead. It doesn’t seem fair to say: “Yes, we want all of the advantages that using an instantly familiar song by one of the greatest songwriters of our time has to offer, but we think that people shouldn’t be jarred out of the fictional universe by the use of an instantly familiar song by one of the greatest songwriters of our time.”
Hell, even Bear McCreary – the guy who did the arrangement – raised an eyebrow at the idea of using the song, as he details in his blog.
I think I get what the OP is saying. A lot of people act like fictional works have some kind of basis in reality - like they’re an adaptation of real events. Obviously they’re not - anything that happens in a work of fiction only happened because the author wanted it to happen.
When you read a novel or watch a movie and you see a cop setting up a suspect, that doesn’t prove that cops are untrustworthy. Because there’s no real cop and there’s no real suspect.
A lot of people are saying “of course, we all know that, that’s obvious.” But how deep does that knowledge really go? How much of your opinions about what cops are like is based on personal experience and how much is based on books and movies and TV shows? How about doctors or lawyers? Or criminals or spies? In some case, pretty much all you know about some group is based on fictional protrayals of that group.