Okay so I the sequel to the Shamer's Daughter movie adaptation has just come out, and I'll be watching it in the cinema tomorrow, and I thought I'd write out my current adaptation opinions beforehand. Fair warning, it's super rambly.

(crossposted to tumblr)

So I've been watching this series on Danish TV and it wasn't bad but it did make me shout “screw the natural order” at the TV a lot, because apparently that is my reaction to overly deathist narratives. It's not even that the decisions made were necessarily bad, because this is explicitly a setting with an afterlife, which might very well be nice enough that being deathist is warranted in this specific case. But they didn't even check.

The basic plot is that our protagonist wants his dying grandfather to not. Luckily, he finds an amulet that lets him enter Fantasy Limbo and make someone else die in his grandfather's place. But then it turns out that if you do that, Fantasy Limbo starts to crumble, making everyone in a radius of a few hundred kilometers unable to die.

Which. Even assuming that this prevents only death itself, not all accidents and disease. (It must still prevent the very worst cases of either or the in-story news reports would've been phrased very differently.) And assuming also that this would've eventually killed the 8 otherwise immortal beings who live in Fantasy Limbo and work as spirit guides. That sounds like a damn good trade.

You could travel around to different places on Earth, crumbling almost all the limboes but leaving a few death zones for the chronically suicidal and those with religious objections. Set up a charity to pay for any consenting adult's transport there. It still wouldn't be ideal for chronically suicidal people, since there's a non-opt-out afterlife, but the status quo also has that. And on the upside, billions of people would get to have more time, finally able to spend decades doing whatever they want without having to feel like they're wasting a valuable resource.

Of course, it's possible that this setting's afterlife is awesome enough to make that a bad idea, that it is in fact just as good as life on Earth or possibly even better. It's not the impression I got — there was a lot of emphasis put on the dead Looking Down Upon Their Loved Ones and Waiting For Them At The Entrance and it left me with the impression they didn't have much else to do. But it's possible my impression is wrong, in which case I think the correct answer is to try a lot harder to prove to everyone else that this world exists. Let everyone make their life choices while fully informed of what life actually entails, make it so nobody has to fear Hell ever again, give people in bad circumstances access to an easily accessible alternative.

…but of course in the actual series, the protagonist makes none of these considerations. He simply “realizes that what he did was wrong”, undoes the swap, and the natural order resumes.

Tom Scott's doing a new series of YouTube videos “from a future. Not the future. Just a future”. Sort of a Black Mirror-esque concept. The second video in the series isn't very interesting IMO, it's basically describing an actual Black Mirror premise without doing anything new with it, but the first one I really liked.

Video link: The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century

Transcript for anyone who doesn't like videos

Oh, and I was going to explain my new username. It's from a song I really like, about staying hopeful when things seem shitty. (I sometimes sing it to myself when I need to remember that.) The lyrics are a little hard to find on the internet, so I'll post them in full below, even though they're in the wrong language for anyone but me to understand.

Part of me does want to try to translate the song so I can show it to others, but I know for a fact that poetry translation is a really hard thing which I'm not particularly skilled at. So probably that's not worth the effort unless I'm doing it purely for my own entertainment.