Discover Top Posts Tagged with #fog fish

One thing Cyan did very well in Obduction was telling the story of the worlds non-verbally. I think this was particularly well done in Kaptar. The further into the world you get the more of the story of the world is revealed until *bam* it all comes together. It starts with rock paintings of fish, that at first have absolutely no meaning to the player. Next you find some rather large looking hooks, again with no idea what they are for. Further along you find giant statues that resemble the fish from the rock paintings and another connection is made. A whole temple dedicated to these fish?

Inside the temple is what appears to be a gondola device for traveling out into the mist. Then you find the giant Fog Fish skeleton still hanging from one of those massive hooks and it all clicks together. You realise that the “gondola” was a device for catching the Fog Fish and hauling their carcasses in to be slaughtered. You remember Farley’s notes talking about how the Arai beetles were used as bait and it all comes together.

What’s done so well in this world is the obvious dichotomy of the two species that lived in Kaptar. The first species revered and worshipped the Fog Fish, the second species hunted and butchered them. The second species took no care to preserve the structures made by the temple builders, they simply built over the top of them. The juxtaposition of the two as jarring as the cell wall’s division of the spheres.

#cyan #obduction #spoilers #kaptar #fog fish #world building

Why I like the fish

By which I mean the flying fog-fish in "A Christmas Carol," as opposed to some other random generic fish. It's a terrible title, I just can't come up with a better one. Because apart from the fact that they're flying around in fog, they're really just...fish. What else do we call them? They aren't even capitalized or anything. The sadly unnamed* planet in "A Christmas Carol" hosts an atmosphere thick enough to support its own ecosystem. It's significant enough that it can prevent the safe landing of spaceships and allow the Sardick family to have built a fortune off of being able to control its movements. But that's just the plot, nobody cares about that. The point is that an atmosphere is a fluid, which means the right sort of things can arguably live and swim in it. And by the right sorts of things I mean fish. Well, technically they live in the clouds and fog, which is no less awesome. There's something deeply satisfying and impossibly cool about cloud-dwelling fish. It fills a gap in terrestrial ecology - we have tons of exclusively sea-dwelling creatures, plenty of exclusively land-dwelling creatures, a few exclusively earth-dwelling creatures, and, to my knowledge, no exclusively air-dwelling creatures. This bothered medieval scholars and cosmologists on a deep philosophical level - it broke a supposed symmetry, which is not to be borne. And so the idea of air-fish is immensely attractive. They're fish...flying around in fog. It's AWESOME. As the Doctor so sagely puts it: "I love new planets." The presence of fog-fish raises a lot of questions. How are they flying? Why only in the fog? How do their gills and things work? Why do they have identical morphology to conventional fish? And these questions are left entirely unanswered by design. Part of it is Rule of Cool - the fish are awesome DON'T QUESTION IT. And...they are. But more of it is that the fish are supposed to be unexplained. That's kind of the point of them. Nobody knows what the deal with the fish is, and very few people are interested to find out. The fish kind of serve as a benchmark for characterization. They exist as an unknown, so we can see how people react to an unknown. Most people are afraid of them - they are taught to be afraid of them, to avoid them. And, to be fair, some of the fish are dangerous - the ones that happen to be sharks, for instance. Although they're not like...killer sharks or anything. They're just sharks. They eat the other fish. As sharks do. Kazran Sardick uses the fear of the fish to keep the population in check. But as a child he was fascinated by the fish, and wanted to learn more about them. People were afraid of them, but he wanted to understand them, in case they weren't as scary as all that. Throughout the episode, the fish are an index of a character's joy, particularly the joy of discovery and of the unanswered question. And by the time Kazran reaches adulthood, all the joy has gone out of him. Abigail immediately stands out as a character because she "loves the fish." Not just a scientific interest, but a love of all the strangeness and infinite variation of the universe. And that is what you need to know about Abigail, right there, plain as fish. And of course the Doctor just thinks they're cool. Wonder, fear, curiosity, love. The fish hold up a mirror, in which our best and worst qualities are reflected. But mostly they're just really freakin cool. FLYING SHARK. Sharknado before it was cool, amirite? Cloud fish. Why not? I mean, they're not space whales, but anyone can do space whales. There's something really compelling about sea creatures in the skies, and the fish are exactly that. They're just neat. And that's all they have to be. And like us, they are drawn to the light.

-----------

* I am told the planet may be called Sardickstown or somesuch. Thanks!