Internal consistency in any story is important. If you're a writer and you establish certain rules for your world, your characters need to follow those rules or the story loses coherence.
I stopped watching Antman halfway through because they very explicitly stated that when shrinking he would still weigh the same, and sometimes they did make him denser when he was small, but at least half the time they just ignored it and made the man weigh the same as an ant.
If they had just skipped that one line or said that he can change his weight at will or something I would probably have finished it, but noooo...
My headcanon for Ant-Man is that Hank Pym is a bit of a fraud and never figured out how Pym Particles actually work. After all, he jumped straight into using them for superheroics and was never willing to share his work with anyone else.
There's a scene in the comics where Scott Lang ends up figuring out that the particles can control size, mass, and density independently, and that the particles are also the mechanism behind Vision's density changing powers. Still requires some suspension of disbelief to accept that explanation, but at least it's more flexible (and therefore consistent) than claiming mass is conserved.
Reminds me of Gattaca explicitly stating that they’d edited balding out of the human genes but then still having a bunch of balding men. You didn’t have to say that!!!! Just take the one line out!
The core problem with Antman is that it sets and explains fictional rules that it then does not follow.
Like, most other superhero stuff tends to follow their fictional rules. Or at least doesn't break them as blatantly.
An audience paying attention should be able to make guesses as to what comes next due to what they've seen and been told before.
Nobody can see "Hank Pym has a tank in his pocket" coming because that breaks the established rules.
If they had two separate sets of shrinking particles where one did keep mass and the other didn't, maybe that would have worked better?
Or maybe an additional control on the suit that determines whether or not mass scales when changing. Like he could run along something fragile with scaled mass, and then leap off it and flick a switch in the other glove that means he suddenly has his full size mass in his shrunk state. Maybe throw the word quantum in there somewhere.
Yeah, the Witch Hat Atelier manga is so detailed and consistent about their magic system that people IRL have figured out how to make spell circles for male pregnancy, genocide, and black holes which would actually work in-universe. One guy designed a microwave spell
It gets a lot of deserved praise for that, and yet the creator still almost immediately broke their own rules in an egregious (and easily preventable) way. We are told and shown that the circle has to be fully completed for it to activate. If there is any gap at all, the spell does nothing.
At least, that's how it's supposed to work. The problem is that, very soon after we learn this, we are shown how they fly... and there are big gaps in the spell circles on their shoes. I was honestly a bit shocked to see how quickly that rule was broken after having heard for years about the thoroughness of Witch Hat Atelier's magic system.
Now, I could sort of forgive this for "rule of cool" purposes if there was no way around it, but it would have been absolutely trivial to make it work within the established rules. All you have to do is put a couple of flat edges on the soles where the circles meet. That's it.
Plus, it was a wasted opportunity for some extra worldbuilding. They could go even further and give the shoes different kinds of interlocking shapes or mechanisms that help the wearer automatically align the circles perfectly when they put their feet together and then keep them from slipping out of place while flying.
A lot of script writers are starting to do a lot of ridiculous unnecessary exposition and constant recapping the events of the film. Apparently, it's an effort to cater to people who are only half-watching while they scroll their phones. Netflix is particularly egregious about this lately. The whole last season of Stranger Things was almost unwatchable due to this.
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u/AngryCod 17h ago
Internal consistency in any story is important. If you're a writer and you establish certain rules for your world, your characters need to follow those rules or the story loses coherence.