What's with high school in anime?

lady_freyja said:


Sheogorath is the god of Madness because he teaches to deny your own existence.
Mehrunes Dagon is the god of Destruction because he teaches to not fear your own obliteration.
Malacath is the god of Pariah because he teaches you the freedom by solitude.
Molag Bal is the god of Enslavement because he teaches you self-control over you own body and soul (or say differently: you don't need your body and your soul).
That's the symbols of those 4 daedra.

It is definitely nihilist, because those four teachings teaches you how to escape the Dream (the ES world), gaining your own autonomy by your own obliteration, you exist because you deny yourself.
It's fun, but serves us nothing in the real world.

And Mara, Dibella and Kyne aren't "virtuous gods" and are symbols too.
Dibella is the Maiden
Mara the Mother
Kyne the Matriarch

The Mother teaches you how to create, the Matriarch teaches you how to destroy, and the Maiden is the junction between the two since she teaches you own to transform what you destroyed for creating something new.
Those 3 symbolize the perpetual cycle of things and is an echo to Sithis, the Void, where everything is constantly born, destroyed and recycled and thus where everything is totally inform and unnamed, well, the "void".
Oh, nihilism again.

The teachings of the Hist (Argonian's "god") is more direct at least and don't need symbols: Before you, nothing. Behind you, the Void.

All the cosmos of the ES world is either aligned on the Sithis (the Void) and thus nihilism or on Anu(iel) which is the Stase, where nothing change and is eternal and thus is "dead", another form of nihilism.
Everything is nihilism because everything is part of the Dream, and a dream is nothing.

Dagoth Ur in Morrowind acts as he acts because he understood that he is part of a dream, but he choose the opposite of the teachings of Sheogorath/Malacath/Dagon/Bal, he tried to use the Blight in order to transform everyone as a "dreamer", dreaming Dagoth Ur's dream.
By doing this Dagoth Ur would become the Dreamer and thus would not be dreamed by someone else.
That's why the followers of Ur are called "the dreamers" and loose their individuality (becoming an extension of Dagoth Ur), that's why he contacts you though dreams and why the Wise-woman of the Ashlanders is saying that Dagoth Ur is already dead and that Vivec says he is only a "shadow".
Because Dagoth Ur is just a living dream who anchored himself in the world though the Heart of Lorkhan for not being diluted in the Water of Oblivion, the Void.

The ES world is a really cool and nice world-building, but it is self-sufficient. The symbols speak to us because everything is loosely based on our own mythologies (in order to make it "realistic"), but those symbols were recycled to be only meaningful in the ES world.

traed said:

Not in that way no. Just adhering to the system set in place but sure some intentionally try to do the opposite. I'm not really saying it's intentional when it happens or at least not usually, it just reflects the culture itself.

TheBrainintheJar said:


Notice how high school anime tend to have no parents. It looks like defying authority from here.

traed said:


Not really. Sometimes the parents are just dead or living far away. If it's a school anime it obviously would focus on school and parents dont go to schools usually so adding the parents adds more complexity abd places focus on home life rather than school life. What I basically was saying was anime tends to either reflect life as is or it reflects a fantasy that is the opposite of it as a stress reliever.

lady_freyja said:

You mean Sanguine?
You can also says hello to Vivec.

Mythologies also deals with "motherhood, madness, dreaming, hedonism, darkness" or whatever, that's the point of the mythologies; explaining our world and how it works. Gaïa for example is the goddess which symbolize "motherhood".
Mythologies = "universal human experience".

I understand what you mean, ES' gods explore "symbols" because they're all loosely based on actual gods from our mythologies which themselves explore "symbols".
But most world-building are doing exactly the same as long as you want to create a consistent world like the ES' world.

You can't create something from nothing, all the worlds build are reflections of part of our own world, and all the symbols and idea we attach to each components of our world.

The thing is, when you don't know the references used or you consider them as irrelevant, some worlds may seem as "meaningless".

TheBrainintheJar said:


A drawing of a catgirl doesn't actually exist in 'idea space'. By that, I mean you experience this idea - the catgirl - using your senses. You see a drawing of her. It has aesthetic value. In this case, it is visual value because you enjoy seeing it.

