Common Sci-Fi tropes that annoy you!

daibakuha

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duwenbasden said:
2. My weapons is completely ineffectual against your tech! Day two: use the same weapons again. eg. Star Wars, Stargate
If the Jedi Knights can juggle your blaster shots like a boss, it is advisable to use something else instead of, you know, blasters for round two.
Enough Blaster bolts will overwhelm and kill a Jedi. That's pretty much how they were wiped out in the first place. Besides, if your opponent uses a deadly melee weapon, it's best to stay out of it's range and just shoot them.
 

Scorpid

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SmallHatLogan said:
Aliens being very human in appearance. It's perhaps not as prevalent now as it was a few decades ago although even now most aliens are at least humanoid shaped. I just feel like there should be a lot more evolutionary diversity. Not mentioning any names but slapping a couple of pointy ears on someone's head makes for a pretty underwhelming alien (nothing against a particular character, just the idea in general). Mass Effect gave us a few cool ones (rachni, elcor, hanar) but there are still plenty of human shaped races. And Animorphs, while not the highest quality fiction, had some pretty interesting aliens too.
Yeah this one bugs me too. They started it because back in the day live action films and shows like Star Trek and what have you were limited by budget, so it was easier to just stick some plaster brows on someone and say "That there is a Klingon". But video games don't have that excuse since everything is rendered digital anyway so why not instead adding another bipedal race throw in maybe a centaur creature, or one made of goo like DS9 did.
 

IBlackKiteI

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Zen Bard said:
Speaking of lazy writing...I can't stand it when aliens are presented as balls of light because they're "energy beings". This mostly happens on TV shows due to budget constraints.

But next to "people with fucked up foreheads" it's THE most unoriginal way to present a species from another world.
The whole balls of light type deal can be cool but yeah, like the fucked up foreheads it frequently just feels like a cop out. Now I wonder though, is having "people with fucked up foreheads" pretty reasonable if you counter that by having tons of truly alien, bestial species?

thaluikhain said:
Yes...especially Proud Warrior Races...if everyone is a warrior, who makes the weapons, grows the food, programs the computers, or does anything other than fight, without which you can't have any sort of military.
I'd love to see (and likely there is) a setting where it turns out all the over the top Proud Warrior Races were so ineffective they got wiped out long ago by those that weren't. Hell, your society can't survive, let alone fight a war without any kind of reasonable economy for one thing.
 

maninahat

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The lazy cyber-punk story arc, wherein the protagonist is supporting a corrupt and dystopian government, and ultimately ends up seeing the evil side of it and joining the resistance. After Bladerunner, it sort of became the default for sci-fi settings; either they are grotty hell holes run by tyrants, or they are pristine crystal palaces run by marginally more subtle tyrants.

That's part of the reason why I like Ghost in the Shell or Dredd - its one of the few sci-fis that can have a dystopian future that actually has pro-institution characters (even whilst acknowledging how dysfunctional, corrupt and fascistic they are).
 

Zontar

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maninahat said:
The lazy cyber-punk story arc, wherein the protagonist is supporting a corrupt and dystopian government, and ultimately ends up seeing the evil side of it and joining the resistance. After Bladerunner, it sort of became the default for sci-fi settings; either they are grotty hell holes run by tyrants, or they are pristine crystal palaces run by marginally more subtle tyrants.

That's part of the reason why I like Ghost in the Shell or Dredd - its one of the few sci-fis that can have a dystopian future that actually has pro-institution characters (even whilst acknowledging how dysfunctional, corrupt and fascistic they are).
Didn't Dredd have a whole story arc dedicated to showing that people where afraid of the Judges and that democracy and liberty where dead?
 

Pink Gregory

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Zontar said:
maninahat said:
The lazy cyber-punk story arc, wherein the protagonist is supporting a corrupt and dystopian government, and ultimately ends up seeing the evil side of it and joining the resistance. After Bladerunner, it sort of became the default for sci-fi settings; either they are grotty hell holes run by tyrants, or they are pristine crystal palaces run by marginally more subtle tyrants.

