Random fic things bothering me

Okay, so, I know that Stargate planets all look like the same bit of Canada
but
survival skills, especially recognising what is locally good to eat, translate poorly between different bits of Earth, let alone between planets.
Wandering around an unknown planet happily picking fruit and nuts and finding the local equivalent of potato? Really? We're supposed to just... figure the whole galaxy has the same foods?

I wouldn't be bothered if the story had any other plot, but they've been stuck on this planet for several thousand words now, and all they do is look longingly at each other and find food.
And thus far the food is the focus.
So, you know, implausible food, I have had time to get annoyed by it.



Also, I was kind of hoping for conversations and a relationship, not just feeding each other and wondering when they fell in love without noticing. But okay. Whatever.

Lawful Good can have several kinds of problems

I was reading an always-angels wingfic the other day and it had one half of the OTP as heaven's good soldier and the other as the fallen, probably demon, rebel dude. And I thought that the characterisation was pushed too far, flattened them out, but I was rolling with it... until the good soldier gets back to 'heaven', and the council that gives him his orders? Is made up of canon bad guys.

At that point, subtlety was gone, and the whole thing stopped even making sense. They'd mixed the alignments and motives of 'heaven' so badly there were capitalist get rich quick scheme guys in charge of the hosts. What does rich even mean when everyone can manifest anything? So then the bad guys made no sense and the story fell apart.

If you want to write about rebellion against heaven, if you want to write the triumph of team free will, then yaayness, go for it, this is a solid place to start. But you've got to see clear what the conflict is.

One of the martial arts films I saw, I think it's Iron Monkey? It had three sides in conflict. It was very very clearly a conflict between Lawful Good, Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil. ( Read more... )

Rampant capitalists are probably Lawful Evil.

Tony Stark is arguably Lawful Evil, before the cave. You can write him as doing it all for the good of the company ie his employees and shareholders, thinking of others first. That's valid too. But you can also write it as complete self centered playboy narcissism, and canon fits fine. That's Lawful Evil. He's getting his, and the getting is good, so why worry about anyone else?

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So Steve as heaven's soldier, a Good man in a Lawful Good organisation, meeting a fallen Chaotic Good Tony Stark and, well, falling for him, or leading heaven's hosts in rebellion in the cause of Good against Law, that all works great. They'll match on the alignment that means everything to Steve.

But finding out heaven is secretly evil? That's oversimplifying the matter. That requires everyone to be stupid for a really long time.

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If you're going to use the heaven vs hell trope set, then heaven is every good thing anyone could ever want, or at least can plausibly sell itself as that. Heaven's angels know unquestionably that they are the good guys, they get what they deserve, and that what they want is the Father's will. If you're going to just drop secretly selfish angels into that, it gets difficult to sell, because what even is it they have left to want? Secretly judgey angels who want all that good stuff for themselves and don't think humans deserve it, sure. Angels who can't even have the good stuff because humans are the only ones that get rewards, great, they can work that problem. Angels fed up with singing the praises of the dude that made them, maybe want their own songs, fine. But it takes a little work, because the source trope is angels and heaven are all the good things, so just dropping some bad guy names on them doesn't make first glance sense.

And it's much more interesting to use the whole set up as a way in to questioning what we even mean by Good.

I keep bouncing out of this Stargate setup

Maybe it's just me, but 'maybe he would snuggle if we were the only two people on the planet' doesn't sound like true love.