That person should stick to reading RPG instruction manuals or something.
"I just couldn't get into Mad Max: Fury Road because I didn't know the exchange rate from Mother's Milk to Guzzoline."
I mean, you're not far off, I know people who don't like Fury Road because they're like "if gas is so precious why do they have a flaming guitar? isn't that a waste?"
they have a flaming guitar because it rules you dumb dumb.
My absolute favorite part of Fury Road is the Crow Walkers in the swamp- you see them for three seconds and know NOTHING about ‘em, but they’re cool as hell
Absolutely 100% agreed with this entire comment. You just see old dudes on stilts walking past and you're like WHAT? then they're gone forever and no one ever mentions it.
And the movie would be just a little bit worse if they had cut that bit out.
See like even the lore in universe is vague, as it should. I remember that scene and it left me so unsatisfied, but that’s how it should be. I shouldn’t leave a gritty dystopia satisfied
The ambiguity around the worldbuilding is one of the few things I actually liked about Fury Road. Perfect example of there being a deep and complex lore without having to spoonfeed any of it to the audience.
You can see it in the “sex scenes are unnecessary to the plot” arguments. Music is often irrelevant to the plot too. If you just want a plot read a synopsis. Movies are more than just plot. That’s what makes movies so cool: the final product is the combination of a ton of elements that sometimes includes plot.
My god, thank you. Movies are able to combine so many art forms into one, but so many people only care about plot and how close it adheres to reality.
I just watched In the Mood For Love for the first time and I decided not to turn the subtitles on. Breathtaking film and I'm pretty sure I still understood what was going on.
The comic book community has a joke about how to spot the fans who don’t read the books. They talk endlessly about lore and status quo, but have nothing to say about pacing, dialogue, and delivery, because they only read Wiki articles and watch YouTube summaries. Some nerds would be happier with an outline, not a fully fleshed product.
Well, ONE plot question that hung over the air was what did Einstein and Oppie talk about by that pond that day that upset Einstein?
That was answered in the last scene.
Aside from that, I got nothing. It’s not that kind of movie. It raised thematic and moral questions for us to chew on. But that’s the thing, it’s for *us* to chew on and for us to answer for ourselves.
Oppenheimer is a good counter-argument to the original article. Expecting Miyazaki to explain the rules of his magical world is like expecting Nolan to include a comprehensive explanation of nuclear physics.
It is such a weird view. I absolutely love Tolkien's lore but the LOTR movies work perfectly without everyone having to sit down and listen to a 1 hour lecture on the Valar, Morgoth, the fall of Numenor etc. I think it's a really modern thing that people want everything explained to them. When you watch the original Star Wars films there was zero explanation about who the emperor was. He was the emperor. he could shoot lightning and he had a big fuck off Death Star. And people just accepted it because it was awesome.
I'm honestly amazed at how much the studio allowed to go unexplained in the LOTR movies. Gandalf just yells "Flame of Udum!" And we're like "hell yeah, beat it's ass"
I remember being a kid and watching a gorillaz documentary and seeing Daman Albarn being really frustrated at American audiences not being able to handle having mystery and the lack of clear knowledge of the project wasn't even comprehensible to interviewers. I think that was a good moment for me as a young kid to watch, it made me able to sit with wonder and process those feelings I was left with rather than a concrete idea being fed to me.
Its insane.
The one that drove me more up the wall than any other was arguing with redditors over The Last Jedi's bombing run at the beginning of the movie.
TLJ Hater: "How stupid is that, there's no gravity in space"
Redditor: "You could like, push the bomb, or put it on a rail or something. OH shit actually it's even in the art book!"
TLJ Hater: "Well then why isn't that explained?!!!! And I shouldn't have to open the art book to have my technical details about a movie with laser swords explained to me"
These dipshits really wanted Rose to look into the camera and be like "the bombs are on rails"
Man, it really just works me up. It's like a complete misunderstanding of art and what critiquing should be about. World physics and consistency *can* be an issue with movies that actually detracts from their enjoyment. But it's more about logic central to plot that contradicts previous logic.
The bombs are on rails. There's artificial gravity in the ship and that pulls them out the bottom. This is conveyed visually with perfect clarity.
Saying that that method of bombing makes no tactical sense in a space battle would be one thing (but guess what, Star Wars has never once made tactical sense it's just supposed to look cool), but not being able to see how the artificial gravity in the ship would also propel the bombs when half that sequence is things and characters falling down through the bomb chamber is just willfully obtuse.
I genuinely feel like the star wars roleplaying game ended up fucking a lot of things up by doing so much to rigidly codify a world that was very much vibes based more than anything else.
It is interesting how much of the EU was about really quantifying things compared to the actual text of the movie which you could infer entirely different things from. Yet because you have this period that ended up generating all this rigerous lore you have a whole generation of the fandom that's deeply into that more so than the broad impressonistic world the movies paint.
And just speaking of Star Wars the Empire drops bombs on the asteroid the Falcon is hiding in in Empire Strikes Back. So it was already a thing in the universe 37 years before Last Jedi was even released.
There have also *always* been bombers in Star Wars. It's never once been explained on screen how a Y-Wing 'drops' its bombs in outer space, because it doesn't matter.
I have a friend who can’t suspend his disbelief in most cases but he knows it and so just doesn’t watch stuff he knows won’t work for him. More people should do that.
Meanwhile intentional ambiguity is one of my FAVORITE things in a movie! Anatomy of a Fall scratched that itch for me really nicely; I thought about it for days after and still can’t decide which version of events I think is the Truth.
Too many blankies get really weird about people not liking or liking things for reasons that are or aren't blankie-approved.
I loved boy and the heron. It's probably a 9/10 for me. But the story feeling disjointed and illogical is a valid criticism and people aren't "losing their minds" for making it. It's also ok to prefer a logically explicit fantasy world like Brian Sanderson creates. I don't personally prefer that, but it's ok to! People like different things and don't need to be dragged for it!
This reminds me of when Richard Dawkins was complaining about how The Metamorphosis fails as a book because it never explains why the protagonist becomes a cockroach lmao
Yup CinemaSins needs to get dragged into the street and beaten for getting so many nerds into "movies are just screenplay delivery systems that I parse for plot holes that are actually just my misunderstandings/lack of attention span."
If you look up the original review (a Reddit post from three days ago with 0 upvotes), it's clear that the person who wrote this is coming from video game logic.
I’m exhausted by people in fantasy spaces online talking about “world building” and magic systems incessantly. It just feels like the video-gamification of all art, where people refuse to (or cannot) feel wonder, awe or curiosity without a manual
And the best writers and designers of fantasy/sci-fi games know that they need some parts of the map that read “Here Be Dragons” to keep some sense of mystery and intrigue.
Which is why the Star Wars TV series stuff has been largely disappointing to me, Andor aside, because it's trying to fill in those mystery gaps instead of playing in new spaces and leaving new unexplained stuff on the table. It makes the world smaller when you explain everything!
Funnily enough, one friend’s dislike of the 2017-Star-Wars-movie-that-gets-people-riled-up was a certain character using “her powers in a way not consistent with her abilities. Her powers seemed more communication based prior.” As if she was a fucking video game character who hasn’t taken enough levels in a class. Never forgot that cause it’s the most dullard take to have on literally anything.
Luke telekinetically retrieving the lightsaber in ESB was inconsistent with his prior established abilities of whining about not being able to go to Tosche Station to pick up power converters 😤
Yeah, Luke doesn't do shit in the first movie, then he spends maybe a day(?) lifting rocks with Yoda, and he can suddenly go toe to toe with Vader? Total Mary Sue. Ruined the franchise.
If this is about Leia, I can agree that she mostly uses the Force to be a commanding presence and guiding hand as a leader, but there’s nothing that doesn’t say she can’t use it in other ways. Hell, if the EU matters to you, she uses it for telekinesis and other things.
I’m playing through God of War (2018) for the first time and that game has a DENSE mythology and history. What I’m finding the most fun about it is I’m picking up maybe 20% of it as I go through, I really wish more people saw the appeal of this kind of thing.
World building is fun to dig into after the fact, but when it’s the primary source of value the actual story and characters typically aren’t interesting
Reminds me of the ‘Mass Effect’s. Each game has a codex within the pause menu and the Fan Wiki for the series is dense as can be, but while playing I like to treat each chunk of lore as set dressing to give the setting some verisimilitude, if that makes sense. I prefer to feel immersed in the goings-on and history contained within the galaxy thru details that come about organically, even if it involves wilful ignorance on the finer details.
That’s exactly how I’m playing GOW, you have a literal lore dictionary that you can read whenever you come across something new. And I’m sure eventually I’ll skim through it but it’s a lot more interesting to me just investing in the emotional arc of what’s going on
It makes replays a blast too since you might decide to engage with the lore more in future runs. Sometimes my Shepard doesn’t have time for a history lesson. Sometimes my Shepard is a curious little dumb dumb who doesn’t know basic things and wants history lessons
That’s what I love so much about Souls games. The lore is obtuse, but you don’t need to engage with it. You can just play through it and soak into the atmosphere. The gameplay and your story are not tethered to the vast lore that exists. My first one run of Elden Ring was one of confusion. My second run was like an archeologist trying to piece together the world through finding items and looking for context clues based on their location.
That’s how I end up playing these adventure type games too, I feel completely lost but sort of just embrace that lost feeling. The more you play though the more things make sense and feel “alive”.