That's part of the reason why I like Ghost in the Shell or Dredd - its one of the few sci-fis that can have a dystopian future that actually has pro-institution characters (even whilst acknowledging how dysfunctional, corrupt and fascistic they are).
Didn't Dredd have a whole story arc dedicated to showing that people where afraid of the Judges and that democracy and liberty where dead?
Judge Dredd is a bit of an old fascist, ultimately, but that's the interesting thing about him. He doesn't represent freedom or democracy or liberty, like many dystopian-fiction protagonists.

He is the law.

Reading the early Judge Dredd strips, the citizens of Mega City One don't come off all that well as a downtrodden populace; rather one that's been driven strange by the boredom of automated labour and boundless luxury. Hell there's one strip based on many crimes being committed out of boredom by regular citizens.
 

Scorpid

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Dr. McD said:
Scorpid said:
SmallHatLogan said:
Aliens being very human in appearance. It's perhaps not as prevalent now as it was a few decades ago although even now most aliens are at least humanoid shaped. I just feel like there should be a lot more evolutionary diversity. Not mentioning any names but slapping a couple of pointy ears on someone's head makes for a pretty underwhelming alien (nothing against a particular character, just the idea in general). Mass Effect gave us a few cool ones (rachni, elcor, hanar) but there are still plenty of human shaped races. And Animorphs, while not the highest quality fiction, had some pretty interesting aliens too.
Yeah this one bugs me too. They started it because back in the day live action films and shows like Star Trek and what have you were limited by budget, so it was easier to just stick some plaster brows on someone and say "That there is a Klingon". But video games don't have that excuse since everything is rendered digital anyway so why not instead adding another bipedal race throw in maybe a centaur creature, or one made of goo like DS9 did.
Because you still have to make a skeleton, model and skin it and animate it. It still costs more, a lot more since basically everything is CGI, games are in fact still limited by budget.
I don't understand, I never said it was free, I meant it's cheaper now to make a unique race in a video game then it is for live action films and shows since you don't have to spend 4 hours in a makeup chair every day to apply that stuff, which costs money for the makeup and the specialized makeup artists and the actor that sits in that chair for that long and all that before the first frame is even shot.
But the cost for programmers making another gun or another human space armor I wouldn't imagine is all that different from making a non bipedal human like race.
 

DementedSheep

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Scorpid said:
Dr. McD said:
Scorpid said:
SmallHatLogan said:
Aliens being very human in appearance. It's perhaps not as prevalent now as it was a few decades ago although even now most aliens are at least humanoid shaped. I just feel like there should be a lot more evolutionary diversity. Not mentioning any names but slapping a couple of pointy ears on someone's head makes for a pretty underwhelming alien (nothing against a particular character, just the idea in general). Mass Effect gave us a few cool ones (rachni, elcor, hanar) but there are still plenty of human shaped races. And Animorphs, while not the highest quality fiction, had some pretty interesting aliens too.
Yeah this one bugs me too. They started it because back in the day live action films and shows like Star Trek and what have you were limited by budget, so it was easier to just stick some plaster brows on someone and say "That there is a Klingon". But video games don't have that excuse since everything is rendered digital anyway so why not instead adding another bipedal race throw in maybe a centaur creature, or one made of goo like DS9 did.
Because you still have to make a skeleton, model and skin it and animate it. It still costs more, a lot more since basically everything is CGI, games are in fact still limited by budget.
I don't understand, I never said it was free, I meant it's cheaper now to make a unique race in a video game then it is for live action films and shows since you don't have to spend 4 hours in a makeup chair every day to apply that stuff, which costs money for the makeup and the specialized makeup artists and the actor that sits in that chair for that long and all that before the first frame is even shot.
But the cost for programmers making another gun or another human space armor I wouldn't imagine is all that different from making a non bipedal human like race.
It's still more expensive than making a human like one because you have to rig and animate it. Most the alien species in ME that actually do anything other than stand around are bipedal and about the same size because they all use the same animations, weapons and cover system. Making another species that moves and fights differently than a human is more expensive than making a new armour.
 

beastro

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Blood Brain Barrier said:
Reading that I agree with most of it but it's also confusing because I'm not sure whether you're for or against fantasy in sci-fi, since you seem to be for realism then bring up Dune, a work of fantasy, in a positive light. I fully agree with you that the science in sci-fi must be there for a reason - to raise issues actually relevant to the way we live now or may live in the future. I don't see how greater realism and "grittiness" do anything but limit the scope of the work.