By 'not real', I mean things that exist in 'idea space' that we don't catch with our senses - like story details. The family trees in Game of Thrones have no sensory information - we don't see them, they're not a drawing or a sound. So if they're not real and are only ideas in someone's head, I ask what the value of their ideas are. Do these trees symbolize something? Or are they just a list of names of people that don't exist?

lady_freyja said:


If you can't see the parallelism between Aphrodite the goddess of Beauty and Dibella the goddess of Beauty, I can't do anything for you, I'm sorry.
Same for Promethée which is the Titan who betrayed Zeus (the chief of the gods) for creating the modern humans and thus was punished by loosing his liver again and again.
And Lorkhan, the god who betrayed Auri-el (the king of the Aedra) for creating the mortals and thus was punished by loosing his heart, again and again (by reincarnation this time).

Those parallelisms are über-obvious…

And like I said, the author based himself a lot on the Hindu mythology rather than the Greek one. Hell, even the concept of "kalpa" (Paarthurnax describes it) like introduced in Skyrim (or more exactly in a book in Oblivion for the first mention) is a copy/pasta of the… "kalpa" from the Hindu mythology.
The Kalpa also resemble strangely to the Ragnarök.

If you don't know the ES mythology nor our own mythologies, no wonder you don't see the parallelisms.

flannan said:

Abstract things have aestetic value too. Just ask any mathematician.
As a roleplayer and a fan of sci-fi, fantasy and anime, I've seen a lot of imaginary worlds. And I can tell if the worldbuilding is aestetically pleasing to me.
I like how in Strike Witches, they took the image of titular witches as a starting point, and made them work. I like how in Rokka no Yuusha the author managed to get a high fantasy setting to support a detective story. I like it when roleplaying settings support many modes of play. I like it when Danmachi made megadungeon a starting point and built a world around that.
I've seen uninspired worlds too. So many generic fantasy worlds that don't really need describing. It was fresh when Record of Lodoss War was played, written and animated, but now, the author doesn't really need to describe most parts of the world of Gate or Outbreak Company or Zero no Tsukaima.
Chaos Dragon's world was unusual, but didn't really shine through. It felt more like it was unusual for the sake of being unusual, and it didn't work out.

TheBrainintheJar said:


You tell me you like things, not why or why these worlds are so interesting and engrossing.

flannan said:

I doubt I can explain this any further than I already did.
"Mathematical" beauty is about being both simple and good for its purpose.
Some people have theorized that it's the same for material things too, and some beautiful things are, indeed, like that. Other beautiful things are not like that.

TheBrainintheJar said:


A world in a tabletop RPG is a lot of text. It's not sensory but exists in 'idea space'. How can it has aesthetic value? Why is filling the world with details in and of itself good?

flannan said:

1) No, simply filling the world with random details does not make a tRPG world good. It's just like with pictures, simplified pictures like anime are a lot more pleasing, and allow more derivative works to be made, than photograph-like pictures of old.
The world has to be good for playing it. Easy enough to understand. Inspiring to play it.
Different worlds have different requirements for content. A hard-sci-fi world like Transhuman Space or Eclipse Phase have to contain enough details to be believable. Enough details that we can understand what moves it, and what the people's lives are like.
A fantasy world sweeps all that under the rug. In particular, in many fantasy settings all the awesome powers that characters can use to kill each other are stubbornly not used for any actual work, and their peasants till soil just like in real middle ages. Instead, it needs past civilizations (so that their ruins can be looted to recover their artifacts), major powers in conflict symbolizing fundamental aspects of morality (so that the main characters can lead one of them to victory) and other fantasy things.

2) Now about beauty: there are many was to do things the hard way. To roll square things and to carry round things. Beauty is about doing things the easy and effective way.

3) I also appreciate it when a setting thinks things through.
For example: there are many settings where people from other worlds sometimes appear. Banestorm runs with this: all humans in the world are descendants of people who came from worlds like our own. Instead of worshipping imaginary gods, they follow religions from our world, so the party's cleric can be a protestant christian or as shia muslim. And there is a conspiracy to keep the world in the middle ages (they especially hate gunpowder, because it makes men equal, and they like being rulers).