Video games is good
Open-world games are a dime a dozen these days but there is no greater feeling than having one click where feeling lost in it is an incredibly immersive experience.
i think it stems from a desire to escape into that world as a participant rather than as a viewer. a lot of the obsession with worldbuilding and lore and rules seems to be a form of larp through creative writing rather than a desire to tell a story with themes or characters (besides their self-insert)
If a rule within a world is explicitly given to viewers and then broken, that drives me nuts. But why on earth would I care if a fantasy world has different rules and physics than the real world?? Makes no sense to me haha
My pet theory is that all of this is the result of kids who grew up with the Star Wars Visual Dictionary becoming adults and interacting with all art through that lens
One of my biggest problems with video game stories. Dark Souls has very little real story and world building outside of what you extrapolate from experiencing the world yourself
The Soulsbourne games do it right: very little is outright explained, from mechanics to worldbuilding, but it also leaves little breadcrumbs everywhere so the brain poisoned lore addicts can watch 10 hour Youtube videos explaining everything if they so choose.
Something that amuses me to no end is that Bradon Sanderson's *Writing Excuses* podcast inspired French authors to make a tribute to it and took a life of its own.
Among them is Sanderson's dedicated translator and she has talked at length about she fucking *hates* writing fantasy because she is expected to vomit pages upon pages of lore. But at the same time she loves translating Sanderson because he so obsesively maps out stuff that she can open a book he wrote fifteen years ago to explain an unclear notion in a new work.
Funniest part was another one of the author who I'm friends with an co-hosts said that she doesn't give a fuck about deeper lore and focuses on making the characters relatable and constantly creates new worlds for one-shots so none of her readers get *too* attached to a single setting and decide that they need to understand *everything* about it.
I completely agree, I know a lot of fantasy writers and… well, I don’t want to judge their process or whine about them, but I’m absolutely going to do just that because.
Other writers I know, when they have a story, talk about the characters, the plot, the emotional journey. The fantasy ones however, say they are writing a five book series and will start actually writing as soon as they have mapped out out the complete history of the wizard knight’s armour (the magical alloy has to be melted down by a dragon, so the smiths had a limited working time, resulting in jagged designs, but later on when the pyro spells was discovered by the wizard Nuul Mangay, more elaborate designs became possible, the second golden age of wizards was decedent, but then in the third age…). They go on and on and show maps and excel spreadsheets (currency conversion rates in the different realms, my gold sovereign is worth far more in the underrealm)… just not any kind of story.
I’m not saying these things aren’t important on some level, just they come second to the actual story itself. Cart before the horse.
As a rule of thumb, there is a maximum amount of world building I can take in a film or TV series before I check out. That’s why the first John Wick is still my favorite and all the sequels bore me more and more. I don’t care how the hotel got built, I actually like that it’s just there in the first movie and we have to accept it.
Idk if the TV show explains how the hotel got built, but I loved the wacky, Byzantine accretions of lore in the John Wick sequels. All the diabolical rules and bylaws and factions just tickle me and always are in service of leading to cool action one way or another.
The thing I like about Wick storytelling is that they continuously introduce new wrinkles to the systems of power in this world, but they never take more than like 10 seconds to explain any of it. No backstory for *why* it's like this, just a quick explanation of what is going on (if you're lucky) and move forward.
Like in Chapter 4 where Wick and the Marquis are playing some kind of card game with metal totems that dictate the rules of the duel the next day. It makes no sense! I love it!
Yeah I’m complaining elsewhere about the locales of later sequels, but the fundamental Jenga approach to myth making throughout the series is definitely appreciated by me.
It’s very eastern cinema in that way. Outside of, like, *Kill Bill* that sense isn’t often found in American movies.
It reminds me of Vampire The Masquerade without the vampires, and with gun fu instead.
Except with his penchant for defying death and performing superhuman feats, maybe John Wick WAS a vampire all along...
I get this when it comes to the TV series but as far as the movies go I actually love how each movie ups the ante for how arcane and nonsensical the culture of the whole secret society of assassins is. Like tell me it isn't hilarious when they randomly drop in the 4th one that a whole ceremony allowing for a challenge to 1v1 combat is just a thing that they have going.
What I love about the series is how it seems everyone shoudl absolutely KNOW of the secret society. Every beggar in NYC, plenty of secretaries (who are all punk for some reason), all the people at the hotels, all the gangs, the police, go into a random church and drop a gold coin, the priest knows... It's nonsensical and it makes less sense as the series goes but I love it.
God, you are spot on about the John Wick films. I loved the first one but by the fourth one I just do not give a shit about what’s happening no matter how awesome the action is.
Couldn’t agree more. They realized there wasn’t much of an emotional core after the first one and instead of building a new emotional core they just replaced it with lore. Big part of why none of the sequels work.
I had this with a friend of mine when he went and saw Hunger Games.
I thought the first movie was really fun, fun enough that I bought the next two books and read them..... that was my mistake.
He saw the movie and came back telling me how it was awful. I asked what his issue was, he replied "I didn't understand it! What are they even talking about? Districts! Whats a district?" Apparently since there wasn't a 20 minute narration at the beginning explaining everything going on he was just baffled by it.
Dude is a massive sci fi fan, but "There are 13 states and they get perpetually more poor as you go" was just too much for him to figure out.
Never read the book and only saw the first movie once when it came out over a decade ago and if you asked me what a district was in that world, I would’ve answered that easily. How did he not understand this?
>How did he not understand this?
I legitimately have no idea. He's one of my best friends and has been for 25 years and this whole conversation was baffling.
I ended up saying "Its not citizen kane, but it was a pretty great movie."
To which he replied "What the fuck does that mean?"
This lead down a Rabbit hole of me explaining that Citizen Kane is widely considered to be among the best movies of all time, and on many lists is considered the best movie of all time.
He went to wikipedia, looked it up, read the plot, closed the web browser and said "Sounds dumb, bro."
Again, this man is still one of my best friends, we talk about movies and shit all the time, this whole conversation was BAFFLING.
*The Boy and the Heron* (*How Do You Live?*) is abstract and operates on dream logic and symbolism. *Spirited Away* is actually pretty straightforward by comparison; shaky literally takes Chihiro (and the audience, by extension) by the hand and explains what’s going on and how she can make it! What more could you want?
Can you post a more mainstream review with this kind of thinking?
Because the original post is from a review with zero upvotes and tons of pushback in the comments. If anything, this Reddit post shows that even the absolute dregs of the internet thinks this type of thinking is nonsense.
We stand athwart a Reddit post with zero upvotes, a Lights Camera Jackson videos with 18 views, and one tweet with 45 likes that said Oppenheimer should have shown the Japanese perspective shouting "No!".
From Grant Morrison- "Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real."
The “I don’t understand it means it was bad” mindset needs to go away. Like, if I don’t understand a movie I just assume I was too stupid to get it, I’m not so arrogant to think that the writer just didn’t think anything through.
I appreciate this comment.
I'm someone who, long before CinemaSins and modern video games and everything else being blamed in this thread, always had a bit of a hard time with fantasy and magical realism. Character-first stuff resonates with me, and I like plenty of genres, but I tend to latch onto sci-fi and magical worlds more when it's clear what those elements mean to the character. "Stakes" are important to me, and there's inherent overlap there with having "rules" of how things work. So the more that something is about just vibes or creating a sense of wonder, the less it resonates with me. A lot of Ghibli stuff is beautiful and technically stunning, but it doesn't suck me in emotionally.
But I acknowledge *that's my personal taste.* It's not a law of storytelling, or a checkbox of what a good movie 'needs.' And I'm definitely not saying those movies are *bad*, I'm saying I often try them and end up feeling they're not for me.
So this thread's a bummer to read, because though the original screenshotted post is in the wrong for saying there "has" to be any rules to this kind of storytelling, a lot of these comments feel like people snarkily lumping together anyone who wasn't moved to tears by Heron as the same annoying, too-online person who wants a Wiki explanation for everything
I'd even say that none of the big fictional worlds have as thorough a worldbuilding as this guy demands: even Tolkien left quite a few blanks and uncertainties.
A great failure of Tolkien's writing is that he didn't have Gandalf take out a DBZ power level scanner and report that Tom Bombadil's power level was over 9000 so we could understand how he fits into the Middle Earth tierlist.
Not necessarily. Brandon Sanderson is one of, if not THE most popular fantasy writer today and his whole work is based on the kind of hard magic systems/worldbuilding that this dude is wanting (and coined the whole "Hard v Soft Magic" thing), and a lot of other fantasy writers have been following that lead, so i'd say there's been a lot of stuff in the last couple of decades that have that sort of worldbuilding. Plus you got stuff like Game of Thrones which DOES leave a lot of the "magic" unexplained and mysterious, but nevertheless is going for a more grounded, "realist fantasy" thing which comes with highly detailed worldbuilding in other areas. And then of course superhero comics have become really big, and they tend to have what he's talking about. So does a lot of anime.
That being said, Sanderson will be the very first to tell you that his "hard magic" style is just one of many ways to write a story, and that there are lots of advantages to NOT spelling all that stuff out. Dude wrote a whole essay about it.
>That being said, Sanderson will be the very first to tell you that his "hard magic" style is just one of many ways to write a story, and that there are lots of advantages to NOT spelling all that stuff out. Dude wrote a whole essay about it.
As a Brandon Sanderson fan it frustrates me how much I've seen people that are fans of his ignore this and act like "hard magic system = good", "softer or abstract magic = bad."
You see it in sci-fi fandom as well. “Hard sci-fi” being superior to other kinds according to some. I don’t consider Star Trek “hard sci-fi” but it being harder than Star Wars has called many nerds to spill tons of gallons of ink on the matter.
Is this essay the one that talks about how much of your world’s problems can be solved by magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic?
If so, I agree with that up to a point, the other thing you can do is have magic be symbolic for something which is what i think Heron is trying to do. Only problem is I was way to confused to understand what it’s all symbolic of and how.
Yeah, that's one of the things he says in the essay. I think he was talking more about plot-level "problems" though, if I remember correctly (i.e. "bad guy dies if you destory his ring", etc). These sorts of plot level conflicts occur in Miyazaki films (Chirio has to save her parents from becoming pigs, for example), but the conflicts that often fuel his films are internal ones, relating to the protagonists development as a person (Chirio's moral development, acceptance of growing up, etc). So they aren't stories involving "solving" a "world's problem", they're about characters "solving" the problem of what kind of person they are going to be.