In the future anything must be considered possible - things people considered impossible 1000 years ago are now our reality. Saying something's impossible in the future must be done for a greater reason - for example in Babylon 5 the station needs rotating parts to create gravity - something which is ignored in say, Star Trek. But this is not just to show off the knowledge of physics, but to contrast the humans with the more advanced species which have artificial gravity, something which may well be impossible.

TLDR: I'm not against realism, more against realism for its own sake. The shaky-cam and lots of blood we're stuck with in new sci-fi is there to look cool, not for any good reason.
My issue has more to do with things being credible than anything. I don't mind if a work isn't "nuts and bolts" realistic or not, but that it's consistant.

Dune set up not only a world, but a set of mechanics around the technology within that world and never deviated from the strict path set out and even worked in some novel tactics to make use of certain technological effects (like suicidal Fremen abusing the lasgun-Holtzman shield reaction to wipe out large chunks of the Harkonnens forces near the beginning of the first novel and a novel creating minefields of shields for someone to shoot a lasgun at to delay a planned assault).

I'm for fantasy in Sci-Fi, because I look on them as two sides to the same coin, the issue is that fantasy is more susceptible to abused mechanics than Sci-Fi and it sticks out less when they are abused - see Star Trek technobabble which could be explained away in fantasy with the old "a wizard did it". But while I'm on that, that's also a big reason why I love and respect Tolkiens work so much, because unlike all the derivative crap that remains wedded to imitating him, he was really restrictive on the use of magic in his world, which was largely limited to enchantments doing their subtle work like the Rings of Power or other little ways like Saruman controlling Theodan.

The only open use of a "spell" I can think of is when they get into Moria and Gandalf uses his staff to produce a light source.

Anyway, getting back into things whether it's fantasy or Sci-Fi I want to see something grounded where rules are made and followed and bullshit isn't pulled out of asses that makes the wonder of wonderful things, be they magic of technology, wonderful. Star Trek Voyager with it's infamous Reset Button and Technobabble made me give up on Star Trek, even casually watching it with a grain of salt because it was as convincing as a kid imagining bullets fly around playing with his GI Joe toys as oppose to playing a game and seeing them.

The other thing is playing out the full consequences of a technology and it's something we often see not done, most of all in Star Trek. I mentioned before, maybe not in this thread, that replicator technology would make for horrifying wars where warfare was reduced to pure attrition with replicators efficiently churning out every many of war material at a constant pace.

With your example of artificial gravity, it's another thing that's bugged me since the two tie together: We don't get to hear the rules set out defining what artificial gravity can and can't do.

Why does it seem to be contained within the ships hull, for example? Why would the crew of the Enterprise been magnetic boots to walk around outside when they should still be affected by the gravity? Along with that, why don't ships with artificial gravity collect dust on their hulls, get dirty and require cleaning? Why can artificial gravity be produced to be as strong as that of an Earth sized planet or more, yet the field isn't as large as the field produced by a planet? How can gravity be produced on one side of something but not all the others - like the deck of a ship producing gravity, and yet the deck above it not pulling people away from the field of the one below it they're walking on - is artificial gravity directional?

All these things could be explain with fantastical excuses, but so long as they were consistent and not used or ignored at whim, they'd feel grounded and I'd be with that degree of "realism" - realism as in being loyal to how that universe functions.

It's why in my own self-written fiction I try my best to explain these things - like artificial gravity existing, but being sensible where it emanates from one source with ships build around that source - like ship being built cigar shaped are even circular with the field itself being unlike natural gravity, where it can produce Earth-like levels of gravity, but the fields strength drops off exponentially after a certain distance away from the source while the a ships crew has to constantly send EVA teams out to clean, repair and repaint the hull as the field is constantly collecting dust which damages equipment and eats away at the ships paint scheme, itself existing to help protect the hull from corrosion no differently than how ships are painted to prevent the corrosive effects of saltwater from eating holes in the hull.

