# Ignoring its own premise **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 18, 2012, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875 "2012-01-18T04:02:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Electric\_Warrior](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ee7513/32.png) [@Electric\_Warrior](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Electric_Warrior)\ **Post date:** [January 18, 2012, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875/1 "2012-01-18T04:02:11Z")
Thread for stories that set up a really cool premise and then spend most of the time focusing on something tangential to it. YMMV, of course. I thought of this because someone was talking about **Brave New World** in another thread. Huxley sets up a fascinating scenario with the caste system, describes it in detail, and then the book goes off into a plotline about the interaction of people within the system with people outside the system, rather than using the characters to show the social interactions between the castes. The post mentioned that we don’t even get to really see people in the Epsilon, Gamma, or Delta classes. Another example I was discussing with friends the other night is **Inception**. Of course, the title of the movie is ‘inception’, and it is about the process called inception in the movie, but the premise set up in the beginning of the movie, as well as what was advertised in most of its trailers as far as I could tell, was all about stealing secrets from dreams. It then goes on to show the team failing at doing so, and the rest of it is about people implanting ideas inside dreams. ---
**Author:** ![coffinjumper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8baadc/32.png) [@coffinjumper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coffinjumper)\ **Post date:** [January 18, 2012, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875/2 "2012-01-18T04:24:36Z")
I liked **Daybreakers** a lot. I really did. I just really wish the concept it started with, vampires are the majority and are running out of blood, was continued more instead of the whole human resistance cure to vampirism thing. I still enjoyed the film, but I was really excited by the initial premise. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [January 18, 2012, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875/3 "2012-01-18T04:25:41Z")
I don’t see your point about **Inception** : the premise is that you can steal secrets in dreams, and, while doing that, you could also plant ideas into the person’s head. It was all one premise – just different implications from it. I’d mention the classic SF story “The Marching Morons” (the uncredited basis for **Idiocracy** ). The story explicitly states something is impossible, but solves the main dilemma by doing exactly what was stated as being impossible. The title comes from “The Marching Chinese,” a concept where if you march all the Chinese people past a point it would never end because more Chinese would be born and grow up before you run out of people. This is even described in the story. Yet the solution to the overpopulation portrayed is to get people to leave Earth in rocket ships, which means that people would be born and grow up before all the ships were filled. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 18, 2012, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875/4 "2012-01-18T04:25:43Z")
> [@Electric\_Warrior](#): > > Another example I was discussing with friends the other night is **Inception**. Of course, the title of the movie is ‘inception’, and it is about the process called inception in the movie, but the premise set up in the beginning of the movie, as well as what was advertised in most of its trailers as far as I could tell, was all about stealing secrets from dreams. It then goes on to show the team failing at doing so, and the rest of it is about people implanting ideas inside dreams. I think you missed the point of the movie. The movie really was about being inside dreams and figuring out what was real and what wasn’t. Stealing secrets was just a macguffin so the characters would have a reason to go into dreams in the first place. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 18, 2012, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875/5 "2012-01-18T04:31:27Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > I’d mention the classic SF story “The Marching Morons” (the uncredited basis for **Idiocracy** ). The story explicitly states something is impossible, but solves the main dilemma by doing exactly what was stated as being impossible. I disagree. The problem was that the intelligent people could never figure out how to kill the stupid people faster than they could breed because the stupid people so vastly outnumbered the intelligent people. Barlow’s insight was that he figured the way to get around this was to con the stupid people into essentially killing themselves. ---
**Author:** ![Don\_t\_Panic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/don_t_panic/32/398_2.png) [@Don\_t\_Panic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_t_Panic)\ **Post date:** [January 18, 2012, 6:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875/6 "2012-01-18T06:39:03Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I think you missed the point of the movie. The movie really was about being inside dreams and figuring out what was real and what wasn’t. Stealing secrets was just a macguffin so the characters would have a reason to go into dreams in the first place. Although really, most the inception stuff counts as a MacGuffin as well. The entire Fischer business is a MacGuffin plot to have a reason to focus on Cobb. ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [January 18, 2012, 12:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875/7 "2012-01-18T12:36:38Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > I’d mention the classic SF story “The Marching Morons” (the uncredited basis for **Idiocracy** ). The story explicitly states something is impossible, but solves the main dilemma by doing exactly what was stated as being impossible. That reminds me of the books “The Mote in God’s Eye” and “The Gripping Hand”. The books are about an alien species that’s more advanced than humanity in many ways, but they have an insolvable population problem. In the first book, the aliens say “We’ve tried every kind of solution, including X, and it didn’t work!” And the book ends without a clean solution to the problem. So far, so good. Then, in the sequel, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that doesn’t really have much to do with the aliens from the first book, and at the end of the second book the humans say “We’ve got the perfect solution to your population problem – try using X!” And presumably it works this time. Um…okay? ---
**Author:** ![Horatio\_Hellpop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2012, 6:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875/8 "2012-01-19T06:01:43Z")
I had thought **Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier** violated the basic conceit for LOEG (Having genre characters of different authors interact in a continuum that could accommodate all of them) by dragging in TV characters, contradicting actual history in major ways, randomly making some of them immortal, etc. On subsequent reading, it appears that Moore’s actual premise was never what I had thought it was all along, and was something more along the lines of “These characters are all total make-believe and I can do anything I want with them.” **LOEG: Century 1969** bothered me by having actual historical characters in the same continuum as their parody/_Roman a clef_ analogues (like name-checking both John Lennon and the Rutles), but again, he makes the rules and I don’t. ---
**Author:** ![Typo\_Knig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/cdc98d/32.png) [@Typo\_Knig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Typo_Knig)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2012, 12:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875/9 "2012-01-19T12:40:20Z")
> [@hogarth](#): > > That reminds me of the books “The Mote in God’s Eye” and “The Gripping Hand”. The books are about an alien species that’s more advanced than humanity in many ways, but they have an insolvable population problem. > > In the first book, the aliens say “We’ve tried every kind of solution, including X, and it didn’t work!” And the book ends without a clean solution to the problem. So far, so good. > > Then, in the sequel, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that doesn’t really have much to do with the aliens from the first book, and at the end of the second book the humans say “We’ve got the perfect solution to your population problem – try using X!” And presumably it works this time. Um…okay? The solution was revealed early in the second book. One the one hand, “The Mote in God’s Eye” mentions that humans are more advanced in biosciences than the Moties. (That doesn’t make sense to me, since the Moties are a collection of bio-engineered species, but maybe that was just the current cycle.) So humans could succeed in a medical solution to the Moties’ pupolation problem where Moties failed. On the other hand, Humans were also trying doggedly to fix the problem, whereas Moties were more fatalistic and gave up trying. Do you think I’m Crazy Eddie? On the gripping hand, with Humans around Moties had to accept a solution or face extinction at the hands of the Empire of Man. The second book is weaker than the first IMO, in part because of the ease of the solution, and in part because the first book is one of the best SF novels ev-ah! And for other reasons as well. ---
**Author:** ![MacSpon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/34f0e0/32.png) [@MacSpon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MacSpon)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2012, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875/10 "2012-01-19T13:14:03Z")
> [@Krokodil](#): > > I had thought **Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier** violated the basic conceit for LOEG (Having genre characters of different authors interact in a continuum that could accommodate all of them) by dragging in TV characters, contradicting actual history in major ways, randomly making some of them immortal, etc. Why do you think that any of these things violate the initial premise? For one thing, a continuum that can accommodate all these genre characters is inevitably going to violate actual history. ---
**Author:** ![WotNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e19b73/32.png) [@WotNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WotNot)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2012, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ignoring-its-own-premise/609875/11 "2012-01-19T14:51:09Z")
> [@Krokodil](#): > > I had thought **Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier** violated the basic conceit for LOEG (Having genre characters of different authors interact in a continuum that could accommodate all of them) by dragging in TV characters, contradicting actual history in major ways, randomly making some of them immortal, etc. On subsequent reading, it appears that Moore’s actual premise was never what I had thought it was all along, and was something more along the lines of “These characters are all total make-believe and I can do anything I want with them.” > > **LOEG: Century 1969** bothered me by having actual historical characters in the same continuum as their parody/_Roman a clef_ analogues (like name-checking both John Lennon and the Rutles), but again, he makes the rules and I don’t. Well, you certainly misunderstood Moore’s basic conceit – not by much, but enough to confuse you, by the look of it. The world he’s created is not just one in which those specific characters can interact, but one in which _all fiction is real_. As such, the TV (and movie and comic book) characters of the later volumes aren’t “dragged in” but are simply taking their natural place alongside, and in succession to, the gothic horror, adventure, pulp fiction and comic strip characters who were there from the beginning. “Actual history” was explicitly thrown out on the second page of the first issue of the first volume, and rather than being random, the two characters who become immortal over the course of the series are the ones whose original fictional worlds contain immortality in one form or another.