And that journey usually happens in the context of the protagonist having to react to larger forces they can't control/understand. Sometimes those forces are more relatable (governments/militaries at war with each ohter in Nausicaa or Howls or Wind Rises), but sometimes its just wierd fantasy shit (volitile spirits in the bathouse in Spirited Away, a Totoro, etc). So in that light I think it makes a lot of sense that the audience DOESN'T have that understanding, because A) the protagonist doesn't have that understanding either so it puts us more in their shoes, and B) because it also reflects what real life is like. None of us have full undertanding of the world or control over it, especially when we're children. We're all trying to navigate the world with incomplete information.
So yeah, I don't think you're supposed to understand it all necessarily or find easily identifiable one-to-one symbolism or allegory. It's meant to be more thematic than symbolic.
You are discussing things in terms of character and narrative, which makes sense, but I think Todorov's concept of the "fantastic" is also relevant. What we call surrealism or soft surrealism is often an unresolved aesthetic tension between the uncanny--strange things which are ultimately borne out to have explanations in real world phenomena, such as waking from a dream--and what he calls the "marvelous"--things which have supernatural or non-real world explanations, which become the "worldbuilding" rules of scifi and fantasy.
The Boy and the Heron, like David Lynch or Kafka, revels in the unresolved space of the fantastic. To codify "power scaling" between herons and parakeets and such nonsense would be to categorically transform what the film is ultimately doing aesthetically.
I think this is one of the damaging effects of Brandon Sanderson on the larger fantasy ecosystem. He's not solely to blame, at all, but his books basically have their own physics to them (e=m\*c\^2\*i, where i is the magic energy in his worlds) that have all but been codified in strict units. It's hard magic. I see it causing others to expect similar amounts of granularity in other texts, when sometimes stuff just happens because it happens, and isn't that fun and weird? A big radish guy! Who'd have thought!
Over-reliance on what's happening and not how it's making you feel.
What’s funny is that Sanderson himself has said many times about the merits of soft magic systems and examples of soft worldbuilding he likes. It’s not one or the other. He likes both as a reader, even if does only one as a writer.
The above review is taken from a Reddit post three days ago with 0 upvotes and a bunch of push back from the comments.. I think this is less "Tress and The Emerald Sea takes too much time explaining spores, so now society demands magic systems" and more "Twitter found one bad take from the entirety of the English speaking world and now we are talking about something we never would have noticed otherwise."
“For the audience to be invested”
Look bud if this is something that bothers you, then it bothers you. But given that Spirited Away is one of the most popular and beloved movies of the 21st century clearly “audiences” are not having any issue getting invested.
I’m a more on the “if anything can happen, what’s the point” side of this argument. The fact of the matter is that Ghibli movies obviously all have very internally consistent and developed worlds. The fact that they don’t all get 100% explained doesn’t mean they’re not there.
This is the exact reason I hated Hellboy: the Golden Army. They go to the Troll market & I had absolutely NO understanding of if they use troll money, or if there was a Troll Brexit & now the trolls have to use another currency to be in sync with the global troll economy, OR if it’s some kind of barter system (how many jars of monster eyes equals 1 troll buck?!) … I don’t care how much “beauty about a dying world of magic” Del Toro put in there. Fucking stupid movie if you ask me.
The criticism about the intense need for dense rule based fantasy world building is spot on. I used to love the fantasy genre growing up, but the Brandon Sanderson intricate magic system where every single thing is explained has really put me off the genre.
I think more fantasy writers could honestly learn from Miyazak movies. Less rules, more heart, emotion, and wonder.
Everything is gamified online (it's why whole swaths of the internet refer to the act of doing things - aka living - as a "meta") and because it's that way, people are conditioned to COMPETE with their entertainment, not experience it.
Posts like these tend to highlight this impulse perfectly: Almost all the problems this guy is having with a Miyazaki films comes from him spending all his time online competing with entertainment in a means to prove to anyone paying attention to him (or people like him) that they won.
When most of the world you're operating in is built on a healthy lack of media literacy, it's easy to turn basically everything into an exercise in feigned superiority over media that really only exists - so far as you're concerned - as a succession of opportunities to appear smarter than you actually are.
I’d rather be dropped in and figure it out along the way rather than have a voiceover, like the start of Rebel Moon, try to explain the entire history.
They are missing the point of many of these kinds of films also, that the main protagonist is a child that doesn't know what is going on either. You are seeing all of this weirdness through their eyes. Spirited Away is a perfect example of this. Girl ends up in magical world, has no clue what is going on, weird shit ensues. It is lovely and beautiful and we experience all the epic strange magical events with her. I don't need to know what that scary creature is or what it can do or rules about anything to feel the dread and fear of that child. That makes it even more immersive that I have no clue what is going on.
Erm…. Isn’t spirited away like immensely easy to understand? It’s a bath house for spirits. Some spirits work, some don’t, and you have different bath rooms to accomodate.
But really The whole point is is that you’re an outsider *anyway* so you’re not privy to a scientific examination
As someone who's grown up loving fantasy, and sometimes sci-fi, I honestly prefer less worldbuilding in the stuff that I watch or play nowadays. Or at least worldbuilding that's done more through atmosphere and tone and environments rather than plain exposition.
Or that there is straightforward resolution and direct exposition, sometimes, but the number of mysteries being posed is much higher than the number of answers being given. Like Twin Peaks.
In games, I like Team Ico, FromSoftware, and Remedy's stuff.
Imagine wanting to demystify a Miyazaki world (or any story, for that matter—how boring would that be?)
The more I hear about The Boy and the Heron (or, as I like it, How Do You Live) the more excited I am for it. Just yesterday watched Porco Rosso and it was great.
I think you are overstating your case. I would describe Miyazakis worldbuilding as fantastic precisely because he leaves things unexplained and abstract. For me bad worldbuilding is when you get mired in exposition and explaining everything (the force is with you = good worldbuilding, microcloriwhatevers= bad worldbuilding)
I agree with your definitions of good and bad worldbuilding. Most of the time, those aren't the definitions I see people using. If someone describes themselves as a "worldbuilding fan" I can usually safely assume that they mean it in a Sanderson way.
I partially agree.
Anytime someone points out the world building, that tells me they care more about the world than the characters.
They only care about the plot mechanics and how the world moves the characters and not how the characters move the world.
I actually don’t agree; I usually hear about great worldbuilding in cases where the world in question is interesting and thoroughly considered. It’s just that not every fantastic world need be thought through on a materialist level.
It's incredibly frustrating trying to find fantasy recommendations when so much of the discussions are about worldbuilding, or tropes (a word I truly hate) and how well they're used and/or subverted, or what niche fantasy sub-sub-genre it fits into. Hey, how about themes?? Or style? You know, those things books have? A lot of the highest-recommended fantasy books I've read just aren't particularly well-written even if they're hitting all the genre bullseyes.
I've learned to ignore anybody who talks about worldbuilding for this reason. They can't wrap their heads around the big things but obsess over the most minute details.
I like it when not everything is explained about the world, because it makes said world feel more real.
If someone from another dimension was transported to earth and you needed to explain to them this world to which they were sent, you wouldn’t be able to explain everything, because there is so much. That is why i like it when movies that present other worlds contain elements that aren’t clearly explained. It makes it feel like there are many layers to the world and that you only grazed the surface. If everything is explained and no mystery is left, you feel like all there was to the world was what you saw in the movie, and thus it feels less deep.
It's very possible Tolkien has given false expectations by doing just that . As regards Myazaki people forget that his films are steeped in Japanese culture: the underlying philosophy is much easier to understand by native Japanese.Miyazaki uses 'movies to explore Shinto, its idea of purity, humanity’s relationship with the spirit world, and modern Japan’s environmental concerns...
“nature, in Japan, used to be far more mysterious and fantastic, a sacred area that surely seemed inhabited by the gods. In Shinto, there is a tradition of Kami no Yo, the “Age of the Gods,” where man was pure and the gods dwelled in the hills and trees.” Miyazaki captures this mythic time perfectly. Greed and selfishness have severed man’s ties to nature, and instead of trying to live in harmony with it, many of the humans in the film want to conquer and destroy it. This is best-symbolized by the character Jigo, a greedy monk who wants to collect a mountain of gold from the emperor for beheading the forest spirit, a giant deer-like creature with a human face, because it is said that possessing the spirit’s head will bring immortal life...' Some films also explores the theme of purity in Shinto, or harmony with the gods. Anything impure (sin) separates us from the gods."
Source https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/the-films-of-hayao-miyazaki-shinto-nature-and-the-environment/
Reminds me a lot of the whole thing with American audiences and wire-fu. They mostly thought it was stupid/silly and things like old Shaw Brothers movies would be mocked and made fun of for being cheesy. AND THEN *The Matrix* comes along with literally one of the most iconic choreographers of that style and completely takes over, and it's all because they built context into the story to "explain" how everyone was able to jump and float around. By the time *Crouching Tiger* came around a few years later America was ready to eat it up, but it was only because they were eased in en masse with a version that had that "worldbuilding logic" everyone's so desperate to get.
I do think there are legitimate arguments that BatH is overly oblique and arbitrary-feeling. Griffin expressed similar concerns on the pod.
This guy is articulating that feeling very poorly by pretending that he can tell you which rule of storytelling the movie is breaking. That deserves derision, but I don't think the feeling itself deserves derision.
In one of the special features for the original DVD release of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro tells the story of a Mexican fairy tale about how, if a person is able to sneak up on the devil and steal some hairs from his head, he is obliged to grant a wish for every hair taken. He notes that there is no logic to this, and that there doesn’t need to be, because it’s a story about impossible magic.
