So I was just watching The Snowman, the British animated children’s film. It’s about a boy who builds a snowman on a winter’s evening. Said snowman comes to life, and the two mess around the house and the neighborhood. The centerpiece of the movie is the musical number “Walking in the Air” (which I was teaching myself to play on the guitar, and the reason I was watching this thing in the first place, but anyway), which plays over a scene where…
Wait, hang on…
OPEN SPOILERS ahead for a 1982 animated children’s film. There, you’re warned.
…a scene where the snowman and the boy take flight, and proceed to fly over the town of Brighton. They continue onwards over the sea, and fly to the North Pole, where they meet Santa Claus and a bunch of other snowmen. On the way they pass various people, landscapes and animals, including some penguins.
What? OK, that’s just stupid.
As everyone knows, Santa lives on the North Pole. Penguins live near the *South *Pole. You idiots.
Ruined the film for me, that did. The fact that it all plays mostly like a dream sequence is no excuse. OK, in the real world there are also no such things as flying sentient snowmen. Or Santa. Those parts, however, didn’t bother me at all. But get your penguin habitats right.
Much the same vein: bad snow. Snow that is obviously shredded plastic.
I don’t worry about Doctor Manhattan and Rohrschach and Adrian Veidt – but bad snow really cheeses me. James Bond can chase nuclear warheads all over the Alps – but bad snow makes me stop caring. Young Spock can go into Pon Farr over and over, and that’s fine – but that stupid Styrofoam snow got my goat.
That’s just what the Borealists want you to think - why would he live on melty sea ice, when he could have a whole continent practically to himself and his minions. Don’t buy into the Northspiracy, sheeple!
Let me also give you my pamphlet on how Rudolph and the flying reindeer are Elder Things…
One mundane thing that’s always bothered me about Back to the Future is the kiddie walkie-talkies that Doc Brown picks up to communicate with Marty. I had a pair of those when I was a kid, and they worked just fine as long as both units weren’t more than ten or fifteen feet apart. I have no problem accepting a time-traveling car, but cheap-ass walkie-talkies that let you talk to someone on the other side of town? Forget it.
Oh, and I also get irritated by the “sports almanac” that turns up in BTTF2. It supposedly lists the outcome of every sporting event for decades, but it’s as thin as a comic book.
In a fantasy novel, I can accept that the book is written in English, but the conceit is the characters aren’t actually talking in English. It’s “translated” even though that’s not really what is happening.
I accept all that, that is, until a particular turn of phrase, a colloquialism that has a definitive earth-history origin, is spoken by one of the characters. So the evil dark elf wizard says “That’s putting the cart before the horse!” or the Queen of Durrendale Kingdom says “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched!”
Everybody speaks English. Foreign country? English. Different planet? English. Different galaxy or dimension? English. Distant past, before English came to be as a language? English.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that feels like this. I spend a lot of time playing the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic, and, occasionally, I find little snippets of dialogue that pull me out of the story. One particular example was a Jedi saying, “eat lightsaber, jerk!”
That insult “jerk” bothered me. I could buy it, maybe, if it were said in an alien language (the game features voice acting), and subtitled into English. But it’s said in English (well, what’s called “Basic” in the Star Wars universe), and I have trouble believing that the word “jerk” has the same equivalent to today’s term.
Those don’t bother me, as I assume the translator understands idioms and is using the appropriate English phrase to express the Ruritanian cliche.
However, “Don’t count your fire-lizards before they hatch” or “Putting the hippogriff before the cart” constructions always strikes me as calling a rabbit a smeerp.
Related, in the video game Dragon Age Origins, one of the characters speaks in a pronounced, almost silly, French accent as she comes from another country. I let it roll because I accept it as a device saying “Hey, she’s not from around here”.
In a follow-up game, Dragon Age Inquisition, you have people from that country actually speaking in French. Not just a borrowed word here or there but full phrases. That bothers me more because now it’s not some France-like fantasy medieval kingdom, it’s “actually” France. Except that it’s not.
I translate for a living, and when translating idioms I always try to find phrase with the same general meaning and connotations in the target language, even if the actual words are completely different. IMHO, a perfect translation is one where readers have no idea they’re reading a translation.
I just look at works of fantasy as perfect translations.
On that note, I get really, really bugged by fantasy authors using phrases from the Bible. Your fantasy characters set in a different world from ours should not be saying things like “swords into plowshares,” “cast pearls before swine,” “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” “you reap what you sow,” etc.
E: Pretty dang sure that GRRM used “swords into plowshares” somewhere in A Song of Ice and Fire.
In Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, when Minas Tirith is shown as a giant walled city towering high above a flat, featureless, thoroughly uninhabited plain, my first thought always is: “Where do these people grow their crops?”
The city was on the front line of a war - the farms had probably all been burned ages ago, and the forests cut down to provide clear lines of sight. OTOH, a river flowed nearby, and was probably used to ship food to the city.
Exactly. If it was me, I’d try to come up with a completely unique phrase that nonetheless has the same point to it. And, to be fair, many authors do do that quite successfully, which I have great respect for.
Yeah, they used to have this town called Osgiliath down on the river; it’s suffering a bit of an orc infestation as we see in The Two Towers.
And all that featureless plain is supposed to be farmland. I imagine it would be tricky explaining the cavalry charges and such if there were fences and walls and irrigation ditches in the way. The roads would have been handy for the siege engines, though.