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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well, right; there's nothing wrong with liking Aliens. It's a perfectly okay film with a lot of good stuff in it. The trouble is the subsequent mushing plot points from Aliens together with plot points of hundreds of other things until they're indistinguishable. Literally everything becomes Aliens, in this sort of meta-narrative where the film itself colonizes everything it touches. If this strawman had anything to it, you wouldn't see the fandom in large part politely ignoring almost everything after Aliens until at minimum Prometheus comes along (right or wrong). Your longtime contempt for people who simply enjoy media on its own terms and to their own tastes, as if they do so uncritically, is showing again. As if one of many 30+ year-old comic books have forever polluted the discourse. In truth, the most engaged fans usually just read fan wikis for a laugh or to look up a reference, and understand that the wikis are written by a certain segment of the fandom to be completionist to a fault, not a retelling of every story from the beginning like a translation of the Bible. People are rightly tired of explaining this to you like you're a chatGPT running on contempt for people who enjoy things, though.
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Mar 28, 2023 06:35
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Enjoying things is cool and good. There are cool and good Aliens comics (Labyrinth), there are some not-so-good ones. Engaging with media however you like is also cool and good; do what gives you the most pleasure/entertainment/emotional response/intellectual stimulation/whatever, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Life’s too short to get all angry and upset over media, let alone getting angry and upset over how other people are engaging with media. I like Aliens movies, and I also like Aliens toys and video games and comic books and trading cards (no really, there’s some neat stuff). I like gushing about the franchise and talking about cool stuff and high-fiving each other over how cool and good some of the movies are, and share ideas in a constructive and positive way so maybe I’ll learn something and maybe other people will learn something from me too. I’m not “ashamed” that I like expanded universe crap (why on earth should I be?), it enhances my love and appreciation of the movies and the franchise as a whole. Truth be told I’m pretty behind on a lot of stuff, but that’s because I don’t have time or patience to spend on media I probably won’t enjoy; I used to voraciously consume anything and everything Aliens regardless of quality, but I just don’t have time for that anymore. I haven’t read any of the Marvel comics because I heard they were not great, and there are a bunch of novels I haven’t bothered reading because I heard they suck. I’ll let the fandom be the guinea pigs, and I’ll catch up on the good stuff later, maybe. I have a long and storied history with the franchise, I went through a period where I was a moderator for a popular AvP forum because I had an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire Alien franchise (no really; I had a website called the Aliens Online Encyclopedia, modeled after the print book “The Star Wars Encyclopedia” by Steve Sansweet). I had a thread called “Ask Me Anything About Aliens” that ran for years and was the biggest thread in the forum’s history. I was also an idiot teenager who took internet poo poo way too seriously. I let the power get to my head, pissed off a lot of people, got demodded, and ultimately quit the forum and the fandom for several years. That was circa 2004. I don’t even know if that forum still exists, I never went back. Unplugging from the fandom gave me an opportunity to grow the gently caress up, recognize that I’d been a douche, and around 2009 (I think?) I re-engaged with the fandom on another forum. I was way more mellow and my mindset is to let people enjoy poo poo however they want, they don’t need to like the same stuff as you or have the same opinions, it’s a fictional franchise about penis-monsters, who gives a gently caress. Xenopedia is alright. It’s got some gaps, and it’s got some wrong info, but I can’t be bothered to correct it. It’s got some neat trivia though. It’s harmless. I think what I’m getting at is we should be cool to each other, enjoy what we want, avoid what we don’t, don’t be condescending and judgmental, and just have a good time. I looked up the bouncing egg thing, it’s from a novel I haven’t read in like 15+ years and I genuinely don’t remember it happening. Whatever. The wiki page gives a page number though, maybe I’ll check it out just for laughs. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 07:04
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I have been sending desperate script ideas to anyone who will listen about Ripley’s dying hallucinations being the rest of the Alien franchise and retconning everything but nobody will return my emails. Please, I cannot keep reading about all of this. It has easily been almost a decade and many people haven’t been able to agree about anything here. I will keep reading about it but it is still funny to me how intensely these debates keep happening.