As for greater realism and grittiness limiting a work - it can or can;t depending on how it's handled, but they're more used for aesthetic reasons than anything and I mean that both to create the illusion of a world being more like ours and feeling like one and also because that kind of look is in style and most people actually want to see their games filled with dirty, brown and grey worlds and colourful ones like we used to have dominate games twenty years ago.
 

beastro

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gargantual said:
Nah he's not talking about virtue. He's talking about skill and technique. Suffocating enemies with bigger weapons and supply chains may have won many western wars. But when its a one trick pony, there are going to be significant losses. clever rallies, misdirection and underdog victories are the things that fuel study obsession. The best battles arent' just physical but mindgames. A shame that only sci fi dogfights, and martial arts scenes understand this concept.
Sadly (depending on which side of the fence you're on) that isn't the case.

The side with the best logistics and better command, coordination and strategy will win out and Vietnam of all places was where that was shown best.

Dogfights were rare in the war and were very ineffective. The North Vietnamese Air Force got most of their kills from boom and zooming American aircraft that didn't know they were being hunted, but the Norths abilities were eliminated by the arrival of AWACs birds later in the war that would alert friendly planes that enemies were in the air and either to avoid them or turn the ambush onto the Norths planes.

Along with that that Wars overarching objectives show what happens when you don't have things right - the North had good strategy and got it into place early by seeding the South fully of an insurgency the South and the US could never dislodge once put into place, while America got into that war with no clear plan of how to fight it, lacking the will to do what was necessary to win it and found what plans they did have were useless and did nothing - the Army got into the war wanting to demonstrate Flexible Response and that their branch was still vitally important at a time when the Air Force and the nuclear deterrent dominated US military strategy while the Navy had it's niche fitting into that derrerant here and there while the rest of the fleet would help escort convoys - all the army had was to sit around and wait for Reforger to happen - a strategy everyone was easily aware would most likely fail and the whole conventional WWIII planning would always default to Air Force and the Navy using their nuclear weapons.

As sad as it sounds, the Vietnam War as we know it was created because the Army felt emasculated and Kenndy and his clique of men sympathized with their plight and wanted to help them out.

The issue is the mindgames are more abstract than we wish they were and things like martial prowess mean nothing. Dogfights and sword duels may be entertaining, but they don't win wars and Japan started and lost a war based on that false assumption of elan overcoming material and strategic superiority.
 

beastro

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Chris Moses said:
beastro said:
What if Mankind gets reduced to only a few tens of thousands and maximizing childbirth goes from an imperative to a moral virtue and any which gets in the way of that is looked on as a social evil, like homosexuality, long after the need for such a view has passed because necessity turned into tradition.
This idea has bugged me for a long time. Forgive me for singling you out for it, but I feel the need to add my "gay voice" to this.

Homosexuals are perfectly capable of reproducing, we just engage in sexual activities that preclude it. You can bet your britches that if we were to start running out of humans that I would donate as much man-seed as needed (or at least as much as I can make...) to continue our race. Homosexuality need not be a barrier to reproduction and I find it offensive the implication that gays would be the ultimate pricks dooming humanity to extinction by selfishly choosing not to reproduce.

Your hypothetical cataclysm would also have to wipe out any and all "turkey baster/tube" technology before homosexuals would actually have to "do the deed" with the opposite sex to continue the species. Hell, even naturally occurring hollowed out reeds would do the trick or large rolled up leaves... add the sauce and a little puff of breath and viola` baby batter delivered without any homosexual having to overcome their revulsion or just plain not being turned on by the opposite sex!

Captcha: no way

yes way, "Life always finds a way"...
The issue is old prejudices we're very predisposed to coming back by mixing up habits.

For another example here's a link (http://www.tboverse.us/HPCAFORUM/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=117) to part of an article written by someone I know in the defence industry who has done studies into the aftermath of a nuclear exchange from the immediate results to the long term. In this case it concerns women:

Winning that race is vital. Lose and we're extinct. The population drops like a stone as disease, radiation and injury take their toll. Then, it should bottom out and start to recover. Teams of older men and infertile women go to the cities to recover what they can. The radiation levels continue to drop. Fortunately we don't have to worry about nuclear winter, that's been largely discredited (the atmospheric models that were used were far too simplistic and the reality seems to be we may actually get a more temperate and less changeable climate out of things - somebody once described it as a Nuclear Autumn). The ozone layer also won't be a problem - it'll regenerate fast enough and the effects of the bombs may actually be beneficial.

