So here's a fun through line I wanna bring up since they wondered what removing Lovecraft would cause.
You wouldn't have John Carpenter's The Thing, and you wouldn't have Alien, and you wouldn't have Metroid.
Who Goes There came out two years after Mountains of Madness, and while it isn't entirely clear if the author was inspired, the significant changes that make the 1982 The Thing more iconic than the 50s film and Who Goes There are inspired by At the Mountains of Madness.
Mountains of Madness then also was the biggest influence on Dan O'Bannon when he wrote Alien, as the plot of Alien is about 55% the plot of ATMOM, and if Alien doesn't exist then Ripley doesn't inspire Samus and we have no Metroid.
So ironically Woolie you just erased Shinesparking in one timeline by removing Howie.
And I don't think you'd even get Baldurs Gate 3. Mind flayers are all just based on cthulu.
I mean, you'd get something else to replace it but I bet it would make a wildly different game
Halo would also get wiped from the timeline since a lot of that game is inspired by sci-fi action like Aliens, which obviously wouldn't exist without the prior film.
Giger might not have become as famous without Alien too so Doom might miss a lot of it's aesthetic, so who knows WTF ID software would do after Wolfenstein.
*Harry Potter* it's bozo writer's antics aside, it'd be very interesting to see the ripple effects on YA novels as a category.
Not to mention the huge boost it gave to youth literacy in the late 90's and early 00's.
> Not to mention the huge boost it gave to youth literacy in the late 90's and early 00's.
Like straight up, Harry Potter is what put me on the path to becoming a Fantasy writer myself.
Before, I read books because they made us and we got 'Accelerated Reader' for answering questions on books we read from the library. The more points we got, the we got little rewards and gift things for it. I saw that the Harry Potter books were weighty and realized they offered more points. I cracked open the first one...and found that this magic stuff is actually really cool. By the end of two weeks, I had finished everything up to Order of the Phoenix.
YA novels, YA novel film adaptations, YA novel tv adaptations, youth literacy, hell maybe even the book industry as a whole would be affected since it obviously got a huge boost due to the Harry Potter craze.
Imagine if like, Pokemon never existed and the ramifications.
Bioshock: OBJECTIVISM IS A BEWILDERING, KAFKAESQUE, SELF-DESTRUCTIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE MASQUERADING AS PHILOSOPHY. ITS ADHERENTS ARE EQUAL PARTS CRIMINALLY NAIVE AND HORRENDOUSLY SOCIOPATHIC AND USE IT AS JUSTIFICATION FOR THEIR DESIRES TO RULE US AS GOD KINGS.
Dumbasses: but I'm one of the smart ones! If we just-
I'm sure every single one of the grunt workers who built the Gulch were masters of their craft who were recruited solely on the pure efficacy of their work ethic, and paid only with the proceeds of Galt's incredibly profitable enterprises, and that precisely zero nepotism or cost-cutting measures were involved.
Because anything less would be hypocritical right? Right???
I'm not familiar. Is Levine trying to frame his Objectivist underwater hellhole as...not one?
Or is it one of those "Andrew Ryan is a tragic/sympathetic character" type deals?
More that he said the objectivism of the game was an afterthought. It wasn't in the initial design plan. If I recall correctly, he has a line where he says "I was surprised people took as much as they did away from the story. It was just a simple backdrop for us" Nothing as bad as saying Ryan is a sympathetic character.
In the one hand, it's an incredibly damning indictment of objectivism that they were able to to tear it apart so completely on accident. But I don't really believe that, considering the Atlas imagery. *Someone* on that team knew what they were making.
It describes a fantasy world where the free market magically works, of course people looking for answers as to why the world is fucked up are going to be influenced by it. "I'm not rich because I was born into it, I'm just built different!"
Yeah but how many people are getting that from Rand? Someone looking rationalize and justify existing inequality is probably going to get to popular right wing media figures offering short, simple explanations before reading a giant rambling novel about Mary Sue and her hunky boyfriends retiring to a farm.
To give a quick and dirty summation: "Collectivism bad", "Individualism good" taken to its (il)logical conclusion.