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Mar 28, 2023 07:12
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I rewatched Covenant last night because I'm reading this thread again and I was reminded of how much I dislike the ending. I don't like the version of horror films where the characters that have 'earned' their survival have a horrible end anyway. To the extent that I care about franchises I am a bit disappointed that we'll never see the presumptive third part of the trilogy where most of the colonists end up as eggs in a cave beneath a derelict Engineer ship, with the last colonist sacrificing themselves to kill David and stop his insane evil android scheme.
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Mar 28, 2023 11:32
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Ferrinus posted:It's not really an unknown or totally changeable shape, though, right? Like we see a xenomorph with eyes in Resurrection but that's obviously a regression from the ideal. On the other hand, the fact that every instance of what you might call the Xenomorph Classic that appears onscreen is a little bit different (smooth versus ridged craniums, different arrangements of tubing, different arrangements of exoskeletal plating, etc...) doesn't at all need to be read as, like, an out-of-character "well of course the art crew couldn't identically replicate the costume from movie to movie, so we have to forgive them for the collar ridge being a few inches lower in the sequel"; it just scans perfectly fine that each generation is a little bit different, in the same way that no two Giger drawings are literal carbon copies of each other but plainly do come from the same DNA. Making the shape and reproduction style an "accident" is one of the coolest things Prometheus and Covenant did, imo. After all, they introduce a relative of the Xenomorph in the first five minutes of the movie that has a completely different body shape (It's bipedal, it lacks a tail, it doesn't have an exoskeleton, it doesn't have acid blood) and reproductive cycle (doesn't have a hive, doesn't lay eggs, bears live young, only reproduces with other Xenomorphs of it's own species.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDOj9XEezDQ&t=28s
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Mar 28, 2023 13:27
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Name Change posted:If this strawman had anything to it, you wouldn't see the fandom in large part politely ignoring almost everything after Aliens until at minimum Prometheus comes along (right or wrong). Your longtime contempt for people who simply enjoy media on its own terms and to their own tastes, as if they do so uncritically, is showing again. That’s not true, though. We’ve already seen multiple cases of people mixing up events from different films, different script drafts, etc. Some of the more outlandish claims can only be sourced back to comics, videogames, and/or D&D sourcebooks. It’s also plainly evident that discussion of the Scott films is hampered by attempts to make them ‘fit’ into AVP and whatnot: David could not have created the creature, so he must be some kind of fraud. Capital-X Xenomorphs CANNOT be less than 10 million years old. This is vitally important, because 20 years means there can only be so many Capital-X Xenomorphs in the “universe”. And so-on. A set time imposes a theoretical limit on the number of however-loosely “canonical” stories you can tell featuring the Iconic movie monsters. The spaceship Covenant has a specific population and, even if Walter finds more humans in space, transforming them all would be a lengthy and resource-intensive process. So, as forums poster Xenomrph says, Alien Covenant doesn’t allow him to imagine the waves upon waves of disposable xenomorph drones, as in Aliens Fireteam and such. And the solution to this and other prohibitions is not to politely ignore but to spread misinformation about the films’ narratives: everything David does is a lie, and everything you see is a diegetic illusion. The opening text of Alien is also lie, etc. The subterranean cave that you see onscreen doesn’t exist. Like, I legitimately don’t care if people enjoy Aliens Nightmare Asylum (the book where the bouncy eggs come from). Maybe it’s extremely well-written? I don’t know; I’m never going to read it. But, again, it’s pretty important to realize that it’s a self-contained story that cannot retroactively change the narrative of a film from the 1970s.
