#wallfacer

[pulusional]

3 body problem book series' dark forest sure is funny! :D

I really like rememberance of earths past by cixin liu

[tv-moments]

3 Body Problem

Season 1, “Wallfacer”

Director: Jeremy Podeswa

DoP: PJ Dillon

[grouchydairy]

IMAGINE BEING THE WALLFACER THOUGH

[dye-it-rouge-et-noir]

I suggest any person who has finished the entire Three-Body Problem series to listen to this song from the final season of the radio drama:

Some of the lyrics take from the song Singer (歌者) sang in Death's End, hence the title being Singer! There are additions which coincide with plot points in the book as well, which are the last two verses. After listening to this, I think it makes the passage with Singer more impactful with an aural reference for the song!

[stevethehairington]

so like as a stand alone thing with no prior knowledge of it, netflix's 3 body problem is pretty good! HOWEVER, having read the books it is based on i am INCREDIBLY disappointed. first of all, they anglicized the FUCK out of it. like. the books are written by a chinese author and they are ABOUT chinese characters in chinese society. so the fact that the netflix show took those book characters' stories and created a bunch of brand new non-chinese characters to give those stories to... don't like that. rancid vibes. (and sure, the new characters are somewhat diversified, as in there's a black guy and a pakistani guy, but there are also 4 new white characters too so like.) but yeah they did that which isn't great but they ALSO are like. taking bits and pieces from all three of the books and mushing them into one show? and iiiiiiii gotta say im not a big fan of that either? like. i feel like these books are split up SO distinctly in their time lines — like they literally span a 400 year period — so to smush them all together does it a great disservice? and like the technology and futuristic developments and the space travel and the details of the space societies in the book were SO cool and those are either erased in the show or just aren't able to be portrayed because of they're squishing it all together. ALSO they changed the name of the aliens and i hate it??? like WHY?? the name they have in the book is cool and the one they gave them in the show... sucks. like what.

anyways. it's good if i ignore the books, but if i don't then im super disappointed :/

[archiveoftragedies]

What I'm hearing is that Trisolaris decided to attack us because they don't respect women. Do better (<-coping with the end of the deterrence era)

[astramachina]

Those saying the 3 Body Problem trilogy is one of the best science fiction works in recent history are correct, I can say near the end of the second installment. But hear me out.

This is as much a horror as it is science fiction. The number of times I have experienced heart seizing terror and nausea have been frequent enough that I had to put it down to watch an actual horror movie in order to recover.

10/10 no notes

[skinnyhyena]

Bro I am losing my fucking mind. How do MOST of the Wallfacers suck?!?!?!

Maybe the Bombs guy isn't that bad? But I don't see how just really big bombs are supposed to be the answer here.

But fucking Loser Ji is out here using money to HIRE A FAKE DREAM GIRLFRIEND, mind you, he ain't even telling her what she's actually here for

And this Tyler guy, and ofc he's American, is trying to revive FASCISM?! Trying to BUY FUCKING AL-QAEDA?! To fight aliens?!?!?!

Morals, do yall have them??? Is that the point?? I fucking guess. I'm not fucking happy about it

[keonhi]

has anyone else read the three body series i am very nervous about netflix's adaptation i dont know if i trust them to do it well

[linusbenjamin]

3 BODY PROBLEM 1.08 — Wallfacer

[goodsirs]

You understand that we're still a few million times slower than the San-Ti? We're slow, we're dumb, and we die easy. We're bugs.

3 Body Problem 1.08 "Wallfacer"

[agbpaints]

My local battletech group is doing a random custom mech free for all, and in order to make things spicy, I've opened up the techmanual to pike around the guts of the BV formula to make something as dumb as possible. I've got a hard 2100 bv limit and I think I managed to make something

Behold! Coming in at exactly 2100 BV, the Wallfacer! You know how expensive ERPPCs can be BV-wise? Well, what if you mounted one backwards to discount all your other torso mounted guns? Oh, it also adds discounts a second time 'round because it's a huge fuckin heat hog and it means *technically* if it were to fire it and every other weapon while jumping it'd have problems, but because it's going the wrong direction it probably won't.

