is it sci-fi that doesn't concern itself with explaining how the science works
that seems like it would be good to help figure out genre
i think
idk i forgot what point i was trying to get at
edited 10th Feb '14 9:55:17 PM by thespacephantom
UN JOUR JE SERAI DE RETOUR PRÈS DE TOII asked Youngest Bro to tell me what he knows about Shinji second-hand from me. Here's what he told me:
"He's a miserable kid who loves this girl named Rei, but she doesn't love him back and she kind of hates him. His father treats him like crap because his mom died and his life is basically a bunch of garbage."
make it through this year if it kills you yet | 2001-2019Well I guess the thing is this:
Aside from the dreamreaders, the science in this story isn't even all that advanced. There's no crazy things like FTL or time travel and such. There are brain implants for severe mental disorders, self-driving cars controlled by GPS, body parts grown from stem cells, etc. A significant amount of the stuff isn't even advanced technology but stuff that happened in the real-world that never really caught on, or hasn't caught on yet, like urban farming or metabolist architecture. There's some weird alternate history elements like how religions decided to form.
The "magic" is fairy-like or almost more cosmic horror. There are strange places where stuff ends up, "ghosts" who were never really alive in the first place, an obsession with "price" in these places, and these things are caused by horrible entities that are stealing from the universe blah blah blah. The "dreamreaders" are technology that manipulate stuff that already existed due to the existence of these entities, and the "wizards" can't actually use magic at all but are more of a very corrupt SCP-like organization.
Pretty much if you can accept SCP-like weirdness coming from a single Meta Origin as being sci-fi, it's sci-fi.
It's like how to have a ghost:
- Fall asleep and dream — enter "the froth"
- Find "backdoor exit"
- Pay toll to being watching that exit
- End up in Turn District. Congratulation. You are now a ghost. Except regular you is still alive, kicking, and fully able to live your life. Have fun being a ghost.
To leave the Turn District the ghost has to pay another toll. Being a ghost is very, very expensive.
The wizards would be ghostbusters, essentially, because they're supposed to be managing things that exist and leave the Turn District. They don't usually do anything unless having two versions of the same person is causing problems.
So, a ghost does not necessarily have to be of a dead person. However people who die in their sleep, particularly while attached to a dreamreader, are much more likely to end up as ghosts, because they're more lucid and therefore more able to panic when they realize they're dying. There are also some beings who are abandoned in the froth who leave because they're painfully bored. Things like that.
Because of the nature of this world, then, I'd say it's pretty unlikely that at least a quick violent death will create a ghost.
I guess the thing is that in the froth a lot of times the identity you have is going to change and fade and pop out of existence and regrow but if you use a dreamreader a lot it's going to be stable and very likely different from your waking identity. This means that all ghosts are actually identities and not the same as the living person themselves which leads to some ghosts of dead people being insistent that "no that person is dead you should be sad stop looking at me like that."
Why would you need a seance to do anything?
...I am going way out of my way to justify Bedsheet Ghost, though.

Ace was... a piece of work, to put it lightly. He's part of the Unholy Trinity for a reason.
MY SOUL IS DARK BUT MY HAIR IS COLORFUL — Brahian Pokémon Alchemist