Planetville Discussion - Television Tropes & Idioms

Daibhid C: I'm not sure Bajor was an exception; it was more like a Planetville we got to know really well. One government, one religion, one history (lots of episodes talked about "Ancient Bajoran" artifacts and beliefs, rather than "Ancient <name of Bajoran region>" suggesting that if the culture wasn't actually unified thousands of years ago, it was close enough).

Idle Dandy: In a related thingy, the Buffy Verse was guilty of Dimension Ville. Theoretically, alternate dimensions should be as big as our universe; yet when one travels to a different dimension, he's never far from his destination. The odds should be astronomical that they're even on the right planet. And, of course, the entire dimension functions as an Adventure Town. There's also the idea that dimensions have given themselves names, which is sketchy.

fleb: I cut two examples, because aversions aren't really that useful, especially when they're this long. I'm not even sure the Stargate one is an aversion though, so I might add it back in — civil wars, for one, are specifically mentioned as an attribute of Planetville's One World Order. And depending on the presentation, the superpowers could be indistinguishable from bickering small-town factions.

* Subversion[sic]: Jack Vance's planet Tschai, in his Planet of Adventure series, not only has a bewildering variety of environments, but is occupied by three different alien species (plus their human servants, some of whom have escaped to form yet other cultures). The alien invaders each hold one region of the planet, while the original inhabitants have retreated underground (with their human servants).

* Exception: In Stargate SG-1, several planets are shown to have more than one country, or at least different factions. For example, Jonas Quinn's home planet has three major superpowers, who argue about the use of the Stargate in a similar fashion to the way different Earth countries are shown to on the show (though they all speak English, all with the same accent. You can't have everything). At least two planets had the populace divided on the function of the Stargate itself, and one was sent into a civil war because of SG-1's arrival through the gate. The other was already at war over it when they got there.

"(S)tories about Planetville make no sense."

Except sometimes they do!

"When the space Nazis invade, they seem to need the same number of soldiers as the Earth Nazis needed to invade Europe."

Considering how much WW 2 (particularly in the ETO) was literally a fight for world domination, this a poor example. If the Germans had conquered Britain (and thus the empire with it) and the vastness of the USSR, they would largely control the planet and be ideally positioned to soon control the rest. And with advanced technology a few million (or even a handful) could easily conquer a planet.

"And they can make a planet surrender by capturing its capital. Back on Earth, capturing New York or Washington D.C. won't give you the whole planet (or even the whole U.S.), but on Planetville, one city is all you need."

Historically, capturing an enemy capital is a classic way to end a war (see the Franco-Prussian War for just one example). On a sparsely populated colonial planet where the majority of the population would live in one area, this would be even more true.

Tzintzuntzan: Those analogies really don't work for a planet. When Paris surrendered in WWII, part of the French Empire refused to surrender and rallied to the Free French. If the Germans captured London, would Canada, Australia, and New Zealand surrender and invite German troops in? No way. The same applies to a planet — it's big, and there's no reason for an entire planet to surrender just because a capital did.

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