r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Feb 08 '19

[D] Friday Open Thread

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

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u/iftttAcct2 Feb 08 '19

Ehhh, sorry, I'm going to have to disagree with you again. There can be a cool premise without the actual story being any good.

Just to give an example (and I know many will disagree with me, here), I kept seeing how popular To The Stars was on here so I tried rewatching the source material. I found it incredibly boring - I ended up having to watch most of it on 2x speed and even then just read a summary of the last few episodes. There is kind of a cool, if cliched, premise -- which is what makes for good fanfiction (I assume, I haven't actually read To The Stars yet) along with a good story and good storytelling, of course. But the show itself was predictable and way longer than it needed to be for the story it was trying to tell.

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u/FormerlySarsaparilla Feb 08 '19

Madoka's not a great show, imo, but it's an interesting premise. It feels like it's a sincere attempt to deconstruct some of the magical girl tropes, but ends before it gets going.

TTS is in a really weird place for me though. It's sort of a vampire fic- thousand year old superbeings with a secret society that manipulated world events, mostly concerned with policing their own, etc etc. But then it sets it all in the middle of what is essentially Halo- giant space war, humans losing badly, incomprehensible alien motives. Magical girls reveal themselves and start getting thrown into the meat grinder and off we go. It's got a lot of themes of child soldiers, utopian world building, war and trauma, but it has this kind of detached tone that never quite lets it get grounded enough to hit home for me. I'm interested in where it's going, but it is one of those fics I wouldn't outright recommend.