The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

Time once again to talk about craft, and this time, the bit of craft to go over is writer’s block. I’ve just been working over some of this myself, though I think mine is at least 80% schedule block. I did have to reconnect with the material I was working on, and had to go to extreme measures to do so.

Let me start off by saying I don’t believe in writer’s block. Never really had it, even this recent bout came down more to feeling connected enough to the material to feel the emotions I needed. It was more of a personal emotional block than a creative block. I never stopped writing other things, I never stopped coming up with new ideas. There was one project that was just a little out of where I could be viciously honest with myself.

I’m pretty good at getting people past writer’s block though, and I don’t seem to follow any standard methods of getting people past it, I just dive in like a therapist, diagnose, prescribe, and then it’s done.

Since I don’t believe in writer’s block, I’ll tell you what I do believe in, fear and blinders. In the case of reconnecting with my current WIP, the fear was am I really doing the emotions of the project justice. This may not be the fear you’re having, it may be a structural fear, a fear of lost direction, or any of several other fears.

I also recently ran across an article on 20 ways to overcome writer’s block, and let me tell you, a lot of it was bullshit. Let me just dispel these points before I get to mine.

One of them was go to a writer’s workshop. Well, if you’re in a major urban area, you can probably find a few in the metro area, but if you aren’t in a big area, you may have to wait for a convention. At any rate, what is happening while you pursue this means of getting out of writer’s block? You’re putting off writing. And the more you put it off, the more doubt creeps in and you’re digging a bigger hole. Don’t wait for a workshop. Get on facebook and twitter and find some writers, bounce ideas off of them. Instant feedback is way better than waiting for a workshop.

Another one this article mentioned is relaxation techniques. There again, something that isn’t writing. If you’re so stressed about writing, this may not be the thing for you, I mean, you won’t be a successful actor if you can’t get your butt on stage. I write better when I’m agitated, anyway.

Sleeping on it. Sometimes a rest is good, but being tired is not writer’s block. If you’re blocked and you’re thinking about sleeping on it, sit that butt back in the chair and write. Sleeping on it will only get you further from writing. Sleeping on it is good when you’ve written your little heart out and you’ve practically had an orgasm because your last bit of output is so good you need a cigarette and a reach around.

Reading inspirational quotes. Did inspirational quotes ever  work? I mean, if they did, there wouldn’t be so many parodies of inspirational quotes. Forget that new age crap. If you are reading inspirational quotes, you aren’t writing. You can read Ghandi and Dr. Phil all you like, but are they really helping you finish your book? No, confront the problem directly and boldly. This goes for another of their suggestions, making an inspiration board. Isn’t this just a way of wasting more time than just reading inspirational quotes? Forget about it. Get your butt in a chair. Write.

They also mention checking the news, which is something I usually do in avoidance of work. News may inspire a story, but it won’t get you over a block.

Another suggestion this post had was to take a walk. I’m iffy on this one. Taking a walk does two things, it accomplishes a change of scenery, and gets the blood flowing. I’ve never been a believer in changing scenery, and leaving your desk means leaving your post as a writer. I’m a pacer, and at the very least, a very active sitter. Stay in the room with your project. I actually keep a set of weights near my desk, and between scenes and paragraphs, I’ll do some exercise. This keeps my heart rate and energy up, and decreases the sedentary nature of the act of writing.

The primary problem I have with a list of 20 things you can do to get over writer’s block, however, isn’t any of the suggestions per se, it’s more that the article is throwing out suggestions without diagnosing a specific problem. I know you have writer’s block, but what is causing the block? It’s kind of like a doctor randomly prescribing something and seeing if it works. This is a craft, it has its techniques, and overcoming block is just one of the processes you’re going to have to deal with. We don’t throw stuff at the wall and see if it sticks. We study the problem, and come up with a likely solution.

So let’s run through it. The scenario I’m picturing is this: you’re working on a novel or something like that, and you just can’t get through a scene, and don’t want to move on to the next one without getting this one out. It is probably useful to go over a few categories of the background on why you’re blocked, and diagnose out a solution. While I am arranging things here by a specific group of issues that may be blocking you, I notice in my thinking I’m going with the most likely means of conquering your block and moving to things that are less likely to unblock you. Fear. Let’s start with fear.