As for the game plan, the armor gives it away- the Wallfacer is a pair of bad hellbringers stapled together. Going forward it has a bunch of missiles and accurate efficient lasers to sandblast the enemy appart, going backward it has a big, long range 'fuck you' gun to snipe with. Advance to a firing position ass-first, dome the enemy with the particle cannon a couple of times, and then flip around to finish with the rest of the guns. Hopefully splitting damage between the front and rear arcs will make up a bit for the thin rear armor but it does mean you can get double tapped by your own main gun with that isXLFE.

I don't expect this to perform well oerse but if someone pulls it it'll be funny

[tv-moments]

3 Body Problem

Season 1, “Wallfacer”

Director: Jeremy Podeswa

DoP: PJ Dillon

[onewomancitadel]

Major spoilers for Death's End, the final book of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy beneath the cut.

So about that terrarium...

My intial somewhat dismayed reading was that of an uncharacteristic, hackneyed sentimentality: even when the books took such an indulgence, there was always a cynical chaser. You don't get to experience the fantastical sense of romantic love without Luo Ji's understanding of women (or lack thereof) and the belief that people only love imaginations of each other and stay together so long as they don't conflict with reality. (This is probably key to the fact that the star-crossed lovers never meet in Death's End, neither of them being disabused of their fantasies. It's juvenile).

Suffice it to say, I really struggled with the ending. I struggled with Death's End in general; not necessarily the fundamental approach (I don't think undoing the victory was a totally bad idea, since I liked evolving that thesis past what it means to win) but the structure felt less whimsical and more directionless, a series of entries - quite literally - which felt disparate and never quite managed to hit that sense of dispassionate historical observation I think the text was trying to go for.

So the idea that there was this terrarium and message in a bottle left behind in a universe built specially for Cheng Xin was just kind of bizarre tonally. It felt silly.

I get it: the entries about Earth's past is right there in the trilogy title. But it felt very self-important; it didn't cohere with the overwhelming notion that humanity was 1. very irrelevant, 2. very bad at what it does, 2a. its women are very bad at what they do, and its men - if soft and weak - are similarly bad, 3. at every moment anything that isn't about pure survival is cut at the knees. Remembrance seems more like farce. Actually, the entire sequence on Pluto felt out of place, almost like we're meant to laugh at the little bugs trying to save their precious granules of sugar.

I was discussing the ending with my best friend and her family - actually I related all the events of the books to them, somewhat out of chronological order, because I know that they all collectively would fucking hate these books (I personally didn't, glimmers of brilliance make me all the more frustrated) - and she said this amazing thing which was like, well, you say there's all this umming and ahhing over whether the universe might not be able to reboot if there's mass left behind - and it seems alright just to leave something - what if this is Cheng Xin's final fuck-up, finally chosen in an active way?

It's actually her seeming passivity which would allow this final stunt at all. Nobody would dare assume - not her last companions - that she would intentionally do this at all. So far she's damned humanity once, and then effectively twice (at least I think she is implicitly damned), and she is, really sincerely, a complete fuck-up wastrel who never does or thinks anything interesting. Luo Ji gets to be a fuck-up wastrel who thinks interesting things and does interesting things, and fails once, twice, three times, probably more, as a Wallfacer, and has a moment of stunning success because he's a fuck-up wastrel. This is a great idea, which unfortunately suffers in the face of the fact that Liu Cixin is obsessed with strong men.

The idea that Cheng Xin looks at the face of the overwhelming loneliness of her universe, the cruelty and inhumanity of the dark forest thesis, the wars upon wars which ravaged multiple dimensions until they were folded into flatness, and then decides to weaponise a sense of sentimentality to finally damn that universe - to prevent it from being reborn, to escape samsara - when she would never be expected to be capable of such a thing, to finally actively choose this maternality she's passively carried and passively condemned humanity with - is maybe the thing which could redeem that ending for me. It's bleak - and I still don't agree with the overall attitude the books hold - but it is actually a real thesis! It does actually deliver on this threat that's expounded upon and seems like, in any other story, would surely allow for some small space to remember humanity. But how much mass is enough? If enough pocket unvierses all leave behind a few hundred grams, surely it would start to add up.

