Story Premises that Just Don't Make Much Sense if You Think About it.

[Feylynn]

If you'd rather watch your version of the movie than go for it.
Spoilers: It's a blank black screen and it needs a new title.

I assumed it was about domination. They contain our entire intelligence, our entire world, and they use it to keep their own nation free of conflict.
I'm pretty sure the other issue is you're designing the wrong direction. I don't imagine they sat down to write the Matrix and started with
"What if we had a machine emperor that wanted to rule a peaceful nation?"
I'm sure it was closer to
"What if our world wasn't real?"

Thus the premise is dependent on that core idea, if you wanna fix it, fix it in that direction. That means we need to be gathered, tricked, keep our mental capacity, etc.

 

[Klumpfot]

Actually they did a really cool Mythbusters episode on that. Plants apparently feel pain and they even get distressed by hostile thoughts. I like pulling out that episode when I run into vegetarians. I'm pretty sure they can't make noise without vocal chords though.

Au contraire! That particular myth was in fact busted in that episode. The first test was seemingly indicative of such a phenomenon, but they were unable to replicate it and they concluded that the equipment and/or their methodology was flawed.

OT: My biggest problem with almost any sci-fi setting in space is the question of how organisms that developed thousands of light-years apart are almost always essentially humanoid. Roughly 5-6 feet tall, bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical and capable of understanding and producing human speech. FEH!

 

[AgentNein]

I never understood the setting of the first "Doom"
So science can open portals to Hell? So, metaphorical dimension for some out of many earthly religions is an actual place, like Disneyland?
I believe science can open portals, and that Hell might exist at some level, but mixing those two always baffled me.
Greatly enjoy the game nevertheless

Superhero universes in general, both DC and Marvel, with their continuous retcons, "what-if", time-travels, going from scale of galaxies and witchery to fighting street gangs with techno stuff, and such. And yet, I don't think anybody in there can eliminate cancer.

Ehh, I don't think this one is a terrible stretch. I mean, you say yourself that Hell MAY exist and that we MAY one day develop some sort of portal or wormhole technology. Mixing the two doesn't break any rules if those two are givens in the Doom universe, right? I do think some folks find it aesthetically unpleasant when an SF story mixes in elements of fantasy or theology, I've always enjoyed it though. But I digress, I think this is more an issue of general taste than "this doesn't make sense".

 

[Vault101]

I never understood in Mass Effect 1 why you needed to go from point A to point A? You go half way across the Galaxy to move maybe 10 feet.

huh?...where is this the case?

[quote/]I know the reason why, but it's sill dumb. Also the Thorian in ME1 was a complete plot device that makes no sense what so ever. Plants can't move, and they don't have neurons. Also why dose it have green parts? It lives underground. This shit is never explained. And I am just suppose to accept it because it's an alien? Umm, no. There are a few other things that bother me but those two the most.[/quote]
plants do "move" but not in the same way animals do (put them in time lapse and they come alive so to speak) theres also the venus flytrap thing

again though there's no explanation aside from "being alien" though honestly I dont find my suspension of disbelife all that challenged

Why does everyone turn into a ************ in all post-apocalyptic games/movies/series?

They know how it used to work, why not try to get into that system again?

not always...theres the odd decent charachter in the Fallout games, and you soon find civilised towns like megaton or the NCR

also when people are under stress and difficult cirsumstances they tend to behave differently,you don;t have to be an ass when youve got drinking water...but if some other mofo has it...

though this is why I avoid zombie fiction...the people act worse than the zombies, its soo annoying

Because they don't WANT to confine/restrict their lives to boring routine again, and enjoy the anarchic chaos of the wasteland. Or at least that's my interpretation. They decide the world's busted, so they might as well have some sociopathic fun.

no offence but an interpretation like that can only come from a firstworld perspective

civilisation is not an "on/off" switch..we don;t just decide to have nice things again...nice things come from the work and co-operation of millions and many many years of cultural/technological advancement before that..wastland survival is not a holiday or fun camping trip...its violent, unpleasant and leads to an early death, SURE some would get some kind of enjoyment out of it (like the lord humongous's of the world) but honestly no one WANTS that, thats why people generally form groups eventually, so they can function

of coarse when your living in your own shit and digging a bullet out of your bloody leg while you see a man come at you with a hatchet because he wants your one and only bottle of water...well I'm sure thats much better than the "borning routine"

people romanticise thease things...like the old west...but if you play read dead or watch true grit the old west actually looks like a pretty shitty place to live