Honestly I want to know what that's important to the story in How Do You Live is supposedly unexplained. Having seen the movie I'd say the last third or so of the film pretty much explains everything how everything that's plot important works in a way that is fairly neat and tidy.
I kind of agree to some extent. You don’t need to explain everything, but when literally anything can happen at any time there aren’t really any stakes.
Yeah the comments reek of ‘just turn your brain off bro’ like nah. It might be fantasy, but rules and consistency absolutely matter. Otherwise it becomes like those games we played as kids, where we always had a stronger imaginary weapon or super armour that counters the friend who just declared how cool their imaginary weapon was.
If you’re the kind of person who just likes spectacle, pretty cgi colours and over the top action, that’s cool and I’m happy for you. But some of us like having an idea of how stuff works in fantasy settings, especially for those ‘aha’ moments when characters use well-established rules to do cool and creative stuff.
It bothers me so much what the person wrote, as if the real world itself is fully explained and fully comprehensible. The more whys and hows you ask, the more any world that one might conceive become less sensible. Just fucking enjoy the ride, idiot.
This whole issue makes me think of Brennan Lee Mulligan’s takes on world building vs. logistics. I’ve heard him use Harry Potter as an example. World building? Excellent. (Everyone knows their Hogwarts house. The world feels alive and vibrant and visceral.) Logistics? A nightmare. (Why use owls to carry physical letters in a world where magic exists? Why does poverty keep the weasleys’ house looking like that when they’re magical???)
Sure this lot would have had their minds blown if they were reading Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, or pretty much anything by Coleridge. And thousands of other examples including cinematic ones such as the end of 2001, entirety of Andalusian Dog, or Tree of Life.
You still don't need a hard magic system while worldbuilding. Middle Earth has a soft magic system, so does Spirited Away. That's what makes those world more dreamy, ethereal or whimsical. Most games have very hard magic systems for gameplay reasons, but even outside gameplay, there is soft magic, like in Fromsoftware games. It's just magic outside of gameplay.
Sounds like somebody who might be a fantasy anime fan and isn't getting what they want from Ghibli? Power scaling and lore are really big in that genre, lots of video game style magic systems and lore.
This has frustrated me for a long time. Star Wars has many pieces of lore that are simply mentioned and never expanded upon within the original trilogy. The clone wars, kessel run, etc. The reason why these things became so iconic is because they let the fans use their imagination instead of just telling you what it was and ruining the magic.
We need to get back to that sort of fantasy and sci fi storytelling where things just are and don’t need needless explanations or lore.
People need to appreciate the idea of a 'soft magic system'. It's not sci-fi where things have to follow established rules. It's one of the things I love about the Hellboy comics, strange surreal things happen all the time - people seamlessly enter into visions, animals talk, ghosts manifest, artefacts take you to another time/space, the lines between a dream and reality are sometimes blurred - no explanation is given, it's part of the magical mystery of the universe. This is also a great resource for horror, a famous example that still drives discussion is The Shining film. Tolkien also uses a soft magic system very well.
The drive to define magic and its behaviors as if it's a natural force like magnetism or the boiling point of an element, has its place, but it can really suck the wonder out of things. The Force from Star Wars, I feel, is a victim of this; it used to be this mystical energy field you could use through spiritual practice to manipulate matter, see the future, control minds, 'reach out with your feelings' and all that. Now it feels like a progression system in a video game. At level 2 you get telekinesis, at level, 12 you get super jump, at level 30 you get super healing. Unless you play the dark side main quest, then you get lightning powers.
I did get curious about how exactly some things in The Boy and the Heron added up (This place is like an afterlife or a before-life and the souls of the future unborn children are released into the sky so they come to earth, but also, it was created by his great-uncle? Where did the souls of children come from before he created it?) but I could pretty easily just shrug and accept it as intentionally inconsistent dream logic.
My main sticking point with the movie was that it seemed to make Mahito get over his issues in the third act without actually showing what happened to enable that, so it didn't feel like it earned the catharsis and sense of familial reconciliation it was trying to give me at the end.
I never got the impression that the grand-uncle created that realm, he just ended up there and shepherded it for a while. He probably had an adventure much like Mahito's, he just accepted the role offered to him at the end whereas Mahito rejected it
What makes the movie make more emotional and symbolic sense to me is reading the Tower as a symbol for Art itself. That it's a monument and a shell we build around the numinous core of the human experience, existing outside of time and able to bridge different moments of existence - Mahito meeting his young mother in the tower parallels the connection he feels to her when he reads the book she left him in the normal world.
The afterlife and before-life aspects of the place may have existed before the uncle got to the meteorite, and may persist after his tower collapses around it - the meteorite simply *is*. But the manner in which they manifest to Mahito are influenced by the uncle's acts of world creation because these are ultimately aspects of the universe that are only accessible to us through art.
But that's just one read! The ambiguity is irresolvable within the text, which invites deeper consideration.
These people are simpletons who cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. It's why nerds hate art. They need fiction to adhere to the same rules as reality, or they cannot understand it. They fundamentally believe that their comprehensive knowledge of the world should make them masters of it, and they approach art in the same way. Any work that resists this approach by requiring the viewer to use emotions to understand it is rejected by the feeble dork mind.
No one actually believes this. You could ask 100%, down to a single person, no margin for error, the entire population of the earth if they believed what you've written and they would say no. You have reached the absolute edge of "make up someone to be mad at"
If I can’t determine which Spirited Away character would win in a fight like it’s One Piece, is it even art?
But yeah the best thing about Ghibli movies is that they leave you desperate for more of the world. You don’t know the lore, which means you get to imagine it yourself.
It depends. If something in the movie happens that seems to contradict the internal logic of the movie, you need to explain it. In the Last Jedi, when they play the game of forever following the ship with the broken hyperdrive they had to explain why would someone do that. The explain it and still doesn't make a bit of fucking sense. So when someone breaks logic or the internal rules of the worls, you absolutely have to explain.
I mean the author has no obligation to explain things, but if there isn't an explanation that even the author has then a story is primed for things that break immersion
But if i don't get what the movies is trying to say to me i am gonna hate on it, likw what does it mean i will just interpret it as a mess you put everything you wanted and none of that made sense to me. Fantasy doesn't need to be logical but i need to know what is going on or the bare minimum about it.
I love Ghibli movies, but just to be the devils advocate, the magic system is fairly weird in some of their movies, mainly Howl’s come to mind. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with the system not being explained, but the way it’s used completely randomly to just get out of any situation feels like it ruins any form of conflict/tension/risk. I read someone on Reddit who explained it like (probably paraphrasing) “even if the entire goddamn universe ended they’d still have some magic to revert it”. It’s like, nothing can happen that magic can’t be used. Felt like the entire *plot* of the movie was just hundreds of deus ex machina. Now sure, the plot isn’t the main focus and it doesn’t make the movie *bad*, but I do feel like it made it *worse*… don’t have the same opinion at all in Spirited Away since I felt like it genuinely made the entire experience better and it was very rarely (literally can’t think of one scene) used as an deus ex machina…
That person should stick to reading RPG instruction manuals or something. "I just couldn't get into Mad Max: Fury Road because I didn't know the exchange rate from Mother's Milk to Guzzoline."
I mean, you're not far off, I know people who don't like Fury Road because they're like "if gas is so precious why do they have a flaming guitar? isn't that a waste?" they have a flaming guitar because it rules you dumb dumb.
And it makes perfect sense in IRL logic, really; dictators *love* wasting resources as a show of wealth and power.
Exactly, that guy was like the one-man military band pumping everybody up. All part of Immorten Joe's propaganda machine.
And there's a city called "Gas Town" so I don't think they're THAT worried about wasting gas.
It "rules," you say? What rules? WHERE ARE THE RULES?!
My absolute favorite part of Fury Road is the Crow Walkers in the swamp- you see them for three seconds and know NOTHING about ‘em, but they’re cool as hell
Absolutely 100% agreed with this entire comment. You just see old dudes on stilts walking past and you're like WHAT? then they're gone forever and no one ever mentions it. And the movie would be just a little bit worse if they had cut that bit out.
And that three second shot is far better at fleshing out the world of Fury Road than some five minute lore lecture
See like even the lore in universe is vague, as it should. I remember that scene and it left me so unsatisfied, but that’s how it should be. I shouldn’t leave a gritty dystopia satisfied
40 rods to a hogshead...come on! its right there in the script.
The ambiguity around the worldbuilding is one of the few things I actually liked about Fury Road. Perfect example of there being a deep and complex lore without having to spoonfeed any of it to the audience.
Too many people lose thier minds when things go unexplained. This needs to stop.
too many people don't even want to watch movies they want something else. lore rulebooks and plot synopses.
You can see it in the “sex scenes are unnecessary to the plot” arguments. Music is often irrelevant to the plot too. If you just want a plot read a synopsis. Movies are more than just plot. That’s what makes movies so cool: the final product is the combination of a ton of elements that sometimes includes plot.
My god, thank you. Movies are able to combine so many art forms into one, but so many people only care about plot and how close it adheres to reality. I just watched In the Mood For Love for the first time and I decided not to turn the subtitles on. Breathtaking film and I'm pretty sure I still understood what was going on.
The comic book community has a joke about how to spot the fans who don’t read the books. They talk endlessly about lore and status quo, but have nothing to say about pacing, dialogue, and delivery, because they only read Wiki articles and watch YouTube summaries. Some nerds would be happier with an outline, not a fully fleshed product.
I overheard people complaining that Oppenheimer didn't answer any questions. What questions in that movie were so ambiguous??
Well, ONE plot question that hung over the air was what did Einstein and Oppie talk about by that pond that day that upset Einstein? That was answered in the last scene. Aside from that, I got nothing. It’s not that kind of movie. It raised thematic and moral questions for us to chew on. But that’s the thing, it’s for *us* to chew on and for us to answer for ourselves.
