The pitfalls of creating a unique setting
Entry posted by Clephas
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I'm currently playing Ai yori Aoi Umi no Hate, AXL's latest game by their 'unusual slice-of-life' team, and the setting is seriously bothering me. It isn't that the concept is boring... there is nothing wrong with the concept of people living on a massive self-repairing ship hundreds of years after the demise of land-bound culture due to global warming. No, the problem is the concept of the game and how it interacts with the setting.
Ok, I can live with the idea that advanced culture was lost - deliberately or otherwise, and I can also live with the characters centering about 80% of their attention on day-to-day affairs. That is normal in a self-sufficient community. However, the idea that recreational culture not existing at all - music being lost entirely, for instance - is ridiculous. Wherever you get a community of humans, you have some kind of recreational culture, whether it is simple sports, drinking contests, tests of strength and stamina, or card games. To put it simply, people might be willing to let go of high tech, but they'll never give up being able to hum a tune while working.
It is such a huge hole in the concept that I just had to shake my head in exasperation.
This isn't the first time I've run into this kind of thing... for some reason, some writers, when they create a fantasy or sci-fi setting that justifies their story, gloss over elements like this that drive me nuts. Moreover, they ignore human nature and history. Even in a confined environment like the one in this setting, people still need recreation and will create it, regardless of the intervention of authority. The first couple of generations might have successfully abandoned culture as they knew it, but the later generations would have inevitably birthed a new recreational culture of some sort. So, the concept is just too ridiculous, at least in my eyes.
Edit: In other words, 'If you are going to create a new setting with a purely human society, you have to justify every difference in a way that makes sense given human history and nature!'
- Zalor, Chronopolis, Narcosis and 1 other
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