Just something that kind of came up with a few people I was chatting with on twitter is the fact many people in the audience think they can handle ANYTHING that happens in fiction, saying things like, “If it was me, I would kick Jason in the balls,” or “if I was in Shinji's place, I would kill all of those angels, easily, instead of crying all the time”, “If I was Batman, I'd shoot the Joker”.

Basically there are those who believe in they were X in situation Y they would become some kind of magical godly machoman that does all of the right things and not fail like the characters, and often not they are the kind of person who not only would fail but be curled in a fetal ball crying in the corner.

I have come to dub this kind of thinking, “TvTropes balls.”

Basically a person who spends all this time knowing all of the clichés, but don't realize that in reality that won't help out at all.

Just thought I bring that topic up.

Much like the old armchair tough guys in a way?

I think we all often have a bit of this in us though?

It's like a “keyboard warrior” in a way, maybe? Not a phrase I've heard in a long time haha.

In part it is because some tropes are a tad unrealistic: I remember an thriller movie where the bad guy was this skinny guy wo went around disguised as a woman (a ripoff of Psycho) and at some point he was running against someone menacing them with a cutter.

Obviously the victims fleed in panic, usual old B-movie thriller thing with people who try to run away from the killer and fall over any possible obstacle etc.

But since the guy looked quite skinny and not very menacing, and a cutter isn't exaxctly the most deadly weapon, I had this loss of suspension of disbeief and this question “why don't they just turn back and slap this brat”.

yeah I really hate people like that, it kinda reminds me of people who think that a solar flare is a good thing or people who think they can survive a zombie apocalypse, and i'm like No??? people have grown accustomed to the way we live that it would be very hard to adjust that scenario violence, chaos and destruction from the masses would be very prevalent in such scenarios that it would be ignorant and naive to survive in all the chaos that they would probably end up in the crossfire

This is especially typical of Americans as there are a disturbing percentage who think they could take on and defeat a dangerous wild animal like a bear or cougar bare handed.

People who approach bear and coyote cubs thinking they look cold and need some warmth. People who want to pet the wooly fur of a bison. The tropes have taught them that you can approach wild animals and they won't bite or run you over or rip your face off.

That said, real life law enforcement and military personnel especially elites like Special Forces are much more competent than depicted in horror genre movies and modern weapons are a lot more deadly than depicted in movies.
Large caliber bullets don't make neat holes you can just shrug off unless you're crazed with adrenaline or a big solid person.
You can literally cut someone in half with an automatic weapon. People can literally be disintegrated in a hail of bullets. Grenades don't blow you back neatly, the shrapnel shreds you. Two guys with large bore shotguns would turn Jason into so much hamburger. Can't use that axe when the arm is a bloody stump from a direct hit from a 30.06.

And stabbing with a knife and suffocating someone can take fooooor-ever. That's why it's always multiple stab wounds in reports. Whole lot of TV TROPES ridiculous behavior to go around.

As for zombies? The way they're usually depicted they could be stopped cold by Zulu War British Infantry let alone modern weapons wielded by professionals. (See the movie Zulu for example. Read reports of mass human wave attacks in Korea or WW2 Pacific.)

marcorossi wrote:
“why don't they just turn back and slap this brat”.

Which is what every guy in the theatre was thinking when they first saw Hayden Christiansen as Darth Vader…

I actually found the movie, it's an italian thriller (that I think are called “giallo” in english) from the eighties; “La casa con la scala nel buio” in italian, “A blade in the dark” in english.

Fear this guy:

Also, something about the invincible murderers in thrillers.

Most males, not only in the USA, tend to overvalue thir martial badassness.

I do some martial arts, but I suck, and I know this.

But this is true also for the murderers: how comes that this skinny guy who never goes out of his house because he is an introverted artist with serious psychological problems has the reflexes of Bruce Lee?

In terms of plot often there is an assumption that, this guy is the big bad, and therefore he has plot armor and plot kung fu just because.

Sometimes it's annoying.
For example, in a show that I liked a lot (blue eyes samurai), at some point there is a big bad who fights two samurais who have been shown as super strong during the episodes, and while this bad guy was never shown using a sword during the whole serie, somehow they are tied. How comes?

