Rage Review: Resist and Bite (Chapter 12, Part A) · 7:42am Apr 12th, 2020
Chapter 12: Failed confrontations in the dragons land
Charlie and Luster Dawn both have been following the long blue stream leading to the Dragons Land for six minutes now.
Six WHOLE minutes! Wow, if they've been galloping along a good road, they've gotten, what, 2-3 whole miles by now!
While they were walking, Charlie had a very disconsolated expression because he remembered what the Chinese soldier said about him and his family,
CAPTAIN ZHAO: Neeners, neeners, Charlie's clan eat wieners! Nyah-nyah!
How did the Chinese soldier know his identity and past?
In the real world, a good intelligence database linked to the open-source Internet. In this world, they probably looked up the YouTube videos everyone made of your deepest, darkest secrets?
Hey, why not? You looked up the Sooper Secret Chinese Red Army Teleporter the same way!
Does the rest of the Chinese military know about him along with the police force and SWAT team?
Oh yes, Charlie. They secretly film everything you say and do, including the filthy stuff with the giant Smurfette plushie, and there's a TV show broadcast all through the Mainland called Let's Laugh at Silly Charlie Lam, Boy Oh Boy He's Silly! Ever wonder why Chinese tourists snicker at you? That's why!
Charlie remembers the death of his father.
December 24th 2009
A date which will live forever in infamy!
There was a huge fire in a skyscraper in Sydney, many were killed and injured from the infernos and most of the NSW firefighter units have been injured from the fire.
What, most of the firefighters in all of New South Wales? That must be some fire!
And the remaining firefighters inside the skyscraper began to evacuate the building along with some wounded because the NSW police tactical response units were about to explode the skyscraper.
"Tactical response" apparently being Aussie slang for "random destruction?"
And the reason why they are doing that is because they need to prevent the skyscraper from toppling down into the center of the town.
Spraying bits of flaming skyscraper all over the center of town is a much better plan! It'll revitalize the Sydney construction industry!
Now where's my fiddle? Rome seems to be burning ...
And Charlie's father Andrew Lam along with the rookie George Jackson were in the basement of the skyscraper to rescue their fellow sergeant Mark Elliot and seven wounded.
There's a popular ballad about this, I'd bet.
Andrew Lam tells George Jackson that he's going to have to take charge of the wounded.
"Wait, we were suppose to stick the C-4's on the water tanks and explode it and ride the currents to the exit of the-"
Yeah, I'm sure that riding water currents out of a burning building is a very plausible way of saving oneself and a bunch of wounded men. It's not like the flood of water would, I dunno, batter them to bits against the building on the way out? Nah, it would just be like a water slide at a theme park!
"The detonator has been lost. I have to stay and explode the bombs manually." He told him.
Andrew Lam knew he shouldn't have packed his Mr. Queasy doll in his new Cheeseburger Backpack, instead of the detonator!
George begs to be allowed to stay behind with his captain. But Lam is firm:
"George, I am not doing this to save you. I am doing this for all of the civilians you can save in the future." Andrew told him "You are a great firefighter ...
CAPTAIN LAM: I, on the other hand, am a lousy firefighter. As proven by the fact that I lost the freakin' detonator! What was I even THINKING?"
George leaves.
Captain Lam then picks up one of the charges:
At the skyscraper basement water tank area. Andrew pulled open the seal cover on one of the C-4'S he has on his hand. He then looked at the circular red button on the top right corner and must assume that it was the button for exploding the C-4.
"Must assume?" Wait a moment, aren't you trained on these things? Do you just assume that any circular red button is a detonator? Why is there even a manual detonator on a civilian C-4 charge?
Why isn't there a "timer" option? Why will detonating one charge set all the others off, even though they're not in physical contact with the first one? (FYI, generally speaking one wishes to control WHEN explosive charges go off; that's why C-4 is used instead of nitroglycerine!)
For that matter, why isn't there any sort of backup detonation system save for Heroic Sacrifice?
These, and many other questions, will remain forever unanswered to Captain Andrew Lam as he says some maudlin words and then pushes the manual detonator.