 

[Vault101]

OT: My biggest problem with almost any sci-fi setting in space is the question of how organisms that developed thousands of light-years apart are almost always essentially humanoid. Roughly 5-6 feet tall, bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical and capable of understanding and producing human speech. FEH!

theres actually a pretty simple answer for that

while we like the idea of aliens we also need them to have human traits so that in fiction we can understand/empathise with them...which is fine I guess...it adds flavour

making them too "alien"....well if the aliens in ME were beings of light or somthing they wouldnt be the most popualr charachters...we can't empathise with things we cant understand

OT: the harry potter universe...

there have been several cracked artiles on this, but essentially is is MESSED UP, I would not want to be a wizard

-bigotry and racism is still a huge problem...waaaaay worse than what we have in our muggle world
-cultural and technological stagnation which doesnt help
-no jobs....aside from several what to wizard actually do if they arent teachers,work for the ministry, shopkeepers?
-no real world skills, you can't function in the muggle world and the goblins own the banking systm

 

[Twilight_guy]

Here's something from Star Trek. They use matter-antimatter explosions. These explosions by definition destroy matter. Doesn't matter how strong or what it is, its basic atoms are gone. Yet, things survive these explosions. Go figure that one out.

As for story premises: Magic space samurai is a terrible concept for a movie yet Star Wars is a good movie.

 

[Scow2]

Here's something from Star Trek. They use matter-antimatter explosions. These explosions by definition destroy matter. Doesn't matter how strong or what it is, its basic atoms are gone. Yet, things survive these explosions. Go figure that one out.

Because there's very little Antimatter actually used... beyond the initial detonation point, it's just the thermal energy and physical shockwave travelling through normal matter. It's kind of like a nuclear bomb - The detonation of the missile has a powerful warhead/payload, but the actual fusion or fission reaction is contained to the specific materials in the bomb - it doesn't get initiated in everything in the blast radius.

 

[Dalisclock]

Spoiler

Instead they found the most pointlessly complicated solution imaginable. They created an entire virtual world for us to live in. Impressive, but completely unnecessary considering all the easy alternatives.

Honestly, it's almost hard to imagine of a more difficult and inefficient way of getting energy if you tried. Which is especially weird when you consider that machines are generally known for ruthless efficiency.

So, can you guys think of any movies/books/or video games whose stories don't hold up well to close scrutiny?

Edit: Obviously some stories aren't meant to be taken seriously in the first place, like psychonauts for instance, so I'd give them a free pass.

You're far from the first person to notice that but you're right. I came up with my own theory which ties in very nicely with "the 2nd Renaissance" part of the animatrix. Basically, the machines didn't want to wipe us out, but when the sky was darkened and the earth became incapable of supporting life, the only way for humanity to survive was to put humanity into the pods and keep breeding us until the earth was able to support life again. Too bad the rebels kept trying to crash the system keeping everyone alive.

I really wanted that to be the final twist in the series. Plus it gets rid of that stupid battery plot point by just having Morpheus be wrong(oh, I'm sure he believes it, but that wouldn't make him any less wrong).

 

[THEMILKMAN]

This is part rant and part inquiry to see if anyone can help me figure out what I thought was a pretty significant inconsistency in 'Looper':

Spoiler

So, by the end of the film, we are aware that a mysterious figure in the future called 'The Rainmaker' has effectively become a tyrant, and is closing all the loops. Bruce Willis has decided to see if he can take him out as a child, but after finding him, the younger version of himself realizes that his attempt to kill the child is what will cause him to become The Rainmaker in the first place (hence his desire to close all loops, so that he can prevent those events from occurring). Younger version kills himself, thus erasing older version, and the child is spared. Okay, that's reasonable.

But where did Bruce Willis' version of The Rainmaker come from? In his timeline, he closed his loop. None of the events that supposedly lead up to the boy being shot and his mother being killed actually happen in that timeline. Yet this tyrant appears anyway and still goes and messes everything up. Was there some other alternate chain of events in which another Looper-related incident killed his mother and destroyed his jaw? That seems oddly specific, unless there's some sort of force actively keeping timelines consistent, at which point it's not unreasonable to assume that some other event will have to come into being to force the child into becoming the Rainmaker. Perhaps I'm just over thinking things.

