Also note how completely random the were-coaster's urge to kill people is. A comment on the sporking said that a roller-coaster's mentality, to be in keeping with the theme, should be either "keep moving forward, follow the tracks" or "I want to bring joy and excitement to everyone who's at least forty-two inches tall", not "KILL SMASH DIE DIE DIE".
Okay, is that anyone else's new Felt genital headcanon, except in their case the stick is plush and prehensile according to Aranea?
Please take a moment to imagine an anthropomorphised roller-coaster dragon thing disguising itself perfectly by wearing a trenchcoat.
Maybe it is a rebellion against knowing just how amazing their safety features are. Truly these tortured sentient beasts wish only for what they were denied as coasters: the deaths of millions.
tbh they'd just be mechanical kelpies, right? I can totally see a coaster-creature with intense murderous urges that tie into its need to go very very fast. once those passengers are strapped in it's a real gamble, isn't it?
Maybe, but the anthro-rides here are still built by humans, so it doesn't seem particularly logical that they'd have the desire to eat humans. Why a mechanical being would need to eat anything is kind of weird but could be handwaved. They also have a serious case of Can't Argue With Elves going on and insist on every page how much better they are than humans, even though it's stated outright that they wouldn't exist if not for humans.
I mean, logically speaking horses have no desire to eat humans either and yet this is a thing people came up with. the human inferiority thing is super weird tho sorry I've just been enamored by the idea of mechanical kelpies since it occurred to me, I haven't even read the coaster fics, but it's like the best kind of scp
There is certainly a seed of an interesting idea in there, I do agree. Too bad it's obscured by the terrible terrible writing. And kelpies make sense because they aren't actually horses, they're just taking the shape of something their natural prey would trust. These things are actually rollercoasters which turn sapient and hyper-violent just because Edginess Was Needed.
I'm reading this story with an evil corrupt matriarchy, and it feels like the author thinks this is very progressive and feminist. women in charge, and they can be good or bad, just like men! except all the pov characters are men, who fucking despise the women they interact with because they're women (barring the one Very Special Love Interest Woman). they constantly humiliate the women they interact with, which the narrative seems to think makes them badass. they mock them for being slutty or stupid or vapid or [insert mysoginist stereotype here]. they are driven primarily by hatred for the HBIC. it goes on and it's the fucking worst
Sounds like even more fun than the Suikoden V "matriarchy" which has a ruling queen, but then is controlled by men at every other level of government and women are legally barred from a bunch of positions of power way more than they seem to be in pretty much any other country in the setting.
Complexity addiction seems to be a thing in bad writing. Two examples which spring to mind: -Sword of Truth and the quads. As one reviewer put it, "When you're dealing with a woman who can enslave people with a touch, do you send a) four men with swords so she'll enslave one, they'll fight, and maybe one will survive to capture her, or b) one guy with a crossbow?" -Battlefield Earth, in which the evil alien spends a full year teaching our hero reading English, speaking and reading the aliens' language, flying a plane, and nuclear fucking physics, when all he ever needed him to do is dig a big hole.
Oh god, Battlefield Earth is. It's....definitely...a thing which got published. Somehow. I remember thinking that even the reviews on the back were...surprisingly bland? Anyways, one of its other problems (and there are Many) is that the evil alien isn't just dedicated to teaching Our Hero a whole bunch of shit that he does not need to in order to do the job he wants done. It's that he's doing it because he's a smug asshole who wants to make sure that Our Hero knows exactly how badly humanity got curbstomped. But you're right that about 50% of what's wrong with the writing is that the author couldn't step away from complicating things further, even when it didn't make sense for things to get complicated in that specific way. (About 10% of the rest of what's wrong is that the evil aliens are all evil, always, except for the Lone Exception, and that they're evil because brain implants? Somehow?)
that could actually go in a really interesting way, though, with mind control brain implants? evil leader making mind control brain implants mandatory perhaps they were created by another alien species which is now extinct, and had Always had the brain implants be a thing to control them, and whoever's holding the other end of that leash wants them to all be evil of course battlefield earth almost certainly didn't do anything that interesting
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was a heavy-handed "psychiatry is bad" thing, which makes sense since the author is the scientology dude.
It probably was, although I think there was some sort of attempted handwave at "well the evil aliens were conquered by another alien species that's now extinct and they made the brain implants mandatory in all the males, because [train noises involving aggression and Being Evil being a positive trait in a species you've conquered]". It made no sense even in context, but honestly you can say that about every other major and minor plot point.
