I feel like resident evil does a completely non-political version of the motte and bailey fallacy on a thematic level. this is by far at its worst in re9 but is found elsewhere in the series and in other media. death note is also one
it includes details that demand we take them seriously, that are only added so that we can take them seriously, and then it doesn't take itself seriously to the extent that if we DID take that seriously the fiction wouldn't work.
umbrella inc. is nonsensically evil, and the rhodes hill chronic care center is even more nonsensically evil than that. at least umbrella inc. was a very large company with secret facilities most employees didn't know about. rhodes hill is just the one place where every single person who works there is doing insanely evil shit to people with no remorse. how did he hire these people. what the fuck was his selection process. an even more pressing matter than "where are the toilets" is "how did nobody notice this when they visited their loved ones in hospice, as is a very very very common thing with people in hospice care"
and notes in this place go into great detail about the utterly horrific and violating things that rhodes hill did to the completely innocent and completely vulnerable people in their care. they clearly want you to take it seriously or else they would not have put it in there. they're performing brain surgery on people to change their personalities and make them monsters who are still aware of who they once were for, and I cannot stress this enough, literally no reason. you are supposed to be shocked and affected by this.
but if you were shocked and affected by this it would be so tragic you would not be able to play the game at all, much less spin-kick them and decapitate them with Leon's axe! taking the setup seriously and asking the question the game wants you to ask, "how could anyone be so evil as to do this?" results in the immediate and inevitable answer "they literally could not, this doesn't make any fucking sense and is not possible." it's a schlocky B-movie where things don't really have to make sense, why are you bothering with details, other than because we put them in for the purpose of you taking them seriously?
they want you to feel horrified by what Umbrella did to helpless children but also has them as all giggling red-eyed Spooky Zombie Killer Girls from a 2005 Newgrounds horror flash game. they want you to feel horrified by the industrial scale at which Gideon is processing bodies in the basement, they want you to take it seriously in terms of presenting how evil it is but not take it seriously in terms of "how the fuck does this make a lick of sense how does he have this many people from a medical center that is supposed to hold people for a long time."
also I will never be shocked or affected by finding out the company was evil and I will never be shocked or affected by finding out the company was actually really really evil and I will never be shocked or affected by finding out that the company was actually maximally evil. saying something is maximally evil is easy, it is so easy it is worth nothing. you have to do something that is not the easiest possible thing to impress me.
If I understand your complaint correctly, I think something similar happens in a lot of sci-fi movies with "cheap" spaceships (like Serenity or Millennium Falcon).
The set of a spaceship interior is built for set convenience and relatability and entertainment, and we accept an unrealistic layout as part of the suspension of disbelief because realistic spaceship sets would be annoying to produce and boring to watch in many ways, often in ways relating to gravity or air.
Then the show temporarily switches to treating the set as an exact representation with physical realism and a problem that has to be solved under the constraints of set placement, even though applying this standard elsewhere would result in the alleged spaceship vanishing in a puff of logic.
Speaking of Firefly and selectively taking its own setting seriously,
Wash: "Psychic? That sounds like something out of science fiction." Zoe: "We live in a spaceship, dear."
The show takes place in the future 26th century. The setting has had spaceships for centuries by then. Imagine if Zoe's line was "We live in the New World, dear" today.
Can you give an example of the "suddenly taking the spaceship design totally seriously" thing?
Possibly a bit related: every single villain base in certain genres having a torture chamber full of pools of blood and gore and bodies that the villain just leaves lying around, and very rarely any other kind of horror.
A realistic interior of the Serenity, given its circumstances, would be something like: a small cramped habitation module, a cargo bay for the sort of cargo that can withstand extreme acceleration, a lot of fuel and engines. Access and maintenance to the latter would be by spacesuit.
The depicted interior has spacious, pressurized rooms everywhere, connected by large hallways, because that's what's easy to make on a set, and it means actors can walk around the ship and be seen by the audience with easy camera placement.
You're right on the gravity (unless the ship is spinning it is not) but not necessarily the air and spacious rooms.
COâ scrubbers are real.
If they're using an absorbent-based capture scrubber, it would make plenty of sense to have the fire kill their scrubber supplies - or just generate enough COâ, they don't have enough absorbent to solve the problem.
I don't think they are, though, not if they can scale up to transport cattle.
But there are other scrubbers - nuclear submarines IRL can stay submerged effectively indefinitely, their scrubbers work so long as there's nuclear power. If a fire kills their power, it'll kill their scrubbers in the exact same moment it generates a bunch of COâ (and CO) that they have to deal with.
In the same direction: Spacious room is precious in IRL space because you're optimizing for ÎV, and IRL military vehicles because nobody is optimizing for luxuries. IRL regular ships are kind of cramped but you can have large rooms. If you accept the sci fi engines, you can definitely launch a larger hab module.
They're taking liberties, sure, but it's not nearly so paradoxically handwaved-yet-important as Brazen's RE example.
And we know Mal bought the ship based on vibes, not practicality.
>having no spare parts aboard because spare parts are for real spaceships not studio sets,
Hang on. I distinctly recall that Kaylee had bought up the damaged part several times before that episode, and Mal kept pushing it down the priority list.
>making the emergency vent for the engine room go through the cargo bay,
Which is the largest exterior access on the ship, yes. Cargo bays generally have nothing but cargo. It's also right next to the engine room, and there's a non-zero chance a fire would start in the cargo bay itself.
Wait, I just checked Fandom, and it doesn't say the cargo bay is the 'official' vent for the engine room, just that it's what Mal used in the moment.
>not wearing a spacesuit because that would obscure the actor's face and make him harder to relate to,
Jamie rigged up a spacesuit in case Mal needs it, IIRC. And, again, Mal Reynolds. He does a lot of stupid, emotional things.
>or the gravity can work without power, which breaks the setting.)
...How? Maybe the gravity plates can hold a charge indefinetely without power, like a cellphone, but will eventually run out.
