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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2173 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 17, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I think I understand you now. You didn't sell me on "tacked on", though - IMHO as long as stakes are raised steadily that's just a common way of writing in general, not a failing and not specific to TV shows. There are a lot of ways to do it wrong (writers who rely on expanding scope because that's the only way they can raise interest, writers who run out of interesting grand-scope ideas too and then end up with an anticlimax or with no sense of stakes, writers who can't or don't bother to come up with convincing Watsonian reasons for the higher stakes and for their particular protagonists to be critical to them...) but I don't think the writers here made any of the typical errors; I think we just have a difference of taste here. You might be right that following your tastes would have led to a better result overall, or even to a result that I'd think was better.

You definitely did sell me on "arrogant", but any kind of "here's how heaven works" worldbuilding pretty much has to be that.

I thought they were somewhat humble about parts of the expanded premise, given their milieu.

There were a significant number of fans whose first reaction to the simplistic stupid point system was: "Ha ha! Yes! There is no ethical consumption under capitalism!" - and I think that was foreseeable, given that the second sentence is something of a far-left-wing cliche. To some extent the worldbuilding here inherently respected their confused sense of ethics, by stating that the point system wasn't too stupid to put in place to begin with, but by the time we see the results it's obviously utter nonsense and the writing doesn't hold back on that. We know that the system is bad, giving false positives by the billion, before we even dig in to the details, and the one guy we see still managing to beat the system isn't a paragon of ethics, he's an anxiety-riddled worthless hermit.

And I stand firm on the idea that, despite the arrogance, the fatal flaw here was that the writers weren't brave enough to be arrogant enough:

If you're going to have the arrogance to end your story with characters deciding the future evolution of whole planes of existence, you've got to go whole-hog and not leave the past evolution of reality so unexamined. Was Nietzsche right in a non-metaphorical sense, and God is dead? Was this whole thing some kind of Deist creator's experiment, with lessons learned only to be applied to the next universe? Are the Makers the top gods? Whoever's in charge, are they as screwed up as the committee they delegated the Good Place to? Do they no longer exist? Why not? If they still exist, why are they incommunicado? Are the afterlives we've seen not really all there is? There might be lots of good reasons why our characters can't find all the answers, but it's weird that they (everyone, but Chidi especially!) weren't more interested in all the obvious questions.

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