History Headscratchers / TalesOfMU

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<<|ItJustBugsMe|>>

*** I can understand that - but, ultimately, "Would like, ''but''" means "''Don't'' like". This is absolutely fair and perfectly fine! However, knowing you don't like something is an excellent reason to instead read something more politically palatable or otherwise more of a pleasure to read. It's a lousy reason to ''obsess'' over something, as one or two people - '''not''' saying ''you'' - have. (Personally, I'm a grumpy pro-market libertarian - if I had a political discussion with Alexandra Erin, we'd probably go hammer and tongs damn quick. However, I don't view Literature/TalesOfMU through the lens of her politics, and I don't try to spot insidious political content in it; kinda like TalesOfTheQuestor, what I have actually seen ''in'' it hasn't offended or even bugged me, her Team Blue leanings aside.)

<<|ItJustBugsMe|>>

** A lot of it probably has to do with him being the only character to immediately and with no hesitation call out Amaranthe on every nonsensical thing she says (aka everything she says) and every piece of advice she gives that's obviously morally terrible or disastrous (again, pretty much every piece of advice she gives). Since Amaranthe essentially bullies everyone else in the setting into just letting her dictate their actions (which would be less annoying if her way wasn't almost always unambiguously worse than their initial impulses) this makes him fairly unique in the main cast.
*** Special mention is merited of his interrupting one of her 'I'm superior to you because I'm vegan' rants by just looking from her to her sub, who she regularly manipulates into doing things the latter clearly doesn't actually want to do, and commenting that it's a lovely night for dramatic irony. That was almost a crowning moment of awesome in itself, after 300+ chapters of the rest of the main cast actively piling on to Amaranthe's side at every opportunity to shame and badger Mack into not standing up for her own viewpoints.

****** I can understand that - but, ultimately, "Would like, ''but''" means "''Don't'' like". This is absolutely fair and perfectly fine! However, knowing you don't like something is an excellent reason to instead read something more politically palatable or otherwise more of a pleasure to read. It's a lousy reason to ''obsess'' over something, as one or two people - '''not''' saying ''you'' - have. (Personally, I'm a grumpy pro-market libertarian - if I had a political discussion with Alexandra Erin, we'd probably go hammer and tongs damn quick. However, I don't view TalesOfMU through the lens of her politics, and I don't try to spot insidious political content in it; kinda like TalesOfTheQuestor, what I have actually seen ''in'' it hasn't offended or even bugged me, her Team Blue leanings aside.)

***** That's fine for reviews, papers, sporkings, etc. For everyone else, "Don't like, don't read" is a much saner alternative to hating a work and yet still reading it so as to have something to obsessively complain about. This is why ComplainingAboutShowsYouDontLike is considered ''bad''.

** There's nothing whatsoever wrong with death at least in the abstract; a setting in which everything alive ''had'' to live forever would probably turn into a form of hell pretty quickly, especially if said living things were still capable of reproduction and had only so much room to expand into. That said, there are a whole ''bunch'' of tropes on this very site that can be used to explain why gods in fiction generally don't come down to set mortals straight (and why, when they try, it rarely works anyway); this setting is simply no exception to that rule. Of course, neither really has anything to do with the fact that the society presented in the stories ''does'' come across as rather dysfunctional -- enough so that the gods of "good" may simply have their hands full trying to keep the whole thing from imploding on itself ''already''.

* The No Science thing Just Bugs Me. Apparently nothing is consistent, and the universe will change everything any anything just to screw around with you. The problem that immediatly arises is "how did they get magic to work in the same way enough to produce multiple TV's, animated carriges, and whatnot". Then comes the inherient problems to experimenting not working. If you check if everything goes down, it will go up or sideways. How do comparitivly identical races and species(such as noting limbs all go in a certain space) form, or reproduction work in the same way for the same thing? Hell, observed laws ''do'' work, otherwise creating Nymphs in the method of Barley and Amaranth wouldn't work. We aren't even supposed to 'try not to think about it', since it takes place in an educational setting, where characters and readers are ''supposed'' to think about it. I generally like the series, but completley tossing out the way things work except when it's convenient to the setting seems lazy.

** Part of the emphasis on No Science is to avoid the LikeRealityUnlessNoted trope so common even in fantasy settings (like Lord of the Rings), and to avoid FridgeLogic like "if you can summon food, then why are there still starving people?" The answer being: the physical universe actively works against you, as the rules change if you try to abuse them too easily. In a sense, it's a lampshade hanging on how people in-universe will react to GMs house ruling broken spells or spell combinations. The reason, say, televisions can be mass produced is probably because they're not being used to cripple the economy, utterly annihilate entire countries, or to amass vast personal resources in a manner that, well, matters. In a sense, the universe (or GM) will say "you can't do this any more" if your method of getting rich is basically "learn Summon Chest Full of Gold, cast a million times". But if it is "gather up these materials, assemble them in a certain way, and then spend time and effort to sell them so they can become useful", then the caster will get a free pass, as "watching TV" won't be considered broken.