The alternative interpretation is that Cheng Xin once again fucks everything up but not on purpose, merely through an innocent-intentioned sentimentality. But I think the fact that she acknowledges the threat allows a bit of wiggle room. The argument here would be that Luo Ji's final Wallfacer plan against the Trisolarans is concealed from us until its reveal; this move has been pulled once before. The key difference is that we never see whether the universe reboots. I think this is very meaningful for the argument that it doesn't, and that we wouldn't see the payoff of Cheng Xin's plan, because there is no universe anymore. This really makes it a true twist ending to me which - most meaningfully of all - doesn't go against what the books were trying to do, but actually strengthens it.

But she put the effort into recording humanity's history, and I might go so far as to argue that she did that to explain her motivation to end it all, instead of slipping into it, but actually thinking about it.

The real conflict here, actually with any ending, is the sense of anthropocentrism which it otherwise sought to subvert. But I think reading against that, if we take it seriously that human beings are moral creatures who make moral judgements irrespective of our place in the universe (however small that is), I think that actually pairs better thematically with the idea that a graveyard remembrance of humanity also serves as the final, very small thing - this small living thing - which says 'no more'. The sense of reincarnation and enlightenment here, too, feels fitting, though I'd argue that its overly cynical view of the universe does the argument better.

I wrote all this out and then I went back to reread the last few pages. (I'm using an ebook version, so I don't have page citations). I'm going to see if this interpretation actually holds:

Cheng Xin asks if she can leave five kilograms behind, and then:

As long as the tiny sun inside the sphere continued to give off light, this miniature ecological system would persist. As long as it remained here, Universe 647 would not be a lifeless, dark world. “Of course,” said Guan Yifan. “The great universe isn’t going to fail to collapse because it misses five kilograms.” He had another thought that he did not voice: Perhaps the great universe really would fail to collapse because it lacked a single atom’s mass. [...] Ultimately, the great universe was certain to lose at least a few hundred million tons of matter, or perhaps even a million billion billion tons. Hopefully, the great universe could ignore such a loss.

So the sequence of events is this:

they're going to heed the call of the Returners

Cheng Xin wants to leave behind something to remember humanity by

Guan Yifan says of course she can, so graciously giving her permission

they acknowledge the general fact that others may do the same thing, or maybe even a single atom might be enough to prevent the universe rebooting, so it's a gamble anyway

Holy fuck this is terrible. Anyway, if we go through this with the perspective of the books - that every civilisation is interested first and foremost in survival at any cost, and short of that, to be remembered (survival in memory) - it is near-inevitable that there will be other mass left behind. But the flipside of this is that each individual choice matters; maybe with enough choosing to forego that, the universe could reboot. It's not definite. The ending is left open, the 'science' here is left imprecise. But we are reading between the lines of motivation. I'm not sure that my reading holds as an intended reading - because I do think the thematic compromise of the ending really does feel quite clear - but this is how I would make it more concordant with the series.

I much prefer it for the fact that Cheng Xin uses her contemplation in this lonely, ugly pocket universe to come to a conclusion of leaving mass behind to damn the universe. It would give her something to do. It would improve it tonally - haha, just rereading it, my God, I can't believe this is the ending to these books - and I think I like it just because it subverts that patronising treatment Guan Yifan affords her, like a little child asking for a lolly, concealing the truth of the potential cruelty of nature... which she is actually very well aware of.

I don’t know how much those catastrophes and the final destruction of the Solar System had to do with me. Those are questions that could never be answered definitively. But I’m certain they had something to do with me, with my responsibilities. And now, I’ve climbed to the apex of responsibility: I am responsible for the fate of the universe.

I would like Cheng Xin to abuse the trust in her sweet passivity. This would parallel neatly with Luo Ji's defense against the Trisolarans, the deception within deception within deception, against the ultimate enemy, suffocating it in the cradle.

[shunphantomhivezoldyck]

Has anyone in the fandom of stories of transmigration and time travel ever read The three body problem trilogy, by Cixin Liu, or just until the second book? Because let me tell you, the book presents something called the Wallfacers, individuals who have to engineer a plan to save humanity from an inevitable alien invasion but they can’t tell anyone the specifics in risk of being found out by alien technology, and so a barrier of communication forms between these Wallfacers and the rest of the population where basically no one can ascertain if what the Wallfacers tell them is true or part of the strategy, etc. So there’s this fragment:

And I was reminded of how transmigrators and regressors operate in their stories, even when they don’t seem to want to, and how people watch them in awe or admire them based on the results of absurd or unconventional plans.

I just wanted to share this weird coincidence I found in a SF book.