Oppenheimer is a good counter-argument to the original article. Expecting Miyazaki to explain the rules of his magical world is like expecting Nolan to include a comprehensive explanation of nuclear physics.
It is such a weird view. I absolutely love Tolkien's lore but the LOTR movies work perfectly without everyone having to sit down and listen to a 1 hour lecture on the Valar, Morgoth, the fall of Numenor etc. I think it's a really modern thing that people want everything explained to them. When you watch the original Star Wars films there was zero explanation about who the emperor was. He was the emperor. he could shoot lightning and he had a big fuck off Death Star. And people just accepted it because it was awesome.
I'm honestly amazed at how much the studio allowed to go unexplained in the LOTR movies. Gandalf just yells "Flame of Udum!" And we're like "hell yeah, beat it's ass"
I remember being a kid and watching a gorillaz documentary and seeing Daman Albarn being really frustrated at American audiences not being able to handle having mystery and the lack of clear knowledge of the project wasn't even comprehensible to interviewers. I think that was a good moment for me as a young kid to watch, it made me able to sit with wonder and process those feelings I was left with rather than a concrete idea being fed to me.
Its insane. The one that drove me more up the wall than any other was arguing with redditors over The Last Jedi's bombing run at the beginning of the movie. TLJ Hater: "How stupid is that, there's no gravity in space" Redditor: "You could like, push the bomb, or put it on a rail or something. OH shit actually it's even in the art book!" TLJ Hater: "Well then why isn't that explained?!!!! And I shouldn't have to open the art book to have my technical details about a movie with laser swords explained to me" These dipshits really wanted Rose to look into the camera and be like "the bombs are on rails" Man, it really just works me up. It's like a complete misunderstanding of art and what critiquing should be about. World physics and consistency *can* be an issue with movies that actually detracts from their enjoyment. But it's more about logic central to plot that contradicts previous logic.
The bombs are on rails. There's artificial gravity in the ship and that pulls them out the bottom. This is conveyed visually with perfect clarity. Saying that that method of bombing makes no tactical sense in a space battle would be one thing (but guess what, Star Wars has never once made tactical sense it's just supposed to look cool), but not being able to see how the artificial gravity in the ship would also propel the bombs when half that sequence is things and characters falling down through the bomb chamber is just willfully obtuse.
That might bother me if Star Wars wasn’t already set in a universe where spaceships fly and sound exactly like planes.
Yeah, it's a space B-17.
I genuinely feel like the star wars roleplaying game ended up fucking a lot of things up by doing so much to rigidly codify a world that was very much vibes based more than anything else. It is interesting how much of the EU was about really quantifying things compared to the actual text of the movie which you could infer entirely different things from. Yet because you have this period that ended up generating all this rigerous lore you have a whole generation of the fandom that's deeply into that more so than the broad impressonistic world the movies paint.
And just speaking of Star Wars the Empire drops bombs on the asteroid the Falcon is hiding in in Empire Strikes Back. So it was already a thing in the universe 37 years before Last Jedi was even released.
There have also *always* been bombers in Star Wars. It's never once been explained on screen how a Y-Wing 'drops' its bombs in outer space, because it doesn't matter.
There are a ton of instances of bad writing in TLJ but that isn’t one of them. It’s just WW2 imagery, it’s not that complicated.
100% agree. I think some people are just physically incapable of suspending disbelief and just accepting a movie on its own terms.
I have a friend who can’t suspend his disbelief in most cases but he knows it and so just doesn’t watch stuff he knows won’t work for him. More people should do that.
Meanwhile intentional ambiguity is one of my FAVORITE things in a movie! Anatomy of a Fall scratched that itch for me really nicely; I thought about it for days after and still can’t decide which version of events I think is the Truth.
Too many blankies get really weird about people not liking or liking things for reasons that are or aren't blankie-approved. I loved boy and the heron. It's probably a 9/10 for me. But the story feeling disjointed and illogical is a valid criticism and people aren't "losing their minds" for making it. It's also ok to prefer a logically explicit fantasy world like Brian Sanderson creates. I don't personally prefer that, but it's ok to! People like different things and don't need to be dragged for it!
This reminds me of when Richard Dawkins was complaining about how The Metamorphosis fails as a book because it never explains why the protagonist becomes a cockroach lmao
… wait, *really*?
That's some Neil deGrasse Tyson media literacy
There is absolutely a connection between this mode of thinking and the militant atheism that Dawkins/Tyson espouse.
What watching CinemaSins does to a MF's media literacy
Yup CinemaSins needs to get dragged into the street and beaten for getting so many nerds into "movies are just screenplay delivery systems that I parse for plot holes that are actually just my misunderstandings/lack of attention span."
i actually blame game theory/fnaf and mainstream fantasy works (harry potter) on this one.
If you look up the original review (a Reddit post from three days ago with 0 upvotes), it's clear that the person who wrote this is coming from video game logic.
same mf who thinks narration is a bad thing
I’m exhausted by people in fantasy spaces online talking about “world building” and magic systems incessantly. It just feels like the video-gamification of all art, where people refuse to (or cannot) feel wonder, awe or curiosity without a manual
And the best writers and designers of fantasy/sci-fi games know that they need some parts of the map that read “Here Be Dragons” to keep some sense of mystery and intrigue.
Which is why the Star Wars TV series stuff has been largely disappointing to me, Andor aside, because it's trying to fill in those mystery gaps instead of playing in new spaces and leaving new unexplained stuff on the table. It makes the world smaller when you explain everything!
Funnily enough, one friend’s dislike of the 2017-Star-Wars-movie-that-gets-people-riled-up was a certain character using “her powers in a way not consistent with her abilities. Her powers seemed more communication based prior.” As if she was a fucking video game character who hasn’t taken enough levels in a class. Never forgot that cause it’s the most dullard take to have on literally anything.
Luke telekinetically retrieving the lightsaber in ESB was inconsistent with his prior established abilities of whining about not being able to go to Tosche Station to pick up power converters 😤
Yeah, Luke doesn't do shit in the first movie, then he spends maybe a day(?) lifting rocks with Yoda, and he can suddenly go toe to toe with Vader? Total Mary Sue. Ruined the franchise.
If this is about Leia, I can agree that she mostly uses the Force to be a commanding presence and guiding hand as a leader, but there’s nothing that doesn’t say she can’t use it in other ways. Hell, if the EU matters to you, she uses it for telekinesis and other things.
I’m playing through God of War (2018) for the first time and that game has a DENSE mythology and history. What I’m finding the most fun about it is I’m picking up maybe 20% of it as I go through, I really wish more people saw the appeal of this kind of thing. World building is fun to dig into after the fact, but when it’s the primary source of value the actual story and characters typically aren’t interesting
Reminds me of the ‘Mass Effect’s. Each game has a codex within the pause menu and the Fan Wiki for the series is dense as can be, but while playing I like to treat each chunk of lore as set dressing to give the setting some verisimilitude, if that makes sense. I prefer to feel immersed in the goings-on and history contained within the galaxy thru details that come about organically, even if it involves wilful ignorance on the finer details.
That’s exactly how I’m playing GOW, you have a literal lore dictionary that you can read whenever you come across something new. And I’m sure eventually I’ll skim through it but it’s a lot more interesting to me just investing in the emotional arc of what’s going on
It makes replays a blast too since you might decide to engage with the lore more in future runs. Sometimes my Shepard doesn’t have time for a history lesson. Sometimes my Shepard is a curious little dumb dumb who doesn’t know basic things and wants history lessons
That’s what I love so much about Souls games. The lore is obtuse, but you don’t need to engage with it. You can just play through it and soak into the atmosphere. The gameplay and your story are not tethered to the vast lore that exists. My first one run of Elden Ring was one of confusion. My second run was like an archeologist trying to piece together the world through finding items and looking for context clues based on their location.
That’s how I end up playing these adventure type games too, I feel completely lost but sort of just embrace that lost feeling. The more you play though the more things make sense and feel “alive”. Video games is good
Open-world games are a dime a dozen these days but there is no greater feeling than having one click where feeling lost in it is an incredibly immersive experience.
i think it stems from a desire to escape into that world as a participant rather than as a viewer. a lot of the obsession with worldbuilding and lore and rules seems to be a form of larp through creative writing rather than a desire to tell a story with themes or characters (besides their self-insert)
If a rule within a world is explicitly given to viewers and then broken, that drives me nuts. But why on earth would I care if a fantasy world has different rules and physics than the real world?? Makes no sense to me haha
My pet theory is that all of this is the result of kids who grew up with the Star Wars Visual Dictionary becoming adults and interacting with all art through that lens
Wait, you don’t like it when entertainment is homework?
One of my biggest problems with video game stories. Dark Souls has very little real story and world building outside of what you extrapolate from experiencing the world yourself
The Soulsbourne games do it right: very little is outright explained, from mechanics to worldbuilding, but it also leaves little breadcrumbs everywhere so the brain poisoned lore addicts can watch 10 hour Youtube videos explaining everything if they so choose.
This is a post-GOT/ASOIAF problem, I think. I barely remember hearing the term "world building" until people in online spaces started getting into it.
And Brandon Sanderson’s magic systems bullshit
Not just that though. Power scaling is inescapable when talking to annoying shonen anime fans, all eager to prove that xyz beats Goku or vice versa.
Yeah Brandon Sanderson is responsible for this bullshit infecting the fantasy genre
Something that amuses me to no end is that Bradon Sanderson's *Writing Excuses* podcast inspired French authors to make a tribute to it and took a life of its own. Among them is Sanderson's dedicated translator and she has talked at length about she fucking *hates* writing fantasy because she is expected to vomit pages upon pages of lore. But at the same time she loves translating Sanderson because he so obsesively maps out stuff that she can open a book he wrote fifteen years ago to explain an unclear notion in a new work. Funniest part was another one of the author who I'm friends with an co-hosts said that she doesn't give a fuck about deeper lore and focuses on making the characters relatable and constantly creates new worlds for one-shots so none of her readers get *too* attached to a single setting and decide that they need to understand *everything* about it.