** To be fair, Laurel Anne doesn't seem to have any problem with The Man until ''after'' she learns he's a demon.

The Man (Mack Daddy) seems a classic case of DracoInLeatherPants. The author FLIPS HER SHIT about this, and even people pointing out how her KickTheDog moment is prone to cross-cultural interpretation as being both 1) consensual and 2) "not all that bad" are likely victims.

****** I can understand that - but, ultimately, "Would like, ''but''" means "''Don't'' like". This is absolutely fair and perfectly fine! However, knowing you don't like something is an excellent reason to instead read something more politically palatable or otherwise more of a pleasure to read. It's a lousy reason to ''obsess'' over something, as one or two people - '''not''' saying ''you'' - have. (Personally, I'm a grumpy pro-market libertarian - if I had a political discussion with Alexandra Erin, we'd probably go hammer and tongs damn quick. However, I don't view TalesOfMU through the lens of her politics, and I don't try to spot insidious political content in it; kinda like TalesOfTheQuestor, what I have actually seen ''in'' it hasn't offended or even bugged me, her Team Blue leanings aside. However, there's no sin in [[YourMileageMayVary varying mileage]].)

The Man (Mack Daddy) seems a classic case of [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DracoInLeatherPants]. The author FLIPS HER SHIT about this, and even people pointing out how her [Kick The Dog] moment is prone to cross-cultural interpretation as being both 1) consensual and 2) "not all that bad" are likely victims.

***** There's cleverness and there's game-breaking. Nymph-based agriculture takes a lot of, er, [[IfYouKnowWhatIMean work]], and in the end, you still have to go out there and harvest the grain. There's a serious advantage to the method, but it doesn't come free. That's why, I think, in the recent "submit your questions for the professor" bit, she had the guy go on about how in a quantifiable, scientific universe, there'd clearly be nothing worth teaching about science and engineering at a university level, because it would all be so ''easy''. Stuff will take work either way; the universe doesn't mind someone being clever, but it minds someone being a munchkin and isn't shy about punishing "I wish I had an infinite number of wishes" stunts. The world is a DM.

****** Of course, taking the world-as-a-DM analogy to its logical conclusion, you still need rules to have a ''game'' in the first place. And a DM who refuses to share those rules with his or her players and keeps changing them whenever said players do figure out a way to use them to their advantage on top of that is (a) still somewhat predictable in ''that'' fashion and (b) just plain being a dick. Really, there's [[Understatement rather]] less wiggle room between settings in which the basic scientific approach should be able to do at least ''some'' good on the one side and just [[WorldOfChaos plain old formless primal chaos]] on the other than one might think, and the [=MUniverse=] pretty clearly isn't the latter.

****** Of course, taking the world-as-a-DM analogy to its logical conclusion, you still need rules to have a ''game'' in the first place. And a DM who refuses to share those rules with his or her players and keeps changing them whenever said players do figure out a way to use them to their advantage on top of that is (a) still somewhat predictable in ''that'' fashion and (b) just plain being a dick. Really, there's rather less wiggle room between settings in which the basic scientific approach should be able to do at least ''some'' good on the one side and just [[WorldOfChaos plain old formless primal chaos]] on the other than one might think, and the [=MUniverse=] pretty clearly isn't the latter.

****** Of course, taking the world-as-a-DM analogy to its logical conclusion, you still need rules to have a ''game'' in the first place. And a DM who refuses to share those rules with his or her players and keeps changing them whenever said players do figure out a way to use them to their advantage on top of that is (a) still somewhat predictable in ''that'' fashion and (b) just plain being a dick. Really, there's rather less wiggle room between settings in which the basic scientific approach should be able to do at least ''some'' good on the one side and just plain old formless primal chaos on the other than one might think, and the [=MUniverse=] pretty clearly isn't the latter.

***** There's cleverness and there's game-breaking. Nymph-based agriculture takes a lot of, er, [[IfYouKnowWhatIMean work]], and in the end, you still have to go out there and harvest the grain. There's a serious advantage to the method, but it doesn't come free. That's why, I think, in the recent "submit your questions for the professor" bit, she had the guy go on about how in a quantifiable, scientific universe, there'd clearly be nothing worth teaching about science and engineering at a university level, because it would all be so ''easy'' - the point is that the universe doesn't mind someone being clever, but it minds someone being a munchkin and isn't shy about punishing "I wish I had an infinite number of wishes" stunts. The world is a DM.

**** That's the impression I get.