Forum: Author Hangout

The authors don't personally know what they are talking about so their stories contain totally unrealistic scenes.

Largely driven by what they see in Hollywood movies.

And it works for Hollywood movies. So why not stories? It's fun, exciting (even though not realistic). You won't find my novels in the non-fiction section.

Personally I agree with you. I'm just saying if the OP has a problem with it, they should take it up with Hollywood, because they started it.

People with head injuries waking from a coma and being completely normal. It just doesn't happen.
Fourteen year old boys with massive cocks. Any story were the men all have ten or twelve inch penises.

People with head injuries waking from a coma and being completely normal. It just doesn't happen.

Another Hollywood trope.

Fourteen year old boys with massive cocks. Any story were the men all have ten or twelve inch penises.

Okay, those aren't Hollywood tropes, but they also aren't part of the OPs complaint.

I often wonder if the 14 year old girls who are written as under 5 foot and 100 lbs is just code to imagine they are actually 10 or 11.

My mother maxed out at 4' 10" and she's lost an inch or due to age. My niece didn't surpass my mother's height until she was 15 or 16

https://childrenswi.org/medical-care/adolescent-health-and-medicine/issues-and-concerns/adolescent-growth-and-development/normal-growth

Girls being under 5 foot at 14 is a little unusual, but it isn't anywhere near as rare as you imagine.

So having a 14yo character that short can happen, but maybe 10-20% of the time, not 90%

Take a look at the link I posted above. Normal height range for a 14 year old girls starts at 59 inches, which is 4 foot 11 inches. No, the % of 14 year old girls under 5 foot is not 90% but it would be closer to 50% than to 20%.

And your original complaint based on height alone, not other indicators of sexual development, is entirely unwarranted unless one story has dozens of 14 year old girls under 5' tall.

It seems that near every 14yo is just entering puberty. I write them full grown and eager to explore.

And you are just as wrong as the ones writing them as just entering puberty. Reality is somewhere in the middle.

And your original complaint based on height alone, not other indicators of sexual development, is entirely unwarranted unless one story has dozens of 14 year old girls under 5' tall.

I have a daughter and some of the groups she participated in, such sports, camps and school the girls would some times cluster by size, I think it made it easier to gossip.

I write them full grown and eager to explore.

What's the point of having them in the story at all then?

How I see it, if you have someone under sixteen having sex, then it is there for a purpose, for that shock value of immature children going at it. And if someone is into fourteen year old specifically, then exactly for how they are different from more mature teens who may be at the point where eighteen or thirty six it may be impossible to tell the difference, but fifteen stand out in majority sixteen crowd, and fourteen is another species entirely.

Time.

Most films take around two hours to complete and action films especially have very few slow periods for a person to stop and think about the things that don't make sense. Sure, someone may have a "fridge logic" moment later, but as long as they enjoyed the film at the time any consistency issues are unlikely to overshadow the experience for most viewers.

Stories, however, are rarely completed in a single sitting, especially in the modern era. Any time a reader has time between sittings of reading, they have time for those little errors to nag at them and hurt their experience. This can reduce the chance that they'll return to the story.

Of course, this is length dependent. If we assume that the average reader sets aside one hour per day for reading, then any story in the 10k to 15k range is conceivably readable in that time frame by an average reader. Authors with (some) shorter stories will be less affected by these fridge logic moments.

Largely driven by what they see in Hollywood movies.

But it all comes full circle, Hollywood does not innovate, they take what was written and popular to use as the story for their movies.

I think you might have missed an important part of Constantine. While he was dying of lung cancer, he was saved by literal divine intervention which was pretty explicit in the film.

In short he made a deal with the devil to save an innocent's life which caused him to be saved since it was a selfless act. One of the main themes of the film was that his past "heroic" acts weren't selfless since he was actively trying to erase his past sins.

Get beat up, get shot, win a fight to the death with multiple opponents, run after a speeding car for several blocks, shoot several people (a block away, while using a pistol) crack a computer password to avoid the nuclear bombs detonation.

Cut, print it. Next scene.

Beowulf spent days swimming down to the bottom of the lake to fight Grendel's mom. The trope goes all the way back.

LMAO, that is hilarious and terrible. I've made some boneheaded mistakes with partially healed bones but that sounds like a particularly horrid one.

To walk on the peevment of course

When someone has their body optimised by some means, whether nanites, magic, computer program etc, why is any waste material always black and very malodorous?

Because it's not waste material in the sense of left over healthy tissue, but rather unhealthy toxic materials that are being flushed from the body.

why should it be so much stronger when eg nanites have excised it? Do nanites/magic/computer programs digest cancer aerobically?

1. It's not enclosed in your body (a sealed container) anymore.

2. It's far more concentrated than when it was in your body.

3. It's not just cancerous cells, it's heavy metals and other toxic chemicals that build up in living bodies over time.

Think about a life time smoker. Smoke particles build up not just in their lungs, but in the pores of their skin and possibly other deeper tissues.

What would you expect it to smell like if you pulled all that gunk out of the smoker's body and dropped it in a puddle of gunk on the floor?

black and very malodorous

I've seen autopsy slides from the lungs of a heavy smoker. They looked like they could be used to fill in a hole in an asphalt road, there were that black.

I've seen autopsy slides from the lungs of a heavy smoker. They looked like they could be used to fill in a hole in an asphalt road, there were that black.

In if you pulled all that gunk out of a living smoker's body and dropped it on the floor it would probably smell like hot asphalt too.

if the smell were that bad, nobody would kiss a smoker.

To a nonsmoker kissing a smoker tastes exactly like a stale crusty ashtray smells.
A fellow smoker would already have that taste and smell in them and never notice it.