#a game has multiple simultaneous goals to meet win condition

[thewickedbohemian]

Friendly reminder that even if some elements of a fictional dystopia come true in our world, that doesn’t mean we’re literally headed for the future the dystopia depicts because how could something exist in the past as fiction and the future as reality at the same time (even if it was used as a guidebook, how could they exactly predict the way the dystopia was taken down since you’d think they would plan for something that specific)?

1. Juggalos marching on Washington does not mean we’re headed for a Homestuck future because A. iirc they’re on the wrong side for it to mirror that particular future and B. even if I remembered that part wrong, Homestuck’s gone a lot meta over the years but never meta to the level where characters in the comic could be reading the comic within the comic (even if the characters who were reading it weren’t reading about their own adventures) and to have it so that, in order to avoid that, the “main characters” of this “real life Homestuck” would be people who haven’t heard of the comic and still fit the “requirements” (13 years old (or however old the Alpha kids are), only child, one parental figure etc.), would require almost ridiculous levels of machinations to set everything up for that future and I doubt anyone who’d have the power to do that has the Homestuck knowledge to do that unless something is going on that’s a level of weird that would make Homestuck’s plot look like Dick And Jane.

2. We aren’t in the dark timeline of Back To The Future because A. Trump didn’t make any part of his fortune on sports bets, B. Biff wasn’t based on him but on one of the studio executives who Zemeckis didn’t like (iirc the name of the guy was Rick Tannen) and C. The movies couldn’t exist within any of the realities they take place in unless e.g. everyone has different names in each version and they’re some sort of universal constant but if that’s the case, A. someone in the movies would have mentioned how familiar what they had to do sounded and B. I think we should check if we’re in some sort of absurdist Simpsons-esque cartoon first because a movie series plot seems like a weird thing to have as a universal constant.

3. Speaking of Simpsons, The Simpsons did not predict this unless you think that either the family depicted on the show is real (and therefore everything that happened to them is a real thing in whichever Springfield is theirs) or some other woman named Lisa Marie Simpson will run for (and win) the presidency in 2020 and appoint a nerdy childhood friend of hers named Milhouse Van Houten as her Secretary Of The Treasury. I don’t know about other cases of “Simpsons predicted it” because I make an effort to not really watch the show but I felt this needed refuting both on its predictive power and the predictive power supposedly meaning that world is real in this particular instance.

4. No matter how many social media memes I see about it, we are not headed for the future depicted in The Hunger Games because A. comparing Trump to President Snow implies that the games have been going on for at least a generation (since he wasn’t the first president of Panem); B. For all I know, the statements that his election etc. is what led to the Hunger Games are just posts by supporters of his who want to keep us from rebelling to get him out of power by making us afraid that us trying to stop him is the rebellion that the Hunger Games are because of. C. Suzanne Collins would have to be either God/an avatar thereof (which blows Christianity all to hell), a precog (who for some reason hasn’t claimed the James Randi Foundation million-dollar prize) or a time traveler (and for some reason in our/their universe, time travel works so weirdly that her traveling back in time to publish the book didn’t change/potentially erase the future she came from and cause a paradox because it would do that even without anyone heeding its warnings) to explain the books’ simultaneous fictionality and reality; D. If a future regime (whether or not it’s his) decides they want to literally copy the dystopia depicted in The Hunger Games and that’s why it’s our future, they’d need to build in safeguards against the way the dystopia was taken down that aren’t completely obvious (e.g. illegalizing the name Katniss); E. That meme that seems to imply that the Hunger Games will start in 2018 overlooks the fact that in order for that to happen, everything including the institution of Panem/the district system and the rebellion would have to happen this year, and, unless that was the Trump administration’s goal, I don’t see that happening.

5. We do not live in the 1984 future because, A. Even if it could somehow exist as fiction in the past and reality in the future, it would be banned for being too subversive (and there would be no way that it would sell out like it’s done on Amazon because it wouldn’t be sold anywhere), B. The surveillance etc. isn’t as deep as people think it is and C. The parts of the future that are like 1984 were around long before Trump so he’s not to blame.