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Mar 28, 2023 15:36
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It’s also plainly evident that discussion of the Scott films is hampered by attempts to make them ‘fit’ into AVP and whatnot: David could not have created the creature, so he must be some kind of fraud. Capital-X Xenomorphs CANNOT be less than 10 million years old. This is vitally important, because 20 years means there can only be so many Capital-X Xenomorphs in the “universe”. And so-on. SuperMechagodzilla posted:So, as forums poster Xenomrph says SuperMechagodzilla posted:but to spread misinformation Having a differing interpretation of media is not “misinformation”, you are not the one sole arbiter of Truth. SuperMechagodzilla posted:But, again, it’s pretty important to realize that it’s a self-contained story that cannot retroactively change the narrative of a film from the 1970s. Reminder that in an earlier post you claimed that, per Prometheus, the Derelict could only be 2000 years old at the most. People are allowed to enjoy multi-part things as a broader narrative, even if you yourself do not. You should probably realize this. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 16:01
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Xenomrph posted:Nobody has been talking about the AvP movies. Sure they have; AVP1 is the only film whose 'lore' is wholly incompatible with the Scott prequels. Prometheus is a full-on remake of it, and then Covenant says that 'Yautjas' did not have access to 'xenomorph queens' for use as target practice. Even AV|P:R can still work with Scott's films, as Ferrinus and I have noted. AVP1 is what's at stake. Xenomrph posted:Reminder that in an earlier post you claimed that, per Prometheus, the Derelict could only be 2000 years old at the most. That's confusing two different apporaches. Here's an example: in Aliens, the place where Jokey's ship landed is referred to as planet LV-426. In Alien 1, however, the object is unambiguously a moon orbiting around a gas giant. Now, despite being mutually exclusive, both things are true: Alien is set on a moon, not a planet. Aliens is set on a planet, not a moon. It's only when we choose to pair the films together, that we have to try and reconcile things. So, to make that pairing work, we have to conclude the characters in Aliens are on a moon and just using the wrong terminology. But, even before we get to that that point, you have to realize that this act of pairing two (or more) films to create an entirely new work is completely arbitrary, and we must first agree that this is what we're doing before we can have any sort of conversation. This is why I've been pretty clear about when I'm talking about Alien 1 on its own, and when I've been talking about "the Ridley Scott Alien trilogy", or any other set of films. Like, I've already said that Aliens is a better sequel to AVP1 than to Alien, but I would be very clear if I were talking about AVP1+Aliens-Alien. What you've been doing wrong is leaving it unclear what films you're talking about, and even that you're referring to things that aren't films - like when you were referring to script drafts and comicbooks, the Alien RPG, and/or the-entire-franchise-except-some-parts. And it takes a great deal of puzzling to figure out what media you're talking about. That's why it's not 'just your opinion': you're stating opinions about reality. So when we write that there's no galactic conspiracy in the movie Alien, that is fully true. You can bring in other media, but then you are no longer talking about Alien but Alien+comicbook or Alien+Aliens+comicbook, or whatever other new conversation. And unless you are clear that that's what you're doing, it's misleading or outright deceptive. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 16:52
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Easily disprovable bullshit, followed by “it’s misleading or outright deceptive.”  
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Mar 28, 2023 17:01
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This isn't an unfamiliar concept. Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies, and one of the big scenes involves a sick dinosaur. The character Ellie stops to investigate why the dinosaur is sick, but the question is never answered. In the original novel, later novelizations of the movie, and some scripts, there is an explanation: the dinosaur was accidentally eating poisonous berries lying on the ground. The scene may even have been filmed at some point. But, in any case, the statement "the dinosaur in the movie Jurassic Park got sick because it ate berries" is straightforwardly false. That's not based on the movie, but on the movie plus various supplementary materials. There is no berry-eating scene in the movie whatsoever. It doesn't exist. In the movie itself, the cloned dinosaurs are just inexplicably dying, which is pretty troubling and highlights how unethical this park thing actually is. The lack of an explanation is consequently important to the narrative, and mixing in supplementary materials fundamentally changes that narrative. "Undeleting" scenes in this way is called fan-editing.
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Mar 28, 2023 17:25
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Here's something fun you can do: go look at the views on Alien reaction videos. It's very consistent. Alien gets good numbers in the 100ks, Aliens does a bit to a lot better, then it falls off a cliff after that because nobody cares about anything else. Most of the reaction channels don't even bother with Alien 3 onward. It's two good films and a bunch of dross to the majority of people. Wikis, comics, and this other poo poo gets into the brains of less than 1% of the people who've seen those movies and it's totally irrelevant.