Eh, time travel is always messy business. It's usually best not to think about it too much. For instance, if you went back in time and killed your own grandpa, did it really ever happen? If your grandpa died before procreating then you never would have existed, therefore you couldn't go back in time and kill him, therefore you do exist, therefore you killed him, but you couldn't, so you did, etc...I confused myself now.

 

[Vault101]

Skyrim, I love the game, but once you are out of the starting cave, why should my character feel the need to do anything? He was almost killed by a dragon and he is persuaded to fight one early in the story, I think your character would be all too happy to gtfo if he got news that a dragon was nearby.

this is my problem with the elderscroll games in general

oh sure its a big nice world but realLY I've got no personal motivation to do anything

 

[Vault101]

Revolution.

I hear its a really bad show anyhow

aiming for a cheap one
renegade shepard you are too slow

just out of curiosity when does renegade shep say that?

Todd was something of a failure which people tended to hate, mind.

Now, some of the female kid sidekicks, though, whose character traits consisted of being nothing more than "adorably" incompetent...blech.

I was going to say I thourght todd was the one who got beaten up by the joker....

also wasnt there a female robin who got tortured to death during a gotham lockdown/riot? so being "adoribly incompetant" didn;t work out...

 

[Pseudonym2]

This is part rant and part inquiry to see if anyone can help me figure out what I thought was a pretty significant inconsistency in 'Looper':

Spoiler

So, by the end of the film, we are aware that a mysterious figure in the future called 'The Rainmaker' has effectively become a tyrant, and is closing all the loops. Bruce Willis has decided to see if he can take him out as a child, but after finding him, the younger version of himself realizes that his attempt to kill the child is what will cause him to become The Rainmaker in the first place (hence his desire to close all loops, so that he can prevent those events from occurring). Younger version kills himself, thus erasing older version, and the child is spared. Okay, that's reasonable.

But where did Bruce Willis' version of The Rainmaker come from? In his timeline, he closed his loop. None of the events that supposedly lead up to the boy being shot and his mother being killed actually happen in that timeline. Yet this tyrant appears anyway and still goes and messes everything up. Was there some other alternate chain of events in which another Looper-related incident killed his mother and destroyed his jaw? That seems oddly specific, unless there's some sort of force actively keeping timelines consistent, at which point it's not unreasonable to assume that some other event will have to come into being to force the child into becoming the Rainmaker. Perhaps I'm just over thinking things.

I think that was intentionally vague. Some unexplained disaster caused him to be the Rainmaker and may happen again. The bigger question I have is why the loopers are even necessary in the first place. If someone can send a body back in time why can't they just teleport it into the furnace directly? Why can't the Mafia use time travel to make money?

 

[Thaluikhain]

also wasnt there a female robin who got tortured to death during a gotham lockdown/riot? so being "adoribly incompetant" didn;t work out...

She'd gotten fired from being Robin due to being incompetent, then started a massive war in Gotham (due to being incompetent), and was tortured to death with a power drill...but was made to look as exy as possible in the process, IIRC.

This made her so adorable that she was retconned back to life and made into a generic incompetent batgirl, replacing the much more popular Cassandra Cain batgirl, who sold much more comics, because Cain is asian and teh comic industry is fucking stupid when it comes to race sometimes.

 

[Syzygy23]

Cthulhu; a being of unimaginable power and part of an incomprehensible cosmic plot, a being that could eradicate mankind without even realizing it. Unless you ram him with a boat, and he'll play nice and go back to bed. He's just a bone idle old sod who wants his sleepies at heart.

He/She/It was never rammed with a boat, where did you read that? The closest thing was the narrator running AWAY from Cthulhu in a boat.

As for me... The Mass Effect universe. The guns are stated to fire little slivers of matter at relativistic speeds, yet you can clearly see the shots travelling from the muzzle to your target, like some sort of very slow ass tracer fire. That, and you'd think that something with the energy of a grain of sand travelling at light speed would be able to destroy all those chest high walls easily.