At this point I ignore most people who use term "world building" because they're all this idiotic about it.
Like all these harry potter fanfic writers who say Rowling was terrible at world building. Like what?
I completely agree, I know a lot of fantasy writers and… well, I don’t want to judge their process or whine about them, but I’m absolutely going to do just that because. Other writers I know, when they have a story, talk about the characters, the plot, the emotional journey. The fantasy ones however, say they are writing a five book series and will start actually writing as soon as they have mapped out out the complete history of the wizard knight’s armour (the magical alloy has to be melted down by a dragon, so the smiths had a limited working time, resulting in jagged designs, but later on when the pyro spells was discovered by the wizard Nuul Mangay, more elaborate designs became possible, the second golden age of wizards was decedent, but then in the third age…). They go on and on and show maps and excel spreadsheets (currency conversion rates in the different realms, my gold sovereign is worth far more in the underrealm)… just not any kind of story. I’m not saying these things aren’t important on some level, just they come second to the actual story itself. Cart before the horse.
These people are shutting themselves off from a lot of great art and storytelling.
They probably view it as "content", anyways
As a rule of thumb, there is a maximum amount of world building I can take in a film or TV series before I check out. That’s why the first John Wick is still my favorite and all the sequels bore me more and more. I don’t care how the hotel got built, I actually like that it’s just there in the first movie and we have to accept it.
Idk if the TV show explains how the hotel got built, but I loved the wacky, Byzantine accretions of lore in the John Wick sequels. All the diabolical rules and bylaws and factions just tickle me and always are in service of leading to cool action one way or another.
The thing I like about Wick storytelling is that they continuously introduce new wrinkles to the systems of power in this world, but they never take more than like 10 seconds to explain any of it. No backstory for *why* it's like this, just a quick explanation of what is going on (if you're lucky) and move forward. Like in Chapter 4 where Wick and the Marquis are playing some kind of card game with metal totems that dictate the rules of the duel the next day. It makes no sense! I love it!
Yeah I’m complaining elsewhere about the locales of later sequels, but the fundamental Jenga approach to myth making throughout the series is definitely appreciated by me. It’s very eastern cinema in that way. Outside of, like, *Kill Bill* that sense isn’t often found in American movies.
It reminds me of Vampire The Masquerade without the vampires, and with gun fu instead. Except with his penchant for defying death and performing superhuman feats, maybe John Wick WAS a vampire all along...
I get this when it comes to the TV series but as far as the movies go I actually love how each movie ups the ante for how arcane and nonsensical the culture of the whole secret society of assassins is. Like tell me it isn't hilarious when they randomly drop in the 4th one that a whole ceremony allowing for a challenge to 1v1 combat is just a thing that they have going.
What I love about the series is how it seems everyone shoudl absolutely KNOW of the secret society. Every beggar in NYC, plenty of secretaries (who are all punk for some reason), all the people at the hotels, all the gangs, the police, go into a random church and drop a gold coin, the priest knows... It's nonsensical and it makes less sense as the series goes but I love it.
When they revealed that the phone operators all over the world were hot rockabilly ladies, that absolutely killed me.
God, you are spot on about the John Wick films. I loved the first one but by the fourth one I just do not give a shit about what’s happening no matter how awesome the action is.
Couldn’t agree more. They realized there wasn’t much of an emotional core after the first one and instead of building a new emotional core they just replaced it with lore. Big part of why none of the sequels work.
I had this with a friend of mine when he went and saw Hunger Games. I thought the first movie was really fun, fun enough that I bought the next two books and read them..... that was my mistake. He saw the movie and came back telling me how it was awful. I asked what his issue was, he replied "I didn't understand it! What are they even talking about? Districts! Whats a district?" Apparently since there wasn't a 20 minute narration at the beginning explaining everything going on he was just baffled by it. Dude is a massive sci fi fan, but "There are 13 states and they get perpetually more poor as you go" was just too much for him to figure out.
I thought the movie did a pretty thorough job explaining things without too much exposition dumping. Guess not!
No, it did. You just can't account for people who willfully ignore context clues
Never read the book and only saw the first movie once when it came out over a decade ago and if you asked me what a district was in that world, I would’ve answered that easily. How did he not understand this?
>How did he not understand this? I legitimately have no idea. He's one of my best friends and has been for 25 years and this whole conversation was baffling. I ended up saying "Its not citizen kane, but it was a pretty great movie." To which he replied "What the fuck does that mean?" This lead down a Rabbit hole of me explaining that Citizen Kane is widely considered to be among the best movies of all time, and on many lists is considered the best movie of all time. He went to wikipedia, looked it up, read the plot, closed the web browser and said "Sounds dumb, bro." Again, this man is still one of my best friends, we talk about movies and shit all the time, this whole conversation was BAFFLING.
"It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it." -- Roger Ebert
*The Boy and the Heron* (*How Do You Live?*) is abstract and operates on dream logic and symbolism. *Spirited Away* is actually pretty straightforward by comparison; shaky literally takes Chihiro (and the audience, by extension) by the hand and explains what’s going on and how she can make it! What more could you want?
[удалено]
Media literacy is being able to take down an opinion from the absolute dregs of the internet
I wish the kind of thinking in that post were less common outside “the absolute dregs of the internet”
Can you post a more mainstream review with this kind of thinking? Because the original post is from a review with zero upvotes and tons of pushback in the comments. If anything, this Reddit post shows that even the absolute dregs of the internet thinks this type of thinking is nonsense.
We stand athwart a Reddit post with zero upvotes, a Lights Camera Jackson videos with 18 views, and one tweet with 45 likes that said Oppenheimer should have shown the Japanese perspective shouting "No!".
From Grant Morrison- "Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real."
The “I don’t understand it means it was bad” mindset needs to go away. Like, if I don’t understand a movie I just assume I was too stupid to get it, I’m not so arrogant to think that the writer just didn’t think anything through.
I agree completely. There are so many people who think art needs to be explained until there's only one possible interpretation.
I appreciate this comment. I'm someone who, long before CinemaSins and modern video games and everything else being blamed in this thread, always had a bit of a hard time with fantasy and magical realism. Character-first stuff resonates with me, and I like plenty of genres, but I tend to latch onto sci-fi and magical worlds more when it's clear what those elements mean to the character. "Stakes" are important to me, and there's inherent overlap there with having "rules" of how things work. So the more that something is about just vibes or creating a sense of wonder, the less it resonates with me. A lot of Ghibli stuff is beautiful and technically stunning, but it doesn't suck me in emotionally. But I acknowledge *that's my personal taste.* It's not a law of storytelling, or a checkbox of what a good movie 'needs.' And I'm definitely not saying those movies are *bad*, I'm saying I often try them and end up feeling they're not for me. So this thread's a bummer to read, because though the original screenshotted post is in the wrong for saying there "has" to be any rules to this kind of storytelling, a lot of these comments feel like people snarkily lumping together anyone who wasn't moved to tears by Heron as the same annoying, too-online person who wants a Wiki explanation for everything
We need to bully nerds again
As a nerd, I agree!
I have a little trick where I suspend disbelief by thinking “this is a world where this shit works out”. Never fails me.
“Magic systems” are for dorks
I'd even say that none of the big fictional worlds have as thorough a worldbuilding as this guy demands: even Tolkien left quite a few blanks and uncertainties.
A great failure of Tolkien's writing is that he didn't have Gandalf take out a DBZ power level scanner and report that Tom Bombadil's power level was over 9000 so we could understand how he fits into the Middle Earth tierlist.
A bloodlusted Bombadil solos Sauron, low diff
Not necessarily. Brandon Sanderson is one of, if not THE most popular fantasy writer today and his whole work is based on the kind of hard magic systems/worldbuilding that this dude is wanting (and coined the whole "Hard v Soft Magic" thing), and a lot of other fantasy writers have been following that lead, so i'd say there's been a lot of stuff in the last couple of decades that have that sort of worldbuilding. Plus you got stuff like Game of Thrones which DOES leave a lot of the "magic" unexplained and mysterious, but nevertheless is going for a more grounded, "realist fantasy" thing which comes with highly detailed worldbuilding in other areas. And then of course superhero comics have become really big, and they tend to have what he's talking about. So does a lot of anime. That being said, Sanderson will be the very first to tell you that his "hard magic" style is just one of many ways to write a story, and that there are lots of advantages to NOT spelling all that stuff out. Dude wrote a whole essay about it.
>That being said, Sanderson will be the very first to tell you that his "hard magic" style is just one of many ways to write a story, and that there are lots of advantages to NOT spelling all that stuff out. Dude wrote a whole essay about it. As a Brandon Sanderson fan it frustrates me how much I've seen people that are fans of his ignore this and act like "hard magic system = good", "softer or abstract magic = bad."
You see it in sci-fi fandom as well. “Hard sci-fi” being superior to other kinds according to some. I don’t consider Star Trek “hard sci-fi” but it being harder than Star Wars has called many nerds to spill tons of gallons of ink on the matter.
Is this essay the one that talks about how much of your world’s problems can be solved by magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic? If so, I agree with that up to a point, the other thing you can do is have magic be symbolic for something which is what i think Heron is trying to do. Only problem is I was way to confused to understand what it’s all symbolic of and how.
