#QuestionOfTheDay what's the most tedious fandom/hobby argument you've ever been apart of?

[pixeljones@mindly.social]

@ami_angelwings
My personal opinion is that the work stands apart and has a life of its own beyond the author ... unless revelations about the author expose darker meanings and intentions buried in the work. Sometimes ideas or scenes you thought were accidents or ironic or pointed humor turn out to be true insights into the author's inner demons. So, those works can't help but get retroactively poisoned by what you know too late.

[zhinxy@mastodon.social]

@ami_angelwings "why doesn't Batman kill the Joker/buy crime" is most tedious, most interesting, otoh?... Hmmm 🤔

[supertaliadx@mastodon.art]

@ami_angelwings the most tedious one for me recently was Helldivers 2 fans trying to paint Super Earth as being "good", just because everyone else is also bad. They're strapping nuked to teens and telling them to run at the enemy, they're not "good" by any means.

[supertaliadx@mastodon.art]

@ami_angelwings one of the more interesting (but completely unimportant at the end of the day) discussions I've never had was about what constitutes a "piece of music".
Is every recording of Moonlight Sonata a new piece of music? Is the original manuscript the piece? Are reproductions of the score the same piece of music? What if they misprint a note? If someone transcribes it by ear and they hear different rhythms than Beethoven intended, have they made a new piece?

[supertaliadx@mastodon.art]

@ami_angelwings If a player makes stylistic decisions, have they altered the piece? Is it a new piece?

It seemed a lot of people considered a musical to be a piece, but no one could agree on what that piece was. Is it the original score, the first performance, the first recording, or even the first filming? Was every performance of it a performance of the same piece, or were they different?

[supertaliadx@mastodon.art]

@ami_angelwings Does the order of the songs in a show matter? Because Love Never Dies changed song order several times, and the filmed production has a different order to the album. Heck the show had substantial rewrites, is it still the same show?

It's very Ship of Theseus, but with extra layers because the Ship is a physical object, while a piece of music is... so many different conceptual objects and also several physical ones, all stacked on top of each other.

[lalah@sakurajima.moe]

@ertchin I've seen this happen over and over again in different fandoms. It makes me cringe.

[bogusmeatfactory@dosgame.club]

@ami_angelwings the most tedious argument is "What is retro?" Its just everyone being old men shouting at clouds refusing to accept the subjectivity of the argument.

[cthellis@urusai.social]

@ami_angelwings There was a guy who simply felt the need to disagree with me, no matter what. To the point where when I was complaining about battle shounen (a common enough occurrence for me) he had said something to the degree of “if you ignore the few hundred filler episodes, Naruto has a pretty tight narrative.”

Like…. My dude…😝

[cthellis@urusai.social]

@PixelJones @ami_angelwings I’m remembering that the guy who always disagreed with me was a “film school guy”. Even if the topic isn’t movies, maybe it’s just their personalities? 😝

To be fair, I would always crush him in every argument. But he WOULD tell me I’m an idiot squared at every opportunity, and flex whatever minimal connection his degree had to anything.

[jlm@mastodon.world]

@ami_angelwings
Back in 88 everyone was up in arms about Michael Keaton being cast as Batman. So much hate and all of us, me included, where so wrong. I admit I was loud wrong and that Keaton is my Batman.

I get to be around college students. They are upset that the end of The Boys is close and are curious about the comic. The looks I got as the "old man" shocked them with the differences between the show and the comic. That was the best.

[otherdracula@mastodon.social]

@zhinxy @ami_angelwings I still maintain that a better question is, why doesn't Harley Quinn kill the Joker?

[bytex64@awesome.garden]

@ami_angelwings “What is pixel art?”

I actually refined my definition quite a bit based on the discussions, but it just never stops coming up. You can argue it forever.

[mdhughes@appdot.net]

@ami_angelwings Most tedious: The Star Trek transporter argument. Almost 60 years, and it's still: You either believe in Ship of Theseus & don't believe in magic souls; or you're scared of transporters. It will never be resolved past that, and some people are literally insane over it.

Most interesting varies, I like a lot of deep dives into single-auteur books & shows; whether that's Heinlein, or Serial Experiments Lain, or whatever. Franchises have no depth.
#fandom #anime #startrek

[flargh@mastodon.social]

@ami_angelwings I have to think on the second question, but hands down for the first: "Star Trek is too woke."

[lockelyfox@meow.social]

@mdhughes @ami_angelwings

It does not help that Trek muddies the waters as much as it does over the entire series lifetime.

Somehow, both Second Chances (TNG 6x24) and Realm of Fear (TNG 6x02) are both canon and entirely contradictory as to how the transporter works. You can't be both entirely conscious through the transport process and basically whole, AND be capable of duplicating into two people.

[ami_angelwings@urusai.social]

@lockelyfox @mdhughes yeah they get weird about the transporter buffer

According to the TNG technical manual (which I own), they take you apart molecule by molecule and that gets put in the buffer and then they physically send those molecules to wherever you beam to so they're not killing you and sending data of yourself and reconstructing you from that data

[lockelyfox@meow.social]

@ami_angelwings @mdhughes

Oh I know, I'm Team Transporter Isn't A Murder Machine, but fuuuuuuck the writers make it hard sometimes.

Like, I quote Realm of Fear all the time because Barclay is conscious through the entire process *and* is able to pull people stuck in the phased state out of it before they go into the buffer.

Combine that with The Next Phase (TNG 5x24) and it feels to me regardless of what the tech manual says, its more likely that your matter gets phased and compressed before being *shifted* to wherever you're being sent and then uncompressed and unphased.

I love Trek but the transporters are basically magic.

[foolishowl@social.coop]

@ami_angelwings I don't know if it counts as tedious, exactly, but in the 90s, on the Traveller Mailing List (for the TTRPG), someone suggested that the civil war called the Rebellion could be quickly ended if someone put reactionless thrusters on an asteroid and accelerated it to a large fraction of light speed before it collided with Capitol, killing Emperor Lucan and billions of other people. Arguments about physics and ethics raged. I took a break from the email list for over a year; when I came back, they'd recently made it a rule you weren't allowed to talk about the asteroid anymore.

The most interesting was on the Elder Scrolls fan forum, when Michael Kirkbride talked about a step beyond CHIM: "No one has achieved Amaranth yet. Except for the one being or idea that no one has found yet, which is still just sitting there." This led to several months of intense discussion of pretty much the whole of Elder Scrolls, trying to figure out what he meant.

[mr_briney@universeodon.com]

@lockelyfox @mdhughes @ami_angelwings my head-canon is that you maintain consciousness so long as the matter stream remains coherent, so for most normal transporter use. It's when something out of the ordinary happens that you get stored in the buffer