(no subject)

[esmenet]

Ugh, shark week. (My favorite euphemism!) At least now that it's started, the weird full-body muscle ache should leave with it, as opposed to the time a few months ago when everything started feeling all crunched up about a week before the bleeding began.

I really hate it when sci-fi works have people blowing up planets. It's always just a device to show how evil the villain is and give one of the main characters some cheap pain. The authors don't seem to get how enormous of a tragedy that sort of thing should be—it's not just the people, it's the history, all those books and art and the old buildings everyone walked past a thousand times. I actually really hate it when anything big and important gets destroyed in fiction, because FUCK YOU I WANTED TO READ ABOUT THAT. All the things I love are the things that get blown up to prove a point. But planets are the worst, because they are all of those things at once and more than the sum of their parts, and their authors never, ever treat their loss with enough respect.

(The one exception, of course, is 'Graduate Vulcan For Fun And Profit', which is perfect in every (heartwrenching) way.)

Comments

[littlebutfierce]

Haha, somehow I think I missed that euphemism but I like it!

[dolores_crane]

The novel version of Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a fantastic section on Arthur trying to get the idea of Earth being gone through his head - I remember it very vividly from first reading it in my youth. (And of course even back in the 70s, Douglas Adams is playing off exactly the same things you're talking about here - just shows how lazy that writing is, forty years later...)