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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1521 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 6, 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 this better captures what I was trying to gesture at with the 'what I didn't like' section. I think I mentioned I bounced off the gameplay- I have a hard time with 'spot the difference' visual games in general and any game that makes me squint is a literal eye sore- and while I characterized it as light on the endings vis-a-vis Papers, Please, it does go further than that. I actually cut off a diatribe of why the moral ambiguity of PP works, which would have led to an longer reflection on story writing, but I wanted to keep it tighter (and didn't see easy-to-reference scripts to try and do any comparisons).

My... enjoyment? appreciation?... is much more at the abstract level. @Bombadil wrote a fair post of how while it uses the cyberpunk aesthetic it doesn't lean into the punk-ethos. To me this was a feature, not a bug, as I find settings where everything must oppress you because the setting demands it to be trite. A setting where life can be hard but winnable is a better ethos than 'you never had a chance' / 'the only chance is The Glorious Revolution.'

I agree in general. I really like trope subversions that lean optimistic like that. I think Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has a lot of flaws as a work, but forgive almost all of them due to its ending and its ethos throughout. What if you reject the humility of the masses, and the social norms that are holding you back, and you do the good thing and you win? There is no Karmic principle of equivalent exchange forcing every gain to be met with an equal loss. There is no law saying any attempt to be clever must be met with ironic consequences. Sometimes reality is exploitable and you can exploit it and win.

What if you reject the humility of the masses, and the social norms that are holding you back, and you do the good thing and you win?

Or more generally, what if it's objectively correct for you to dominate others?

THIS.

I really really want to see a good narrative subversion of anticolonialism. The good guys go and conquer the savages, civilize them, enlighten them, uplift them, and embody honor and Noblesse Oblige to be nice to them in the process and not just pointlessly oppress them or make them suffer. It doesn't have to be a zero sum game where one group exploits another, everyone can win simultaneously. There's a couple of stories that kind of sort of vaguely do this (Dr. Stone is the first that comes to mind), but I'd like to see it done in a way that specifically aknowledges the fact that colonialization is happening and can be controversial, and rejects the assumption that it's inherently negative. I'm not sure I've ever seen that done before.

This is the entire ISOT genre, going back to Stirling's original Trope Namer Island in the Sea of Time.

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