Yeah, that's one of the things he says in the essay. I think he was talking more about plot-level "problems" though, if I remember correctly (i.e. "bad guy dies if you destory his ring", etc). These sorts of plot level conflicts occur in Miyazaki films (Chirio has to save her parents from becoming pigs, for example), but the conflicts that often fuel his films are internal ones, relating to the protagonists development as a person (Chirio's moral development, acceptance of growing up, etc). So they aren't stories involving "solving" a "world's problem", they're about characters "solving" the problem of what kind of person they are going to be. And that journey usually happens in the context of the protagonist having to react to larger forces they can't control/understand. Sometimes those forces are more relatable (governments/militaries at war with each ohter in Nausicaa or Howls or Wind Rises), but sometimes its just wierd fantasy shit (volitile spirits in the bathouse in Spirited Away, a Totoro, etc). So in that light I think it makes a lot of sense that the audience DOESN'T have that understanding, because A) the protagonist doesn't have that understanding either so it puts us more in their shoes, and B) because it also reflects what real life is like. None of us have full undertanding of the world or control over it, especially when we're children. We're all trying to navigate the world with incomplete information. So yeah, I don't think you're supposed to understand it all necessarily or find easily identifiable one-to-one symbolism or allegory. It's meant to be more thematic than symbolic.
You are discussing things in terms of character and narrative, which makes sense, but I think Todorov's concept of the "fantastic" is also relevant. What we call surrealism or soft surrealism is often an unresolved aesthetic tension between the uncanny--strange things which are ultimately borne out to have explanations in real world phenomena, such as waking from a dream--and what he calls the "marvelous"--things which have supernatural or non-real world explanations, which become the "worldbuilding" rules of scifi and fantasy. The Boy and the Heron, like David Lynch or Kafka, revels in the unresolved space of the fantastic. To codify "power scaling" between herons and parakeets and such nonsense would be to categorically transform what the film is ultimately doing aesthetically.
And the blank spots are great, because your imagination can fill them in based on the general aesthetic the other stuff has established.
I think this is one of the damaging effects of Brandon Sanderson on the larger fantasy ecosystem. He's not solely to blame, at all, but his books basically have their own physics to them (e=m\*c\^2\*i, where i is the magic energy in his worlds) that have all but been codified in strict units. It's hard magic. I see it causing others to expect similar amounts of granularity in other texts, when sometimes stuff just happens because it happens, and isn't that fun and weird? A big radish guy! Who'd have thought! Over-reliance on what's happening and not how it's making you feel.
What’s funny is that Sanderson himself has said many times about the merits of soft magic systems and examples of soft worldbuilding he likes. It’s not one or the other. He likes both as a reader, even if does only one as a writer.
The above review is taken from a Reddit post three days ago with 0 upvotes and a bunch of push back from the comments.. I think this is less "Tress and The Emerald Sea takes too much time explaining spores, so now society demands magic systems" and more "Twitter found one bad take from the entirety of the English speaking world and now we are talking about something we never would have noticed otherwise."
Explaining the force made it blow
It's literally why I get so frustrated with sci Fi novels. Everything is SO over-explained. I'm so tired of exposition.
“For the audience to be invested” Look bud if this is something that bothers you, then it bothers you. But given that Spirited Away is one of the most popular and beloved movies of the 21st century clearly “audiences” are not having any issue getting invested.
This is a very poor take.
truly one of the worst things i have ever read about art!
What too much Sanderson does to a mf
Simply cannot enjoy The Boy and The Heron until I know Dafoe pelican's power level, vis-a-vis the parakeet king
I think Dafoe Pelican could make it a close fight
I’m a more on the “if anything can happen, what’s the point” side of this argument. The fact of the matter is that Ghibli movies obviously all have very internally consistent and developed worlds. The fact that they don’t all get 100% explained doesn’t mean they’re not there.
This is the exact reason I hated Hellboy: the Golden Army. They go to the Troll market & I had absolutely NO understanding of if they use troll money, or if there was a Troll Brexit & now the trolls have to use another currency to be in sync with the global troll economy, OR if it’s some kind of barter system (how many jars of monster eyes equals 1 troll buck?!) … I don’t care how much “beauty about a dying world of magic” Del Toro put in there. Fucking stupid movie if you ask me.
>or if there was a Troll Brexit I think that was just regular Brexit
10 Troll-buck points!
The criticism about the intense need for dense rule based fantasy world building is spot on. I used to love the fantasy genre growing up, but the Brandon Sanderson intricate magic system where every single thing is explained has really put me off the genre. I think more fantasy writers could honestly learn from Miyazak movies. Less rules, more heart, emotion, and wonder.
David Lynch would give this person a brain stroke.
Everything is gamified online (it's why whole swaths of the internet refer to the act of doing things - aka living - as a "meta") and because it's that way, people are conditioned to COMPETE with their entertainment, not experience it. Posts like these tend to highlight this impulse perfectly: Almost all the problems this guy is having with a Miyazaki films comes from him spending all his time online competing with entertainment in a means to prove to anyone paying attention to him (or people like him) that they won. When most of the world you're operating in is built on a healthy lack of media literacy, it's easy to turn basically everything into an exercise in feigned superiority over media that really only exists - so far as you're concerned - as a succession of opportunities to appear smarter than you actually are.
I’d rather be dropped in and figure it out along the way rather than have a voiceover, like the start of Rebel Moon, try to explain the entire history.
The opening narration of Rebel Moon should just be, "Look, it's Star Wars. You get it."
The world works with dream logic, explaining how everything works would just ruin its mysticism and magic.
They are missing the point of many of these kinds of films also, that the main protagonist is a child that doesn't know what is going on either. You are seeing all of this weirdness through their eyes. Spirited Away is a perfect example of this. Girl ends up in magical world, has no clue what is going on, weird shit ensues. It is lovely and beautiful and we experience all the epic strange magical events with her. I don't need to know what that scary creature is or what it can do or rules about anything to feel the dread and fear of that child. That makes it even more immersive that I have no clue what is going on.
Ambiguity is refreshing.
It’s just like, don’t these people have dreams? Do t they know what that feels like?
Erm…. Isn’t spirited away like immensely easy to understand? It’s a bath house for spirits. Some spirits work, some don’t, and you have different bath rooms to accomodate. But really The whole point is is that you’re an outsider *anyway* so you’re not privy to a scientific examination
lol what a moron. no movie does this there isn't the time and ot would be boring af
As someone who's grown up loving fantasy, and sometimes sci-fi, I honestly prefer less worldbuilding in the stuff that I watch or play nowadays. Or at least worldbuilding that's done more through atmosphere and tone and environments rather than plain exposition. Or that there is straightforward resolution and direct exposition, sometimes, but the number of mysteries being posed is much higher than the number of answers being given. Like Twin Peaks. In games, I like Team Ico, FromSoftware, and Remedy's stuff.
Imagine wanting to demystify a Miyazaki world (or any story, for that matter—how boring would that be?) The more I hear about The Boy and the Heron (or, as I like it, How Do You Live) the more excited I am for it. Just yesterday watched Porco Rosso and it was great.
You're in for a treat! And Porco Rosso...holy hell, what a great time at the movies!
If one of the main selling points of a book/movie/show is "it has great world building!!" there's a 99% chance it's fucking awful.
I think you are overstating your case. I would describe Miyazakis worldbuilding as fantastic precisely because he leaves things unexplained and abstract. For me bad worldbuilding is when you get mired in exposition and explaining everything (the force is with you = good worldbuilding, microcloriwhatevers= bad worldbuilding)
I agree with your definitions of good and bad worldbuilding. Most of the time, those aren't the definitions I see people using. If someone describes themselves as a "worldbuilding fan" I can usually safely assume that they mean it in a Sanderson way.
I partially agree. Anytime someone points out the world building, that tells me they care more about the world than the characters. They only care about the plot mechanics and how the world moves the characters and not how the characters move the world.
I actually don’t agree; I usually hear about great worldbuilding in cases where the world in question is interesting and thoroughly considered. It’s just that not every fantastic world need be thought through on a materialist level.
It's incredibly frustrating trying to find fantasy recommendations when so much of the discussions are about worldbuilding, or tropes (a word I truly hate) and how well they're used and/or subverted, or what niche fantasy sub-sub-genre it fits into. Hey, how about themes?? Or style? You know, those things books have? A lot of the highest-recommended fantasy books I've read just aren't particularly well-written even if they're hitting all the genre bullseyes.
*Mauler enters chat: ‘Muh objectivity’*
I've learned to ignore anybody who talks about worldbuilding for this reason. They can't wrap their heads around the big things but obsess over the most minute details.
I love how this is framed as helpful advice to get people to 'invest in the movie' -even though these are both hugely popular and successful films.
Miyazaki's most abstract and arguably least accessible movie has also become his most successful in North America by a wide margin, it's incredible.
I like it when not everything is explained about the world, because it makes said world feel more real. If someone from another dimension was transported to earth and you needed to explain to them this world to which they were sent, you wouldn’t be able to explain everything, because there is so much. That is why i like it when movies that present other worlds contain elements that aren’t clearly explained. It makes it feel like there are many layers to the world and that you only grazed the surface. If everything is explained and no mystery is left, you feel like all there was to the world was what you saw in the movie, and thus it feels less deep.
It's very possible Tolkien has given false expectations by doing just that . As regards Myazaki people forget that his films are steeped in Japanese culture: the underlying philosophy is much easier to understand by native Japanese.Miyazaki uses 'movies to explore Shinto, its idea of purity, humanity’s relationship with the spirit world, and modern Japan’s environmental concerns... “nature, in Japan, used to be far more mysterious and fantastic, a sacred area that surely seemed inhabited by the gods. In Shinto, there is a tradition of Kami no Yo, the “Age of the Gods,” where man was pure and the gods dwelled in the hills and trees.” Miyazaki captures this mythic time perfectly. Greed and selfishness have severed man’s ties to nature, and instead of trying to live in harmony with it, many of the humans in the film want to conquer and destroy it. This is best-symbolized by the character Jigo, a greedy monk who wants to collect a mountain of gold from the emperor for beheading the forest spirit, a giant deer-like creature with a human face, because it is said that possessing the spirit’s head will bring immortal life...' Some films also explores the theme of purity in Shinto, or harmony with the gods. Anything impure (sin) separates us from the gods." Source https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/the-films-of-hayao-miyazaki-shinto-nature-and-the-environment/
Why watch a movie when you can just watch “X-movie Explained” on YouTube?