So nothing you put down seems right, and you can’t get a word in without a massive wave of self-doubt. Nothing is good enough, it’s all crap and you should give up and become an accountant. We all deal with doubt. It is a temporary phase. Understand that first. Got it? Good. Now start writing, and don’t stop. Really. Any doubt just gets in your way of the goal, and the goal is getting more words at the end of the page, more pages at the end of the document, and getting it done. Really, this is just a draft. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Force yourself to write it no matter how bad you think it will be when you look at it. I have a hint, it probably won’t be as bad when you come back through, and a second hint, it’s just a draft. So you set down a thousand words or so that didn’t work. That’s not horrible. That can be an hour or less. No biggie. Stop thinking it is. It doesn’t have to be perfect the first time, no matter what your journalism class told you (unless you’re a journalist, then you’re on your own).

If you had so much fear, you wouldn’t have started, right?

If your fear is getting too much of you still, and you absolutely can’t get a scene out, the next best thing to do is to give a few minutes to what actually has to be in the scene, and write them out in a summary sentence each. Expand on those thoughts. Link one to the next to the next. It may not be pretty, in fact, it probably isn’t, but its done and set down. Expand on the first one, keep moving, try to create a flow to them. Or you can move on, but make a note to expand, edit, rewrite. I have less problems setting down something and moving on than I do stopping working. Stopping writing is the enemy, and it should be avoided at all costs.

Maybe you have an issue with is format. I find this happens a lot with people switching formats between screenplay and prose or comic script, or people who can’t decide what format it should be in. This can sometimes be obvious if you do an outline or at least a major act breakdown. If it isn’t in a nice three act formula, it probably isn’t a screenplay. But still, that person who is used to writing screenplays and wants to transition to prose may have some issues and see some scenes in a more cinematic style may get blocked when the format changes from dialog and description to prose. Write it in whatever format you feel it fits in. Get it out. Put words at the end of the page. Go back and re-write. In the interim you’ll figure out what format this is going to take. The prose may turn to screenplay, the screenplay may turn to prose. Either is fine. Just keep going (are you noticing a theme yet?).

Maybe your problem is plotting. You aren’t sure where your story goes immediately, but you have a goal, you know where it’s going overall. It may be time for an outline. Yes, an outline. You look at me as if I said a dirty word, memories of your pigeon faced English teacher in high school are running through your mind and now you know you’ll never write again. Let me rephrase just a little bit. It may be time for a near-term outline. List out the next three main scenes you have in mind in a couple key sentences. Now you’re a story paleontologist, and you’re looking for the missing link. Write a sentence that would fall between them, and another. Summarizing is fine at this point. Just keep going until you have everything you need to be writing again.

Or, find a writer (we tend to hang around on twitter and facebook a lot). Ask questions. Ask for help. When a writer asks for help and I see it, I’ll usually jump in. Seriously. Every time I help a writer through an issue or help a writer make a decision, I learn more, I hone my skills, my craft. I get energized. Every writer out there has been in your situation before, we all have our ways. We all like to share them. Even the best get stuck on plot at times, and the key is out there. You just need to ask. Unlike our characters, we don’t bite.

The point I want to keep making is nothing will allow you to overcome a block better than keeping yourself directly entangled in the work you’re trying to do. Stepping away from it is stepping away from it, no matter what you call it. You have to confront the block, if you step away the blockage will only get stronger, and probably start calling you bad names behind your back and ruing your reputation.

So what else might be plaguing the blocked writer?

You may be suffering a disconnect from your material. I had to go to an extreme recently to reconnect with some material, and you can read about that in the post just before this one. There are lesser extremes, ones that don’t open old emotional wounds.

First warning. Editing a previous part of the book may seem like a great idea, and it probably is if you’re picking up the book a really long time after you laid it down, but if the story is fresh for you, it’s a very bad idea to go back and edit. You’ll hate what you’ve already done (you’re already in a hypercritical mood after all), and you’ll get caught up in minutiae that don’t matter. For most people, writer head is very different from editor head. Let them exist separately.

Like a lot of writers, I’m a pretty intense researcher. I have a file for my big book with news stories (its sometimes ripped from the headlines, sometimes the headlines rip from it), images of various kinds, an iTunes playlist, movies and books that will remind me of what I’m trying to do. Some of it is sorted according to plot point of the WIP. If I get stuck, I’ll take a brief foray into these. The important note is brief. Very brief. Then get back to writing.

What we’re trying to accomplish is the creation of flow. You should check out the books on Flow and Creativity by Professor Mihalyi. They’re brilliant. In flow, a minute will seem like an hour, an hour will seem like a minute, you’ll forget conversations, you’ll forget about the need to eat, and solutions will come to you. When you’re blocked, you’re about as far from flow as you can be.

