Fatal is... What is fatal?

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All markers have different tastes and colors.
This article describes the phenomenon of so-called taste. That is, the presence or absence of this phenomenon largely depends on the opinion of the audience. Please include examples of this phenomenon in articles about the phenomenon itself.

This film is made, if not excellent, then at least not bad - all the genre tropes are in place, the actors play well, the cameraman holds the camera firmly, and the plot is smooth and keeps you close to the screen.
This book is well written, the plot is suspenseful, and the plot and climax are wonderful. This game has good graphics, the controls are responsive, and the music is nice to listen to. This comedy is funny, and the authors tried to do everything to make the viewer laugh. But everything was ruined by one minor (according to the creators) flaw. Just one - but viewers are already spitting at the trailer stage. Just one - and the book was taken back to the store. Just one and the song was erased from the playlist. Just one - and the work will not stand the test of time. Meet the well-known problem of audience evaluation, called a fatal flaw - when in a well-crafted work there is one (less often, very rarely several) detail that turns the viewer and critics away from it, and this work fails at the box office or is lost in time.

An easier case is Good, but bad: the mistake is obvious, but because of love for the author/franchise or other merits, the audience forgives it. However, in both cases the problem of opposite assessments is observed in full force: what is an uncritical mistake for one person will ruin all the fun for another.

"Fatum" is fate

Indeed, from the Latin “fatum” is fate. Therefore, you can easily establish that fatal is:

Destined by fate. Something mysterious, fatally determining a person’s life.
Something that suggests tragedy, perhaps death.

But don’t be afraid, most often we are not talking about death, but rather about predestination. For example, you can hear from commentators at team sports matches: “This mistake by the goalkeeper turned out to be fatal for the team.” After all, the audience understands: the goalkeeper did not cause a fatal illness for all his teammates, and they did not die after the match. In this case, the goalkeeper's mistake is fatal, because it predetermined the result of the match and turned out to be fateful. “Fatal” is something that cannot have a happy ending.

Fatalism and voluntarism

Surprisingly, what is associated with fate is not endowed with a positive meaning by a person.

There are mutually exclusive systems – fatalism and voluntarism. With fatalism, everything is clear - this is a worldview that believes: there is no freedom in the world, and everything is subordinated to a single plan of fate. Moreover, be that as it may, a fatalist is not necessarily a pessimist. These are people who believe in fate, who believe that they will definitely be lucky, at least some of them. Another thing is that they are rarely lucky, but that doesn’t matter. In most cases, fatalism involves a fair amount of pessimism and doom. People usually remember fatalism when a person is rolling down an inclined plane.

What about “voluntarism”? The term is familiar to Soviet and Russian viewers from the film “Prisoner of the Caucasus” by L. Gaidai. But few people know what it means. And the concept presupposes the following belief: the main driving force in the world is the freedom of man or God (or what replaces Him). And I would like to say that voluntarism, in contrast to fatalism, is optimistic, but, remembering the thinkers who adhered to this doctrine (F. Nietzsche, A. Schopenhauer), somehow my tongue cannot be turned. The main difference between fatalism and voluntarism lies in the following: some believe that there is no freedom, while others believe that there is nothing but freedom. One way or another, “fatal” is something that will definitely not end well for a person.

Examples[edit]

Cinema[edit]

Home Alone 3 is the standard. Excellent acting, pleasant family music, not two, but four villains, and not some stupid bandit freaks, but “serious” terrorist guys. There is much more action here, the subtexts about children's problems have not gone away, there is almost no stupid bullying of the younger brother by the elders... Yes, here even the main character himself dealt with the villain (except that the parrot helped a little at the end). Yes, even Scarlett Johansson is here! Alas, the leading role is not Macaulay Culkin. That's all. There was no need to try to ride on a well-known franchise.
But the same cannot be said about the fourth and fifth parts. They are bad from every point of view.

"Predator 2". The tough cop follows the Predator's trail and simultaneously defeats the bandits, using both strength and intelligence, repeatedly winning the battle with the boss and in the end defeating him face to face with his own weapon! There is still a lot of action and thriller... But alas, “instead of Schwartz there is some kind of black man.” And the black man, by the way, is not “some kind”, but Danny Glover himself from Lethal Weapon!

“Alien 3” is an atmospheric thriller by David Fincher with controversial characters, decent action and memorable scenes. But at the very beginning, Newt, Hicks and Bishop are thrown out into the cold with particular cynicism, completely devaluing the plot of the last film.

