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Samara Weaving

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Scott Pilgrim is, I think, the best example I can think of for establishing a setting's Nonsense Limit. The setting's Nonsense Limit isn't quite "How high-fantasy is this". It's mostly a question of presentation, to what degree does the audience feel that they know the rules the world operates by, such that they are primed to accept a random new element being introduced. A setting with a Nonsense Limit of 0 is, like, an everyday story. Something larger than life, but theoretically taking place in our world, like your standard spy thriller action movie has a limit of 1. Some sort of hidden world urban fantasy with wizards and stuff operating in secret has a nonsense limit around 3 or 4. A Superhero setting, presenting an alternate version of our world, is a 5 or 6. High fantasy comes in around a 7 or so, "Oh yeah, Wizards exist and they can do crazy stuff" is pretty commonly accepted. Scott Pilgrim comes in at a 10. If you read the Scott Pilgrim book, it starts off looking like a purely mundane slice of life. The first hint at the fantastical is Ramona appearing repeatedly in Scott's Dreams, and then later showing up in real life. When we finally get an explanation, it's this:

Apparently Subspace Highways are a thing? And they go through people's heads? And Ramona treats this like it's obscure, but not secret knowledge. Ramona doesn't think she's doing anything weird here. At this point, it's not clear if Scott is accepting Ramona's explanation or not, things kind of move on as mundane as ever until their Date, when Ramona takes Scott through subspace, and he doesn't act like his world was just blown open or anything, although I guess that could have been a metaphor. there's a couple other moments, but everything with Ramona could be a metaphor, or Scott not recognizing what's going on. Maybe Ramona is uniquely fantastical in this otherwise normal world. And then, this happens

Suddenly, a fantastical element (A shitty local indie band finishing their set with a song that knocks out most of the audience) is introduced unrelated to Ramona, and undeniably literal. We see the crowd knocked out by Crash and The Boys. but the story doesn't linger on the implications of that, the whole point of that sequence is to raise the Nonsense Level, such that you accept it when This happens

Matthew Patel comes flying down onto the stage, Scott, who until this point is presented as a terrible person and a loser, but otherwise is extremely ordinary, proceeds to flawlessly block and counter him before doing a 64-hit air juggle combo. Scott's friends treat this like Scott is showing off a mildly interesting party trick, like being really good at darts. The establish that Scott is the "Best Fighter in the Province", not only are street-fighter battles a thing, Scott is Very Good at it, but they're so unimportant that being the best fighter in the province doesn't make Scott NOT a loser. So when Matthew Patel shows off his magic powers and then explodes into a pile of coins, we've established "Oh, this is how silly the setting gets". It's not about establishing the RULES of the setting so much as it is about establishing a lack of rules. Scott's skill at street-fighter battles doesn't translate to any sort of social prestige. Ramona can access Subspace Highways and she uses it to do a basic delivery job. It doesn't make sense and it's clear that it's not supposed to. So later on, when Todd Ingram starts throwing around telekinesis, and the explanation we're given is "He's a Vegan" , you're already so primed by the mixture of weirdness and mundanity that rather than trying to incorporate this new knowledge into any sort of coherent setting ruleset, you just go "Ah, yeah, Vegans".

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I AM THAT IS

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SGKSGKSGK MA’AM

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Link to thread

Link to news story

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So I uhhhh started reading Shakespeare for fun

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went to an elementaryschool musical production and they started the show with the director saying: "Now there's some very small viewers here today, so just so you know. There will be a scary character later in the show. This is her," and a girl in a kinda scary ghost outfit did a creepy walk across the stage, the stood up straight and did a cheery wave, "but remember, it's just Nina. She's pretending to be scary."

Aaaand i would very much like for horror movies to have that as a little bonus feature you can chose. Let me start a movie with Guillermo del Toro showing me a scary ghost that might jump at me, but don't worry, thats just Doug!

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its crazy how nobody has ever been as objectively beautiful as danny john-jules in red dwarf and nobody ever will be again

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Adria Arjona

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Brie Larson

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GRACIE ABRAMS for Vogue at the Cannes Film Festival (May 21, 2025)

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people I think might actually do it

Pete McTigh, written for the show a bunch is co writer on the upcoming spinoff

J Michael Straczynski, has expressed interest multiple times good track record with sci-fi

Jack Thorne, at this point I think Jack Thorne is a default writer for british tv shows honestly strange that he hasn't done any Doctor Who yet

people I would like to do it

Duncan Jones, good sci-fi writer and director has never been so successful that this would feel like a downgrade

Edgar Wright, likes Doctor Who but is probably too big to do more than guest spot

Lisa McGee or Sally Wainwright, just really solid TV writers who I think would bring something interesting to the table

Nida Manzoor, 'We Are Ladyparts' and 'Polite Society' is all the resume she needs

Steve McQueen, not for a second do I believe it would happen but my word it would be good

Me, I have no experience but I'm sure I could work it out

Really often people talk about who they'd like as a Doctor but more rarely do they talk about who they'd like as a showrunner for Doctor Who.

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I don't know. This is far too reductive, of course, but I kind of think that there is a very real and notable difference between the way that violence was treated in the 1960s Star Trek, which was written in the shadow of nuclear armageddon twenty years after the bloodiest war in human history (and largely by people who had fought in that war), and in the newer series, where the writers' experience of violence comes primarily from action movies and video games.

Like, I think that there's a tendency of people in the present to imagine that people in the past were naive and...I really don't think that history bears this out. I don't think that subversion is always clever just because a trope can be subverted. I think that imagining that your enemy might be an actual moral actor with whom it's possible to reason is actually a great deal more mature than imagining your enemy as a bloodthirsty monster who will kill by nature.

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The handrail at Schwaebisch Hall, Germany by Karl-Henning Seemann