A big part of flow is choosing and creating your environment. There is a good basic quick idea about flow and environment. Some people say changing your environment will help, get up, go to eat, get coffee (these are of course contingent on you taking your writing device and writing while elsewhere). I never found that a change of environment helped me or was necessary until I was hungry, in fact, discovering a monster in my belly that needed sating was a good cue to move out of the house and get food and keep writing. Clean off all of the kipple from your desk (preferably with a cathartic single swipe of your arm), and keep writing. Immerse yourself in an environment that reminds you of your project.

Part of environment is time. Make a schedule to develop a habit of writing. Schedule a couple hours at least. Give the kids to the significant other, give the dog a shot of wine to make it drowsy (not really, but you get the idea), close and lock the door. Make your writing time your own, and make the consequences of disturbing you clear and severe. This is YOUR time to write. Not theirs.

The reason I tell you to schedule a couple of hours is important. Rather than switching to something else to get past your block, try switching to your project. Write some warm up, a character sketch, something else. Struggle on words you definitely won’t let anyone see, and when you’re warm, dive in. You may just come up with something useful or a new story. It will help create a flow, and take the pressure off of sitting down to a screen and thinking these words count.

In fact, I really think the correct term for writer’s block is flow block. Really, we mostly know what we want to write, we just can’t get the flow going.

I like the concept of setting a writing goal, a deadline for completion, or a minimum word count for the day, but for some people, this can add to the fear of failure. Another problem with this is knowing that some scenes are definitely way harder than others, and we don’t necessarily know which will be one of these scenes until we’re in it. The extreme of this is the program write or die, which I believe you can find on-line. I’ve never tried it, but it works for some people. Turning off the internet should also be considered. This would fall into the eliminate distractions category. I really think an important part of setting a goal is setting an accomplishable goal. Saying 5,000 words a day or else is likely not practical unless you’ve got no distractions, commitments and day job. You’ll likely hit it sometimes, but you’ll feel bad when you don’t. Setting a goal of 500 words is manageable, and if you’re dead set on 500, you’re probably doing 1,000 or more without thinking about it. That requirement of 500 is merely a requirement that you sit down and get something out, keep it going.

Another part of your environment is the tools you work with. Are you still working with Microsoft Word just like it was 1994? Ditch that program. Try something like Celtx or Scrivener, where you can make notes, save multiple documents in the same file, create character profiles, setting profiles, and just about anything else you may like to do. You may also try mindmapping. A program like Freemind can open yourself up to some very fast sketching of plotlines, and the speed with which you can throw down and alter with this program is faster than anything else out there. It will get your synapses moving, and will actually help you find connections in your WIP more easily.

If you still can’t get yourself to put words down on your project, the next best thing you can do is to write on something else. You may have a short story you’re dabbling on, a side project. These things are important. I really believe in letting my subconscious work things out. Best way to do that is to give my conscious mind a cat toy to bat around. If you don’t have that, do some writing exercises. Try finding a portrait of someone and write a character sketch. Try some flash fiction. I came up with stories from a hat. That would work. Notice, the most important thing is to start writing, keep writing. If you are blocked, no word set down is wasted. Stop thinking that every word must be gold, because you’re going throw a lot away as a writer. It is just part of the process. It may be important for you to remember that no one ever needs see what you’re setting down. Take that pressure off yourself.

When I’m really well locked into flow I’ll trade off activities, but I don’t recommend it if you’re really blocked. It is a very slippery slope between giving yourself a break and distracting yourself under the guise of a writing break and not getting anything done. When everything is working for me in writing, I’ll work on the novel until my brain says to stop. Then play guitar. Then do some art or craft. By then my brain has allowed the subconscious to assemble the next part and kick it back up to my conscious mind. Repeat. It is worth noting however that these are rarely my best moments at the other tasks.

So here we are, 2,500 words into an essay and I’ll now talk about doing something other than writing to get yourself over a block. This is how important I think writing your way out of a writing block is. Stopping writing  is the most dangerous thing you can do, and you have to recognize when to do it. There may be a time to put the writing away for a while. The brain needs down time, science has studied and confirmed this. The down time doesn’t mean go do email or play a game, the science says that isn’t really down time, and for a writer, it forms a part of that slippery slope. It needs to be real down time. Let it recharge. But don’t do this for too long, or it will be harder to start up again.