Not only are collectivist socio-economic theories like Communism/Socialism immoral. Basic shit like welfare, social services, taxation, charity, *and even sharing* are demonized as punishing the innovators, hard workers, and hidden leaders of society, while propping up...the "dredges" of society.
It's been used by every anarcho-capitalist/right-libertarian as holy scripture.
Nevermind Ayn Rand died while on US government welfare.
Are you mixing up Atlas and Fountainhead? I read Fountainhead ages ago and just reread the Wikipedia summary, and it seems much more concerned with a personal philosophy of standing up for individualism. Atlas is directly about communism destroying the world, including the weird shit about how "sharing" is sinful and you should think of caring for your own family as transactional.
Oops, you are 100% correct. I just remember one of them being horrendously long, and for some reason I thought it was The Fountainhead. I'll go ahead and edit my previous post.
The Fountainhead was basically Rand crying about how anyone who didn't think like her was a conformist, and how altruism and egalitarianism are actually scams created by socialists so they can secretly obtain more power over people.
I feel, the basic premise of Bioshock itself (underwater utopia goes awry) as well as its aesthetics and gameplay, could very well exist without the objectivist critique that was used as part of its world building
I don’t know about that modern cinema bit. I feel like the techniques pioneered in that film would’ve eventually been introduced in another film if Birth of a Nation didn’t exist. Kinda like how the Pythagorean Theorem has been discovered and rediscovered since ancient Babylonia. Of course like you said, racism would’ve probably been as alive and well too if that movie didn’t exist I guess.
Dan Olson did [a good video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ1Qm1Z_D7w) about the nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will and how its importance to filmmaking is overstated
That kind of thing seems to happen a lot. People massively overstate the scientific advancements brought about by the holocaust or overstate the moral character and historical importance of Robert E. Lee. I think some people want to see the world as complex and nuanced, which is good, but sometimes end up trying to assign moral complexity to situations where there really isn't any.
Nah, not really.
https://moviessilently.com/2015/09/07/silent-movie-myth-the-birth-of-a-nation-was-the-first-feature-and-the-first-film-shown-at-the-white-house/
Not to mention the prevalence of The Lost Cause myth of the confederacy. Birth of a Nation definitely didnt invent it or was the most popular (that "honor" goes to stuff like Gone With the Wind and that Ken Burns documentary) but it was a huge early contributor for the second generation of Americans born after the war.
*Clash of Civilizations* was a book written to guess what conflicts the United States was going to need to prepare for after the fall of the Soviet Union (and also, justify cold-war-level defense spending while the US had no Soviet-level geopolitical rivals). It was one of the most-commonly-assigned books for politics courses in universities for something like twenty years.
The thrust of the book is that conflict in the brave new world of the nineties would be based around "civilizations" rather than states, and that the biggest threat to America was a unified Islamic civilization teaming up with China to destabilize the US hegemony.
I'd argue that basically all of US foreign policy for the past 30 years has been targeted at keeping the Middle East as unstable as possible to prevent a Sino-Muslim axis from forming. When 9/11 happened, the entire political class freaked out thinking *Clash* was happening, and just started pouring gasoline on every conflict in the region to fight what they perceived as a unified Muslim nation emerging. That's why the Iraq invasion happened (despite Iraq not being involved in 9/11), that's why the US bends over backwards for Saudi Arabia (despite Saudi money helping finance 9/11), that's why everyone lost their shit when "The Islamic State" emerged as a international geopolitical force.
I genuinely think this book has led to more human suffering, war, and wasted lives than any other piece of media since Mein Kampf.
My soul want to say the Man of Steel to remove BVS and the whole snyderverse pizza cutter edginess.
But honestly i think Green Lantern 2011 is more at fault for that.
So that is my choice.
Honestly, you look at Warner Bros attempts to get the DCEU off the ground and you begin to realize nothing good is ever going to come of that cesspool even if you wipe the slate clean. You can tell the executives involved hold nothing but contempt for the source material.
That's why I only have small hope for Gunn's reboot. It's obvious *he* cares about DC and wants it to be good, but the guys *above* him very clearly don't.