6. We do not live in Idiocracy not just because of the obvious things like not having a president who open carries assault weapons on his person at all times or a reality show called Ow! My Balls but because A. For reasons previously discussed in earlier points on this post, it is impossible for something to be a “documentary from the future” and still have that future have happened in reality, B. Just because we have a stupid president does not make him Camacho, and C. IQs are actually rising over time, look it up.

7. Not just the current storyline but any Magic: The Gathering storyline that has already been out can’t be an allegory for our current situation (though in the Magic The Gathering tag on my blog, there’s an interesting theory of mine as to how Earth could exist in that universe and still have that game exist) because A. The only villains in that universe who aren’t too smart to be compared to Trump are either that universe’s version of Elder Gods (who are actually somewhat too mindless to be compared to him) or weren’t villains of their own free will (which I doubt is the case with him unless the section of the conspiratard crowd that’s actually against him are right) and B. In order for the story to have been an allegorical prediction like a lot of people are saying, they would have had to know the election results beforehand and unless Wizards Of The Coast are actual wizards...

8. This is not Star Wars no matter who Trump is in that allegory because if he’s Vader, that means the only ones who can take him down are his long-lost twin children; a son who is living somewhere in the desert with distant relatives and loves to fly, and a daughter whose adoptive parents are either other politicians/royalty (of an opposite political alignment) or celebrities (because they are also kinda “royalty” of a sort) and if he’s Palpatine and we’re in the Revenge Of The Sith phase because Beyonce is pregnant with twins then I’m not sure which thing that “has to happen” (according to this metaphor) is more unlikely; either Jay-Z accepting a cabinet post or Kanye both being the father of the twins and the winner of the 2020 election, Beyonce dying in childbirth and her twins being given up for adoption (with one ending up among her fellow elite and one in some desert flyover state), or Trump (or whoever succeeds him) ruling until said twins are teens/young adults. 

9. This isn’t like Divergent for reasons that will be obvious if you’ve read the third book or seen the third movie but I refuse to mention them because I refuse to accept those particular plot twists as canon but also because the Trump administration isn’t smart enough to be Erudite or selfless enough to be Abnegation (the faction that actually made up most of the government in the Divergent universe)

10. This isn’t Brave New World not just because of the point I keep reiterating about sci-fi not being able to exactly exist as both fiction in the past and reality in the future in the same universe but because corporate-owned TV and lack of social mobility, while sucky, don’t equal biological castes and conditioning from “birth” and, while a lot of people are a bit too football-crazy for comfort, liking sports/games and/or pop culture shouldn’t be something worthy of shame and junk food/drugs, though bad for you in some respects, aren’t freaking soma!

11. This hopefully can’t be Harry Potter (or at least a similar universe) because that means that at best (if he’s the Umbridge in this metaphor with our country being Hogwarts) we have to set up some kind of shadow government that actually makes the decisions (as a DA parallel) while leaving him and his “Inquisitorial Squad” just a puppet government and at worst (if he’s the Voldemort in this metaphor) we have to track down all deaths he (whether directly or indirectly) caused and find out if there’s any scenarios where the parents were killed and a kid survives living with relatives (and if there’s multiple, choose the one that looks the most like a young him) and gradually guide that kid from a distance to achieve his destiny and make sure he gets into some exclusive private school where he ends up meeting his two best friends and saving the world from Trump pretty much every year before finally taking him down in seven years (after this hero kid has lost pretty much everyone he cares about who’s older than him and one or two people the same age).

12. This can’t be Game Of Thrones even though George RR Martin joked about having written 2016, and not just because it isn’t set in the past (although that would be cool yet sad if Game Of Thrones was our history and reality is just an endless chain of similar events occurring, say, once every couple centuries) but because we have far fewer than seven major political families competing for power and because he has been compared to so many characters from that series that if he were somehow all of them mashed up into one fulfilling multiple roles (which helps with the lack of families etc.), he would have killed himself by now (because he’s been compared to so many people that there’s a good chance one of them has killed another one of them) to fulfill the parallel