Writing is also a basic input-output system. Many of us writers don’t read, not nearly enough. I hear this complaint of many writers, professional and aspiring alike. We need input data, and when our memory of source material is used up, we need to refill the buffer. Read a book. I think I’ve heard the right ratio of reading to writing is ten to one, and that seems about right. Make the time, it is an investment in your writing future.

There are other reasons for block, more personal and psychological reasons that may be a more difficult thing to diagnose in this venue. I’ll revisit the topic as long as you give me some comments on your specific block. Or find me. I’m up here and on twitter and facebook. I’ll certainly listen and give you some ideas. But that’s it for now, Need to get back to writing.

Let me start out with a disclaimer, move to a contradiction of my title, and then move on to support my title. I first stated this on Facebook a month or so ago, in just so many words, in response to editing a short story by a young writer. No sooner had I put this up, but some people tried to defend adverbs. I didn’t get into it too much, figuring I’d write something about it soon. So this is it. Adverbs are a cop-out, plain and simple, an indefensible sin when they are used wrong, and they most often are. They don’t equal adjectives, despite sharing a purpose, that of description, and I’m even beginning to be suspicious of adjectives. I won’t back off of this premise, so don’t even try to convince me otherwise.

So, the contradiction. There are places to use adverbs so they are effective and correct, namely when to use anything larger would be a distraction or a delay in action, or in other words, to give a fuller, more specific description would leave the reader saying “get on with it.” That’s it. As an example, your character breaks free from a henchman, runs across a room to get to a gun first and the tables have turned. You could describe it thus:

Jack wrenched his arm free, clocked the thug across his jaw, breaking it, and ran like a Jesus lizard running on the water for the gun on the table.

Or you could use an adverb.

Jack wrenched his arm free, clocked the thug across his jaw, breaking it, and quickly ran for the gun on the table.

The use of the adverb is debatable, but justifiable here. The image of the panic of a Jesus lizard running across the water is kind of fun, and if you haven’t seen a Jesus Lizard run, go check it out, but at the same time, the space it take on the page is considerable, especially if there’s a lot more action coming in the next few lines, or it’s a particularly climactic part of the book. In the example above, I could have used a few adverbs, or I could have loaded the sentences with cumbersome description, three phrases of several words apiece.
But let’s look at why adverbs are a cop-out. We’re told adverbs are words that describe verbs, and really this is what they do. Most of the time, however, we really want to describe a character. Consider this:

He slammed the phone angrily in its cradle.
“Get me Becker!” he said to his subordinate.

The less than average reader or writer would think this fine, but we miss a grand opportunity. Here’s three more ways to tell it:

1) He slammed the phone in its cradle, then with a swipe of his arm cleared everything off the     desk. He stood, kicked the pile and screamed at his subordinate, “Get me Becker!”

2) He slammed the phone in its cradle, hit his subordinate in the jaw, and then pushed him into     the wall. “Get me Becker!”

3) He slammed the phone in its cradle, stood in a grand and slow gesture, clenched his jaw and     said in a quiet tone with deadly force, “Get me Becker.”

Each of these actions could be said to be done “angrily” but when we think about how they describe the act, we get much more. In the first, we have a character who will displace his anger to inanimate objects. On the second, the anger is displaced to another person, something that could be significant later on as that character gets abused and finally rebels. In the third example, the anger is internalized, the mark of a refined tyrant. So much more than just saying “angrily.”

So what it comes down to is, “Angrily” is a vague sense of how something happened. It’s like you’ve gotten a report from somebody who is the cousin’s former college roommate of someone who actually was there, and they heard it third-hand, and you can’t get anything reliable third-hand. Coming up with good description is hard work, and as writers, this is what we signed up for. We don’t take the easy way out. The easy way out is the surest route to not getting published.

Most of the fine mechanics of writing comes down to one essay I read long ago, Harlan Ellison’s “Telltale Tics and Tremors” which you can read in The Essential Ellison. In it he describes how to write your character, and it’s all about character, really. You can come up with any number of ways to describe how that character angrily reacts to the news he’s just heard on the phone, and the more specific and more unique you make it, the better your writing will come off and the more interesting your story will be. “Angrily” is a vague sense of something happening, it isn’t an exact delineation of what happens.

Angrily is a stage direction, and we only give stage directions to actors who have training to bring life to those directions. You have auditions for actors to bring life to “angrily,” you don’t let any schmuck off the street speak those lines, and we shouldn’t let our readers do the interpretation for us. They aren’t qualified. Words like “angrily” and “madly” and “haughtily” may work great for fairy tales, but in the grown-up world, they just don’t carry the weight of a good description. They are an easy out, and that’s why you should avoid them.