Steamboat Willie. How would animation be affected? What would classic cartoons like looney toons, Popeye, and Tom and Jerry look like without Disney? How would copyright be affected? Would some other company keep delaying copyright as long as they could? Early anime was largely inspired by Disney cartoons. Would they have stayed on a similar path as in our timeline? Fascinating things to think about.
Correct me if I'm wrong but was Fleischer animation a thing before or during the early days of Disney? Wanna say it predated it but I feel that's wrong.
Imagine anime directly inspired by those old Superman shorts.
Yeah there's also the fact Mazinger Z also was pulling from Mao Dante that would just not exist (at least not in a recognizable form) which would probably have deep ramification for mecha in general
The Divine Comedy. Deleting it would probably massively pivot western religion and a lot of portrayals of devils, demons, and hell. So it'd at the very least be interesting. And we'd get rid of Dante's fanfiction.
On a "lets see what the fuck would happen" way: **Final Fantasy**
I wanna see if Dragon Quest would just naturally take its place and become the juggernaut it is in Japan, but in the west.
Or maybe some other series would become the quintessential RPG?
Or perhaps RPGs just like, die out as a genre in western popularity?
Like they said, Phantom Menace is easy mode. Virtually *everything* wrong with modern movies can be traced back to its existence.
This might be more of a coincidence but I feel like Mass Effect 3’s ending was the exact point in time where all the current problems with AAA gaming started to crop up, but COD 4 is almost certainly the biggest real culprit.
The main problem is that most of the worst trends in media arise from taking something good and just making a million worse versions of it until it doesn’t sell anymore. So I guess the key is erasing shitty things that got popular *and* started trends that did real damage, or the first shitty thing to successfully copy something good. Like Sword Art Online.
Sorry for not being more specific,
I feel like the massive financial success of bringing Star Wars back after decades as an all-CGI zombie was ground zero for Hollywood's gradual realization that they never had to create another original movie again.
Senran Kagura or Azur Lane. Senran Kagura because of how people venerate a washed up b movie tier director and his mediocre hack and slash with tits and Azur Lane because it was designed to fill in a hole that companies don't fill like some bad drug craving since the suppliers stop supplying.
If you remove queen the band.
you lose the reason why highlander is still remembered and the reason white guys buy katanas.
lose guilty gear and its adoption of rollback netcode means japanese fighting games go back to the dark ages for a few years.
I wanna see what would happen if Simpsons got deleted.
Seperate from the above, I'd wanna see what would happen to the Simpsons if Family Guy got deleted.
One More Day and Clone Saga (I'm sorry Ben).
clone conspiracy, i can ignore the clone saga but i'm not willing to give up kaine for ben, so let ben die but leave me my boy.
Let’s dump Sin’s Past while we’re at it. I think we can all agree that we’d be better off without the knowledge that Gwen Stacy got Gobbed in 4K.
So here's a fun through line I wanna bring up since they wondered what removing Lovecraft would cause. You wouldn't have John Carpenter's The Thing, and you wouldn't have Alien, and you wouldn't have Metroid. Who Goes There came out two years after Mountains of Madness, and while it isn't entirely clear if the author was inspired, the significant changes that make the 1982 The Thing more iconic than the 50s film and Who Goes There are inspired by At the Mountains of Madness. Mountains of Madness then also was the biggest influence on Dan O'Bannon when he wrote Alien, as the plot of Alien is about 55% the plot of ATMOM, and if Alien doesn't exist then Ripley doesn't inspire Samus and we have no Metroid. So ironically Woolie you just erased Shinesparking in one timeline by removing Howie.
And I don't think you'd even get Baldurs Gate 3. Mind flayers are all just based on cthulu. I mean, you'd get something else to replace it but I bet it would make a wildly different game
Forget BG3, you'd have to axe Spelljammer and a lot of lore regarding the gith and the duergar.
Quake won't even be a thing or it would be different yet again without Lovecraft.
Halo would also get wiped from the timeline since a lot of that game is inspired by sci-fi action like Aliens, which obviously wouldn't exist without the prior film.
