Seen the thing on how WWII is so implossible before on a forum. To be honest, it got me more twitching how it's more a case of people not knowing the larger area of history and concentrating on such a smallpart. Makes an ammusing read though otherwise.
Of course they know. The point was twofold. Firstly, presented in narrative, 45 minute bursts, history sounds improbably silly. Secondly, contemporary Americans have gotten so jaded in our media consumption that we would scoff at stories which (yeah, thanks to the larger arena of the setting) are actually plausible.
It's like everyone's a walking Pitchfork review. We wish our hot dogs were more or less artfully smothered; we painstakingly muse that our little sisters could, for once make a sweater without dropping a stitch; we watch the sun rise with critical disappointment. Your 'twitching' (and my knee-jerk need to respond) is actually a case in favor of this point. We fear we're somehow passively blank and idiotic if we simply sit back and absorb what's happening around us.
Yeah, it's one of those "well, of course it sounds crazy when you say it like that" things.
It reminds me of an interview I heard with an author soon after 9/11. He'd written a thriller where terrorists were going to do something similar to what happened at the WTC and his editors rejected it as being implausible.
It's also kind of like those things we accept in real life (i.e. major military blunders that even a 5th grader wouldn't create in a game of RISK) that we never accept in fiction.
Well, in either case in that thread on a forum, I played along but just kept talking about how they missed so much out of the books for the series.
I can also understand the diffrence between real and fiction as well. Same subject, the more I learn about WWII in the pacific the more I wonder if the Japanese attacking America wasn't a bad plot. It happened, but knowing the situation it seems bizarre that it really did.
My dad has been an Early U.S. History Buff(tm) for the past decade or so, mostly centering around Lincoln and the founding fathers.
His biggest "holy cow" moments are all the points in history where the country would have gone off in a completely different direction and/or failed because of dumb luck, happenstance, someone doing something stupid, etc. Which I guess most history is, in retrospect.
It's kind of like thinking your house is one of the most solid structures around until you have some work done and see how thin drywall actually is. :)
I don't know that mucha bout early American history, but I do remeber one tidbit about how during the civil war one side found the other's battle plans wrapped around some cigars.
Houses to me seem like nothing compared to how mind boggling it is that cell phones work at all when I found out just how much goes on behind the scenes to make them work.
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It's like everyone's a walking Pitchfork review. We wish our hot dogs were more or less artfully smothered; we painstakingly muse that our little sisters could, for once make a sweater without dropping a stitch; we watch the sun rise with critical disappointment. Your 'twitching' (and my knee-jerk need to respond) is actually a case in favor of this point. We fear we're somehow passively blank and idiotic if we simply sit back and absorb what's happening around us.
-JT/Sihaya
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It reminds me of an interview I heard with an author soon after 9/11. He'd written a thriller where terrorists were going to do something similar to what happened at the WTC and his editors rejected it as being implausible.
It's also kind of like those things we accept in real life (i.e. major military blunders that even a 5th grader wouldn't create in a game of RISK) that we never accept in fiction.
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I can also understand the diffrence between real and fiction as well. Same subject, the more I learn about WWII in the pacific the more I wonder if the Japanese attacking America wasn't a bad plot. It happened, but knowing the situation it seems bizarre that it really did.
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His biggest "holy cow" moments are all the points in history where the country would have gone off in a completely different direction and/or failed because of dumb luck, happenstance, someone doing something stupid, etc. Which I guess most history is, in retrospect.
It's kind of like thinking your house is one of the most solid structures around until you have some work done and see how thin drywall actually is. :)
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Houses to me seem like nothing compared to how mind boggling it is that cell phones work at all when I found out just how much goes on behind the scenes to make them work.
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