"Navy Seals 2". Arguably the best hand-to-hand action movie: action scenes will fill almost any film with Van Damme (and others), a variety of characters with a variety of weapons, a colorful main villain, an elegantly solved “gun problem” (you can’t shoot at that base, because everyone will fly up), cool and an energetic final battle, and anyone can die at any moment! And what is wrong? There is not a single famous actor in the cast by mainstream standards (connoisseurs of the genre knew very well at that time both Michael Worth (TV series “Heat in Acupulco”) and Damian Chapa (“Street Fighter” with Van Damme and “Under Siege” with Seagal), and Marshall Teague (“Roadhouse” with Patrick Swayze)). That’s why the film went unnoticed, especially since it was released when films about martial arts in the West had seriously lost popularity.

“15 Minutes of Fame” is a harsh detective story on an emigrant theme with cruel and calculating villains and noble heroes. And here Mashkov and De Niro HIMSELF are filming. And they play well... Only they are not the main characters, and in general one of them is killed right away, and the second a little later.

"Cops in Deep" - Sam Jackson and The Rock jump off a roof and die. Many people thought that they were the main characters, which spoiled the rating, and the film itself was forgotten.

The “Undeniable” series is an example of reverse viewing: many who are familiar with Yuri Boyka from parts 3 and 4 decide to watch the first two. And in the first they are awaiting his absence (although Wesley Snipes and Peter Falk play well there), and in the second he receives "from some left black, and both times like a sucker." That's why Boyka fans don't like these two parts.

"Carrier 3". There are still a lot of action scenes and chases, and they are still not bad, but the hero’s partner, after one famous phrase, was immediately called the Despicable Jar Jar, and the film itself was trashed by critics, despite generally good box office receipts. Another part of the franchise suffered due to the absence of Jason Statham.

Before the advent of the New Trilogy, the second Star Wars episode was considered the worst of them all - and this despite the powerful Jedi performance, the tough warrior Jango Fett and the serious plot. People didn’t like Count Dooku and the “merging of two cool Jedi at his hands” - after all, everyone was used to seeing a cool cyborg or an artsy trickster with a memorable appearance as the final boss, but here was some “sad old man.” But Christopher Lee himself played and prepared for the role!

Wasn't he scolded for his dialogues about sand?

Some critics spoke well of the film adaptation of “The Dark Tower” - the film was interesting, a lot of action and all that... But Idris Elba in the role of the Shooter was not forgiven already at the trailer stage and was biased towards the film.

But from the point of view of other critics, this is an inversion. There is too much action, the events of almost the entire cycle are crammed into one film that is not very long, the characters that remain have changed for the worse. Along the way, Idris Elba, a talented and hardworking actor, is one of the many bright spots here.

"Resident Evil". The very first film. Everything seemed to be fine. Who is this girl and where does she live? Really, who is Alice?

The author of the edit grasped the message at the very first viewing - who Alice is is not revealed, partly because her memory has been erased and over the course of the film she gradually tries to restore it. Everything looks completely organic. The complaint here is not that she doesn’t have a story, but in orangurism: she is an original character who was inserted into an already existing universe that had a considerable fandom and, with her appearance, lost all of its lore.

"Resident Evil: The Final Chapter." On the one hand, after a series of bloated sequels, each worse and more delusional, the film looks quite invigorating. But the director and screenwriter completely neglected continuity, not bothering to straighten out the plot at least with the first film in the franchise.

“Tom and Jerry” (film) - the vast majority of complaints agreed on one thing: it was impossible, impossible
to give Tom and Jerry human voices! The main feature of the series, from their point of view, was missing.

"The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift." It would seem that the film is no worse than the first two and fits into the idea of that time - there are illegal street races, there are pretentious parties of majors in expensive tuned cars, there is a plot, the main character develops throughout the film and learns to drift, there is some drama sprinkled in, there is even one One of the best characters in the series is Khan. For a change, even the atmosphere is different - the action takes place in Tokyo. What did the fans dislike so much? It’s simply that little-known actors were cast in the main roles, and not Paul Walker and Vin Diesel. Or rather, the latter is present in the film, but only at the very end and for a couple of frames. Also, the subsequent idea of moving the events of the film chronologically into the interval between the sixth and seventh fast and the furious seemed dubious to fans, although Tokyo Drift was released in 2006, and part 6 in 2013, so the cars themselves, and even little things like the style of clothing and cell phones of the characters from The third part looked, to put it mildly, not very relevant for 2014.