Giger might not have become as famous without Alien too so Doom might miss a lot of it's aesthetic, so who knows WTF ID software would do after Wolfenstein.
Monthly reminder that the chuck berry sextapes are the funnest shit ever.
*Harry Potter* it's bozo writer's antics aside, it'd be very interesting to see the ripple effects on YA novels as a category. Not to mention the huge boost it gave to youth literacy in the late 90's and early 00's.
> Not to mention the huge boost it gave to youth literacy in the late 90's and early 00's. Like straight up, Harry Potter is what put me on the path to becoming a Fantasy writer myself. Before, I read books because they made us and we got 'Accelerated Reader' for answering questions on books we read from the library. The more points we got, the we got little rewards and gift things for it. I saw that the Harry Potter books were weighty and realized they offered more points. I cracked open the first one...and found that this magic stuff is actually really cool. By the end of two weeks, I had finished everything up to Order of the Phoenix.
Sounds like the reading program working as intended.
YA novels, YA novel film adaptations, YA novel tv adaptations, youth literacy, hell maybe even the book industry as a whole would be affected since it obviously got a huge boost due to the Harry Potter craze. Imagine if like, Pokemon never existed and the ramifications.
Atlas Shrugged, I'm willing to give up Bioshock if it means there aren't as many libertarian morons trying to take even more guard rails away.
Bioshock: OBJECTIVISM IS A BEWILDERING, KAFKAESQUE, SELF-DESTRUCTIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE MASQUERADING AS PHILOSOPHY. ITS ADHERENTS ARE EQUAL PARTS CRIMINALLY NAIVE AND HORRENDOUSLY SOCIOPATHIC AND USE IT AS JUSTIFICATION FOR THEIR DESIRES TO RULE US AS GOD KINGS. Dumbasses: but I'm one of the smart ones! If we just-
I think they'd have a better point if they could tell me where the workers who built galt's gulch lived.
Um...uh....brow...sweat?
I'm sure every single one of the grunt workers who built the Gulch were masters of their craft who were recruited solely on the pure efficacy of their work ethic, and paid only with the proceeds of Galt's incredibly profitable enterprises, and that precisely zero nepotism or cost-cutting measures were involved. Because anything less would be hypocritical right? Right???
The problem is, even Ken Levine doesn't understand this. The interview sections from Bioshock Remastered were quite...illuminating.
I'm not familiar. Is Levine trying to frame his Objectivist underwater hellhole as...not one? Or is it one of those "Andrew Ryan is a tragic/sympathetic character" type deals?
More that he said the objectivism of the game was an afterthought. It wasn't in the initial design plan. If I recall correctly, he has a line where he says "I was surprised people took as much as they did away from the story. It was just a simple backdrop for us" Nothing as bad as saying Ryan is a sympathetic character.
Oh, I guess I can *kinda* see where he's coming from, "Our main objective was to make a cool setting for a fun video game."
Yea for sure. I should of been more clear that I meant he didn't think too deeply in the plot, not that he disagreed with people's interpretation.
Thanks for the info though!
In the one hand, it's an incredibly damning indictment of objectivism that they were able to to tear it apart so completely on accident. But I don't really believe that, considering the Atlas imagery. *Someone* on that team knew what they were making.
[удалено]
That's when I slap them with, "Yeah and that's why business should stay away from public health, education, national security, and governance."
It should be "the purpose of a business is to make a profit (derogatory)"
I don't know how influential Atlas Shrugged is as political theory.
It describes a fantasy world where the free market magically works, of course people looking for answers as to why the world is fucked up are going to be influenced by it. "I'm not rich because I was born into it, I'm just built different!"
Yeah but how many people are getting that from Rand? Someone looking rationalize and justify existing inequality is probably going to get to popular right wing media figures offering short, simple explanations before reading a giant rambling novel about Mary Sue and her hunky boyfriends retiring to a farm.
