The Masquerade: tired cliche or inevitable reality?

I'd drop the "highly suspect" and "really" qualifiers from that, personally. Besides, the version of this I've always heard is that they weren't capable of recognizing them as ships, not that the ships were "perceptually invisible".

edited 4th Apr '12 10:47:53 PM by nrjxll

Oh, I think that's from What The Bleep Do We Know?, so it can be safely dismissed.

You're right that something like it might be fun in a story, though.

Yeah, the "couldn't see the ships" story is BS and a bad basis for a masquerade.

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that people are saying that The Masquerade is very implausible because (insert reason here) when that's the entire point of a Masquerade?

That's sort of the point: it's not just a matter of execution, the trope is inherently flawed. (At least from a purely realistic standpoint, which isn't the only one to take).

edited 8th Apr '12 5:06:54 PM by nrjxll

What do you mean?

I mean, if there were a masquerade in real life, then the fact that we keep saying that such a thing is impossible and "inherently flawed" means that the ones behind said masquerade are doing their job rather well.

So you're a conspiracy theorist, and absence of evidence is itself evidence?

Because that's what you're apparently saying.

Nous restons ici.

If so, I'd say this discussion is at its end.

Uh, no. Dude, WTF?

In a way, yes (at least when it comes to this trope).

Why?

Because there is absolutely no point in arguing with someone that claims absence of evidence constitutes evidence.

Yeah, that's conspiracy-theory thinking; you could just as well say "the moon landing is faked, and the evidence that it isn't just shows how good they were at faking it." Essentially it's giving up the ability to evaluate the probability of any scenario.

*Facepalm*

Do you not see the irony of your complaints about this trope? That's what I'm asking.

You keep saying "This can't happen in real life, because such and such" when the entire point of The Masquerade trope is to make people think that.

But I'm not saying anything like that. Of course the moon landing is real, because we have no reason to think that it isn't. I'm just pointing out the irony in people's complaints about this trope.

edited 8th Apr '12 8:51:10 PM by Rynnec

It's like the old joke.

"How do elephants hide in cherry trees? They paint their toenails red. Of course you've never seen an elephant in a cherry tree, they're so good at hiding!"

Of course it's intuitively wrong that elephants hide in cherry trees, but because of the nature of the question you have to acknowledge that such a possibility exists, no matter how slim.

Or it's like a refrigerator light.

Once you prove that it's real, that makes it so that it's impossible. You can't get a positive.

I'm not sure what your point is (and in all honesty, I have to say that I don't particularly care). I and most of the other people in this thread have argued that there is no possible way The Masquerade could exist in real life. Your claim is that that's "ironic" because if it did, we wouldn't know it. The reason I'm dismissing that is because it requires the elimination of any attempt to evaluate the trope.

In other words, to respond to people pointing out reasons why it wouldn't work by saying "but if it did work, we wouldn't know it, so those reasons must be wrong" renders any attempt at conversation completely pointless.

edited 8th Apr '12 9:09:00 PM by nrjxll

So...you're saying this entire thread is pointless?

No, because most people have been making arguments related to concrete evidence (for or against), not just simply saying "if it worked, we wouldn't know it".

Guys, what if aliens created TV Tropes just so this thread could be started and they could laugh at us arguing?

Guys, what if everyone in this thread is an alien?

Guys... I'm an alien from a planet beyond the Kuiper Belt.

Do you believe me?

(屮≖益≖)屮 彡 ┻━┻ F*ck yo' table; Go read my book! —> http://goo.gl/mtXkm

Rynnec, you're the one saying that this entire thread is pointless, because you're the one saying that, a priori, any argument against the masquerade concept is automatically invalid.

Except I only said that particular argument against it is pointless, not all arguments against it are pointless. Jesus.

Heh. Just remembered a story... no idea which one, or even what sort of story it was... where magic actively resisted any and all attempts to analyze it; it was quite literally impossible to verify via the scientific method, because it didn't work the same way twice. Made controlled experiments kinda hard .

In whatever case, an even halfway-functional masquerade basically relies on the masque-ees being newcomers in some fashion (maybe fairyland was out of dimensional phase, or they're from another planet, or whatever), science being a hoax on a scale that makes it the enforcer of the masquerade (basically just transferring the problem), or some external force causing it.

Your counter-argument is equally pointless, however. Arguments without evidence are simply a lot of noise.

Fine, whatever dude. Just drop it.

I don't find the concept of The Masquerade all that implausible. The argument of "If it was out there, we'd have heard about it by now" rings rather hollow when one considers that we as a species are always discovering new stuff about the world we live in, and that's without some force actively preventing people from finding it out.

Now, I'll readily admit that in the modern world such a thing would be hard to pull off, for the reasons already listed. And the trope is a little over-used *

. But people do have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion, especially when believing one way means acknowledging that the world is a lot scarier than we'd like it to be. The Dresden Files actually invoke this quite well in the novel "Dead Beat", after Butters gets exposed to the supernatural for the first time.

Is The Masquerade a cliche? Debatable. Is it implausible? Maybe. Impossible? Not at all.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

I've never bought the "we don't want to know about it" explanation and I never will. Humans aren't that self-deluding on large scales, and it's utterly implausible that the kind of Masquerade depicted in The Dresden Files could exist in real life. In fact, while I may enjoy the series, if the apparent foreshadowing of a Broken Masquerade goes nowhere, my suspension of disbelief won't so much be broken as annihilated at a molecular level - and buying the fact that it hasn't happened already takes quite some suspension as it is.

Actually, that brings up a point I've been considering: The Masquerade is most plausible when done on small scales. It's pretty easy to believe that a small family who can do magic has flown under society's collective nose; it's virtually impossible to believe the same of a global community of millions of wizards. I think this has been mentioned earlier in the thread, but it merits repeating.

The idea that people can't accept magic is undermined by the fact that we regularly do. We just call it "string theory" or "alternative medicine" or "Austrian economics."

That isn't even a joke. If nothing else, I really don't see the difference between high-level quantum mechanics and magic.

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