TheBrainintheJar said:


Why does an abundance of details make a world more believable? It never existed in the first place.

flannan said:

1) When talking about a hard sci-fi setting, "believable" means "you can believe that such a future might exist someday, more or less as described".
2) Try describing a fictional (especially anime) setting in a few words, and it will sound silly. Even if it makes sense when you're actually watching the anime. Because anime has more details.
3) Note that it's not random details that make a sci-fi setting believable. It's the details that answer common questions in this subgenre of fiction. Such as "why use giant robots when tanks are well known to be a better idea?".
4) Random details are more about giving the players a feeling of the setting. In Transhuman Space, description of a single house and its inhabitants gave me more feeling of the setting than all the detailed technical catalogues.

TheBrainintheJar said:


I will never believe a single man can predict a direction for whole humanity. This premise is already quite overblown.

An anime setting is reliant on visuals, not just chunks of prose so it works different than literature. But I don't see how a setting such as Kill la Kill's 'A world in which clothes have power' or TTGL's 'Humanity has been forced underground' or Humanity Has Decline's 'A world where humanity is nearly extinct and tiny human-things rule the world and are silly' sounds bad.

I don't really care 'why use giant robots when tanks are known to be a better idea' - I'm here for human stories, not about startergies of battle. I'll leave those to real military generals.

Atmospheric details are more important than technical details. I completely agree with this - technical details are a bore.

flannan said:

The prediction doesn't have to be right. It only needs to be possible, and not provoke a reaction of "there's no way the future can be like this!".
For example, Eclipse Phase and Transhuman Space from the examples are both transhuman sci-fi set not very far into the future (it's 2100 in TS, and I don't remember what year in EP). But they are very damn different! TS's future has developed gradually from our days, and EP's future suffered a major catastrophe which left Earth a robot-haunted ruin.

TTGL and Kill la Kill are very 'soft' sci-fi, and not subject to hard sci-fi's requirements. In fact, they barely qualify for "sci-fi" label. I haven't seen "Humanity Has Declined" yet, so I will refrain from comments on it.
Gargantia, Dennou Coil and Rocket Girls are some examples of hard sci-fi.

Sure, I understand that you might be watching for human stories, because you're that kind of person. I prefer some science in my science fiction, because I'm a science person.

TheBrainintheJar said:


What do you mean when you say 'possible future'? How real is real?

I do agree that sci-fi does that, but it doesn't try to predict how the future may look like. Rather, it's taking ideas and giving them physical form. It's asking us how we would live if X was possible, and X is always more than just a technological invention. The glasses in Dennou Coil don't represent glasses, they represent children building their own world separate from grown-ups.

flannan said:

1) I expect to have to deal with my children having such glasses and spending time in augmented reality someday.
So far, the biggest obstacle is getting children. Everything else will work out on its own.

2) Many sci-fi shows do not take one single invention. They try to guess how the world will change as a whole.
Gargantia is not all about giant mechas. Or spoilers. Or climate change. Or space travel. It's about all of them.

3) No, Rocket Girls doesn't have much in the way of metaphors. It does tell us a lot about invention, adults and dreams, though.
Even if people might look down on it for having schoolgirl protagonists, it's one of the best shows to know what it's like to be an adult with a good job.

TheBrainintheJar said:
Has there ever been any sci-fi book that accurately predicted the future?

TheBrainintheJar said:


Has there ever been any sci-fi book that accurately predicted the future?

flannan said:

Predictions of the future change the future. Self-fulfilling prophesies are just one facet of this (arguably unrealistic one).

But to tell the truth, I do not care about the answer to your question. Sci-fi hardness is a reward in itself for somebody like me. It's so nice to relax one's suspension of disbelief and look at a realistic future!