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Mar 28, 2023 17:30
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:"Undeleting" scenes in this way is called fan-editing. This is allowed, even if you personally don’t do it or agree with it. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Here's something fun you can do: go look at the views on Alien reaction videos. It's very consistent. Alien gets good numbers in the 100ks, Aliens does a bit to a lot better, then it falls off a cliff after that because nobody cares about anything else. Most of the reaction channels don't even bother with Alien 3 onward. It's two good films and a bunch of dross to the majority of people. Wikis, comics, and this other poo poo gets into the brains of less than 1% of the people who've seen those movies and it's totally irrelevant. Also, this. I post about that stuff because it’s fun trivia that’s fun to think about and I like it, I neither believe nor care that very many people actually “believe” it or let them shape their view of the movies (although it might, and that’s okay). That’s also why like 100% of the time I clarify with “the movie says this, the expanded universe/script/novelization says that”. Hell, I did it like in the last page when someone asked where Alien hive resin came from. I did it when someone asked what cryosleep pods are for. It’s totally harmless. Who gives a poo poo. Most people are going to say “oh huh, neat” and move on, I’m not saying “but it says THIS in the RPG and official Aliens coloring book and you have to believe it OR ELSE!!” MacheteZombie himself said he likes seeing the random silly wackiness from all over the franchise. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 17:32
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Xenomrph posted:This is allowed, even if you personally don’t do it or agree with it. Well sure, it's not illegal to like things. A rare handful of fan-edits are actually even good movies in their own right. The issue is that referring to a fan-edit as if it's the original movie is deceptive. Like, If you say that it's really great how Ripley can fly without a ship in Aliens, that's false. It remains false even if - in your opinion - Ripley met Edward from The Twilight Saga and became his vampire bride after he divorced Bella, and you wrote a story about it. The only way it becomes true is if we all agree that we're talking about the Twilight fanfic instead of the 1986 movie Aliens. (Although the vampires in Twilight Saga can't fly either, so I'm not sure where you got that from.)
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Mar 28, 2023 18:12
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Nobody cares, that’s not what anyone is saying We had a person on the last page say they don’t consider anything other than the first 3 movies. That’s “false”, those other movies exist. It’s not “deceptive” to ignore them, and tell people that. I’m not sure you know what “deceptive” means, apparently it’s just a buzzword you like to sling around. If I say I think Ripley married Hicks and they lived happily ever after, who gives a poo poo. Why do you care? Move on. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 18:15
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Xenomrph posted:That’s also why like 100% of the time I clarify with “the movie says this, the expanded universe/script/novelization says that”. Hell, I did it like in the last page when someone asked where Alien hive resin came from. I did it when someone asked what cryosleep pods are for. It’s totally harmless. Who gives a poo poo. Most people are going to say “oh huh, neat” and move on, I’m not saying “but it says THIS in the RPG and official Aliens coloring book and you have to believe it OR ELSE!!” MacheteZombie himself said he likes seeing the random silly wackiness from all over the franchise. Yeah I don't think you've let your hype for the series cloud your judgement too much. You've been pretty honest that you really like to deep dive and you'll tell people what the other stuff says if they ask but hey, it's just fun trivia. Mostly.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:17
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I understand that you think your standing up to a bully or whatever, but you're more focused on being anti-SMG than on making any sort of point. Like, SMG's talking about super basic media literacy stuff and you're arguing against him, because..? And normally I couldn't give a poo poo, but like two weeks ago SMG brought up how the Engineer was humanoid and you got so caught up in proving him wrong that you swan dived into an empty pool. Xenomrph posted:This is allowed, even if you personally don’t do it or agree with it. This is what I mean. SMG hasn't written anything that suggests that they do or don't agree with fan editing, only that if you do bring in supplementary materials you need to be honest about it. You've flat out invented SMG holding a position they don't just so you can heroically oppose them on the matter.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:17
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Schwarzwald posted:only that if you do bring in supplementary materials you need to be honest about it. I have been, that’s the thing. Megaman’s Jockstrap pointed that out. For someone who “doesn’t care” if people like or talk about ancillary media, SMG sure does harp on it a lot. That’s the problem, who gives a poo poo. MacheteZombie said he welcomes that stuff in this thread, SMG needs to get over it. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 18:21
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Using the term "fetish" is interesting considering the type of media we're dissecting in relation to the "lore" that's being extrapolated from outside sources like comics, the comic book itself is considered a fetish item, a long outdated medium that was at first used as a cheap way to sell ads in newspapers, transmogrified over the generations into the very niche product it has now become.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:24