So why do adjectives work, and adverbs don’t? For the most part any adjective you add will narrow down what you are describing to a single specific example. Take a car. It may be a Toyota Corolla, but if you add adjectives like hunter green with brown interior, a dent in the front fender from when the guy went straight in the left turn lane, and a stain in the back seat from a milkshake that didn’t get cleaned up in time. Compare that to a phone being hung up angrily. We have all hung a phone up angrily many times, but the adverb doesn’t give us anything to make it at all different from any other time or person hanging up the phone. It doesn’t really get any more specific with more adverbs. He could have hung up the phone angrily and forcefully, but does that give you any better picture of how it happened?

So can we call this issue closed?

I’ve been watching through the Director’s cut of The Watchmen, and exactly why the ending didn’t work has really just made itself clear to me. I saw it twice in the theatre, and put off really criticizing it until I saw this edition, since I knew the theatrical release was only part of a larger film, which was only part of an expansive graphic novel. I wanted to give it it’s due, which is not easy to do, considering Alan Moore’s campaign against the film of his own book. I should also mention that The Watchmen is one of the best examples I can find of fractal storytelling, with its repetition of themes and events in different places and moments in the plot.

Now, a few things about films of books, before I get into the nitty gritty. I don’t think there’s any story that can’t be told on film, with all deference to Alan Moore and J.D. Salinger. Any claims to the contrary are author’s egotism or control freak natures. Prose, comics, and film are all storytelling mediums, each has strengths and weaknesses, and each have their own structures, conventions and creative vocabularies. Changing mediums is an act of translation, and in any act of translation, some parts translate better than others. The translation lets another person, with all that other person’s sensibilities into the creative process, and so there’s an interpretation that goes on in the process. To be fair, to shoot The Watchmen, you’d need eight hours of movie, and some way of putting in some text-heavy exposition. On the other hand, it does kind of look like Zack Snyder held up a copy of the comic, and told each actor to change their posture until it matched the comic exactly. It would have been long and complete.

I mention this because this interpretation, and this translation is what made Zack Snyder choose bombs over tentacles.
But we should start at the comic, recount the story, and then look at what this all means, and then compare the movie, and see if we can come to some conclusions. In the comic, the machine Dr. Manhattan has been working on transplants a gigantic being from another dimension to downtown Manhattan, and it is the Godzilla of transdimensional tentacle beasts, destroying blocks of the city, and killing thousands, causing great psychological harm to the psychics of the world. The creature immediately dies in the Earth’s atmosphere, leaving us all to wonder what the hell just happened. The net result of John leaving for parts of the galaxy unknown is played the same, but his reasoning is quite different.

The tentacle represents something beyond humanity, something that has caused such great harm, and which may strike again any time anywhere. All comparisons to terrorism aside, it is a unifying terror. Terrorism has failed to do this to us because terrorists are, by and large, humans. This is something we’ve been looking for proof of for millenia, the tentacle is alien. This is first contact, the game changer. In light of this, Dr. Manhattan can stop defending humans, he can leave us to our own means, because our means are now unified against a proven universal problem. We are left knowing little about the wheres and whys of the inexplicable appearance of the tentacles,and exactly what kind of danger it represents, but we do know there is something beyond our meager struggles.

This leads us to Dr. Manhattan. In the comic, this event liberates the man in blue. He has been freed of the burden of being defender of the earth for the cause of American justice and freedom, such as he can provide while Tricky Dick is in power. Dr. Manhattan started off as a scientist, with a sense of curiosity which had been interrupted by his accident. With the appearance of the tentacle, and as abhorrent as the plan was, it did work as we are led to believe, and with his tremendous powers from the accident, Dr. Manhattan could finally do what no other man in history (and for a long time into the future) could do, visit the stars, find other civilizations, and satisfy his curiosity. The mixed ethics of the root cause of his freedom were something he chose to live with as it solved his struggle, the ends had justified the means. Adrian Veidt had taken the ethical step he couldn’t take himself. His job was done.

It should be noted that in the Watchmen, everything is masterfully nuanced, and so Dr. Manhattan’s notion of freedom is probably a conflicted notion in his head. He was isolated by the military and government into doing their dirty work in pursuit of their version of freedom, which as we know in the world of the Watchmen, is anything but free even as far as we understand freedom. At the same time, he had his own notion of freedom that refused to be brainwashed out of him.
In the movie, Adrian Veidt made a device that destroyed blocks of many cities all over the world, and made it obvious that Dr. Manhattan had built them, and was actually the enemy in the end (though not necessarily all along). The weapons were very similar to existing nuclear technology, and were very obviously man-made weapons. What is more significant is that The weapons were obviously made and detonated by Dr. Manhattan. He was framed, and in the process, chased away from the earth.