Not to forget those “How … should have ended” videos, where some people apparently put a lot of effort into showing off how clever they feel.
This is exactly why nerds still get bullied, even by people normally not dumb and starved of self-esteem enough to even consider such a thing. I've got nothing against nerds in general, I'm a webcomic freak after all, but as with everything there's an annoying end of the scale.

I'm probably annoyed by this because I personally feel way more clever than them for having long realised that temporary suspension of disbelief is a thing and thus learned to ignore what others might refer to as plot holes as long as I like the story and its characters and visuals and so on.

The really clever ones are probably somewhere in the middle and keep it to themselves. 😉

Okay, confession time.
I often have get a bit peeved when it comes to slashers when it is some scrawny guy armed with a box cutter, and at times I start the armchair quarterbacking as one thing is, I had been in that situation a few times in my life, when dad gotten extra messed up I had to hold him off growing up or out run him, or the time I was jumped and nearly killed in Baltimore by some wannabe thugs.

I learned a lot of things, a big one is first step to survival is running is not enough, one has to get to a very busy area, even if people won't jump in to help out but cause a scene and I bet the cops will show up which will hopefully chase off the attackers. Another thing I learned is if you can't run, grab anything you got and just start swinging, shove them over, smack them, just get them off their feet and than run, don't stay and “finish them off” like so many armchair slasher fanatics like to say.

But back to the thing that annoys me, the fact to make the slasher film tends to break reality to force the whole scenario to work but often those breaks are not only ignored but treated as a fact.

Phones have to be taken away, the person has to be in rural bumfuck nowhere, and the victims has to be pretty physically weak, and kind of stupid, and the killer has to be able to teleport a lot.

Honestly it isn't even the fact the movies does that, I can understand that needs to be done but the fact the ones champion these movies being realistic and putting down my favorite subgenre, ghosts and haunted house, drives me crazy.

In the real world I've had more run ins with ghosts and haunting than I have had with slashers. I am being totally serious. Me and my liking overnight shifts. In senior residences? Only thing worse is a children's hospital. You will hear things that just are not there.

And any credible self-defense instructor will tell you that projectiles are a great thing, even something like throwing sand and gravel. Humans will slow down, even if Jason and his ilk will not. And there's the fact that a spray of 5.56 fire across the gut would likely cut them in half or at least cause enough trauma for them to just lie down and do some serious bleeding.

Furwerk studio wrote:
But back to the thing that annoys me, the fact to make the slasher film tends to break reality to force the whole scenario to work but often those breaks are not only ignored but treated as a fact.

Phones have to be taken away, the person has to be in rural bumfuck nowhere, and the victims has to be pretty physically weak, and kind of stupid, and the killer has to be able to teleport a lot.

It's this very cheesiness that I kind of like about some of them. The key for me here is whether the movie takes itself seriously. If it does - and I think, they're the ones you've probably got in mind here - it's indeed more than annoying, though.

Furwerk studio wrote:
Honestly it isn't even the fact the movies does that, I can understand that needs to be done but the fact the ones champion these movies being realistic and putting down my favorite subgenre, ghosts and haunted house, drives me crazy.

Totally seconded! I think they only do that because the former are easier to write, direct and act, so they can be done by cheap, inexperienced crews without necessarily ending up as a complete mess-up. Not that all slashers are. There are many made by highly-experienced stellar film makers and you can tell the difference (and these often don't take themselves too seriously for some reason).
Ghosts and haunted houses, which I like a lot better too, along with psychological horror in general, are on a wholly different artistic level. In slasher films you might get away with a relatively “objective” reality, as plenty of horrifying stuff happens in the outward action that you can just point a camera at and be done with it. In our favourite horror genres, however, the storyteller needs to work from a much more subjective angle, as the frightening part comes to a large extent from what happens within the characters' minds and yours, the viewer's. So the whole thing has to get the mood and tone exactly right, as if it all was seen straight through another human's eyes instead of a camera's. That takes some serious skill, especially as they've of course only got a camera to work with! There are a million of tiny important details to keep track of, and if anything goes wrong, they can't just “fix” it with another unseen dart into the scream queen's buttocks and liberally spraying an additional gallon of red paint on the set. Calling slashers more realistic because of that is a really cheap excuse that can work only on those who just don't get how to watch films. It's the other way round.

bravo1102 wrote:
In the real world I've had more run ins with ghosts and haunting than I have had with slashers. I am being totally serious. Me and my liking overnight shifts. In senior residences? Only thing worse is a children's hospital. You will hear things that just are not there.