WHA-BOOM!!! BOOM!!! BOOM!!! KER-SLOSH!!! The hole at the center of Michael Bay's dark heart is momentarily-filled by brilliant fireballs and unnecessary property destruction as the charges go off and the super-mega-ultra-zillion-gallon water tank inexplicably installed on the skyscraper ruptures!
Then, tons of water were released from the tanks and rushed to Sergeant Mark Elliot , Rookie George Jackson and the wounded.
Once the water has splashed all of them.
Spash! WHUMP! Splish! WHACK! Sploosh! WHUCK! Rookie George Jackson and the seven civilians' path to the ocean is gently serenaded by the dulcet tones of them being slammed hard against concrete and steel and jagged glass on the way down.
They all rode the currents in the sewer area ...
WHANG!! That was one of the civilians slapping head-first into the sewer cover, knocking it aside and letting the others through. WHAP-RANG!!! Another civilian hits a sewer grating, delicately bending the iron out of the way of his body, and the bones in his body out of the way of the grating, letting still more through! It's a fun magic ride!
... to get to the ocean were the water rescue team will pick them up.
... what's left of them after the sharks have had their way with their battered, bleeding bodies.
Ah, I love it when a plan comes together!
The Sydney morticians will dine well for the next month.
AC97 said:
I know that's supposed to be touching and all that (it wasn't), but that uh... felt stupider than some over-the-top action movie scene. Why would the sewers go to the ocean... What is this, Finding Nemo? Why didn't they all drown or something?
I'm... flabbergasted. How the hell am I supposed to make sense of this? This feels horribly nonsensical. Just... please help me if this actually makes any sense, in what is supposed to be a mundane setting, any of that, I beg of you.
My intuition says that no, no it probably doesn't, considering, but I'd gladly be proven wrong, because I just want the extreme confusion to go away.
I just can't conceive of a way this actually makes any sense, any of the above... (AC97)
Oh no, AC. This makes absolutely no sense from any angle of fire fighting, explosive demolitions or hydrodynamics.
Realistically -- even heroic-realistically -- they've just battered much of the Sydney downtown into flaming ruins and gotten everyone in or near that building killed or wounded.
Charlie nearly shed a tear when he remembered that depressing memory of his father's heroic sacrifice during that skyscraper fire in Sydney. (Story)
Nearly shed a tear. For Charlie was made of sterner stuff!
He only got upset when he thought about that meanie Red Chinese captain who talked about his parents!
How, exactly, is Charlie remembering "that depressing memory of his father's heroic sacrifice" from his FATHER'S point of view?
I mean, George Jackson might have survived and told him about the parts of this scene that he witnessed. But Andrew Lam, of all character's, can't have survived, or it's not about his heroic sacrifice!
Luster Dawn snaps Charlie out of his reverie:
Luster Dawn was a little worried about Charlie. But, she shook her head and said "We have arrived at the entrance of the dragon lands Charlie."
There's like a big sign standing on two tall poles saying "The Dragon Lands," or something.
Charlie then looked in front of him and saw very astonishing things. It was a country with four volcanoes almost similar to the ones in Hawaii except it had less.
It had "less" what? Volcanoes? Dancing girls in hula skirts? Cute little girls hanging out with interstellar aliens?
Lava pouring from the peak, rocky mountains and stone seats.
Okay.
Now, a little scaling issue.
Charlie and Luster have gone some distance from the Changeling Kingdom. 6 minutes to the start of Charlie's impossible flashback to his father's thoughts, and say x 4 as much time -- 24 minutes -- until Luster snaps him out of it. That's half an hour.
At 20-30 mph by hoof, that's 10-15 miles.
Why couldn't Our Nominal Heroes SEE the erupting volcanoes from the Changeling Kingdom? At least in the form of smoke plumes rising into the sky?
And truly, this is Theme Park Equestria.
"What's good, plotters? This is Plot Convenience Videos, bringing you all you need to know to speed up any narrative. Remember to smash that like button like I smash dramatic pacing!"
