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Sneeze Party posted:As for Xenopedia, its existence is to provide a centralized source of information for fans, to track and document the Alien franchise in a comprehensive manner. Although it may not encompass every possible interpretation or connection, it serves as a valuable resource for those who want to explore and engage with the franchise more deeply. Beyond that, I don't know. Right: you're taking that additive approach where you conceive of all media marketed under a certain brand as a 'universe', where each new piece of official media released deepens the worldbuilding (even if less- or non-canon). Then, in your view, this deeper worldbuilding directly translates to rich storytelling. The act of releasing Alien-branded merch is 20th Century Studios' artistry - its creative process. The problem is that this is entirely an illusion. "Even some media officially endorsed and licensed by 20th Century Fox may not necessarily be canon. [...] The studio has rarely attempted to clarify the issue officially, and so the decision as to what exactly qualifies as canon is often left to fans. The issue is muddied further by statements or opinions given by directors or writers, which may not necessarily correspond to what is intended by Fox. As such, Xenopedia has its own policy for dictating canon. [...] If you are at all unsure regarding contradictory information, feel free to ask an Administrator." Xenopedia is full of such disclaimers because the actual author of "the alien franchise" is Xenopedia itself: a loose network of anonymous fans attempting to "integrate every event and piece of information from an entire fictional universe into a single coherent storyline". Quickly realizing that this is impossible, but not realizing that it's due to their faulty premises, these fans concluded that "concessions have to be made when declaring what is true and what is not" - which led to their establishing a bunch of arbitrary dictates and rules. 20th Century Studios, the ultimate authority, is frustratingly silent - and often wrong - so Xenopedia Administration have stepped in to reverse-engineer and improve upon the company's intentions by gauging canonicity by general popularity, artistic intentions of the directors, "cohesiveness", the loose consensus of the fans themselves, etc. In other words, they're doing something like what I'm doing - curating media to create an exhibition that is an artwork unto itself - but doing so very, very badly.
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Apr 3, 2023 16:58
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PeterWeller posted:SMG is rejecting intentionality in favor of a thematic sort of canonicity. While this perspective can be thought-provoking and open up new avenues for discussion, it's also important to consider the role of authorship and creative intent when examining different works. The Alien franchise, for instance, has a unique identity and history that has been shaped by the vision and creativity of its various contributors over time. Recognizing and respecting the intended narrative structures and artistic choices within the franchise can be equally as valuable as exploring thematic connections across different works. Ultimately, finding a balance between these two approaches to canonicity could lead to a more enriching and nuanced understanding of the Alien franchise and the broader science fiction genre as a whole. or not idk
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Apr 3, 2023 17:08
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Sneeze Party posted:While this perspective can be thought-provoking and open up new avenues for discussion, it's also important to consider the role of authorship and creative intent when examining different works. The Alien franchise, for instance, has a unique identity and history that has been shaped by the vision and creativity of its various contributors over time. Recognizing and respecting the intended narrative structures and artistic choices within the franchise can be equally as valuable as exploring thematic connections across different works. That's not a proper response to what's been asserted. As with your previous post, it's already been shown that the "unique identity of the franchise, shaped by creative intentions" doesn't actually exist. Consequently, there's no reason to "recognize and respect" it.
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Apr 3, 2023 19:12
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:That's not a proper response to what's been asserted. However, I would argue that this doesn't necessarily negate the value of considering the intentions and creative visions of individual contributors. Each installment in the Alien franchise, despite any inconsistencies, can still offer unique insights, themes, and perspectives that enrich the overall experience for fans. Recognizing these individual contributions and their impact on the broader universe can help deepen our understanding and appreciation of the franchise, even if a singular cohesive vision might be elusive. Furthermore, the evolving nature of the Alien franchise and the diverse perspectives it encompasses can also be seen as a strength, allowing for a rich and multifaceted exploration of its themes and concepts. By engaging with these different creative visions and acknowledging their contributions, we can continue to foster a dynamic and engaging dialogue about the Alien franchise and its place within the science fiction genre. It's also important to recognize that the artistry of a franchise isn't solely defined by its official studio or creators, but also by the community that engages with and interprets the content. Fans play a crucial role in keeping the franchise alive, fostering discussions, and providing valuable insights that can enrich our appreciation of the works. Instead of dismissing the efforts of Xenopedia and its contributors as "very, very badly" done, we can acknowledge their role in shaping the conversation and helping us navigate the complexities of the Alien franchise. By embracing diverse perspectives and approaches to canonicity, we can cultivate a more inclusive and vibrant understanding of the science fiction genre as a whole.