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Xenomrph posted:Nobody cares, that’s not what anyone is saying Well no; that's not true, is it? Like, I actually recently pointed out an example of people mixing up Alien (where the pods are in a cave beneath the ship) and Aliens (where Ripley insists that the pods were brought to the If we read the films together, Ripley is wrong. It's only by treating Aliens as a standalone film that she can be correct. Pointing this out resulted in a multi-page argument, so I reckon somebody besides Ripley really cares about there not being a cave - even when it's unambiguously a cave in Alien: Isolation, and Prometheus shows that engineers like to build underground facilities on remote moons. The thing described as a cave being interpreted as a cave clearly isn't some hot take.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:32
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You’re welcome to the cave interpretation, even if others don’t agree with it. People are allowed to believe different things than you. People are allowed to connect movies together if that’s what they want to do. Get over it, stop harping on it. People in this thread have said, independent of other movies, that they think the cargo hold in ‘Alien’ isn’t a cave, that it’s part of the ship. They are allowed to think that. You are not the arbiter of truth lmao Also there you go again talking about how “‘Alien’ says it’s a cave, when you look at that movie separately” and the immediately cited Alien Isolation (which I’m not so sure you’re right about but whatever) and Prometheus. For someone saying “we need to look at movies separately and ignore ancillary media” you sure do like citing additional stuff. You have to be more careful. Also who gives a poo poo if something that’s shown to be a moon in one movie is called a planet in another movie, that’s pure semantics, who gives a poo poo. I’m not even sure it gets referred to as a planet in Aliens, but maybe I’m wrong. Whatever. Again, who gives a poo poo. Nobody was talking about the AvP movies until you brought it up (they were talking about how Alien connects to Covenant). And even if they did, who gives a poo poo. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 18:36
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:If anything I've written is untrue or inaccurate, it should be trivially easy for you to demonstrate it.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:36
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Um Xeno, just pages ago, you went to the (extremely gross and weird) mat in defense of your reading of the Space Jockey as an entirely sessile ‘inhuman’ piece of furniture when literally nothing in the movie actually supports that idea (and several things, I think, contradict it) It’s a little rich to now be all ‘pshh I’m just having fun up here above it all’ after fuckin whatever that was
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Mar 28, 2023 18:54
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"It's just semantics" I state, between typing posts about the hyper-definition of the term "Xenomorph"
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Mar 28, 2023 18:55
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People are allowed to think the Space Jockey is fused to the chair, that isn’t a hot take. Ridley Scott himself said he believed that, until he said “but what if it isn’t?” and made Prometheus. The gross stuff (which I apologized for) was where I talked about amputees. Saying the Space Jockey is immobile doesn’t make me some kind of space-ableist or some poo poo. ruddiger posted:"It's just semantics" I state, between typing posts about the hyper-definition of the term "Xenomorph" You’ll notice that that was semantics, and I pointed that out in my post, and Ferrinus and I came to an understanding. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 18:58
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Xenomrph posted:You’re welcome to the cave interpretation, even if others don’t agree with it. People are allowed to believe different things than you. People are allowed to connect movies together if that’s what they want to do. Yes, I already told you that it's not illegal. Don't worry! However, we're now back to the overall point about how reading works. If you want to engage in conversation on, say, some kind of electronic board for messages, it's not sufficient to say "I disagree" to a stronger interpretation. I mean, you can say it, but it's no longer an attempt at communication but an attempt at shutting it down. When we look at Alien as a standalone film, there is little evidence that the tropical cave is part of a ship. It's close to the Jokey room, and the wall patterns are similar, but that's about it. Instead, there are multiple clues to the contrary: Kane doesn't see any entrance or exit, besides a hole in the ceiling. Kane states outright that he doesn't believe it's part of the ship; he believes it to be too far down, below the ground, and we don't see any reason why he'd be wrong about this. When we're shown a wide shot of the chamber, it is genuinely much too large to be part of the ship. Like, even accounting for the elastic scale of movies, the entire ship would need to be hollow and still be larger on the inside than the outside. The matte painting also shows that the cave bends off into the distance with an S-shape. The ship itself is U-shaped, and curves steeply upwards at the tips. So, concluding that the cave isn't a cave requires downplaying/ignoring textual evidence, and/or bringing in supplementary materials. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 19:02