It all began when one tourist described his reaction to a spider the size of his foot as a "tactical response"...
Pennywise wrote a most irate letter to the Sydney city council afterwards. They never did this kind of thing in Derry.
Well, there was this YouTube video...
120 Days Since Our Last Immolated TouristI'm going to say Spam.
In all seriousness, this is more video game logic at work, with the game loading the new environment as it played the dramatic cut scene. Now to see how Charlie manages to pick the worst dialogue options yet again.
You're quite right. The story's dramatic pacing and transitions between scenes positively reek of the artificial limitations imposed by computer games as a medium. This is one of the major flaws in the story, because Author is so unfamiliar both with real-life action and with well-written story action that his main concepts of how stories work come from computer gaming.
Now, computer games don't have to be like this, theoretically. In practice, however, memory and processing requirements, and perhaps still more the relatively crude state of AI assistance to game designers, mean that there has to be at best either a strict distinction between levels of maps, or profound distortions in the intersection between travel and combat scales.
That's what we see here. Author doesn't grasp that the Dragon Lands are a whole province located hundreds, maybe thousands of miles from Central Equestria; he perhaps looked at the montage from "Dragon Quest" and entirely missed that Spike walked a long distance (while Twilight and her companions may have traveled a lot faster by other means). Instead, Author takes the scale of the strategic map on which tactical encounters are imposed as the same as the scale of the tactical map.
So we have absurdities such as Our Designated Heroes walking through the Everfree in a matter of maybe six hours, then reaching the Kirin Village, then "The Griffonstone Cloudsdale" in a few hours more, then "The Changeling Kingdom" in an hour or so; finally Dragon Lands in maybe half an hour.
He's not thinking in terms of a real large-scale map and plugging time, distance and terrain into it the way those of us who grew up on board wargaming and tabletop roleplaying might. He's thinking in terms of something like a Final Fantasy game, where a lot gets simplified because it's irrelevant to the main plot line.
Or at best, he's looking at the Show and not realizing the way in which plotting for a 21-23 minute episode forced the Show Writers to compress apparent time, using vague transitions to avoid dealing with questions of how long it took to get anywhere. That works well in video formats, where one can't digress for even a sentence or two of background description, and can't easily show a long journey graphically. It is terrible in a text format, where one can't see anything that isn't described, but can get away with a paragraph long description of anything interesting.
Maybe he'll learn better by the end of the story?
Probably not.
If I'm going to be honest, I thought of Zhou's talking about Charlie's parents as a vague, general scolding from an unrelated adult, kind of like when somebody swears, another might go, "Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?" I mean, if I was doing something some stranger disapproved of and they told me, "What would your parents think?", I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that they know my parents. I probably wouldn't be alarmed unless they mentioned them by name. Even with his father's death as a sore spot, it's no reason for him to believe that the Chinese actually know who his parents are.
Also, that flashback is hilarious, because who in the right mind would blow up a skyscraper on fire? I just googled skyscraper fires to see how firefighters fight them, and there is absolutely nothing about blowing them up, even in cases where the fire overwhelms the systems meant to contain the fire to the room it started in.
(My thought process when writing that part of the review was kinda reminiscent of the "Denial" and "Bargaining" stages of Grief, to be honest, lol; glad to know this is 100000% full of crap [even if I was almost certain of such], again, because that was just so... mind-boggling, it sort of caused one of those internal BSODs, in your head, where you're kinda mentally sputtering in disbelief/shock for a period of time)
The author ran into this problem. "You weren't there man."/"How did you know about the parts you weren't there for?"
Also, while I'm not trying to be insensitive to anyone who's lost someone, and still feels grief years later, I would like to point out that Charlie was five-years old at the time, so it feels kinda whiny (Wangsty) in a way, for him to be so torn up over this, due to A: him not witnessing it, and B: it being 13 years later. In short, from a narrative standpoint, that just doesn't help; we didn't know Andrew Lam as a character, and we (probably) don't feel sympathetic towards Charlie for multiple reasons (overshadowing characters more competent than he should ever be, being too skilled when he shouldn't be, shallow personality, being an idiot who never learns from his mistakes, etc, etc), so why would we start feeling sad now?
