Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
213,737
edits
Planetville: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
| (2 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
[[File:Gateway Galaxy Planet 2310.png|link=Super Mario Galaxy|
{{quote|''"When you live on a planet the size of a town''
Line 11:
By extension, if a planet represents a country, an alien race represents an ethnic group, and an empire that spans Earth becomes a multi-planet empire.
Unfortunately, because [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]], stories about
This might work if technology was really advanced—if transport were so fast that crossing a planet took as much time as crossing a town or Earth country does today. But that almost never happens. Besides, even if Planetville were a global village in terms of travel time, a planet still has thousands of times as many people, thousands of times as many hiding-places, thousands of times as many strategic locations, thousands of times as many and as much of everything as a city on Earth today has.
Line 17:
A side effect of this is that the characters never realize that things can happen in parts of planets. You will never see aliens trying to capture a planet's equator, or its polar caps—it's the whole planet or bust.
* [[Ditto Aliens]]: To outsiders, most any human ethnic group looks alike.
* [[It's a Small World After All]]:
* [[One World Order]]: A country has one government except in civil wars.
* [[Planet of Hats]]: It's just like the wacky [[Adventure Towns]] of Earth.
* [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens]]: Nazis... [[Recycled in Space|In Spaaaaaace]]!
* [[Single
This trope is sometimes extended further still, with each star system apparently only having a single planet in it... every body in the system aside from Planetville itself is merely decoration if it is considered at all.
Line 35:
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* The Moon Kingdom from the [[Backstory]] of ''[[Sailor Moon]]'' seems to consist of a single city, most of which is the palace of Queen Serenity.
== [[Comic Books]] ==
Line 41 ⟶ 40:
** That's just where all the interesting stuff happens (following in daddy's footsteps). Twenty six pages showing the inky blackness of space in order to demonstrate scale does not make for a fun story.
* Oddly inverted in a [[Marvel Comics]] miniseries, ''Captain Universe''. Gladiator, a [[Flying Brick]] alien, flies to Earth from across the galaxy. That sort of travel is usually hand waved in comics as those characters being just that darn powerful. It gets odd when Gladiator has to fly from one part of the globe to another once he gets there and uses the Captain Universe [[Power-Up]] in order to grant himself enough speed to make the flight in time. So essentially, space is smaller than the planet Earth, according to this story.
== [[Film]] ==
Line 53 ⟶ 51:
** In ''[[The Empire Strikes Back]]'', the Empire finds the Rebel base simply by launching scouting droids at various planets. Sure, it apparently took a few years but that would be an insanely short amount of time for even one planet, to say nothing of an entire galaxy's worth. Keep in mind the scouting droid that eventually found the base did so after conveniently landing about a mile away.
*** In the same movie, some rebels find Luke in the wilderness by just flying over the surface the morning after he went missing. Those sort of rescue missions last days or even weeks in real life. Granted, they did know where he went missing, since he was on a scouting patrol for them.
== [[Literature]] ==
Line 79 ⟶ 76:
* In [[Star Trek: The Battle of Betazed]], Cort Enaran is leading the Betazoid Resistance. Having one group of resistance fighters under one mountain chain referred to as "the Betazoid Resistance" seems to take us into Planetville territory. That said, Enaran and other leaders are former members of the parliament, so their resistance cell (near the capital) might be considered ''the'' resistance. Still, the novel probably runs afoul of this trope.
▲== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[Star Trek]]'' is a constant offender here, where everybody on a planet is the same and nothing happens on a smaller scale, ever. When a low-tech planet isn't united, Starfleet considers it in civil war. Earth in 2000 BC was presumably in civil war, and (except for some arguable periods of peace) continued to be at least into the nineteenth century. Possibly the only exception is the depiction of Bajor in ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]]'' as its proximity to the show's main setting meant that the writers were able to focus on the planet in greater depth than any other planet depicted in Star Trek's history before or since.
** Particularly conspicuous in ''The Next Generation'' episode "Reunification", in which the Romulans planned to seize control of the entire planet Vulcan with [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale|just a few thousand ground troops]].
Line 90 ⟶ 86:
** Are you sure they're targeting the city to conquer it and not to draw the Rangers in the open to kill them?
** Subverted in RPM, where the rest of the planet was conquered first.
* Justified in ''[[Firefly (TV series)|Firefly]]'', as all the planets there are colonies of varying sizes, usually initially settled by a cohesive group of people in just one area.
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
Line 105 ⟶ 100:
* Averted and played straight in ''[[Traveller]]''. It is made clear that there is more to most planets but that is all PCs often see because they are interested in intersteller stuff.
** Many planets in ''Traveller'' are colonies with populations of 1,000,000 or less. All the interesting people are likely to be in the same city as the starport.
== [[Video Games]] ==
Line 123 ⟶ 117:
* ''[[Phantasy Star]]'' is an especially [[TV Tropes Drinking Game|egregious]] example, with each planet having an average of 2-3 cities. [[Casual Interstellar Travel]] means that a quest to talk to the governor of one [[Single Biome Planet]] will involve buying a cake from the only bakery in the star system, located at the bottom of a dungeon on another planet. Alis even has the Fly spell, designed to take you back to the last church you visited, which works without regard to whether or not it is on the same planet you are currently visiting.
* ''[[Mass Effect]]'' averts this, somewhat. In the Codex, it is mentioned that planetary invasions are common. However, thanks to the way colonization works in most cases, there are rarely any planets with more than a dozen settlements. The exceptions are mainly the species of the galaxy's homeworlds (Earth, Pavalen, Thessia, Sur'Kesh, etc.)
== [[Western Animation]] ==
Line 134 ⟶ 127:
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]▼
[[Category:Settings]]
[[Category:Tropes in Space]]
[[Category:Otherworld Tropes]]
[[Category:Index of the Week]]
▲[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
| |||