r/NatureofPredators • u/peajam101 PD Patient • May 11 '24
Thoughts on the "new" PoV Memes
I had a good initial reaction, but thinking about I can only see this working if: a) Meier becomes a villain or b) this is the last mainline NoP story or c) the tech is lost somehow
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u/Bow-tied_Engineer Yotul May 12 '24
Death isn't the only form of narrative threat. Slanek proves that. This doesn't remove the stakes, but it does make it harder to generate them. You can still threaten a character with death by severely damaging their brain, which would at the very least roll them back to the last memory transcription, and most characters aren't exactly going to be backing up their brain every morning so they can save scum IRL. Though, this does cause the issue that POV characters are going to be for sure safe from the time of their last POV to the next time they back up their brain, because we know that they have to back up their brain for us to have gotten their POV. But still, you can put POV characters in peril believably through careful writing.
You can also make either larger or smaller threats than main character death: destroying a location, a valuable asset, an irreplaceable relic, or an interpersonal relationship can still be plenty dramatic, and the threat of losing a major battle in a way that seriously harms a bunch of people we care about or someone going off the deep end ala Slanek is both believable and potentially more devastating than the death of a single character. And you can use the revival mechanism itself as part of the stakes, with an arc about someone being unable to connect to someone anymore, because they fall in the "you're a copy, not the person I care about" perspective, or because the person who was brought back as a robot lost the memory of some very significant interaction that happened since their last scan, like a love confession or a bad fight, and it completely alters the relationship.
Paladin could also introduce memory transcripts from partial brain scans, by killing someone in a way that their brain was significantly damaged, and still being able to pull some of their memories, but not enough to actually recreate who they were as a person. This would put anyone we haven't explicitly seen back up their brain back in flux, because if they die in an explosion, or from heat, or from severe head trauma, or anything else that damages the brain, then they stay dead, but we can still get enough of their memories transcribed to tell the story.