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Apr 3, 2023 20:13
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The failure in that line of reasoning is that Alien belongs to the same pool that all collected storytelling experiences are from, not the other way around. It's why alien fanatics can't comprehend the fact that Aliens is in fact a Terminator sequel, and never get to that conclusion on avp.com or xenopedia (there's no direct reference to skynet, how can it POSSIBLY be a Terminator sequel?)
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Apr 3, 2023 20:26
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I'm watching a bunch of Alien/Predator movies this month. Anybody have any ideas for interesting or odd ways to watch them in terms of the viewing order? Double feature ideas? In the past I've just watched them in release order but I'm feeling like I might want to mix that up a bit because why the hell not.
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Apr 3, 2023 20:32
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Basebf555 posted:I'm watching a bunch of Alien/Predator movies this month. Watch Prometheus and covenant and then cry in the shower bc we’ll never see a conclusion to them
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Apr 3, 2023 20:36
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Basebf555 posted:I'm watching a bunch of Alien/Predator movies this month. Chronological order, so start with Prey.
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Apr 3, 2023 20:59
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Prey is no doubt in my mind the best Predator movie, and it's not particularly close.
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Apr 3, 2023 21:12
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Pair up Predator 2 with either I Come In Peace or Marked For Death.
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Apr 3, 2023 21:13
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Predator 2 is my favorite
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Apr 3, 2023 21:19
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Alien/Alien 2: On Earth (1980) Aliens/Demons 2 (1986) Alien3/The Devils (1971) Alien: Resurrection/M3GAN (2022) Prometheus/The Martian (2015) Alien Covenant/Re-Animator (1985) Predator/Sorcerer (1977) Predator 2/Marked For Death (1990) Predators/Turkey Shoot (1982) The Predator/Inglorious Bastards (1978) Prey/Hostiles (2017) Alien v Predator/Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) Alien v Predator: Requiem/Dollman v Demonic Toys (1993) ruddiger fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 22:20
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prey and hostiles is an excellent pairing
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Apr 3, 2023 22:32
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https://twitter.com/elle_hunt/status/1379341076687904773 The thread is great. I'm struggling to think of the last time anyone was this Wrong about anything (and I've read SMG's posts, woo woo woo!)
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Apr 4, 2023 01:25
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Ella dump more like bc her brain is feces
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Apr 4, 2023 01:43
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Mister Speaker posted:https://twitter.com/elle_hunt/status/1379341076687904773 "Horror cannot be set in space." I...
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Apr 4, 2023 01:46
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What exactly makes that thread “great”
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Apr 4, 2023 01:48
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Dawgstar posted:"Horror cannot be set in space." I... That may be the most rigidly deterministic definitions of genre ever.
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Apr 4, 2023 01:48
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horror can't take place on Earth either, because Earth is in space. I love that even Spotify's official twitter account weighed in
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Apr 4, 2023 12:04
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The Bateman voice was my internal dialogue while reading these posts and 
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Apr 4, 2023 13:39
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https://twitter.com/elle_hunt/status/1379343795968479236 This is the special kind of dumb you can only get by saying something nearly smart. Cheap gross-out or jump-scare "horror" can be set anywhere, but actual scare you over time horror requires a certain level of empathy and relateability. If it's not a setting you can see yourself encountering then it needs to work harder to pull you in - I see these characters as real people and do not want anything bad to happen to them so I am scared for them, or this setting is unfamiliar but believable so I can still put myself there. If it's a common setting then there's more straightforward links to pick up the slack - I also am home alone at night, ooh, spooky. Good space horror is as good as any other good film, but while the quality drop off for e.g. comedies is a nice slope or maybe a hyperbola, the quality drop off for space horror is a cliff.
