Feo Takahari
Auror
Advance warning: one work I'm dissecting is aggressively political. I find it artistically interesting, so I'll be talking about it in artistic terms. If a political argument starts, I'll apologize to the mods and ask them to lock the thread.
The anime Paranoia Agent revolves around a spirit that appears to people who don't want to face the truth. It offers them whatever they need in order to continue denying reality, then hits them in the head with a baseball bat. Most of the characters don't really know what to make of this strange being, and they react to it in realistic ways appropriate to their personalities. (There's even a running subplot about the cops trying to track down what they think is a mundane criminal.)
For me, at least, Paranoia Agent seems plausible. It has a fantastical element, and it has humans who act normally around it.
The game Nothing to Hide takes place in a country where absolutely every public activity is logged online. Every word someone utters in a public place can be read on a Facebook-like site, every place they go can be seen through omnipresent surveillance cameras, and attempting to abuse cameras' blind spots results in immediate sedation with tranquilizer darts. This sounds like a recipe for pitch-black satire, and the game does make a lot of jokes about the implications of such massive surveillance, but by and large, it takes itself surprisingly seriously.
Unlike the game itself, I wasn't able to take Nothing to Hide seriously at all. Technologically, there's no reason the society in this game couldn't exist a hundred years hence. But it's implausible that such a society would evolve, so any points the game might want to make about the implications of government surveillance were pretty much lost on me. (I'm not sure how I would have taken it if it had gone for heavy comedy like Dr. Strangelove--it certainly couldn't have gone worse.)
What makes you not take a setting or a story seriously? What steps do you take to make your own settings believable, and how high a priority is it for you?
The anime Paranoia Agent revolves around a spirit that appears to people who don't want to face the truth. It offers them whatever they need in order to continue denying reality, then hits them in the head with a baseball bat. Most of the characters don't really know what to make of this strange being, and they react to it in realistic ways appropriate to their personalities. (There's even a running subplot about the cops trying to track down what they think is a mundane criminal.)
For me, at least, Paranoia Agent seems plausible. It has a fantastical element, and it has humans who act normally around it.
The game Nothing to Hide takes place in a country where absolutely every public activity is logged online. Every word someone utters in a public place can be read on a Facebook-like site, every place they go can be seen through omnipresent surveillance cameras, and attempting to abuse cameras' blind spots results in immediate sedation with tranquilizer darts. This sounds like a recipe for pitch-black satire, and the game does make a lot of jokes about the implications of such massive surveillance, but by and large, it takes itself surprisingly seriously.
Unlike the game itself, I wasn't able to take Nothing to Hide seriously at all. Technologically, there's no reason the society in this game couldn't exist a hundred years hence. But it's implausible that such a society would evolve, so any points the game might want to make about the implications of government surveillance were pretty much lost on me. (I'm not sure how I would have taken it if it had gone for heavy comedy like Dr. Strangelove--it certainly couldn't have gone worse.)
What makes you not take a setting or a story seriously? What steps do you take to make your own settings believable, and how high a priority is it for you?