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
SuperMechagodzilla posted:When we look at Alien as a standalone film, there is little evidence that the tropical cave is part of a ship. It's close to the Jokey room, and the wall patterns are similar, but that's about it. But why on earth should I ultimately care if another person in the thread thinks it’s not a cave? How does it affect me? Do they have to acknowledge that they’re “wrong” in order for the thread to move on, or my life to be complete? People are allowed to disagree and move on and disengage from the topic. Edit— I acknowledge that I took the Space Jockey humanoid debate too far. I acknowledge that thinking it’s humanoid is a perfectly valid and acceptable conclusion to draw. I recognize and acknowledge the evidence for that conclusion, even if I still don’t really agree with the conclusion. The point is that there’s a point where it’s clear that people are just talking past each other and aren’t going to convince each other, and if one person chooses to disagree and move on, that’s an extremely acceptable behavior. I crossed the line in that particular debate and should have disengaged well before I did, that’s my fault and I apologize for it and I will try to do better. I stand by my position that people are allowed to believe different things and still try to be genial with each other. This thread can be a fun zone and have people share ideas without it turning into heated angry debates every other page. Edit again— the “is it a cave” discussion is so interesting that I’m genuinely going to post about it on the AvP forum I’m on, and I’m honest to god going to go to bat for it being a separate structure, using the evidence SMG provided, just to see what other “fans” say. Edit again— done: https://www.avpgalaxy.net/forum/index.php?topic=66371 Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 19:27
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Making the shape and reproduction style an "accident" is one of the coolest things Prometheus and Covenant did, imo. After all, they introduce a relative of the Xenomorph in the first five minutes of the movie that has a completely different body shape (It's bipedal, it lacks a tail, it doesn't have an exoskeleton, it doesn't have acid blood) and reproductive cycle (doesn't have a hive, doesn't lay eggs, bears live young, only reproduces with other Xenomorphs of it's own species.) That xenomorph clearly reproduces by disintegrating into primordial ooze which goes on to seed the planet with extremely xenomorph-generative life billions of years down the line!
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Mar 28, 2023 19:53
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Terminator 2 RPG Kickstarter is live https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nightfall/the-terminator-rpg-t2-judgement-day
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Mar 28, 2023 20:13
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Very easy purchase. Backed! I have my issues of the Blade Runner book, but the Alien books are impeccable. I love how they're framing this as the sourcebook for the films themselves. That's really what it feels like they're after as a company and as a person who loves systems, it's catnip to me. Would love a Blade Runner 2019 and 2049 supplement that was after the same thing which managed a little more worldbuilding and was less cautious and safe. But I think we're in slow-drip season with BR despite the PDFs coming out nearly a year ago and a new case file nowhere on the horizon. e: Also, while I'm on the subject, if anyone was interested in the BR game but doesn't have the patience to read through the books, someone did a really well-crafted audio drama/actual play version of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQWCk7RLg9s It is significantly better than you would assume based on that description. Basically someone just turned the RPG's campaign into a fully-produced audio drama with decent acting. feedmyleg fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 21:01
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Ferrinus posted:Broadly, I'm willing to grant the somewhat fantastical assumption that some aspect of the monster from Alien is just so adaptive and efficient OR such a pure expression of grisly, primordial truths that it does survive millions of years of radically-different-across-different-planets selection pressures, like that we might legitimately find a xenomorph on a desert planet and then a xenomorph on a jungle planet on the other side of the galaxy and thereby learn something about the nature of life in general. But yeah there's a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding here, because a universe filled of varied horrors is exactly what I want. Ferrinus posted:They're the teleological endpoint of reproductive life, generally.  Ferrinus posted:This is to say that I'm actually very sympathetic to the Xenomrph/Splicer/whatever position. I just don't get why, like, specifically that one egg and that one spider are so important. "These hosed up eggs are one example of how hostile life itself is" is actually more true to Alien than "Watch out! These eggs could be anywhere!" I like it when monster films (horror or otherwise) end with their universe more interesting than when they started. I don't like it when all the monsters get killed. Alien does this excellently - yes, they kill the specific monster that was picking them off one by one on their own ship, but there's still a huge cargo hold full of alien eggs waiting for the next unlucky few to be pointed at. And it's not done with a cheesy after-credits reveal; we see the giant hold of eggs before we even see the alien, and it's left to us to remember they're there. And that's not including the less explicit implications, where if