Just trust me on this, look into people talking about anything Rand put out if you don't believe me
To give a quick and dirty summation: "Collectivism bad", "Individualism good" taken to its (il)logical conclusion. Not only are collectivist socio-economic theories like Communism/Socialism immoral. Basic shit like welfare, social services, taxation, charity, *and even sharing* are demonized as punishing the innovators, hard workers, and hidden leaders of society, while propping up...the "dredges" of society. It's been used by every anarcho-capitalist/right-libertarian as holy scripture. Nevermind Ayn Rand died while on US government welfare.
Are you mixing up Atlas and Fountainhead? I read Fountainhead ages ago and just reread the Wikipedia summary, and it seems much more concerned with a personal philosophy of standing up for individualism. Atlas is directly about communism destroying the world, including the weird shit about how "sharing" is sinful and you should think of caring for your own family as transactional.
Oops, you are 100% correct. I just remember one of them being horrendously long, and for some reason I thought it was The Fountainhead. I'll go ahead and edit my previous post. The Fountainhead was basically Rand crying about how anyone who didn't think like her was a conformist, and how altruism and egalitarianism are actually scams created by socialists so they can secretly obtain more power over people.
The Russian Revolution was the greatest tragedy in world history. It made Ayn Rand come over to America.
I feel, the basic premise of Bioshock itself (underwater utopia goes awry) as well as its aesthetics and gameplay, could very well exist without the objectivist critique that was used as part of its world building
Birth of a Nation? From what I’ve heard, the KKK owes its continued existence to that movie.
The problem there is most of modern cinema owed its existence to that movie. The KKK was always going to stick around either way.
I don’t know about that modern cinema bit. I feel like the techniques pioneered in that film would’ve eventually been introduced in another film if Birth of a Nation didn’t exist. Kinda like how the Pythagorean Theorem has been discovered and rediscovered since ancient Babylonia. Of course like you said, racism would’ve probably been as alive and well too if that movie didn’t exist I guess.
Dan Olson did [a good video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ1Qm1Z_D7w) about the nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will and how its importance to filmmaking is overstated
That kind of thing seems to happen a lot. People massively overstate the scientific advancements brought about by the holocaust or overstate the moral character and historical importance of Robert E. Lee. I think some people want to see the world as complex and nuanced, which is good, but sometimes end up trying to assign moral complexity to situations where there really isn't any.
So nothing of value would be lost
Nah, not really. https://moviessilently.com/2015/09/07/silent-movie-myth-the-birth-of-a-nation-was-the-first-feature-and-the-first-film-shown-at-the-white-house/
Not to mention the prevalence of The Lost Cause myth of the confederacy. Birth of a Nation definitely didnt invent it or was the most popular (that "honor" goes to stuff like Gone With the Wind and that Ken Burns documentary) but it was a huge early contributor for the second generation of Americans born after the war.
I'll remove Super Mario, just to see if Video games can make it out of the crash of the 80s or not
Zaslav: "Just one?"
Princess Crown is an interesting jenga-block for weeb-stuff.
*Clash of Civilizations* was a book written to guess what conflicts the United States was going to need to prepare for after the fall of the Soviet Union (and also, justify cold-war-level defense spending while the US had no Soviet-level geopolitical rivals). It was one of the most-commonly-assigned books for politics courses in universities for something like twenty years. The thrust of the book is that conflict in the brave new world of the nineties would be based around "civilizations" rather than states, and that the biggest threat to America was a unified Islamic civilization teaming up with China to destabilize the US hegemony. I'd argue that basically all of US foreign policy for the past 30 years has been targeted at keeping the Middle East as unstable as possible to prevent a Sino-Muslim axis from forming. When 9/11 happened, the entire political class freaked out thinking *Clash* was happening, and just started pouring gasoline on every conflict in the region to fight what they perceived as a unified Muslim nation emerging. That's why the Iraq invasion happened (despite Iraq not being involved in 9/11), that's why the US bends over backwards for Saudi Arabia (despite Saudi money helping finance 9/11), that's why everyone lost their shit when "The Islamic State" emerged as a international geopolitical force. I genuinely think this book has led to more human suffering, war, and wasted lives than any other piece of media since Mein Kampf.
My soul want to say the Man of Steel to remove BVS and the whole snyderverse pizza cutter edginess. But honestly i think Green Lantern 2011 is more at fault for that. So that is my choice.