Nice to see somebody talk about their encounters with the supernatural openly because I had seen, heard and experienced a lot of very weird and spooky shit out there in the world, but keep it to myself even in so-called paranormal believer forums/sub-reddits due to how many there is bad skeptics there is. Much of it felt like it pose a very real threat if I didn't get out of the area.

The dead can't hurt you my ass.

bravo1102 wrote:

And any credible self-defense instructor will tell you that projectiles are a great thing, even something like throwing sand and gravel. Humans will slow down, even if Jason and his ilk will not. And there's the fact that a spray of 5.56 fire across the gut would likely cut them in half or at least cause enough trauma for them to just lie down and do some serious bleeding.

Oh yeah, I think even the heavy hitters of the slasher genre had to stop when getting shot or at least something in the eyes, in real life it does help get away faster when that person is nursing some mace in the eyes, or a shot to the leg.

Lost a bit of my train of thought because I often wonder why in a lot of zombie fiction many people don't try to shoot out their limbs. Less in a “that's not realistic” way of thinking but more of a “that be a neat little trick to do,” thing.

To PaulEberhardt:

Honestly it feels like at times people forgot how to watch movies, or read books, or how to deal with fiction.

I talk about the supernatural openly because I am a skeptic. My favorite reading is Joe Nickell and others in the skeptical community. But I know sometimes things happen that just shouldn't be and can't be explained and require further investigation. Took me nearly thirty years to determine my “mothman” encounter was an owl. Took five years to determine my orb sighting on security cameras was actually bats. Sometimes regular nature is very extraordinary and gets mistaken for the supernatural but that doesn't make the occurrences any less extraordinary and amazing.

bravo1102 wrote:
I talk about the supernatural openly because I am a skeptic. My favorite reading is Joe Nickell and others in the skeptical community. But I know sometimes things happen that just shouldn't be and can't be explained and require further investigation. Took me nearly thirty years to determine my “mothman” encounter was an owl. Took five years to determine my orb sighting on security cameras was actually bats. Sometimes regular nature is very extraordinary and gets mistaken for the supernatural but that doesn't make the occurrences any less extraordinary and amazing.

I am a true believer, but even I have to call out some shit as animals just being animals or “orbs” being just dust particles.

Kind of on/off topic there's a lot of scary videos that say they're real but just hoaxes and all I can think is, “why the hell isn't Hollywood employing these people to make horror movies?”

I should note that every where the wife and I travel that has ghost walks, we do them. I also collect regional ghost story books. Some are autographed by the authors. It's local lore, legend and history so I just eat it up. One book “When the Ghost Screams ” about Asbury Park was given to me by the senior residence librarian. She passed quietly a week later.
A few months later I finished the book I was reading and another just appeared at the entrance sitting on the handrail. Sure there is coincidence but sometimes it's hit you in the face “wtf, there's just no way” coincidence. The book was the autobiography of my favorite actress. No one had been at the entrance, I hadn't seen the book anywhere before. It was part of my job to check the library on my rounds. Just too much of a coincidence.

At the time I was introduced to local paranormal club and grabbed some opportunities to listen to them. I listen and soak it up. Not actively debunk. Most of the time I know more about the topic than believers. That's me. I've only been studying this stuff for fifty years. I really should mine it more for my comics. I already did for UFO lore and busted a few tropes. I did the same in my science fiction horror story.

marcorossi wrote:


Fear this guy:

Hahaha so many balls!

marcorossi wrote:
Sometimes it's annoying.
For example, in a show that I liked a lot (blue eyes samurai), at some point there is a big bad who fights two samurais who have been shown as super strong during the episodes, and while this bad guy was never shown using a sword during the whole series, somehow they are tied. How comes?

I find that trope SO annoying.
It's often an anime and manga thing: a weak, small person has phenomenal power and easily crushes gigantic and powerful opponents.
Obviously the purpose is to show how surprisingly powerful they are, and that can work when done right but it's usually taken too far so that all it does is break the logic of the world so that nothing makes sense and the scene just becomes annoying.

