I don’t use them as a measure of popularity. I use them as a measure of how well a story inspires its audience to engage with that story.
Fanfiction is a modern term, the idea behind it has existed as long as people have been telling stories. Oral storytelling operates on the same logic as fanfiction. Somebody tells a story, others retell it, others change the story, others tell connected stories, etc.
Fanfiction is a damn good metric for determining whether a story resonates with its audience in the most foundational aspects of storytelling as a basic aspect of human psychology.
There’s a reason why we’re still telling the same myths and fairy tales from thousands of years ago.
No, it really isn’t. What you have is a no true Scotsman fallacy. “youre not a true story unless you inspire fanfiction.” “youre not a true fan unless you write fanfiction.”
No, that’s pretty much exactly what you said. Youre defining the success of a story based on the amount of fanfiction it generates, which you A: have no way of measuring accurately (not all fanfiction gets put in a public space, and most of it is crap anyway) and B: which has no relevance to the quality of a work anyway. 50 shades of grey started off as a twilight fanfic, of all things, and most people agree that the two stories are both abysmal. And yet I promise you that a mind bogglingly large number of teenage girls have at one point written up a little blurb about their own sparkly vampire boyfriend or werewolf savior at some point.
My point is that Starcraft’s story isn’t very popular. It generates minimal interest on discussion forums and creative writing archives.
I can’t know exactly why that is, but I’m pretty sure that the story being badly written is a contributing factor. Although being an RTS story is probably the biggest, since strategy gamers generally don’t play specifically for the story and game stories are shallow in general.
And not all badness is created equal. 50 Shades was popular because it depicted a pretty common sexual fantasy. SC2 got flack for its romance plot. 50 Shades engaged the baser emotions of its audience. SC2 engaged the skepticism of its audience.
Going back over SC1: the script is extremely shallow and expects the audience to invent the world building and characterization in their heads. It doesn’t work if adapted to prose, as the novelizations showed. Liberty’s Crusade was okay and the writer certainly tried to add depth and rationalize oddities, but it was ultimately held back by its source material‘s idiosyncrasies. Queen of Blades was just embarrassing and the writer clearly didn’t care all that much for the source material.
One wonders why the other campaigns were never novelized. Quality of the source material? Lack of interest? Who knows!
I don’t know anything about it, so I cannot provide an answer.
And How much? He certainly didn’t learn about Amon. The cerebrates didn’t seem to know about Amon, either.
And If the UED hadn’t appeared due to author fiat, then the zerg would have recovered and won anyway.
Oh Please. The first rule of fiction is that if an author wants a dead character back, they’ll come back. Starcraft already has multiple precedents for resurrection, including space magic hax and multiverse time travel.
You should check it out. It’s regarded and critically reviewed as a masterpiece of science fiction story telling, and coincidentally, has little to know actual story.
We can rip on it together!
How should I know. The Protoss did know about the Hive Mind though. That was the reason Tassadar advised the Conclave to strike at the Cerebrates.
Of course not. The Overmind’s purpose and motivation was expanded upon/retconned in the sequel.
The Zerg won the Brood War with the UED involved anyway.
That happens in a lot of fiction. The Cerebrates won’t be at this time though due to some legality. That’s why they were replaced with Brood Mothers for the sequel.
I criticize Starcraft mainly for having a bad story, not a lack of story.
I think the way the revelation was handled was clunky and obviously contrived to force the plot in a particular and non-organic direction. I would have preferred if the respawning was revealed in the terran campaign when they decided to assault a brain bug after getting intelligence to believe it would be a good plan. Because space magic hax nullifying their efforts instantly is lazy, I’d have brood’s coordination dramatically reduced but not removed while they take their time to replace the cerebrate. The terrans would use this tactic multiple times, but it would be neither pointless nor an instant win button. Then later the commander would develop a better attack like, IDK, a neurotoxin that drives the brood insane/feral/whatever. In the zerg campaign you could hunt down and/or treat the infected.
Basically the writing is lazy and meandering, okay? read the Queen of Blades novel to see why.
Because of lazy author fiat.
I heard about that. It makes no sense tho. It would not hold up in court. Brain bugs come from Starship Troopers, not Warhammer.
SCR repopularized cerebrates. They’re just more interesting than those lame drool mothers anyway.
The specific details of the agreement aren’t public, and what Games Workshop threatened Blizzard with, if anything, isn’t really relevant at this point because the agreement did get made, which gives them a significantly stronger position.
Well, not internationally true. At least, for a small (or big ^^) country in the Southeast Asia, the series was quite niches until the TV show explode in popularity. It certainly wasn’t as popular as Harry Potter prior to the first movie adaptation.