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Planetville: Difference between revisions
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''You can't get your kicks by getting around"''|'''Richard Hell and the Voidoids''', "The Kid With the Replaceable Head"}}
[[Adventure Towns]] [[Recycled in Space|IN SPACE]]! Most [[Space Opera]] stories are lifted from other genres, then transposed into outer space. And the most obvious way to do it is to make everything take place on a planet. Not just any planet, but '''Planetville''', the planet that serves the same function in space that towns and countries do in Earth-based stories.
If a [[The Wild West|Wild West]] story is about outlaws going from town to town, the [[Wagon Train to the Stars]] will be about outlaws going from planet to planet. If the Nazis conquer a dozen small countries, the [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens|space Nazis]] will conquer a dozen planets. If a plague broke out in a Third World country, the alien plague will fill an entire planet.
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 '''Planetville''' make no sense. Nobody seems to realize how BIG a planet is—everything in '''Planetville''' takes the same amount of time as stories set in towns or countries. In the updated [[Wild West]] story, the outlaws are "exiled from the planet" just like they'd be exiled from Dodgeville, and the outlaws have to leave... instead of challenging the authorities to find them when they have an entire planet in which to hide. When the space Nazis invade, they seem to need the same number of soldiers as the Earth Nazis needed to invade Europe. And when the crew of the [[Cool Starship]] finds the cure for the alien plague, the issue of distributing it to an entire planet rarely gets mentioned at all. These considerations are [[Hand Wave|minimized]] [[Easy Logistics|or left out entirely]] in many stories.
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* [[Ditto Aliens]]: To outsiders, most any human ethnic group looks alike.
* [[It's a Small World After All]]: '''Planetville''' is as small as a town, so finding things is the same.
* [[One World Order]]: A country has one government except in civil wars. '''Planetville''' has only one 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]]!
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== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* Both averted and played straight in ''[[Warhammer
** Justified in the cases of Hive Worlds, where pollution forces the inhabitants into a few gigantic cities surrounded by endless ash wastes, and [[Death World]]s, where the local geography and/or wildlife makes widespread population growth impossible.
** Played straight with the Space Marines, as less than a thousand of them can crush entire rebellions and purge whole worlds. Than again, aside from being extremely powerful [[Super Soldier]]s, and most citizens thinking of Space Marines as literal angels, believing them to be divine agents of the God-Emperor, their strategies revolve around swift, brutal strikes that decapitate the enemy's command structure, before or after some judicious use of [[Death From Above|orbital bombardment]], so it's less blatant than normal.
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]'' features this. In order to find the Star Maps, all the group need to learn is what planet it's on. They're even within walking distance of the starport (Manaan excepted, maybe). The sequel averts this however, you land on Telos, which is a planet recovering from war. The main first part you land on is forest and tropical, and then you fly to the polar ice caps.
** ''[[Star Wars: The Old Republic]]'' is similar: a planet is roughly equivalent to a zone in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', and the ''largest'' "worlds" are fleets or space stations rather than planets.
* Justified in ''[[Halo (series)|Halo]]''. The Covenant have battles in space above the planet, and usually seem to land on one city/country, ignoring the rest of the planet. However, the only reason the ground assault exists is to recover [[Precursors|Forerunner]] artifacts, which are only on whatever part of the planet they land on. Once finished, they fly back into space and glass the entire planet, assuming they won the space battle. Which they almost always do, given how much more advanced they are compared to humanity. In the third installment, a character specifically noted that Truth could've landed his forces anywhere, but specifically chose the ruins of New Mombasa, Africa.
** They also do ground assaults to destroy the ground-based generators which power the planet's [[Kill Sat|orbital]] [[Magnetic Weapons|MAC]] [[Wave Motion Gun|cannons]] which are pretty much the only weapon humans have which can reliably destroy Covenant ships.
** This trope is thoroughly averted however when on the eponymous Halo rings. They're about the size of Earth, and they have a very diverse ecosystem.
* ''[[Freelancer]]'' is a major offender: every single planet is a Planetville. Without exception. Pittsburgh, for example, appears to be an entire planet with just one little mining site. And on top of that, planets usually offer the same services as a "tiny little" battleship. This is rather justified, though, because due to [[The Law of Conservation of Detail]], ''Freelancer'' has hundreds of planets and space stations within its own world.
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* The [[Filmation]] series ''[[Bravestarr]]'' is a major offender in this regard. It features New Texas, an entire futuristic western-styled planet with exactly one -1!- village-sized settling by the name of Fort Kerium. Especially mind-blogging considering that the planet is said to be rich with the rare and valuable element Kerium. However, considering that one episode had the local star stolen and buried in the desert, that might be the least of the show's logical problems. Yes, that's "star" as in "celestial body".
** It had a shotgun wielding cyborg horse. [[Refuge in Cool|It was awesome.]]
* ''[[Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers|Galaxy Rangers]]'', being a [[Space Western]] of the same era also rocked this Trope: Tortuna was a [[Wretched Hive]] with a few domed cites that [[God Save Us From the Queen|Her Travesty]] didn't nuke into ashes. Ozark was an isolated [[Lost Colony]] backwater. Granna and Nebraska were farm worlds. The justification for using the Trope was that large-scale human colonization had only been going on for a decade at most, and sleeper ships only launched about 50 years prior to the series.
* In the ''[[Star Wars: The Clone Wars]]'' Movie, Mace Windu says Obi Wan Kenobi captured an entire planet by himself. He probably meant "General Kenobi and the clone fleet under his command", but still that seems like a small amount to take a planet. Either that, or an over reliance on those Droid Command ships (or something similar) like in ''[[The Phantom Menace]]'' means that a conquered friendly planet could be liberated by a commando unit.
** During the invasion of Kamino, General Grievous boasted that Kamino had fallen. This is despite much of his fleet getting shot down in orbit without doing similar damage to the Republic fleet, and his crashed troop transports (which was part of the plan) only really managing to get a foothold in Tipoca City. Grievous might have simply been trying to psyche out Kenobi though.
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[[Category:Otherworld Tropes]]
[[Category:Index of the Week]]
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