 

[Vault101]

She'd gotten fired from being Robin due to being incompetent, then started a massive war in Gotham (due to being incompetent), and was tortured to death with a power drill...but was made to look as exy as possible in the process, IIRC.

ahhh....right 0_0

[quote/]This made her so adorable that she was retconned back to life and made into a generic incompetent batgirl, replacing the much more popular Cassandra Cain batgirl, who sold much more comics, because Cain is asian and teh comic industry is fucking stupid when it comes to race sometimes.[/quote]
was this recent? I thought the chrachter was still in limbo (or killed off for realsis)

what you may have to expand on what you mean with the "race" comment

 

[Syzygy23]

OT: My biggest problem with almost any sci-fi setting in space is the question of how organisms that developed thousands of light-years apart are almost always essentially humanoid. Roughly 5-6 feet tall, bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical and capable of understanding and producing human speech. FEH!

theres actually a pretty simple answer for that

while we like the idea of aliens we also need them to have human traits so that in fiction we can understand/empathise with them...which is fine I guess...it adds flavour

making them too "alien"....well if the aliens in ME were beings of light or somthing they wouldnt be the most popualr charachters...we can't empathise with things we cant understand

OT: the harry potter universe...

there have been several cracked artiles on this, but essentially is is MESSED UP, I would not want to be a wizard

-bigotry and racism is still a huge problem...waaaaay worse than what we have in our muggle world
-cultural and technological stagnation which doesnt help
-no jobs....aside from several what to wizard actually do if they arent teachers,work for the ministry, shopkeepers?
-no real world skills, you can't function in the muggle world and the goblins own the banking systm

Speak for yourself, you racist! I can empathize with another sapient regardless of their physical form just fine!

Slapping rubber foreheads on a human is just a lazy way to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

 

[Vault101]

Speak for yourself, you racist! I can empathize with another sapient regardless of their physical form just fine!

Slapping rubber foreheads on a human is just a lazy way to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

not so much "rubber foreheads" I mean yeah that is really lazy (though in startreks defense they were working on a limited budget)

but aliens like Krogan, Turian, Quarian, even elcor and hanar we can call unserstand on some level, because essentially they act like us (though I found it a bit jarring when playing mass effect for the first time the scary looking raptor aliens spoke and were polie XD..I like that though)...hell even the Predators we understand in a way

real aliens could very be so bizare we simply coulnd't comunicate with them effectivly

speaking of mass effect does anyone else not find it odd how shepard doesnt raise an eyebrow at the racism towards the vorcha?

 

[Thaluikhain]

[quote/]This made her so adorable that she was retconned back to life and made into a generic incompetent batgirl, replacing the much more popular Cassandra Cain batgirl, who sold much more comics, because Cain is asian and teh comic industry is fucking stupid when it comes to race sometimes.

was this recent? I thought the chrachter was still in limbo (or killed off for realsis)

what you may have to expand on what you mean with the "race" comment[/quote]

Pre-retcon, she became the 3rd Batgirl (well, main Batgirl, there where other temporary ones).

Cassandra Cain, the 2nd main batgirl was a much more successful character, sold much better etc...and yet DC replaced her, and didn't bring her back despite the replacement being much less popular, and fans wanting Cain back. I'm not sure what's going on with the new 52.

Now, it's been pointed out that DC (well, Marvel too) has a thing going where they will endlessly pump out crap comics about straight white guys, rather than ones about women, PoC and/or people who aren't straight. And this is true even when those are more popular characters that would sell more, in defiance of the most basic financial sense.

You also see this with movies, superhero movies are dominated by straight white male superheroes. DC has any number of popular characters who aren't, ones that fans would love to see, but they've decided that getting the people who made the Green Lantern movie, which everyone hated, to make a movie about Aquaman (who everyone hates) is a good idea.

 

[Vault101]

snip.

so essentially what your saying is they are sticking with the "straight white american male" thing when it actually may not represent popular demand or at least what could be sucessful

old white guys in suits mabye?

[quote/] but they've decided that getting the people who made the Green Lantern movie, which everyone hated, to make a movie about Aquaman (who everyone hates) is a good idea.[/quote]
wait...they are doing that?

*facepalm*

poor Aquamans dead in the water....

 

[IamLEAM1983]

As far as Batshit Insane story premises go, consider Evil playthroughs of any Fable game. How could anyone justify the sort of abuses you create, and effectively go "Welp, he's the king now! Better grin and bear it!"

Yet that's what happens. Every single time.