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A Rant.
Have you ever been thrown out of a story, not because "this character would never act like that" but because "a human would never act like that"? I'm thinking of two, recent-ish, that were otherwise fairly well-constructed stories, with plot, intrigues, nice prose, and decent dialogue, but there was something off about the worldbuilding that just didn't work.
-The first was a time-travel fanfic. One of the premises was "In the future, almost everyone is of mixed ethnicities so everyone's hair/eyes/skin is colored varying shades of brown." Okay, I'll buy that easily. "Therefore, blonde hair/blue eyes are extremely rare sights and so are considered extremely attractive." Still easily believable. Except the next step was "therefore EVERYONE stares at this guy wherever he goes with hunger and awe because everyone has brown or black hair and he stands out SO MUCH and EVERYONE WANTS TO DO HIM" where it should have been "therefore many people dye their hair and use colored contacts like crazy, and people tend to assume he's just got a pretty awesome hairdresser before they get close enough to check his roots."
I was like "dude, it's the future, WHERE IS THE ENVIRONMENT-FRIENDLY HAIR DYE." People have only been bleaching and applying henna to their hair for dozens of centuries. If there is a reason given why hairdressers are now considered taboo, I would have liked to hear it in the fic -- at least make the blond guy raise the issue! He's from an era where one girl out of two has blonde highlights or some kind of unnatural red-purple shade. It wasn't enough to make me stop reading the fic, but it did make me eyeroll everytime someone did a double-take and hit on him because ooooh, blonde and blue eyes, so rare, so sexy~
-The second was kind of like hitting a wall ten steps after the running start. After that, I couldn't buy anything from the premises at all, and so I didn't keep reading. It killed the story.
Premises: a group of humans crash-land on a very dangerous planet. The adults promptly die off, the kids fall back to a primitive clan-like arrangement and into a prey/always scared mindset. They grow up, breed, things go on.
Sounds good so far.
Except somehow they'd totally lost the knack to use weapons. And by weapons I don't mean guns, I mean spears and pointy rocks. Up until the Gary Stu du jour suddenly "figured out" that he could *gasp* pick up things! and throw them! and kill bad things with it! And then the clan of mopey-scared "wahh we're only born to be monster food" idiots is all "ooh, no one ever thought of that." Sounds like a job for Darwin and his Chainsaw of Natural Selection right there. :|
Everyone who's ever babysitted a couple of toddlers knows that it would take a lot, a LOT more than a couple of generations growing up in the wild for the human animal to lose the instinct to happily bash its little playmates over the head with a plastic rake. A TODDLER.
A kid raised by wolves might lose the ability to use tools. But then it would also lose the ability to speak and to socialize with others on a human model. THEREFORE THEY WOULDN'T BE A HUMAN CLAN, NOW WOULD THEY, THEY'D BE A PACK OF GRUNTING, MENTALLY RETARDED CREATURES. And they weren't even raised by alien creatures! They raised each other! They weren't alone in a pack of aliens -- they were in a group of other humans, why wouldn't they imprint each other! Argh.
It wasn't a "I'm 13 and this is my first fic yay bizarre worlds!" story either. The guy who wrote that was an adult and published. No excuse. >:(
Anyone's got examples like that? I'm in a pitchforky mood and need some pointing and laughing. Or teeth-gnashing, I don't know. >.>
-The first was a time-travel fanfic. One of the premises was "In the future, almost everyone is of mixed ethnicities so everyone's hair/eyes/skin is colored varying shades of brown." Okay, I'll buy that easily. "Therefore, blonde hair/blue eyes are extremely rare sights and so are considered extremely attractive." Still easily believable. Except the next step was "therefore EVERYONE stares at this guy wherever he goes with hunger and awe because everyone has brown or black hair and he stands out SO MUCH and EVERYONE WANTS TO DO HIM" where it should have been "therefore many people dye their hair and use colored contacts like crazy, and people tend to assume he's just got a pretty awesome hairdresser before they get close enough to check his roots."
I was like "dude, it's the future, WHERE IS THE ENVIRONMENT-FRIENDLY HAIR DYE." People have only been bleaching and applying henna to their hair for dozens of centuries. If there is a reason given why hairdressers are now considered taboo, I would have liked to hear it in the fic -- at least make the blond guy raise the issue! He's from an era where one girl out of two has blonde highlights or some kind of unnatural red-purple shade. It wasn't enough to make me stop reading the fic, but it did make me eyeroll everytime someone did a double-take and hit on him because ooooh, blonde and blue eyes, so rare, so sexy~
-The second was kind of like hitting a wall ten steps after the running start. After that, I couldn't buy anything from the premises at all, and so I didn't keep reading. It killed the story.
Premises: a group of humans crash-land on a very dangerous planet. The adults promptly die off, the kids fall back to a primitive clan-like arrangement and into a prey/always scared mindset. They grow up, breed, things go on.
Sounds good so far.
Except somehow they'd totally lost the knack to use weapons. And by weapons I don't mean guns, I mean spears and pointy rocks. Up until the Gary Stu du jour suddenly "figured out" that he could *gasp* pick up things! and throw them! and kill bad things with it! And then the clan of mopey-scared "wahh we're only born to be monster food" idiots is all "ooh, no one ever thought of that." Sounds like a job for Darwin and his Chainsaw of Natural Selection right there. :|
Everyone who's ever babysitted a couple of toddlers knows that it would take a lot, a LOT more than a couple of generations growing up in the wild for the human animal to lose the instinct to happily bash its little playmates over the head with a plastic rake. A TODDLER.
A kid raised by wolves might lose the ability to use tools. But then it would also lose the ability to speak and to socialize with others on a human model. THEREFORE THEY WOULDN'T BE A HUMAN CLAN, NOW WOULD THEY, THEY'D BE A PACK OF GRUNTING, MENTALLY RETARDED CREATURES. And they weren't even raised by alien creatures! They raised each other! They weren't alone in a pack of aliens -- they were in a group of other humans, why wouldn't they imprint each other! Argh.
It wasn't a "I'm 13 and this is my first fic yay bizarre worlds!" story either. The guy who wrote that was an adult and published. No excuse. >:(
Anyone's got examples like that? I'm in a pitchforky mood and need some pointing and laughing. Or teeth-gnashing, I don't know. >.>