Trope Talk: Those Dang Phones

Hey, have you noticed how many newer stories are giving the protagonists tools for always-on easy-access instant communication? Have you rewatched an older bit of sci-fi and questioned why the characters haven't been using the comms tech they DO have to stay in touch? Are you a writer who's noticed YOU'VE been giving your characters cell-phone equivalents without even thinking about it? Well, I hope you're prepared for a half-hour-long descent into madness as I unpack the history of telecommunication, both fictional *and* real, and try to convince you that I haven't spent the last two months losing my mind!

Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

[OverlySarcasticProductions]

hey lovelies ❤ instead of telling me your headcanons for why that one interesting case of authorial-blindness-induced plothole I'm having so much fun analyzing actually makes perfect sense as long as you pretend something that didn't happen onscreen and was never discussed actually did happen, please refer to 15:51 and also internalize the distinction between watsonian and doylist explanations for things

(A QUICK EDIT: hey guys so I consumed the sacred spice of Arrakis and it showed me a mystic vision that said that "butlerian jihad" thing you keep talking about was actually only written out in any detail in the 2000s by frank herbert's son decades after he died and also decades after the cell phone was invented, making it the exact opposite of a refutation of my point about dune not inventing phones. sorry to disappoint but I'm a space chosen one now or something and my mystic visions are always correct. thanks for making me google dune sequels though, that worm centaur guy was pretty cool)

ok love you bye 😘 -R

[peterhammes]

The reason Leia couldn't just email the death star plans to Obi-Wan is that the Jedi code forbids attachments.

[OsmSkylandersCheats]

I'm reminded of the quote "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."

[elisibethjames]

In my D&D group, we had a warlock who was psychically linked to his patron. He abused this mercilessly to ask for advice so often that eventually I made hold music for the DM to play when the warlock was out of contact with his patron

[GippyHappy]

I think it’s hilarious in sci-fi, even modern sci-fi, there’s this insistence on face to face communication no matter how impractical (holograms, picture phones) rather than simpler voice communication. And while I understand the reason is aesthetic for the sake of the visuals, it makes me laugh because IRL most people hate FaceTime and video calls unless there’s a specific reason like to see someone’s baby or better explain to your grandma how to set up her TV.

[bdletoast]

One of my all time favorite moment in Critical Role's history is that time when Jester realized she could use the Sending Spell to annoy random people she met or heard off. The look of absolute horror on Matt's face as he realized what this spell can do in the wrong hands...

...and then, 50 episodes or so later, he weaponized it as his big bad was harassing Caleb with sending.

[middlemuse]

I work with middle schoolers, and I had to explain what a phone book was to one of them. When I told her it was a book filled with everyone’s phone number, her eyes got big and she went, “That’s creepy.” This feels like a real world example of your argument here.

[SakuraMoonflower]

"Dearest Martha, it has been TWO AGONIZING HOURS since I last parted from your DMs." When I tell your, I LAUGHED HARD. XD

[The_Viscount]

The photo of the Lunar lander descending that Michael Collins took was the first photo to include every human who was alive or had been alive to that point...except for one: him. It's amazing and bittersweet to realize that Collins took a photo of all of humanity, and couldn't be in it because he had to hold the camera.

[Epicmonk]

I find it so funny how this Trope Talk started as “how the march of real-world communications technology influences communication in fiction” and ended with “Red gives us the play-by-play of how a simple innocuous addition to her own long-running story gave her an existential crisis.”

[TheJH]

I love how Rick Riordan treated this trope in his Percy Jackson and the Olympians universe.
The heroes can't use normal cellphones without EXTREME risk because the enemies can trace those to them very accurately. The gods and demigods DO have their own communication thing called 'Iris messages'... but it has quite a couple of prerequisites for it to work.
You need: 1) golden Drachmas to pay for the connection through an offering;
2) water and light available in such a way that you can create a rainbow (because Iris is personified as a rainbow) to *create* the connection in the first place;
3) The goddess Iris being active and doing her job as normal and *not being captured or incapacitated.*

This means that a lot of the time, the heroes will have an issue creating a connection based on points 1 and 2, and there's this constant tension that everyone hopes that Hermes-be-blessed Iris is fine and doing her job, to the point that when sending an Iris message *works, * it's basically a massive sigh of relief.

[abadidea]

Funny story about Sending Stones: I once ran Waterdeep Dragon Heist, a low-level D&D adventure module, for my friends and as a joke I decided that the city watchmen would each carry Sending Stones like they were cops with radios. It occurred to me that the more I played into this bit, the more the city watchmen actually became a competent police force that was REALLY difficult to deal with. Any given watchman could radio their dispatch officer, who would then put out an APB to every watchman in the district and suddenly a simple robbery would turn into a GTA-style massive chase scene. They could even deploy Griffin riders with their own Sending Stones like they were police choppers to keep track of quickly fleeing suspects no matter where they ran to.

[ASquared]

Ya know it just occurred to me that since Aurora’s version of a phone is a wind elemental messenger bird, she could just make the excuse for why it doesn’t work be “it was too windy and it got blown to smithereens”

[Agent]

I'm reminded of a scene I wrote in a modern fantasy sort of setting where a guy is sneaking around and his phone rings, so he rushes to shut it up before it gives him away, and then a minute later he gets a magic message directly into his brain from his Sister asking, "Why aren't you answering your phone?"

[prop-a-gent]

This isn't a trope talk. This is a half-hour documentary about the evolution of communication tech and the way creators use of communication in their works evolved alongside it.

I'm not mad. Nor disappointed.

Frankly, I'm just impressed. This is amazing.

[obiwanobiwan]

"Speaking as someone with a large Jewish family I can say from firsthand experience that in this culture arguing is considered to be extremely healthy and necessary about anything and everything all the time."

*THANK. YOU.*

[Vinemaple]

In 1953, Ray Bradbury published a short story called "The Murderer, " in which people's radio wristwatches and personal background music are recognizable as cell phones and unlimited streaming music. Especially since the people in this future act in ways that were strange when the story was published, but are extremely relatable today: they panic when loved ones stop checking in every 2 minutes, they're unable to strike up conversations with strangers when they can't use their radio wristwatches to ignore their neighbors, and they spend most of their days drifting around in blissful musical bubbles, serenely self-satisfied and disinterested in anyone else's problems. The amount he got right in that story is frankly incredible.

And, of course, in the same year, his novel _Fahrenheit 451_ introduced the Seashell, which was nothing less than a noise-canceling, radio-receiving earbud... as well as on-demand, personally-tailored television on increasingly massive screens.

I will say, however, that as someone who chooses not to use a cellphone, I'm treated far better than Bradbury's stories predicted.

[jh-nesy]

Thing that happened to my group in D&D when using an ally’s sending stone:

Player: “Are you okay? Where are you at?”

Lich holding the ally hostage: “Wrong number (23 words worth of laughter)”

[Greil]

That "Why did Han need to go look for Luke instead of calling him" at least is an easy one. Luke was caught in a snowstorm and those tend to disrupt signals heavily.

[vincentkazella]

It’s like when covid happened and every show came up with an excuse to have the main characters stay in their homes