GenesisAria said:
@flannan
Rocket girls is the hardest sci-fi you're gonna find in anime. Believe me, i've looked.
(unless you count vaguely futuristic worlds where there's a holographic gadget or 2 and nothing else different, like Dennou Coil)

Isaac Asimov books, and several others i can't remember the names of. You can't predict the future word for word without having seen it yourself, but you can predict patterns. To predict the patterns more than a few years ahead, the farther you look, the more you have to deeply understand the way things work beyond everyone else. There are non-fiction writings that predicted the future as well, like those written or said by Nikola Tesla.

Soon to be my own. My CosmoGenesis project is employing anticipated scientific discoveries even (i'm working on a complete unified field theory). The future of field theory (beyond quantum), and it's implications.

If you want extremely hard sci-fi yet able to prove the possibility of fantasy elements, you really should be keeping in touch with me lol. I got sick of weak sci-fi and fantasy that people lazily throw together from imagination, i intend to make it real. I don't have much to show yet, i need to build a website to write wiki info on (or i can tell people about it directly). I also don't care for pseudo-modern sci-fi like The Martian, i want to work with space-based civilizations, militaries, and so on. I dunno about books, but Battlestar Galactica is probably the most realistic sci-fi put to a tv screen that actually has epic plot.

There might be some pretty legit sci-fi VN/LN/manga out there. Though japan tends to prefer emotional or fantastic stories over realism.

Most writers just don't have the dedication.

GenesisAria said:
@TheBrainintheJar
What are you talking about? Asimov had all kinds of way ahead of his time predictions and commentary on robots in society and stuff like that.

The robot vacuums are already becoming mainstream, and there are plenty people working on robot maids. It's coming the same way fiction has been anticipating for ages.

TheBrainintheJar said:


Can you show me an example and explain to me what's so realistic about it? Especially when we're talking about a medium that's about things that are not real?

flannan said:

1) Basics. I don't know your background, and what people like you call realistic. So I will explain what it means to me.
A giant humanoid mecha is realistic. A suitably talented group of inventors, or suitably funded corporate research facility can probably make it in a 5-10 years. Kind of like they did in Robotics;Notes. They aren't made because there isn't much demand for them - they will probably make good replacements for forklifts and other utility vehicles, but there is no reason to use them in the military yet. So far, all mecha built have been toys.
Making it controlled from a gamepad, Robotics;Notes style, is harder than it looks - it's hard to teach a robot to walk. Maybe because people who do it are talentless dreamers. Maybe because they forget to put proprioception (is it the right word?) into their robots. It sure isn't about square-cube law.
We even know what discovery will make humanoid machines more practical - if the motors were replaced with pseudo-muscles, animal-derived shapes will make a lot more sense.

A Striker Unit from Strike Witches or Brave Witches is not realistic. It requires physics completely different from what we know in our world. And based on the technology that we have no idea about.

Many things are in-between. Can we really fit a particle accelerator inside a pistol? And what about a power source that will fit in the handle? We don't really know, but it seems damn hard to do nowadays.
Laser pistols seem simpler (but we still need a whole lot of energy to make a laser that will kill people reasonably well).

Many things are more realistic than giant humanoid mecha. Augmented reality, in the form of Pokemon Go, has become quite real for many people this year. Google Glass is quite real (but expensive and not really useful yet) too. Massive augmented reality, like in Dennou Coil, might not happen, but it can be done. And it will probably be done, given the way computer technology progresses. Its limitations will probably not be like they are in Dennou Coil.

2) Counter-pressure vacuum suits, like the ones in Rocket Girls, are realistic devices that somebody is working on right now. Instead of containing air which presses on the astronaut, these vacuum suits press on the astronaut themselves. They are also really practical devices, and we can expect them to become widely used when completed.
All other concerns that Rocket Girls highlight are real concerns too. It's moderately hard to scale rockets up (and to scale anything up or down, really), and the decision to use lighter people is just something that may get used (Soviet army applied this solution widely during WWII). Missions rushed for political reasons, unexpected trouble in flight and so on are all very real things that happened to real spaceflights too!

flannan said:
A giant humanoid mecha is realistic.

A Striker Unit from Strike Witches or Brave Witches is not realistic. It requires physics completely different from what we know in our world. And based on the technology that we have no idea about.

Many things are in-between. Can we really fit a particle accelerator inside a pistol? And what about a power source that will fit in the handle?

