Discuss!
"Treating the Cthulhu Mythos as SF also means that even magic is explicable. As Walter Gilman discovered in "The Dreams in the Witch House", magical visions and also the apportations to distant places and perhaps even distant times or dimensions were shown to not be occult mysteries, but the deliberate uses of advanced science to manipulate the structure of space-time. In short, the creatures and magics of the Cthulhu Mythos are explicable natural phenomena and not unknowable mysteries. Along with this point of view comes the more general viewpoint common to almost all science fiction; knowledge is always superior to ignorance and that new knowledge can then be applied to solve problems. " - John Snead, from that essay I just linked in the entry before this one
This quote is a perfect example of why I prefer the MCU version of Asgard over the comics version, at least in theory. I love pure magic and fantasy in its own right, but I also like rules or limitations and explanations to that system, no matter how fantastical.
It's easier to fit something fantastic like Asgard in as a race with a technology that can be understood and decoded. In a lot of ways, it's easier to fit sci-fi into a broader universe. Magic is great as a nuclear thing - and it's easy to bring the mechanical into fantasy, but it's harder to bring fantasy into sci-fi. Whedon did a brilliant job of incorporating that into The Avengers. Little bits made me happy - like Odin needing to gather dark matter to send Thor to Earth, because a stable Einstein-Rosenbridge would require a negative energy field to stabilize it. Likewise, the Tesseract isn't a magic box. It's something that can be understood (and Loki does understand how it works). It was a very smart move on the part of the overseers and how to best fit Thor into the MCU. This is another thing they did well the first time and I'm hoping they won't completely muck up in the next Thor movie.
Also makes me wonder how they'll handle Doctor Strange.
This quote is a perfect example of why I prefer the MCU version of Asgard over the comics version, at least in theory. I love pure magic and fantasy in its own right, but I also like rules or limitations and explanations to that system, no matter how fantastical.
It's easier to fit something fantastic like Asgard in as a race with a technology that can be understood and decoded. In a lot of ways, it's easier to fit sci-fi into a broader universe. Magic is great as a nuclear thing - and it's easy to bring the mechanical into fantasy, but it's harder to bring fantasy into sci-fi. Whedon did a brilliant job of incorporating that into The Avengers. Little bits made me happy - like Odin needing to gather dark matter to send Thor to Earth, because a stable Einstein-Rosenbridge would require a negative energy field to stabilize it. Likewise, the Tesseract isn't a magic box. It's something that can be understood (and Loki does understand how it works). It was a very smart move on the part of the overseers and how to best fit Thor into the MCU. This is another thing they did well the first time and I'm hoping they won't completely muck up in the next Thor movie.
Also makes me wonder how they'll handle Doctor Strange.