The ugly side of life continues. Abortion and contraception are likely to be highly illegal. We MUST have those babies. There will be more than enough parents who have lost their own (or have received too high a radiation dose) to look after any that are unwanted. Women are enslaved by their reproductive systems again. Don't like that but there is nothing we can do about it. The social pressure on women to have children will be immense in both material and moral senses. Women who can have children get the best of everything, the cleanest and best food, the most comfortable housing, the most careful protection. Women who can have children but refuse to do so will be social outcasts (and in this sort of society to be an outcast is virtually a death sentence). We're likely to see a situation where women of childbearing age are "protected" by severe restrictions ("don't go outside the house, the radiation may harm your babies" gets abbreviated to "don't go outside") . This is a grim and disturbing picture; we take an old woman out of her house and throw her in the snow to provide shelter for a pregnant mother and her children - then lock her in. Newborn babies obviously damaged by radiation are likely to be killed on the spot. That may or may not be justifiable but I think its inevitable.
Now you can look on it level headed now, but in such circumstances, given how people are, especially in a world where the quality of education would be dropping like a stone, you'll have plenty of people pushing to maximize reproduction rates butting heads with homosexuality and getting things like the whole "electrical outlet and plug" analogy stuck in their heads.
 

beastro

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CHUD said:
Seriously, in such a story, I'd root for the bug-eyed aliens. Let them wipe us out - we're a hopeless and apparantly inherently evil specie.
Naturalistic fallacy right there.
CHUD said:
beastro said:
While this may be the way the world is going presently, when dealing with speculative fiction you're open to a wide range of things, and yes, a more "old fashion" outlook is a possibility due to environment and social pressures.

What if Mankind gets reduced to only a few tens of thousands and maximizing childbirth goes from an imperative to a moral virtue and any which gets in the way of that is looked on as a social evil, like homosexuality, long after the need for such a view has passed because necessity turned into tradition.
I think this is avoided because it would diminish interest in the story.

Honestly, if in the future women are back to being breeding-betties while the menfolk run things - then I simply would have no interest and no stakes in whatever story is being told. Because then I would simply NOT CARE anymore. Why give a frak that we're living in space stations or whatever? If women are back in the kitchen (or the futuristic equaliant) while men govern and explore and fight - then all our technological advancements simply don't matter.

Seriously, in such a story, I'd root for the bug-eyed aliens. Let them wipe us out - we're a hopeless and apparantly inherently evil specie.
From your perspective yes, but that is also the interesting thing about such scenarios - seeing the conflict between an old and impractical mentality butting heads with new and dire necessities.

The amusing thing about what you've said is to think about if speculative fiction had been around for centuries and some arrogant, chauvinistic, ultra Catholic nobleman taking a look at a novel detailing a world like ours and declaring he'd rather die than live in a world like that and how it would show that what a horrible, irredeemable people we are to let ourselves slide into such a moral cesspool full of Protestants, infidels, loose women and sodomites.

The one comment about not caring anymore is telling - you'd be self-selecting yourself for extinction and leaving the world to those who are able to adapt and thrive, be they those craving for such a society to return or those like yourself who have to swallow a hard pill, but do so hoping that, in time, things will go back to how they once were and our post-apocalyptic society would return , one day.
 

Isra

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Swords, fist fights and other melee weapons, and rejection of the idea that personal and infantry weapons would have advanced in any meaningful way. Lasers that travel slowly and bounce off of armor, people still running around with wild west revolvers and rifles that look futuristic, but offer no apparent advantages over an AK47. Idiots trying to kill each other with vibrating steak knives and shurikens instead of simply packing some proper heat. Captain Kirk invariably getting into a biff.