these monsters exist here they may exist anywhere, and a universe which can bring these monsters into being implies the existence of other, equally terrifying monsters, a whole big scary universe. Aliens, Alien 3, and Resurrection all chipped away at this. I like the alien queen (love me some specialised forms) in Aliens, and it would have been neat if the egg tenders had made their way into the actual film, but it's been 57 years and nobody's found any other equivalently scary monsters, penis shaped or otherwise, and the film ends with all the monsters we explicitly know about blown up. In Alien 3 we find out a queen is ~important~ and a queen from birth, which makes the monsters more fragile and less scary and also can we please stop following Weyland Yutani around everywhere. In Resurrection we still haven't found any more monsters and WY got eaten by Walmart. There's a reason people love the AvP idea so much; a universe with only one weird thing in it IS boring, IS uninteresting. So taking two universes with only one known "thing" and putting them together, well, two things more strongly implies three things implies four things etc. But if you are stuck with one thing, if that one thing is, in effect, many things, can become greatly different things based on context, like, for example, a creature that incubates in alien lifeforms and takes on aspects of its host... well, if you have to have one thing, that's a very good thing! But then Prometheus came along. Not a good film, but oh my god, fuckin' lore heaven. Aliens are just one of a huge menagerie of monsters created by a race of weirdos who've been around since before the formation of life on earth. Alien is about humans stumbling upon one of their lost weapons like a gooey penis headed landmine. The galaxy must be FULL of monsters, many of them with bizarre lifecycles and heads shaped like human genitals because apparently that's what they're into! You know what the galaxy isn't full of? The monster makers themselves! They used to visit us and then they stopped! This weird weapon's facility blew up thousands of years ago and nobody came to check on them! They must have been wiped out by something, maybe by their monsters, maybe whatever they were making monsters to wage war against, who knows? So the galaxy is absolutely riddled with dick monsters and abandoned military facilities, whatever killed our creators, and possibly the (obviously much diminished) remnants of our creators themselves! Yeah the film itself sucked but I couldn't WAIT to see what someone competent would do with this universe it implied! Instead I got... Covenant. 10 minutes of Michael Fassbender blowing himself surrounded by 110 minutes of Ridley Scott doing them same, and somehow they made the former as uninteresting as the latter. What happened to the Engineers? Nothing really, up until a sad robot killed them. What other monsters are out there? Just the ones the sad robot made, including tiny airborne xenomorph particles which is a child's concept of making things narratively scarier. It's still fine though; the OG monsters are still cool. We know a bunch of them got out, we saw the ship. We know it happened a long time ago, before the sad robot got involved. They've had thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years to get around and get Real Weird with it. We know that there's at least one source of cool, awesome monsters out there untainted by- nope, nope, the film says the sad robot made them. Burn it all loving down. And I know I haven't really articulated well why all the scary things in the universe being funnelled through one sad robot is deeply, deeply uninteresting to me, but it is. That one egg and that one spider are important because of what they promised and what they represented. A deep, dark, scary universe filled with ancient horror and inexplicable happenings. Initially they were both a general representative of the scary things in the dark, and also a specific scary thing out there in the dark. Then we got three films chipping away at that, leaving them as the only scary thing in the dark, the only ancient horror, the only inexplicable happening. Then we were presented with a deeply flawed, deeply boring film... but a film that said no, there is more out there, both scarier, darker, and less explicable than you ever imagined. But they hurled all of that away in favour of a film about a robot with daddy issues fiddling his flute. And then he even took away the egg. Splicer fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 21:02
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Splicer posted:in Aliens, and it would have been neat if the egg tenders had made their way into the actual film, but it's been 57 years and nobody's found any other equivalently scary monsters, penis shaped or otherwise, and the film ends with all the monsters we explicitly know about blown up. If it makes you feel any better, it’s implied that the Derelict, chock full of eggs, survived the atmosphere processor blast because it’s behind a mountain range (“out beyond the Ilium range”). For what it’s worth, other ancillary sources reference its survival as well.
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Mar 28, 2023 21:08
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Xenomrph posted:Nah, people can disagree and move on, nobody needs to “force” the other person to agree. I'm not sure what "forcing you to agree" would even accomplish if that were the aim. What I'm interested in are actually more substantive disagreements, to really explore what's going on here. Like, it's extremely interesting to trace a misinterpretation of Ash's role in Alien back to the precise earlier script draft where he was an entirely different character. It provides a jumping-off point to talk about the nuances in screenwriting. They went through multiple drafts for a reason, after all.