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Apr 4, 2023 14:39
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A fun side effect of this is that Resurrection the sci fi action gross-out comedy ranks a good 3 or 4 points higher out of 10 than Resurrection the horror film.
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Apr 4, 2023 14:53
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Right, that tweet is the equivalent of "Look, fellas, the words 'outer space' do not appear on horrorpedia, what do you want me to say?" It's not that she's capital W WRONG, it's that she's fallen into a wiki-hole. She's no more right or wrong than the person insisting that all the scientists in the film Prometheus graduated at the bottom of their class because some guy decided to add it to the novelization.
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Apr 4, 2023 17:35
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ruddiger posted:She's no more right or wrong than the person insisting that all the scientists in the film Prometheus graduated at the bottom of their class because some guy decided to add it to the novelization. But that’s basically implied by the movie, isn’t it? I thought Vickers chose the crew and she didn’t care at all about the mission. She also had to get the caliber of person who’s willing to go on a years long mission without knowing any details about it.
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Apr 4, 2023 18:31
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david_a posted:But that’s basically implied by the movie, isn’t it? I thought Vickers chose the crew and she didn’t care at all about the mission. She also had to get the caliber of person who’s willing to go on a years long mission without knowing any details about it. I'm not sure if I would say the movie really implies it, more that it's a natural conclusion to come to when you hear Vickers thoughts on the value of the mission. So what we know is that she thinks the mission is pointless and just wants it over with, and that she was the one responsible for putting the crew together. From there you can put 2 and 2 together and say that she probably didn't care that much about the crews qualifications, but the movie is far from definitive about it.
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Apr 4, 2023 18:36
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I honestly would not spend a lot of energy dissecting the opinion of an obvious moron/troll on Twitter.
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Apr 4, 2023 18:48
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david_a posted:But that’s basically implied by the movie, isn’t it? I thought Vickers chose the crew and she didn’t care at all about the mission. She also had to get the caliber of person who’s willing to go on a years long mission without knowing any details about it.
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Apr 4, 2023 19:03
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Splicer posted:There is nothing in the movie to imply that the scientists are incompetent buffoons except for their words and actions. gosh
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Apr 4, 2023 19:13
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Splicer posted:There is nothing in the movie to imply that the scientists are incompetent buffoons except for their words and actions. The film does not well convey whether these are supposed to indicate that they are incompetent buffoons or if their on-screen incompetence and buffoonery are unintentional results of poor writing, directing, and editing. Looping back to Ruddiger’s point a little bit, the Weyland Yutani Report book makes it outright text that Vickers hired the dumbest people she could find to indirectly sabotage the mission  It’s ancillary data not stated in the film so you can take it or leave it, but it’s still pretty funny. Also some more fun trivia, Prometheus got a movie novelization… but only in Japan, and it’s in Japanese. I’m not even sure who wrote it. So far no intrepid multilingual fans have taken the time to translate it as far as I’m aware.
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Apr 4, 2023 19:32
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I mean it obviously tracks that Vickers would not want the mission to succeed, because if it does that means Weyland lives for another X years and she may never get her shot to run the company. Her ideal scenario is they get there, scientists go outside for a while and run some half-assed tests, they don't find anything, they go home.
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Apr 4, 2023 19:35
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The movie does enough to imply vickers did not bring the best
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Apr 4, 2023 19:38
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The scientists of Prometheus aren't incompetent buffoons, they just don't know they're in a horror movie. It's plain by the end of the film that corners have been cut since scientific investigation was never the primary purpose of the mission, but, why would you think that 99th percentile rather than 95th percentile (or whatever) geologists would be better prepared to deal with chaos demons? These guys would've lived if they'd just gotten better grades in school? Sounds like ideology to me.