TV series[edit]

“Prosecutor's check” is a zigzag. The fourth season is denied only by the most ardent fans of Alexander Chekalin, because there is Alexander Besfamilny instead of him.

Animated series[edit]

The Buzz On Maggie - While generally enjoyed by most people who have seen it (some of whom consider it a legitimate cult classic, while most others simply consider it "so bad it's good"), it is extremely (on actually, probably a parody) stereotypical slice-of-life sitcom aimed at little girls (an audience known for being squeamish, to say the least), set in an overcrowded garbage dump infested with sentient anthropomorphic flies and various other types of insects, who may or may not have acquired their anthropomorphism. from prolonged exposure to radioactive liquid/gas. For these reasons, the show only lasted one season.

Anime and manga[edit]

Code Geass: Akito of the Broken Lands - the midquel greatly expanded the alternative history lore of the franchise (for example, it dispelled expectations about the European Union, which generally remained behind the scenes in both seasons), introduced new very interesting characters with a very good plot and, most interestingly, eliminated some plot holes. And yet, the fans spit. And why? But because Lelouch and S.S. participate in the series in tertiary roles, and the roles of the protagonists went to some no-names in the form of Marysia, who was too much loved by the authors [2] and a crazy maniac, albeit on the “Light Side of the Force”. Because of this, the cunning maneuvers so beloved by the audience became catastrophically few (and they were all merged at once). Of course, Taniguchi and Co. tried to compensate for this with combat, but even here they made a mistake: action duels on knightmare frames lost all their luster due to 3D graphics.
Stitch! and its prequel Stitch & Ai - there is no Lilo here, instead a Japanese/Chinese girl. Therefore, many fans do not perceive these series with hostility. In the case of the second series, there is another reason: Stitch here turns into a giant monster, and this is presented to the viewer as another of his abilities, laid down by Jumba during creation, which completely destroys the canon. Judging by the early drafts of the original film, Sanders had no idea about such a thing.

Imouto sae Ireba Ii - few people have gone beyond the first 1:40 of the first episode, which is the most vicious perverted trash... despite the fact that in fact this is the fantasy of the main character, and the series is actually about the everyday life and friendship of a company of light novel authors. As a result, the second season never happened.

Punch Line - the hero spends the first 5 episodes in the form of a ghost and does not really do anything except watch his three roommates around the house. Not everyone was able to endure the seemingly voyeuristic ecchi underdog to the end and discover that the series is not about that at all.

Video games[edit]

The Sega Dreamcast was a great console, except for one thing - the lack of a proper anti-piracy system. The consoles themselves were snapped up so much that factories did not have time to produce new ones, but no one was in a hurry to buy games, which became one of the main nails in its coffin. About the same thing buried the second revision of XBOX in income (but not in sales).

The Atari Jaguar port of Doom is one of the best, closest to the original Doom ports... except there's no music at all!

The situation with the recent Doom Eternal is worth mentioning because of its atypical nature. Almost everyone was satisfied with the powerful metal soundtrack and cheerful gameplay... But the game’s opponents put forward the cartoonish, deliberately frivolous interface and color scheme as a fatal flaw. For many, the cognitive dissonance of the “bright milking for mobile phones” design and the serious plot with childish dismemberment killed the immersion – and the otherwise excellent game. There are also clown skins of the main character like a rainbow unicorn and a fat plumber. That case when the unexpected bathos was not expected in a different sense.

For the author of the edit, this drawback was the very intrusive platforming elements. Come on, remind me what DOOM was originally about?

Sonic Free Riders - a potentially good game made completely unplayable by the terrible unresponsive Kinect controls. And the game is a Kinect exclusive; you can’t play it with a normal gamepad.

Touhou 17: Wily Beast and Weakest Creature - an overall good game was spoiled by terrible visuals. In general, the series suffers from overly bright, unpleasant visual effects that make it difficult to distinguish bullets, starting with Touhou 9.5, but here they are simply poured in tanks. It gets to the point where you have to time the hypers not in order to cancel the bullets at the right moment, as in DoDonPachi of normal danmaku, but in order to see
the bullets at the right time (during the action of the hyper, the graphics become more or less sane). Moreover, if you play as Marisa with lasers, then even hyper will not help - the bullets will not be visible behind your hyper lasers. We can only puzzle over why no one has yet made mods for Touhou to disable the extra grafon.

