Creating a Comic

Please excuse a little bit of nerd venting before we get back to the topic of stand-up comedy.

Unobtainium and handwavium are terms that science fiction authors often use–ironically!–to describe mysterious unknown elements or technologies that are crucial to the story. They’re the sci-fi genre equivalents of the MacGuffin.¹

That’s why I couldn’t believe it when I heard that the term “unobtanium” is actually used, seriously and without irony, as the name of the special everyone’s-fighting-over-it substance in the movie Avatar. But it is. As a friend of mine said, “at some point you’re supposed to take out the stupid placeholder name and change it to something else.”

James Cameron is clearly a savant for emotional storytelling and technical filmmaking, but it sure would be nice if he’d let someone else help out with the writing. Or if someone would have the guts to tell these megalomaniac writer/directors when they’re being especially retarded.

And then there’s this problem, which is also fundamentally a writing problem…

1. The Spice from Dune or Star Trek‘s dilithium crystals are two prominent examples. [↩]

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