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Mar 28, 2023 21:36
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Splicer, I don't think more than a couple of people are entirely happy with Covenant. People have turned around on Prometheus and you're starting to get this huge love/hate split around it, but even when people *like* Covenent, it's *in spite* of the movie throwing away what it could have been (especially knowing that much of the reason is studios pushing more Xenos because that's what the people want). With Prometheus, people are like "this is a really great film, and it expands the universe in a way I like, and David is awesome," while with Covenant you get "this is a really great film, but I would have liked to have seen (a number of extensions of Prometheus that never came to be)" as praise in general. And that's for those that actually praise it completely; others have caveats to even what I compliment (for instance, I loved more David being weird and exploring him more but I think the last act is dumb and takes away from the rest of the feel of the entire movie).
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Mar 28, 2023 21:40
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What of the more recent novels are worth reading? I read Cold Forge, liked it, and Infiltrator, didn’t like it (but fun to see the connections in Fireteam Elite), last year.
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Mar 28, 2023 21:59
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Splicer posted:But then Prometheus came along. Not a good film, but oh my god, fuckin' lore heaven. Aliens are just one of a huge menagerie of monsters created by a race of weirdos who've been around since before the formation of life on earth. Alien is about humans stumbling upon one of their lost weapons like a gooey penis headed landmine. The galaxy must be FULL of monsters, many of them with bizarre lifecycles and heads shaped like human genitals because apparently that's what they're into! I genuinely don't understand how you can write the third paragraph here after writing the first two. Prometheus opens the door for a literal universe of nightmare evolution spurred on by a race of unwise ancient aliens (and that's if you take an extremely conservative and restrictive view of what the goo is and does, treating it like some sort of specific irreproducible monster-making juice rather than an agent that simply catalyzes and accelerates what might have happened anyway). So if, in the next movie, the camera happens to follow one android to show us the one monster he creates... aren't the first two paragraphs I quote, or the second sentence I write in this paragraph here, still true? Like, zooming in: "What other monsters are out there? Just the ones the sad robot made" <---what? How do you know? Now, I liked Covenant a lot, but coming out of the theater I had the strong impression it had gotten screwed around a bit in basically the same way that Sam Raimi's third Spider-Man movie had. We want more money, audiences like Venom/the xenomorph, so you better loving put the word "Alien" in the title and give us third act xenomorphs doing horror movie slasher poo poo! This ended up working fine (I like Spider-Man 3, too) but my general intuition is that Scott wouldn't have ended Covenant like he did if left alone. So I can understand and indeed even share some disappointment with the movie so sharply looping back into familiar territory. But it didn't definitively foreclose on a haunted house-style monsterverse or something. Far from it! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 22:04
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While I have some complaints with Covenant, as a prog-rock reimagining of Forbidden Planet I find it easy to vibe with. I don't think David finding a planet inhabited by the Engineer people implies that -- now that David's killed them -- they're gone forever. Rather, if there can be one planet inhabited by the Engineer people, there can easily be others. Especially given how the film is centered around humans going on to inhabit other planets.
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Mar 28, 2023 22:14
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I think the strong implication of Covenant is that the space-faring "inner church" of the Engineers who all gave themselves biomechanical augmentations and masqueraded as gods to the rest of their people have died out. The Engineer peasantry that just tends to their fields and awaits the return of the ancients might still be dotted across various worlds.
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Mar 28, 2023 22:17
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David's first arrival to the planet is so loving great. Love the engineers gathering and watching the return of one of their ships and whatever it means to them only to be greeted by David's bombardment
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Mar 28, 2023 22:19
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Xenomrph posted:Terminator 2 RPG Kickstarter is live I wonder if anybody's trying to get the Predator license for the arr pee gees.
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Mar 28, 2023 22:25
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FastestGunAlive posted:What of the more recent novels are worth reading? I read Cold Forge, liked it, and Infiltrator, didn’t like it (but fun to see the connections in Fireteam Elite), last year. Other than that the fan consensus on the other new novels has been “ehhh it’s okay” to “bad”. MacheteZombie posted:David's first arrival to the planet is so loving great. Love the engineers gathering and watching the return of one of their ships and whatever it means to them only to be greeted by David's bombardment Agreed, and I agree with Ferrinus that it’s a neat juxtaposition of the hyper-technological Engineers of Prometheus and the “peasants” of Covenant. Dawgstar posted:I wonder if anybody's trying to get the Predator license for the arr pee gees. To my knowledge, no, but I’ll ask Andrew Gaska. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 22:28
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