[fantasyinvader]

I'm near the end of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, the series that started with The Three Body Problem. Two days today clicked for me, making me really get what's going on. Wade says that to lose our human nature is to lose a lot but to lose our bestial nature is to lose everything. Meanwhile, the alien who destroys the solar system talks about how humanity must not have a hiding gene. With these to clues, the true nature of the Dark Forest became clear to me.

The Dark Forest theory says that the reason why we don't see evidence of alien life in the universe is that because everyone is both hiding and willing to annihilate any race they come across. The comparison is to a bunch of hunters in a dark forest, firing shots wherever they hear a sound less they become prey to something else. What clicked is that while races are hunters in the dark forest theory, they aren't like humans hunting. The dark forest turns all into animals in a Buddhist sense.

World of animals ［畜生界］ ( chikushō-kai): Also, realm of animals or world of animality. The third of the Ten Worlds and one of the three, and the four, evil paths. When viewed as a state of life, the world of animals is a condition governed by instinct, in which one has no sense of reason or morality. Beings or persons in this world stand in fear of the strong but despise and prey upon those weaker than themselves. In The Object of Devotion for Observing the Mind, Nichiren defines the characteristic of this world as “foolishness,” which is one of the three poisons.

The Singer, the guy who found and destroyed our solar system, talks about there being a hiding gene. That there's something biologically that makes races hide in the dark forest, and how we must not have one because humanity didn't hide it's location when we revealed both ourselves and Trisolaris to the universe. The fact we didn't present ourselves as safe by hiding within an area of space where we reduce the speed of light ultimately said to him that there might be cause to fear mankind, so it was best to cleanse it. Granted, even if we did go into hiding they'd also wipe out mankind because it would show that mankind would have the technology to actually reduce the speed of light, and that by having that technology we could be a threat. That's why Trisolaris was taken out first, because they showed they had the tech.

It's an oppressive system running on fear, committing genocide after genocide because of the possibility that whatever race you find could be a threat and done so in the cheapest manner possible. Hell, the Singer is a low ranking guy in his group and he was the one to remove our third dimension. This happens all the time, having wrecked the universe which once had 10 dimensions and where lightspeed had no limits. This universe lacks what makes humans... human.

The ability to overcome instinct and impulse through rationality, and as a result the ability to act in a humane manner. Instead, everything comes down to survival, and this has echoed through the entire series. The whole thing started due to the Cultural Revolution in China and the atrocities there. There was the Trisolarians, who focused so heavily on survival on their harsh homeworld that when they found out about Earth they decided to invade, calling us insects. The Wallfacer proposals are all things that people turn against once they find out, their truths being considered to inhumane, but it's only by entering the Dark Forest that mankind can broker a ceasefire.

But people don't want to live with someone who can wipe out both worlds with the press of a button, so they decide to make Cheng Xin the next swordholder because of how unthreatening she is. But she was unable to press the button when the time comes, causing the invasion to resume and the Trisolarans to attmept genocide before the signal manages to go out, but that puts people in fear of the dark forest. When people think there's a strike coming, they're willing to fire up their rockets with people underneath in an attempt to save themselves, which eventually turns mankind against escaping the solar system despite it being our best shot at survival because it would favor the rich. We attempt to create space colonies to survive, but we didn't understand how big of a threat the dark forest was. Wade tries to focus on the space travel plan, but eventually manages to create normal guns that fire anti-matter bullets that can destroy a space carrier in a single hit. He has replicated the Dark Forest in miniature, a mundane and economical way of killing many with a single shot, but he relents to Cheng Xin, keeping his humanity at the end. There's races that hid in pocket dimensions to ensure their own survival, but by doing so they may have made it so that the universe doesn't have enough matter to be reborn.

In the end, all Cheng Xin can do after holding onto her humanity this entire time is to leave a message behind for the new universe, in the hopes that it will be discovered and prevent this from happening again. Knowledge that can break this cycle, to free the universe from the need to reincarnate in order to undo the damage of space wars.

The whole series is about the dangers of putting survival above all else, as that can rob us of our humanity like what happens in the book or during the cultural revolution, as well as how life and conflict impact the environment around us. And I honestly wouldn't have fully grasped this if it wasn't for me familiarizing myself with aspects of Buddhism due to the Houses discourse.