And it's very lackluster Theme Park, at that, due to the main characters obviously being extremely nearsighted, and the rides being lackluster.
5241067
Yes, that's kinda how it came across to me, personally, and you put it into words quite well. It didn't really feel like an attempt at cold reading, it felt like an attempt of going down the route of "how would your parents feel if they knew you're doing this" trash talk, as opposed to anything meant to be threatening, or even a comment on if they're alive or not.
They were 100% nonspecific, even in regards to if they were alive or not (Zhao seemingly under the impression that yes, they are) so how Charlie "wise genius extraordinaire" came to the conclusion that he, Captain Zhao, knew anything specific, based on anything not already public information (which would come back around to "why are you surprised?"), if that, even, is beyond me.
It's also funny that Humanoid / Eldritch Abomination protagonist here, supposedly a normal human, had these memories of his father's last moments, inexplicably, as if he were really there... or he's really just delusional, and the entire story is his extremely distorted view of events, as posited before by others, here. Or he's a delusional higher being, too.
But yeah, it's not a common occurrence for skyscrapers to just topple over during fires, is it? Blowing them up to somehow reduce collateral damage is just preposterous.
I can only count the number of times skyscrapers toppled during fires on like, one hand, to my current knowledge (if anyone feels like giving me more examples, I wouldn't mind). Sure, there's 9/11, but I can't easily think of others, especially if we're talking modern skyscrapers.
5241067
You're right. I was giving Charlie too much credit by calling it a "cold reading." It was more like a random verbal shotgun blast, which unexpectedly hit something.
OEDIPUS (wailing): How did he know? How did he know?
ELEKTRA (pats him on the shoulder): Hush, Father-Brother. He was just fishing.
Right. You would evacuate the buildings adjacent to the skyscraper, maybe the whole blocks, and make sure you got everyone possible out of the building. If you had to demolish the skyscraper, you would probably do so after the fires were mostly out, and you would do with a controlled demolition carefully-calculated to implode the structure and/or cables to pull down the structure.
Doing it the way shown in the story would spread the devastation over a wide area.
5241188
The reason the Towers collapsed on 9/11 was that the buildings were first strucutrally-compromised by plane impacts and fuel-air explosions, and then weakened by the jet fuel fires right at the points already structurally-compromised. Normal fires, occurring by accident or even by arson, wouldn't have done all that.
The other parts of the World Trade Center Complex were, essentially, smashed by the Towers falling on them. If you've ever watched the footage, the fall was mostly vertical, though some of the top parts first leaned over a little to one side or the other on the way down. This is because gravity is a thing.
Having burning debris fall on buildings from hundreds of feet above them is generally fatal to their future usage as buildings, as that's enough force to deform the steel skeletons, assuming that the wreckage doesn't just batter the buildings into rubble. The fires don't help matters. Generally, all that one can do with buildings so treated is demolish them later, both to recycle their materials and to clear the ground for new construction.
That's why blowing up a burning skyscraper, especially under less than perfectly-controlled circumstances, is such a terrible idea.
What Andrew Lam did in the flashback -- using one charge to sympathetically-detonate the others -- would almost certainly create an unbalanced force. This would be realy bad, because instead of imploding the building, it might make the part of it above the charges lean to one side or another, letting large parts of it fall on other buildings, collapsing them as well.
As for the bit about riding the surge of water traveling ahead of the collapsing building into the sewers -- what part of momentum does Author not understand? If the water were traveling at near-terminal velocity, it would hit the survivors with enough force to break bones, and would then beat them repeatedly against parts of the building, which would break more bones.
Assuming that the survivors, well, survived this ungentle treatment (and, remember, most of them were already wounded), their likeliest fates would have been either getting stuck inside the collapsing building as the water poured over them, soon followed by the stories above them pile-drivering them into goo with bone and tooth splinters in them, or getting sprayed out of broken windows, probably still dozens to hundreds of feet above the ground, to splat on the sidewalks, moments ahead of parts of the building landing on top of them.
