6.7 KiB
[FF][RT] Supernaturally Rational, a thought experiment on the TV Show "Supernatural"
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Author: u/eaglejarl *
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URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11530632/1/Supernaturally-Rational
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Score: 40
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Created: 2015-09-28T03:28:27
Post:
Comments:
u/eaglejarl [+11] (an hour later)
I've been watching Supernatural lately; it's a good show and (on a tactical level) people behave pretty sensibly most of the time. Still, I wondered what would happen if people behaved sensibly on a strategic level.
u/artifex0 [+8] (17 hours later)
I have to say, one of the absolute worst depictions of tactics I've ever seen was on an episode of Supernatural.
So, the brothers and some other heavily armed people are holed up in a school, protected by a salt ring around the building, while the town outside is overrun by demons. They decide that their only way out is to let the demons in and fight them.
So, obviously, they set up a bunch of barricades to keep the demons in a kill-zone, concentrate all of their fire on the area from behind cover, and open a small break in the salt circle to let the demons come in one at a time, right?
Nope. Each person goes to different part of the school building, wipes away part of the circle, and is immediately surrounded by demons. While two of them wait on the roof.
Granted, the characters were in sort of a "doomed last stand" mode in that scene, but damn was that uncomfortable to watch.
u/eaglejarl [+8] (20 hours later)
Oof, that's pretty bad.
I'm only in mid-season two so far. There have been a few too many "let's split up!" moments for me to be entirely happy but, for the most part, things have been...at least not unreasonable, albeit not always the way I would do them.
One thing that does annoy me is that Sam is the resident Damsel in Distress. Every single episode, Dean saves him from something. Every time there's a fight, the bad guy gets the upper hand on Sam almost immediately and is choking him / about to stab him / whatever when Dean shoots / punches / whatever it off of Sam. It's irritating. The whole "I need to take care of my little brother" thing is nice character motivation, but it doesn't need to be so one-sided.
u/Saffrin-chan [+3] (a day later)
oh... oh man. The Sam whump isn't going to end any time soon, I'm afraid.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (a day later)
u/None [+3] (a day later)
It's gotten worse as they've nerfed demons. They went from massive threats with telekinesis to people that can apparently only punch unless they're a named character.
All tactics go out the window and people engage in shitty fist fights long enough for someone to jab them with a sword.
Same goes for angels.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (5 days later)
I just watched that episode, and it wasn't quite as stupid as it seemed. The plan was to lure all the demons inside, have the people on the roof jump down and salt the doors so that the demons couldn't get out, and then do a massive exorcism to get rid of all of them at once while they were trapped inside. If the good guys let the demons in one-by-one it probably would have ended up with one lucky demon taking the good guys down before all of them were inside, so they needed to let them in from multiple places simultaneously.
The advantage of their plan was that they didn't have to kill all the possessed people -- the exorcism drove the demons out without forcing Sam/Dean/etc to shoot all of the host bodies. Your plan would have had a better chance of working, and the plan they used never should have worked...but it did allow them to be heroic.
u/zajhein [+7] (6 hours later)
It was funny, though this idea could be applied to nearly every fantasy type story as no one ever sees the bigger picture. An adventure friendly world is the closest trope that I could find which applies.
u/None [+6] (14 hours later)
Ideally universes would have reasons for why that doesn't happen.
Dresden Files plays with it both ways. A form of warfare is seeding the public consciousness with the weaknesses of your enemies (this lead to the near total destruction of the "classic", Black Court vampires, less nimble and adaptable than their enemies) but there is still a Masquerade for some reason, likely because no one actually wants to deal with a humanity that has been growing and the races that exist are just powerful enough that you don't want to make that decision unilaterally. There'd look at you oddly in the next Fantasy UN (they do actually have some diplomatic system)
Supernatural? Absolutely no one to impose the Masquerade. Which makes it all odd. It's probably the worst time in history for supernatural beings, given our information gathering capabilities.
u/eaglejarl [+5] (15 hours later)
Dresden Files plays with it both ways. A form of warfare is seeding the public consciousness with the weaknesses of your enemies (this lead to the near total destruction of the "classic", Black Court vampires, less nimble and adaptable than their enemies)
There's another information war, too: the Oblivion War, where people go around destroying books and etc that contain information about certain Outsiders, because knowing the names of those Outsiders gives them power. It's only mentioned in one particular short story, but it's canon.
but there is still a Masquerade for some reason, likely because no one actually wants to deal with a humanity that has been growing
Yep. That's actually canon -- it's been mentioned a couple of times that humans occupy this weird niche where everyone has contempt for them as oblivious prey...but also doesn't want to stir them up, because there are a LOT of them, and they have good weapons.
and the races that exist are just powerful enough that you don't want to make that decision unilaterally. There'd look at you oddly in the next Fantasy UN
By "look at you oddly", I assume you mean "squish your face"?
u/None [+2] (16 hours later)
By "look at you oddly", I assume you mean "squish your face"?
When you're dealing with immortal supernatural entities of terrible power the two aren't as clearly delineated as they seem :P
u/eaglejarl [+3] (9 hours later)
though this idea could be applied to nearly every fantasy type story
Oh sure, absolutely. Still, it was knocking on my brain demanding to be let out, so I did.