Laser pistols seem simpler (but we still need a whole lot of energy to make a laser that will kill people reasonably well).

Many things are more realistic than giant humanoid mecha. Augmented reality, in the form of Pokemon Go, has become quite real for many people this year. Google Glass is quite real (but expensive and not really useful yet) too. Massive augmented reality, like in Dennou Coil, might not happen, but it can be done. And it will probably be done, given the way computer technology progresses. Its limitations will probably not be like they are in Dennou Coil.

TheBrainintheJar said:
I don't care whether an invention is real or not in fiction. Fiction isn't real by definition. What I care about is what the invention means.

flannan said:

I do care. Call this a professional deformation, if you will.

GenesisAria said:
@TheBrainintheJar
I'll be honest, i haven't read Asimov's works, but there's so much reference to it, especially concerning robotics. There's also random dudes like daVinci that come up with all kinds of things way ahead of their time.

As far as fiction affecting the future: you do know that Star Trek was the inception of the cellphone, ya?

Not the ones in anime. The ones you see in other movies like The Matrix or Avatar are more plausible. Ones jumping around doing martial arts are completely silly and impractical, and exist only for the sake of RuleOfCool. They're possible but completely pointless. That said, half their problems is not compounding golden ratio for efficient force distribution in the body. If you want to mimic a human body, do it right.

Not exactly true. You're unlikely to make energy travel through the unit exactly like the "magic" energy does, but flying around with a forcefield and leg propulsion is not any less possible than kung-fu mecha.

Particle accelerator? Easily. Power source is the problem: see Tesla.

Electrolasers. Again, problem is power source. Chemical capacitors are garbage.

Augmented reality is a very old concept, and we knew it was inevitable for a very long time. There are numerous companies working on Dennou Coil style augmented reality with the glasses overlaying the digital world, and again, have been for years, the military has been using it as standard equipment for decades.

Skin-tight suits, also a very old concept, almost as old as the EVA suit itself.

@TheBrainintheJar
With the appropriate scientific knowledge, a fiction writer can propose a device which has a high likelihood of being functional or practical. Unlike devices where you can work towards and solve problems, ideas cannot be works towards, you just get them or you don't. You must take advantage of the people with practical imaginations.

TheBrainintheJar said:


Treating unreal things as if they're real is deceiving yourself, isn't it?

TheBrainintheJar said:
I don't understand how it proves Asimov could predict the future accurately. His fiction - and I read a shitton of it - shows an incredibly intelligent person not well versed in psychology who knows his limits. He's an excellent storyteller, but can anyone show his merits as a SeriousDeep author? He seemed content telling fun, quick stories and kept his philosophies and science in non-fiction works.

flannan said:

Yes, this is what suspension of disbelief is all about!
Hmm... I wonder if this would have been something hard for the past me to approve, before I started playing tRPGs and became well-versed in mixing fiction and reality?
Or is it just @TheBrainintheJar that finds this idea alien?


Science fiction stories look at humanity's future.
Soft sci-fi makes up developments (with little concern for how real they are) in a way that will underline whatever the author wants. The most critic-praised of them make the future that will underline the problems of the present day. That's what gives them depth. A famous dystopia, 1984, is very relevant nowadays, as government surveillance expands and news degenerate into pure propaganda. Fahrenheit 451 is worrying too. This is all very appealing to humanities people.

Hard sci-fi takes realistic developments, and runs with them. Many try to predict the way they will shape the future, and that's the way Asimov's sci-fi works. By the way, Asimov is the first sci-fi author who made robots that did not rebel against humans. Because they were not a metaphor for exploitation for him, they were actual technology.
I think actually looking into the future is no less important than using it as a mirror to reflect today.

Note that both kinds of sci-fi can shape their narrative into fun stories, and have believable characters. It's all about the author's skill.

TheBrainintheJar said:


You did not explain how Asimov's story provide a meaningful angle with which to look at the future or today. So robots may not rebel, okay, but what does it mean?

flannan said:

I repeat. Technology is not a metaphor. It does not "mean" anything, it is what it is.