"...technological advancement doesn't happen independent of man's choices, so it's not part of the natural order of things."
It's not even the "technological advancement" that is necessarily in the natural order, but the inevitable conflict is due to the existence of the choice to do wrong. When thinking of circular times lines, you have to think reeeeally broad. I'm not saying people are incapable of making the right decisions and putting all their work towards good. I'm saying that when you have billions of lives with billions more to come and each has so many choices laid out in front of them, whether or not it's days or generations on, one of them will make the wrong choice. Andy's Turk might not have been Skynet, but the second it hits the world, how long will it take for one person out of billions to decide that something similar could be used in an aggressive way? Somewhere out there, at least one person wants another dead.
The circle contracts to drop conflict from circulation once world peace ensues. It expands again to include it once one angry arse with enough charisma to get people to follow him comes along. It's always in flux.
I'm not saying the characters are irrelevant. They matter because we place value on them. Just looking at the story in these broad terms is bloody boring and like staring distantly at a chess board just watching the cycle of the game play out before a new ones starts, and another, and another. It only gets interesting when you sit the Knight down and get his story about how he'd die for king John Connor and how he wasn't expecting the Queen to be so normal when he was sent back 5 squares to protect her. The archetype catches people's attention because they are patterns that we as human beings have built. They are typically the foundation on which we can suspend our disbelief while it's the details that make us actually care.
I suppose a better example in the tiny microcosm that is my bedroom would be if Sarah & John Connor never "existed"... if for some bizarre reason in some alternate dimension James Cameron never shared his story with the world, I'd right now be plugging away reading the latest chapters of Girl Genius to fill the void and seeing how Agatha Heterodyne plans to save the world from the Clanks and Constructs that the mad scientists let loose during an industrial revolution gone wrong instead of writing Terminator fan fic in another window. XD
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2009-05-14 01:48 am (UTC)"...technological advancement doesn't happen independent of man's choices, so it's not part of the natural order of things."
It's not even the "technological advancement" that is necessarily in the natural order, but the inevitable conflict is due to the existence of the choice to do wrong. When thinking of circular times lines, you have to think reeeeally broad. I'm not saying people are incapable of making the right decisions and putting all their work towards good. I'm saying that when you have billions of lives with billions more to come and each has so many choices laid out in front of them, whether or not it's days or generations on, one of them will make the wrong choice. Andy's Turk might not have been Skynet, but the second it hits the world, how long will it take for one person out of billions to decide that something similar could be used in an aggressive way? Somewhere out there, at least one person wants another dead.
The circle contracts to drop conflict from circulation once world peace ensues. It expands again to include it once one angry arse with enough charisma to get people to follow him comes along. It's always in flux.
I'm not saying the characters are irrelevant. They matter because we place value on them. Just looking at the story in these broad terms is bloody boring and like staring distantly at a chess board just watching the cycle of the game play out before a new ones starts, and another, and another. It only gets interesting when you sit the Knight down and get his story about how he'd die for king John Connor and how he wasn't expecting the Queen to be so normal when he was sent back 5 squares to protect her. The archetype catches people's attention because they are patterns that we as human beings have built. They are typically the foundation on which we can suspend our disbelief while it's the details that make us actually care.
I suppose a better example in the tiny microcosm that is my bedroom would be if Sarah & John Connor never "existed"... if for some bizarre reason in some alternate dimension James Cameron never shared his story with the world, I'd right now be plugging away reading the latest chapters of Girl Genius to fill the void and seeing how Agatha Heterodyne plans to save the world from the Clanks and Constructs that the mad scientists let loose during an industrial revolution gone wrong instead of writing Terminator fan fic in another window. XD