The appropriately named Jarrett Walker is the author of Human Transit,
a seminal text on transportation and cities that draws on his decades
of experience in urban planning; he has the distinction of being called
“an idiot” by Elon Musk on Twitter, when he pointed out that Musk’s
Boring Company tunnel proposals could not possibly work due to their low
capacity.
Walker’s overarching thesis is that city transit is undermined by “elite
projection,” where rich people pretend that the way they like getting
around – in private vehicles that go from door to door – can possibly
work at urban scale, despite the fact that simple geometry shows that
this is a physical impossibility.
As in, “It doesn’t matter how tightly you pack self-driving Ubers
together on our roads. If all the people who make your coffee and empty
your wastebin are in private vehicles rather than on buses and trains,
the roads will be at 5 or 10 times their physical capacity.”
This emphasis on private vehicles leads people to seize on technological
fads to defend the indefensible – hence the vogue for describing the
smartphone as the key technology for transportation, or self-driving
cars, or data-driven custom shuttle routes that re-route themselves
based on demand signals from riders’ phones.
These all share the geometric flaw: even the smallest cars, packed as
tightly as possible, multiplied by all the people who rely on buses and
trains, will overflow all the roads we have now and all the roads we
could ever build.
There is another flaw: when you make it cheaper to ride private vehicles
(rather than public transit), you siphon transit riders out of the
buses and trains, and put them on the roads, increasing congestion: so
adding “efficient rideshares” actually makes transit worse, not better
Walker tried to explain this to Elon Musk on Twitter, discussing how his
proposed Boring Machine tunnels’ narrow bores meant that on the one
hand, they couldn’t carry enough people to make an appreciable
difference in traffic, and on the other, that his proposal for allowing
private cars to run through the tunnels is nuts: “The amount of the city
that you would have to level to create enough of those elevators to get
everybody’s car into the tunnel at 5:30 in the evening, it’s
preposterous; it cannot help being. Anything that is that inefficient
has to be only for elites.”
Tumblr: why do misogynists like to invalidate strong female characters???????????
If we’re going to be fair here, the reason so many people get upset when a female character is called a Mary Sue is because that label is thrown around so haphazardly and so very often handed to characters who really don’t deserve to be labeled as such. The controversy of the term comes from its overuse and misuse.
The term can be used correctly, but it is too often misused by people who see a capable strong female character and have a gut instinct to burn the witch and return to their male hero power fantasy.
“So, there’s this girl. She’s tragically orphaned and richer than anyone on the planet. Every guy she meets falls in love with her, but in between torrid romances she rejects them all because she dedicated to what is Pure and Good. She has genius level intellect, Olympic-athelete level athletic ability and incredible good looks. She is consumed by terrible angst, but this only makes guys want her more. She has no superhuman abilities, yet she is more competent than her superhuman friends and defeats superhumans with ease. She has unshakably loyal friends and allies, despite the fact she treats them pretty badly. They fear and respect her, and defer to her orders. Everyone is obsessed with her, even her enemies are attracted to her. She can plan ahead for anything and she’s generally right with any conclusion she makes. People who defy her are inevitably wrong.
The problem isn’t that characters are unrealistic. Heroes often are unrealistic and it’s ok to criticize media.
However, female characters are criticized where male characters aren’t.
Everything in OP’s post could apply to Luke Skywalker (and definitely applies to Anakin) but those characters won’t be criticized the way Rey has been (even though everything Rey does in The Force Awakens is believable). We are more willingly to believe in a male chosen one who can just do amazing things because he’s the hero.
Boys can have wishfulment stories but girls can only have realistic stories.
Organized Chaos 