I don’t think the game wanted to paint an “unbridgeable gap” here, as the author says. The way Mio and Zoe get more into each other’s stories is exactly the testament to the way this gap can be closed through a unique shared experience, and to the way one genre can enrich the other.
I play Split Fiction with my girlfriend, and she is a fantasy fangirl, while I am very sci-fi, so the characters land just perfectly. And I can’t help but notice that, as Mio and Zoe get more open-minded and try to look into the root of how those two preferences formed, me and my girlfriend also get more passionate for each other’s interests.
And that’s one of the most powerful things about the game. It helps to deconstruct our notions and perceptions about both genres, and become more open to each other’s vision.
The game looks fun, but I personally can not get into a world that switches between fantasy and sci-fi so much. The mix just isn’t my thing. Magic and tech don’t mix well in my head.
I guess I’m the odd one out then. I’m a huge Sci-Fi fan. Ender’s Game still stands as my favorite book after all these years. But I’m not too crazy about fantasy. I’ve bounced off of books, shows, and movies that my friends and family loved. They just seemed to be mediocre stories with fantasy paint on it and people who like Wizards were able to gloss over the holes.
It’s not unheard of for people to not be interested in the other genre. But those people are outnumbered by consumers who just want the new thing.
Fein the article:
People might have a preference, sure, but that’s not what’s happening in Split Fiction; the game makes it seem like sci-fi writers think fantasy isn’t a form of legitimate artistic expression, and vice versa. It’s hard to imagine any fan of either genre today being that hardline about the other.
the game makes it seem like sci-fi writers
What? No, it’s just Mio. Still, the dialogue is somewhat tropey; I hope it stays ultimately better than ITT.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I tend to lean more to sci-fi myself. But the premise argues that it and fantasy are somehow different, when they’re not. It’s a criticizes generative AI, which is valid, but doesn’t question why the two genres have to be at odds when it obviously has a blend of both.
I feel that Sci-Fi and Fantasy are different. Especially enough to be seen as two different genres.
Tell that to everything I like, star trek is fantasy adjacent, star wars too, all of chinese fantasy (especially the movies) are technically fantasy but have so much stuff that works like scifi just using magic engines and shit, low magic matches epic scifi, its literally just is science driving the cool thing or is magic, its set dressing, it can be swapped. Harry potter can be the same story but with a scifi setting, idk what im even saying im rambling at this point.
Imo scifi is under the umbrella of fantasy.
Depends on the sci-fi and depends on the Fantasy!
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I have long standing issues with fares and the narrative shortcuts and tropes he uses.
But yeah. Watched the first hour or so on a stream and it was pure nonsense. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what SFF even is (there is a reason we just call it “Science Fiction and Fantasy”) but even what writing is. One character can never shut the fuck up about how “I am going to get published. Were you published. PUBLISHED” because apparently this dystopic future where machine learning steals ideas from people and combine them into the best stories ever told doesn’t have ebooks.
I got on a Whitest Kids You Know kick recently and they were talking about when they jacked off one of the guys on stage in a massage parlor skit. And I think it was Trevor (RIP) who couldn’t stop laughing about how they were dumbass kids who had no idea how ANYTHING worked and that was the basis for so many of their skits.
And yeah. That is definitely the rosetta stone to fares et al’s writing. Whether they are talking about undercover cops or writing or what it means to be a child of divorce.
See, I feel like both Sci-Fi and Fantasy have enough different that the should be sperate genres. I think the combining them is to the detriment of both. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve given up looking for something new to watch because I click Sci-Fi and every listing is Lord of the Rings.
Isn’t a ring which has an inbuilt GPS tracker sci-fi? :p
Which gets to the crux of it. Unless you are reading REALLY hard sci-fi, most of the tech boils down to “a wizard did it”.
Like, the OT of Star Wars is 100% a fantasy series and it was only the EU (and later the PT) that tried to explain the tech and make it more sci-fi. Similarly, a lot of the litrpg writers think Sanderson is a softy and go ridiculously hard on explaining their magic systems in greater detail than actual textbooks.
And, at the end of the day, they are all just different shades of speculative fiction that primarily use magic/tech/magitech as a plot device to explore the impact on society of whatever metaphor the big bad is.