I wish we'd see more stuff like District 9's weapons - shooting lightning, green fire, emptying a hundred round clip at pull of a trigger, setting off explosions that sizzle and crackle with electricity. Futuristic, brutal and highly effective. But even if you're talking about someone who's caught off guard and unarmed, if they're in a dangerous profession surely they'd at least carry future pepper spray that physically castrates on the spot, a little guardian drone that burns an assailant with a laser, or gloves that put 600VAC & 200 amps into someone at a touch. Within 50 years I imagine phones could automatically assess someone as a threat, taze them and call the police at the same time. They can already do just about everything else.

This stuff?

.

Future ninja mumbo jumbo. They fly through space just to hit someone with an axe.
I mean I like Firefly but I just have to switch my brain off and tune out when I see stuff like River's melee flip out and I can never quite understand why they're using rifles and shotguns from the 50s.
 

Thaluikhain

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beastro said:
The issue is old prejudices we're very predisposed to coming back by mixing up habits.

For another example here's a link (http://www.tboverse.us/HPCAFORUM/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=117) to part of an article written by someone I know in the defence industry who has done studies into the aftermath of a nuclear exchange from the immediate results to the long term. In this case it concerns women:

Winning that race is vital. Lose and we're extinct. The population drops like a stone as disease, radiation and injury take their toll. Then, it should bottom out and start to recover. Teams of older men and infertile women go to the cities to recover what they can. The radiation levels continue to drop. Fortunately we don't have to worry about nuclear winter, that's been largely discredited (the atmospheric models that were used were far too simplistic and the reality seems to be we may actually get a more temperate and less changeable climate out of things - somebody once described it as a Nuclear Autumn). The ozone layer also won't be a problem - it'll regenerate fast enough and the effects of the bombs may actually be beneficial.

The ugly side of life continues. Abortion and contraception are likely to be highly illegal. We MUST have those babies. There will be more than enough parents who have lost their own (or have received too high a radiation dose) to look after any that are unwanted. Women are enslaved by their reproductive systems again. Don't like that but there is nothing we can do about it. The social pressure on women to have children will be immense in both material and moral senses. Women who can have children get the best of everything, the cleanest and best food, the most comfortable housing, the most careful protection. Women who can have children but refuse to do so will be social outcasts (and in this sort of society to be an outcast is virtually a death sentence). We're likely to see a situation where women of childbearing age are "protected" by severe restrictions ("don't go outside the house, the radiation may harm your babies" gets abbreviated to "don't go outside") . This is a grim and disturbing picture; we take an old woman out of her house and throw her in the snow to provide shelter for a pregnant mother and her children - then lock her in. Newborn babies obviously damaged by radiation are likely to be killed on the spot. That may or may not be justifiable but I think its inevitable.
Now you can look on it level headed now, but in such circumstances, given how people are, especially in a world where the quality of education would be dropping like a stone, you'll have plenty of people pushing to maximize reproduction rates butting heads with homosexuality and getting things like the whole "electrical outlet and plug" analogy stuck in their heads.
Ah, Stuart Slade...very good on technical aspects, but his politics do tend to intrude.

We just don't know what will happen in the aftermath of a nuclear war (long term). What he describes is feasible (excepting he was talking about one nation being affected and ignoring the rest of the world), but not a certainty.
 

beastro

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thaluikhain said:
Ah, Stuart Slade...very good on technical aspects, but his politics do tend to intrude.

We just don't know what will happen in the aftermath of a nuclear war (long term). What he describes is feasible (excepting he was talking about one nation being affected and ignoring the rest of the world), but not a certainty.
He doesn't hide where his biases lay, on of the reasons why I find him endearing. Politically I have more in common with than without.

My only issue with him is when a topic gets him heated he doesn't takes on a rather intolerant tone, but fortunately that is entirely limited to technical matters in my experience. He's used to being right, usually is, but at least he's willing to admit when he's in the wrong.

With that said, I haven't nor ever will read his books. Most aren't my sort of fair.

With that said, I tend to lean in his direction, that society would become very reactionary, conservative and cautious very very quickly in the event of social breakdown.
 

Thaluikhain

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beastro said:
With that said, I tend to lean in his direction, that society would become very reactionary, conservative and cautious very very quickly in the event of social breakdown.
Not sure...even if it did, what form it's conservatism would take.

You also get socialism and the like spring up in times of crisis as well, though.