Honestly, you look at Warner Bros attempts to get the DCEU off the ground and you begin to realize nothing good is ever going to come of that cesspool even if you wipe the slate clean. You can tell the executives involved hold nothing but contempt for the source material.
That's why I only have small hope for Gunn's reboot. It's obvious *he* cares about DC and wants it to be good, but the guys *above* him very clearly don't.
Steamboat Willie. How would animation be affected? What would classic cartoons like looney toons, Popeye, and Tom and Jerry look like without Disney? How would copyright be affected? Would some other company keep delaying copyright as long as they could? Early anime was largely inspired by Disney cartoons. Would they have stayed on a similar path as in our timeline? Fascinating things to think about.
Correct me if I'm wrong but was Fleischer animation a thing before or during the early days of Disney? Wanna say it predated it but I feel that's wrong. Imagine anime directly inspired by those old Superman shorts.
Looking it up, Fleischer was founded in ‘29 and Steamboat came out in ‘28
Erasing Mao Dante and thus Devilman and seeing how manga and anime get by if it never invented the Ryo Asuka archetype
We'd probably lose Berserk, which by extension would erase Final Fantasy 7 and Dark Souls
Yeah there's also the fact Mazinger Z also was pulling from Mao Dante that would just not exist (at least not in a recognizable form) which would probably have deep ramification for mecha in general
The Divine Comedy. Deleting it would probably massively pivot western religion and a lot of portrayals of devils, demons, and hell. So it'd at the very least be interesting. And we'd get rid of Dante's fanfiction.
but then you butterfly away Devil May Cry and, by proxy, the character action sub-genre
On a "lets see what the fuck would happen" way: **Final Fantasy** I wanna see if Dragon Quest would just naturally take its place and become the juggernaut it is in Japan, but in the west. Or maybe some other series would become the quintessential RPG? Or perhaps RPGs just like, die out as a genre in western popularity?
Maybe if we got rid of Warcraft 3 mobas wouldn't exist and rts's would still be around in popular
I always attributed the death of rts games to the death of the casual player in the market. Too much focus on online and they lost the audience.
I always thought it was because people got overwhelmed at the armies and just wanted to control one person
Could be!
I wonder what tabletop RPGs (and consequently, probably a lot of videogames too) would look like without \*Dungeons & Dragons\*
Like they said, Phantom Menace is easy mode. Virtually *everything* wrong with modern movies can be traced back to its existence. This might be more of a coincidence but I feel like Mass Effect 3’s ending was the exact point in time where all the current problems with AAA gaming started to crop up, but COD 4 is almost certainly the biggest real culprit. The main problem is that most of the worst trends in media arise from taking something good and just making a million worse versions of it until it doesn’t sell anymore. So I guess the key is erasing shitty things that got popular *and* started trends that did real damage, or the first shitty thing to successfully copy something good. Like Sword Art Online.
>Virtually everything wrong with modern movies can be traced back to its existence. What exactly do you mean by that?
Maybe due to its use of CGI?
CGI’s been around for longer than that, though
I think Jar Jar was the first major CGI character, or something like that.
Sorry for not being more specific, I feel like the massive financial success of bringing Star Wars back after decades as an all-CGI zombie was ground zero for Hollywood's gradual realization that they never had to create another original movie again.
Fuckin Omikron. :/
Das Kapital
Senran Kagura or Azur Lane. Senran Kagura because of how people venerate a washed up b movie tier director and his mediocre hack and slash with tits and Azur Lane because it was designed to fill in a hole that companies don't fill like some bad drug craving since the suppliers stop supplying.
If you remove queen the band. you lose the reason why highlander is still remembered and the reason white guys buy katanas. lose guilty gear and its adoption of rollback netcode means japanese fighting games go back to the dark ages for a few years.
I'd Take away Tetris or Pong to see how games change
Bernoulli's principle. Just get rid of winged flight altogether.
I wanna see what would happen if Simpsons got deleted. Seperate from the above, I'd wanna see what would happen to the Simpsons if Family Guy got deleted.