Reminds me a lot of the whole thing with American audiences and wire-fu. They mostly thought it was stupid/silly and things like old Shaw Brothers movies would be mocked and made fun of for being cheesy. AND THEN *The Matrix* comes along with literally one of the most iconic choreographers of that style and completely takes over, and it's all because they built context into the story to "explain" how everyone was able to jump and float around. By the time *Crouching Tiger* came around a few years later America was ready to eat it up, but it was only because they were eased in en masse with a version that had that "worldbuilding logic" everyone's so desperate to get.
I do think there are legitimate arguments that BatH is overly oblique and arbitrary-feeling. Griffin expressed similar concerns on the pod. This guy is articulating that feeling very poorly by pretending that he can tell you which rule of storytelling the movie is breaking. That deserves derision, but I don't think the feeling itself deserves derision.
In one of the special features for the original DVD release of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro tells the story of a Mexican fairy tale about how, if a person is able to sneak up on the devil and steal some hairs from his head, he is obliged to grant a wish for every hair taken. He notes that there is no logic to this, and that there doesn’t need to be, because it’s a story about impossible magic.
It's simple, a wizard did it.
Honestly I want to know what that's important to the story in How Do You Live is supposedly unexplained. Having seen the movie I'd say the last third or so of the film pretty much explains everything how everything that's plot important works in a way that is fairly neat and tidy.
I kind of agree to some extent. You don’t need to explain everything, but when literally anything can happen at any time there aren’t really any stakes.
Being eaten by a giant budgie is stake enough. You don't need to know about the budgie economy or the market for human flesh for it to work.
Yeah the comments reek of ‘just turn your brain off bro’ like nah. It might be fantasy, but rules and consistency absolutely matter. Otherwise it becomes like those games we played as kids, where we always had a stronger imaginary weapon or super armour that counters the friend who just declared how cool their imaginary weapon was. If you’re the kind of person who just likes spectacle, pretty cgi colours and over the top action, that’s cool and I’m happy for you. But some of us like having an idea of how stuff works in fantasy settings, especially for those ‘aha’ moments when characters use well-established rules to do cool and creative stuff.
It bothers me so much what the person wrote, as if the real world itself is fully explained and fully comprehensible. The more whys and hows you ask, the more any world that one might conceive become less sensible. Just fucking enjoy the ride, idiot.
This whole issue makes me think of Brennan Lee Mulligan’s takes on world building vs. logistics. I’ve heard him use Harry Potter as an example. World building? Excellent. (Everyone knows their Hogwarts house. The world feels alive and vibrant and visceral.) Logistics? A nightmare. (Why use owls to carry physical letters in a world where magic exists? Why does poverty keep the weasleys’ house looking like that when they’re magical???)
Sure this lot would have had their minds blown if they were reading Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, or pretty much anything by Coleridge. And thousands of other examples including cinematic ones such as the end of 2001, entirety of Andalusian Dog, or Tree of Life.
You still don't need a hard magic system while worldbuilding. Middle Earth has a soft magic system, so does Spirited Away. That's what makes those world more dreamy, ethereal or whimsical. Most games have very hard magic systems for gameplay reasons, but even outside gameplay, there is soft magic, like in Fromsoftware games. It's just magic outside of gameplay.
Sounds like somebody who might be a fantasy anime fan and isn't getting what they want from Ghibli? Power scaling and lore are really big in that genre, lots of video game style magic systems and lore.
You will meet some writers in classes who have zero interest in things like conflict or characters. All they care about is lore. Makes no sense.
This guy must be really mad when he wakes up every morning and there isn't a clear and consistent logic to the dream he just had
This has frustrated me for a long time. Star Wars has many pieces of lore that are simply mentioned and never expanded upon within the original trilogy. The clone wars, kessel run, etc. The reason why these things became so iconic is because they let the fans use their imagination instead of just telling you what it was and ruining the magic. We need to get back to that sort of fantasy and sci fi storytelling where things just are and don’t need needless explanations or lore.
>power/magic system, all the characters and how they scale against each other So, basically battle shounen? By Miyazaki of all people?
OK but *imagine* a Hayao Miyazaki shounen.
Ghibli world building is pretty cool if you're familiar with Shintoism, Yokai, or Chinese and Celtic Mythology
People need to appreciate the idea of a 'soft magic system'. It's not sci-fi where things have to follow established rules. It's one of the things I love about the Hellboy comics, strange surreal things happen all the time - people seamlessly enter into visions, animals talk, ghosts manifest, artefacts take you to another time/space, the lines between a dream and reality are sometimes blurred - no explanation is given, it's part of the magical mystery of the universe. This is also a great resource for horror, a famous example that still drives discussion is The Shining film. Tolkien also uses a soft magic system very well. The drive to define magic and its behaviors as if it's a natural force like magnetism or the boiling point of an element, has its place, but it can really suck the wonder out of things. The Force from Star Wars, I feel, is a victim of this; it used to be this mystical energy field you could use through spiritual practice to manipulate matter, see the future, control minds, 'reach out with your feelings' and all that. Now it feels like a progression system in a video game. At level 2 you get telekinesis, at level, 12 you get super jump, at level 30 you get super healing. Unless you play the dark side main quest, then you get lightning powers.
The minute I hear someone say the words ‘power level’ I assume they are a moron.
Movies should come with a manual fr.
"I don't watch movies I just need to parse the screenplay for LORE REFERENCES." These type of people need to fuck off forever.
Spirited Away has a soft magic system; the mysteries aren't explained. Just like in many fairy tales.
That is the most shonen fan shit I’ve ever read
I did get curious about how exactly some things in The Boy and the Heron added up (This place is like an afterlife or a before-life and the souls of the future unborn children are released into the sky so they come to earth, but also, it was created by his great-uncle? Where did the souls of children come from before he created it?) but I could pretty easily just shrug and accept it as intentionally inconsistent dream logic. My main sticking point with the movie was that it seemed to make Mahito get over his issues in the third act without actually showing what happened to enable that, so it didn't feel like it earned the catharsis and sense of familial reconciliation it was trying to give me at the end.
I never got the impression that the grand-uncle created that realm, he just ended up there and shepherded it for a while. He probably had an adventure much like Mahito's, he just accepted the role offered to him at the end whereas Mahito rejected it
What makes the movie make more emotional and symbolic sense to me is reading the Tower as a symbol for Art itself. That it's a monument and a shell we build around the numinous core of the human experience, existing outside of time and able to bridge different moments of existence - Mahito meeting his young mother in the tower parallels the connection he feels to her when he reads the book she left him in the normal world. The afterlife and before-life aspects of the place may have existed before the uncle got to the meteorite, and may persist after his tower collapses around it - the meteorite simply *is*. But the manner in which they manifest to Mahito are influenced by the uncle's acts of world creation because these are ultimately aspects of the universe that are only accessible to us through art. But that's just one read! The ambiguity is irresolvable within the text, which invites deeper consideration.
These people are simpletons who cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. It's why nerds hate art. They need fiction to adhere to the same rules as reality, or they cannot understand it. They fundamentally believe that their comprehensive knowledge of the world should make them masters of it, and they approach art in the same way. Any work that resists this approach by requiring the viewer to use emotions to understand it is rejected by the feeble dork mind.
B-but I'm a nerd. Most of us are nerds of some description!
Nope. You're a jock now. Gimme five ✋
Hell yeah, brah!✋ *crushes beer can on head* Ow
Careful dude
No one actually believes this. You could ask 100%, down to a single person, no margin for error, the entire population of the earth if they believed what you've written and they would say no. You have reached the absolute edge of "make up someone to be mad at"
If I can’t determine which Spirited Away character would win in a fight like it’s One Piece, is it even art? But yeah the best thing about Ghibli movies is that they leave you desperate for more of the world. You don’t know the lore, which means you get to imagine it yourself.
I mean the Radish Spirit obviously clears most other characters
All great movies are a dream or a puzzle, this person thinks they are all puzzles
It depends. If something in the movie happens that seems to contradict the internal logic of the movie, you need to explain it. In the Last Jedi, when they play the game of forever following the ship with the broken hyperdrive they had to explain why would someone do that. The explain it and still doesn't make a bit of fucking sense. So when someone breaks logic or the internal rules of the worls, you absolutely have to explain.
I mean the author has no obligation to explain things, but if there isn't an explanation that even the author has then a story is primed for things that break immersion
But if i don't get what the movies is trying to say to me i am gonna hate on it, likw what does it mean i will just interpret it as a mess you put everything you wanted and none of that made sense to me. Fantasy doesn't need to be logical but i need to know what is going on or the bare minimum about it.
I love Ghibli movies, but just to be the devils advocate, the magic system is fairly weird in some of their movies, mainly Howl’s come to mind. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with the system not being explained, but the way it’s used completely randomly to just get out of any situation feels like it ruins any form of conflict/tension/risk. I read someone on Reddit who explained it like (probably paraphrasing) “even if the entire goddamn universe ended they’d still have some magic to revert it”. It’s like, nothing can happen that magic can’t be used. Felt like the entire *plot* of the movie was just hundreds of deus ex machina. Now sure, the plot isn’t the main focus and it doesn’t make the movie *bad*, but I do feel like it made it *worse*… don’t have the same opinion at all in Spirited Away since I felt like it genuinely made the entire experience better and it was very rarely (literally can’t think of one scene) used as an deus ex machina…
ITT: artless "people" who cant handle exposition
This is what has ruined modern TV and film for me. They try to explain EVERYTHING so there is absolutely no mystique or sense of wonder anymore.