You have a giant, 80 tonne tank that can't do anything against a tiny 45kg girl… a 3 meter tall superhuman cyborg with bulging muscles, mechanical augmentations and attached weapons and yet they can't compete against a 14 year old teen boy with floppy hair… A football field sized dragon that breaths fire which can melt forged steel and yet a couple of magical girls and a dwarf can knock it out in less time that in takes to blink…

The world logic makes no sense because power, size, and threat mean nothing, and that makes the story less enjoyable because it's not internally consistent.
The only way it works is if the smaller, weaker person defeating the more powerful opponent is shown to be truly surprising, very unusual and astonishing to other people in that world rather than just business as usual.

With ghosts I'm not even a “skeptic”, I just know they don't exist XD
They have not one single possibility of being real, they're totally part of cultural belief and nothing else.

BUT, I full accept their “reality” in fiction.

Ozoneocean wrote:
With ghosts I'm not even a “skeptic”, I just know they don't exist XD
They have not one single possibility of being real, they're totally part of cultural belief and nothing else.

BUT, I full accept their “reality” in fiction.

That's exactly the reductionist thinking a true believer uses. They can't accept the lack of evidence whereas you couldn't accept any evidence that doesn't fit in with your world view.
Being a skeptic merely means that I hold with the evidence. So far ghosts haven't come close to meeting any standard of evidence that passes a decent “BS” test. There are some “iffy” things but doesn't meet any standards of evidence and certainly is not the simplest and most credible explanation based on what evidence we do have. So I withhold belief but I hold with Hamlet in saying “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” But then you could be totally correct, just I don't think there's enough for me to say “definitely don't exist”

They certainly make for a good story especially if you mess with the cultural definitions a little. Kind of like that bravo1102 did in his story for the Drunkduck horror anthology. Everyone read it now. And if you don't have a copy, get one so you too can bask in his genius at subverting tropes. 🤣😉 Not really but it's fun to play with such things.

And they certainly make for a good story. And I'm a storyteller.

LOL you can related me to a “true believer” 🤣🤣
But that doesn't work 😅
For a believer it requires effort, it needs them to rationalise and change reality to fit with their silly illogical notions that go against reality.

It's all very well to hear a ghost stoey and passively beleive it but as soon as anyone tries to think of how the world actually works with ghosts really existing it means they have to rationalise and work at it.
Even playing at being a sort of agnostic skeptic involved work.

Since I accept that it's nonsense I don't have to do that. I don't have to rationalise extra physics and chemistry to explain things that are purely cultural beliefs. 😇

Ozoneocean wrote:
LOL you can related me to a “true believer” 🤣🤣
But that doesn't work 😅
For a believer it requires effort, it needs them to rationalise and change reality to fit with their silly illogical notions that go against reality.

It's all very well to hear a ghost stoey and passively beleive it but as soon as anyone tries to think of how the world actually works with ghosts really existing it means they have to rationalise and work at it.
Even playing at being a sort of agnostic skeptic involved work.

Since I accept that it's nonsense I don't have to do that. I don't have to rationalise extra physics and chemistry to explain things that are purely cultural beliefs. 😇

Yup. Just trying out the apologist's favorite argument to an atheist. But you can't prove a negative. You can't say god doesn't exist, properly have to say there's no evidence that she exists. I don't have to rationalize anything. I have Occam's razor. Get out the razor and just cut it all up. Any kind of rationalization doesn't pass a BS detector.
So we're using somewhat different methods but we do get to the same conclusion.

But the fact remains that “Ghosts Don't Kill” is a work of pure genius at subverting typical haunting tropes.

Actually, I can say that God (or ghosts) doesn't exist, it's just that people refuse to believe me.

If God took a day off just once, a lot of people would suddenly notice his absence and sorely miss it. Unfortunately, taking a day off doesn't seem to be in His nature. Pity, really. Or perhaps not, all things considered.
But believe what you like. I'm not here to convert anyone, I just know what makes most sense to me. I do believe in hard scientific facts as well, without compromises even, only they're a totally different domain, since science is about how the world works, not why and what for, or how to deal with it. To me, trusting both in science and in God presents no conflict at all. I also believe He doesn't mind very much what you call Him, I just prefer God because there's no need to make up a new word/name/label if an old one exists that gets the message across just fine.

As for ghosts, I'd say that it depends on what you define as a ghost. I personally don't believe in them, not in any physical way at least and not in what I have to call the standard definitions, and all the other definitions are too vague for me to really settle on an opinion. I could imagine ways to allow for the presence of ghosts in this world, though, if I felt the need to.