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Apr 4, 2023 20:07
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Ferrinus posted:The scientists of Prometheus aren't incompetent buffoons, they just don't know they're in a horror movie. It's plain by the end of the film that corners have been cut since scientific investigation was never the primary purpose of the mission, but, why would you think that 99th percentile rather than 95th percentile (or whatever) geologists would be better prepared to deal with chaos demons? These guys would've lived if they'd just gotten better grades in school? Sounds like ideology to me. They probably would have lived were they in touch with their humanity and not each defined by their competing self-interests. They're all too disappointing to tolerate really.
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Apr 4, 2023 20:20
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Really they would more have survived if the armed guards on Prometheus could aim.
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Apr 4, 2023 20:28
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I don't know about that. Didn't the Fifeld-zombie basically ignore gunfire and have to be crushed under some kind of vehicle?
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Apr 4, 2023 20:50
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The Marines from Aliens would not have survived the events of Prometheus.
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Apr 4, 2023 20:56
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Ferrinus posted:I don't know about that. Didn't the Fifeld-zombie basically ignore gunfire and have to be crushed under some kind of vehicle? This is correct. I think they even light him on fire. Granted one could argue that they weren’t using Pulse Rifles (which fire explosive-tipped ammo) so while Fifeld was able to shrug off conventional ammo, pulse rifle ammo might have straight-up blown Fifeld apart like it did to the Xenomorphs in ‘Aliens’. ruddiger posted:The Marines from Aliens would not have survived the events of Prometheus. Save for 1, the Marines of Aliens didn’t survive the events of Aliens either
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Apr 4, 2023 21:09
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Schwarzwald posted:gosh In the Matrix, Morpheus's description of the Machines' use of the Humans makes no sense. Either he's lying, he's wrong, or the laws of thermodynamics just work different there. This is never addressed in the films so we don't know the answer. So yes the words and deeds of the Prometheus crew are those of a science-themed clown car, but whether they're idiots in-fiction or if the reality of Prometheus considers these the actions of intelligent professionals is down to viewer interpretation. From star trek's tropes and conventions we know Kirk beaming down without a helmet isn't supposed to be indicative of any real ineptitude on his part, so is agitating a clearly aggressive unknown animal supposed to come across as stupid in Prometheusland or is this SOP and it's weird that it didn't work this time? If we assume they are idiots in-fiction, we now have to guess why that is, because we don't really get much in-fiction guidance. Are they nepotism hires due to the same corporate hellscape that lead to one of Earth's first FTL ships being wholly owned by a corporation? Did Weyland blow all his money on the ship so the only compensation offered was college credit and parking validation? Did they skimp out on the ship's air recycling or sleep tubes, resulting in poor air recycling and ultimately significant long-term oxygen starvation? Is Weyland an Elon Musk level narcissistic idiot who forced Vickers to hire a bunch of I loving LOVE SCIENCE influencers he followed? Or did Vickers want to see her father fail so bad that she voluntarily shipped off to another planet on a four-year round trip she herself had sabotaged instead of just staying home and dicking with her father's sleep tube which literally only she knew about? All good theories, none of them with any greater textual support than "Morpheus was a weird Q-Anon conspiracy theorist rambling some nonsense about adrenochrome and actually the Matrix is a low-maintenance long-term storage solution designed to keep Humanity alive while the Machines sort out the mess we made of the environment". The Vickers daddy issues theory seems the most plausible because daddy issues is the entire theme of the film, but that's based on metanarrative analysis rather than in-fiction information. So we don't know if they only appear to be idiots due to bad writing, direction, or editing, or if they're supposed to be idiots and it's just the context that was lost to bad writing, direction, and editing.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:12
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Xenomrph posted:This is correct. I think they even light him on fire. The shotgun shot blue poo poo didn't it? I ain't never seen no conventional blue ammo.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:20
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Ferrinus posted:The scientists of Prometheus aren't incompetent buffoons, they just don't know they're in a horror movie. It's plain by the end of the film that corners have been cut since scientific investigation was never the primary purpose of the mission, but, why would you think that 99th percentile rather than 95th percentile (or whatever) geologists would be better prepared to deal with chaos demons? These guys would've lived if they'd just gotten better grades in school? Sounds like ideology to me.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:21
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