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Widely-theatrically released movies (of recent years) are a terrible way to learn about life, or storytelling (warning: long)


Tyranno
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Okay, this rant is going to be a bit strange, as I know places like IMDb and YouTube, where some of these stories come from, are not exactly associated with high intellect (and I really want to know what would happen if aliens used those two sites as the only sources in the search for intelligent species on Earth...).

But some things just leave thoughts swirling round my head over and over again until I just have to get them out.

So basically, this is about widely-theatrically released movies, which are usually just an excuse to show a celebrity and/or special effects demonstration, and as thus are shoddily-written, have been like this for so long that people have started thinking either that this reflects reality or even how storytelling should be, whether in older movies, less known movies, or other things such as... even Creepypasta, really.

Before we get into this, there's this thing called "suspension of disbelief" which, essentially, boils down to the fact that if I can't suspend disbelief for the idea that the entities the actors are portraying are supposed to be human beings, I'm not going to suspend disbelief for Spider-Man, alien invasions, of orcs and unicorns.

"Lessons" people "learned" from recent theatrical releases:

If you're doing something you shouldn't be, people will notice you, even if their focus on something else entirely. If you're going to meet a drug dealer, people who care and are in another room will immediately approach you, making buying drugs more difficult.

Because humans are Lego, damage caused to one location such as breaking an arm or being shot/stabbed in the chest will not impact utility of other body parts, such as making it difficult to walk or use of your arms, for kinetic energy can't travel through your body to reach the break in your arm bones, and chest muscles certainly aren't used in heavy lifting or anything.

(Chest muscles have also been argued about by both atheists, who argue a benevolent deity would never give the human body muscles that do nothing, and the religious, who argue muscles that don't do anything cannot be the result of evolution.)

Dumb/poor writing in wide theatrical movies causing people to get lost when seeing something competently written:

If something is onscreen and of plot relevance, characters in that scene "should be blatantly noticeable" and the characters "must be blind" to not notice.

Not understanding characters automatically not knowing things the audience knows.

Not understanding something a character said not being true, unless it was blatantly clear to be a lie or that the character is untrustworthy (a big sign of the shoddy writing in many modern movies - they usually won't leave it to the audience to figure out such things).

Poor writing in wide theatrical releases causing people to fail to understand a character doing/not doing what a real person would/would not do:

In a certain movie, a rare example of a wide theatrical release with competent writing, it appeared the younger son of a couple had been the first to be visited by aliens. It's later revealed the older son was. Then later the parents discover some pictures he drew in his younger days, much his brother did in the movie's current timelines.

Of course *groan* an issue brought up was "why wouldn't the parents remember their son drawing those pictures"... because parents remember every single thing a three-year-old (or whatever) did, just in case there was some significance at any point in their lives.

The classic "character is an idiot for not believing in [whatever, e g zombies]; even though no real person would.

Poor writing making people unable to understand realism regarding to fantastical concepts:

"[Comment about absence of explanation as to supernatural elements]" - in reality, if things like ghosts exist, humanity knows so little of them that they cannot prove they exist. As such, in a ghost story attempting realism, any explanation of the how and why of ghosts would ruin the effect.

There's other stuff too, but I can't remember and this is long enough as is.

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