Now, this is in many ways, the same thing. The world has been united against a common enemy, Dr. Manhattan and the big blue guy is gone. Problem really is, what happens when you show a technology that can vaporize spheres of earth and city, well, all of a sudden it is the new shiny, and everyone wants one, in particular before anybody else, including two-bit third world dictators like North Korea and Iran. In the movie, Adrian Veidt introduces a new arms race to a world one minute from nuclear war. Great job, world’s smartest man. Way to go.

So I think it is time for me to make a writing comment on Avatar since by now everybody, even impoverished children in Africa have probably seen it. While it was pretty, and the story was epic, it wasn’t without its writing flaws. James Cameron is, I think, the best person in Hollywood for polishing the turd. I think he has had only a couple of original stories (The Abyss and Strange Days), and even those I’m beginning to doubt. He ripped off the Terminator from a Harlan Ellison written Outer Limits storyline. Titanic was based on “A Night to Remember” which I first read in fourth grade. This one was widely known to be a take off on Dances With Wolves, Pocahantas, or any other of 20 or so books. Given how lazy he seems to be in coming up with stories, I’m guessing he didn’t go too deeply into the more obscure of the list. Most of the issues I had were issues of laziness, and I think they are from the laziness of not being hungry. Somebody who isn’t given five years, $300 million and complete control from the outset of filming would have fixed these problems. Let me ruin the movie for you.

Actually, I found the movie tremendously enjoyable, let me start by saying it. The world Cameron created is richly detailed, down to creating a full language and ecosystem. But you’d think if you could come up with such a world, you could come up with a better name for the rock the humans want than “Unobtanium”. This name is a joke from materials scientists and materials users that should never have made it into a movie. You’d think after 5 years of production, you could come up with a better name for a mineral. There were two ways around it. One, come up with a better name, or second, mention “unobtanium TM, I don’t know what it’s made of and I don’t care, I just know it makes money.” The repetition of the name in serious context just made it silly. Another example of this is Pandora. We couldn’t come up with a better name for it than this? Really? Star Wars can do it just fine.

The other issue with the unobtanium is that we don’t know what it does. This entire three hours of this epic tale and epic war was fought over something that so far as we know is a rock, by the looks of it, a piece of pyrite or hematite. At least in Dune (another story parts of Avatar’s plot could have been stolen from) we knew what the spice did. You could say it’s a MacGuffin, but in this case, we deserve more than a MacGuffin. MacGuffins only work when it’s a story about characters, and this is a story about a war. The characters are absolutely secondary to plot. They don’t really have their individuality, much as James Cameron would like you to think. There’s the grizzled military leader, the money-driven company man (last played by Paul Reiser in Aliens, another James Cameron movie), Sigourney Weaver’s native liaison is nothing more than a Jane Goodall without a past. Think about it, what do we know about her, what did she do before coming to Pandora? Where are the telltale tics and tremors of any of these characters? No, not a character piece, and so we have to care about what the pathetically named unobtanium does.

The next issue I have was a reference to a “Daisy Cutter” in reference to a bomb to be used on the natives. If you look up “Daisy Cutter”, it is not a generic term. It is used in reference to a particular weapon of the current U.S. Military, the largest conventional bomb in the world, which fills up the entire cargo bay of a C-130. It is nickname the daisy cutter for the blast pattern it creates. What the future military creates on Pandora is the mother of all cluster bombs, not a single gigantic and comparable conventional bomb. All comparisons aside, when she said, “Fricking daisy Cutter,” it pulled me out of the world of Pandora, and back into the very familiar war-torn world we live in, and that worked counter to all of the work they did in creating the world of Pandora. Eight years of development and execution thrown away in one word. Now, if they had used “cluster bomb”, it would have made plenty of sense, as this is a generic term for a bomb made of many little bombs. It would also have made things that much more horrible, as cluster bombs are now banned by the U.N.

And really, robots that carry guns and knives? What possible utility does that have? I can’t imagine we’d build anything so anthropomorphic as we’d have a device for the knife, a gun with much more design efficiency. Didn’t we see enough of this with the Matrix? Aren’t the robots and weapons of Robotech much more likely than these cheesy things?