I mean, Andrew Lam's plan was suicidal. And not just for himself.
5240947
Great to see another of these reviews! If nothing else they do a great job of getting across the idea, "See this? No never ever do that in your own writing."
12 0 Days Since Our Last Immolated Tourist
Is it wrong of me to say that I can see this happening in the show itself? Of course the new sign is a big improvement over the old one, which just read SCRAM and was studded with the skulls of clueless visitors.
Great, now I'm wondering what a Equestria-to-Dragonlands tour agency would be like. And how dangerous the job of tour guide would be. 'Fearless' Fergus Reith from DeCamp's 'Krishna' stories had it easy in comparison.
I bet someone's already drawn Ember in a hula skirt, haven't they?
5241480
Basically, no building was designed to withstand things like that, on top of things inside the building itself catching fire in addition to the jet fuel, contributing to the heat (regarding the collapse of the two main towers).
Aside from the (very valid) physics concerns of "how many times over would their already wounded and/or weighed down or something bodies be beaten to death, to be followed by drowning because they can't surface in time to breathe, if they even lived that long, etc, 'not just washed into a wall, or the ceiling/whatever,'" (there's multiple reasons why knowing how to swim might not help you much with a Tsunami, for instance), you're left wondering how they'd even have the energy left to surface after making it to the ocean. I don't think anyone could stay on the surface if they'd taken a beating a tenth as bad as what'd by all rights happen there, as depicted.
That kind of thing is literally is out of Finding Nemo, I think, where Nemo got flushed down a drain and got back into the ocean. Bonus points for it being the city of Sydney, Australia, as well.
(in case you were worrying about my physics knowledge, due to me not mentioning those concerns the way you did, well, while I'm not a physicist, I'd never greenlight a scene like that, if you were going for "plausible;" why the heck were those huge water tanks with a supposedly huge amount of water even there, as you brought up? Convenience? "Rule of Cool?")
And you also have to remember that conversely water doesn't negate all "fall damage" in real life, like it may in say, Minecraft (as fun/creativity-inspiring as that game might be to you), and other games, and can easily kill you after a certain point.
Much like "what if a tree falls over, and it's on flat ground... so where does it go if you just cut a straight line through, or if lightning strikes, or whatever the wind does," pretty much.
Controlled demolitions aren't a procedure done in a hurry, it goes without saying. There's those sorts of concerns that take time to figure out, time which a big fire doesn't provide.
I have it about right?
(I did read this article for a few examples of fires, even if they're not all "skyscrapers" by definition [I am not British, either, unrelated note]. The Grenfell Tower wasn't destroyed on the spot as part of a "firefighting tactic," or as a result of the fire, as per Wikipedia, and is currently awaiting demolition.)
This sort of thing... can it be said to go beyond Critical Research Failure?
5241485
Spike thinks Ember would look cute in a hula skirt!
5241513
Generally speaking, the sorts of things that are likely to go wrong in the unplanned demolition of a large building in a built-up area are such that one does not want to do it in the middle of a major fire! One would literally do better just evacuating the area, playing water or chemicals on the fire from a safe distance, and waiting for it to burn itself out before considering the best method of demolition.
Takes longer to do, but not as likely to cause catastrophe as just setting off demolition charges at random.
5241518
Spike thinks Ember would look cute in a hula skirt!
derpicdn.net/img/view/2016/6/3/1169112.png
He's not the only one!
5241911
This is going to sound really bizarre and OT, sorry, but for some reason I'm wondering if the pony-size dragons from the show wouldn't make natural firefighters. They can't be burned, they can breathe in smoke (heck they can breathe around flowing lava without any problems), they've got superhuman strength and resistance to injury, their senses are probably better than human normal, and they can fly. I mean, those dragons we saw living in the 'new Equestria' have to find some way to pay the rent, right?
5241917
That would make a lot of sense. The firefighter-Dragons might be so valuable in this role that the Fire Department would try to assign one to each elite firefighting unit, so as to maximize their effectiveness.