Abstract shoot-em-ups from ABA Games are not bad games, but the electronic music in them mostly sucks. Subversion: no one bothers you to go into the game folder and replace the music with your own.

Armies of Exigo has great graphics, a good, albeit rollicking, plot, interesting missions, even the AI is quite good... but the game is just a clone of Blizzard strategies without any new mechanics. From the golden age of RTS, we still remember those that were more or less original.

Asura's Wrath. Epic! GARNO! Large-scale! Awesome music! It's just that there's almost no gameplay. And if so, why do we need interactivity? We should make an anime straight away.

Life is Strange 2 is not about Max (and Chloe).

The Last of Us: Part II - a certain masculine girl (Abby) brutally kills the main character of the first part, Joel, and then we are forced to play for her for the second half of the game and accept her truth.

Cyberpunk 2077 - alas, a lot of bugs and crooked optimization for consoles of the outgoing generation - the reason why it is considered not shameful to pour slop on a good game.

Biomutant is a ridiculously high priced game.

Alice: Madness returns - a translation to the powerful and colorful Unreal Engine in 2011, and after Quake III, from which they squeezed the most out of, it could only be welcomed. But the refusal of swimming and acrobatics... And for dessert, the battle system with several opponents with a faulty auto-aim and fashionable slow-mo is completely screwed up, for which McGee wants to be beaten with a rocking horse. And all for the sake of the dubious value of the port on the console and playing with a gamepad, on which it’s a little difficult to get solos on the keyboard...

Real life[edit]

In IT, the term “fatal flaw” is usually used ironically and means that some company does not recommend using someone else’s good software simply because another company released it. For example, Microsoft condemned the Java programming language from Oracle, after which it released the C# language, which was originally conceived as the same Java, but from Microsoft. A similar logic is used in the military and paramilitary industries. Using third-party hardware and software is dangerous, as they may contain hidden vulnerabilities that could fall into the hands of and be activated by a potential enemy when hostilities begin. This is where the legs of all Elbrus and others like it grow.

Martin Eden as an example of tragic fate

Jack London's novel is an eternal work; it tells the story of a man's battle with fate and life. The bad thing about this work is that the author had a certain ideological attitude: love is the main driving force in the world. And while the hero of London thought that Ruth loved him, he overcame himself and developed. After all, Martin Eden is a genius. But as soon as the main character realized that Ruth was a dummy, he immediately wilted. For those who have not read, we will not reveal all the cards, but let’s say: the meeting with Ruth predetermined the fatal outcome (what this means is clear from the context, and if it is not clear, then read Jack London) of the fate of Martin Eden.

Meaning of the word fatal

They were hunted from horseback, and when the exhausted and wounded animal was driven into a corner from where it could not escape, someone had to dismount and deal a fatal blow with this ax.

Why are teenagers, who have almost never encountered life and have not yet had time to become disillusioned with it, since they did not have enough time to experience it, so inclined to take a fatal step, to voluntarily cross a mysterious and ominous line?

When the fatal outcome seemed inevitable, the engines turned on again, shaking the ship with overloads of several g.

In classical onasm, the future fate of G is unenviable and has two possible outcomes - pessimistic and fatal.

People are multiplying so quickly that, unless something exceptional happens, the fatal moment is getting closer and closer when the expanded humanity will cover the entire globe, like solid caviar from human heads!

And again, we mean not only their current state, but also the history of science, that is, cuneiform Babylonian arithmetic; incinerated, extinct images of the universe - both Chaldean and Egyptian; Ptolemyism and Einsteinianism, matrix and patrix calculus, the algebra of tensors and groups, methods of firing vases in the Ming Dynasty, the machines of Lilienthal, Hieronymus, Leonardo, the disastrous balloon of Salomon Andre and the airship of General Nobile (the fact that during the Nobile expedition there were cases of cannibalism, has a special and deep meaning for the reader, for Hannahan’s novel can be likened to the point at which some fatal weight fell into the water and disturbed its surface; and the circles of waves, concentrically diverging further and further from the “Gigamesh”, turn out to be “everything” human existence on Earth, starting with Homo Javanensis [Javanese man (lat.)] and Paleopithecus).

The price of a war that was impossible to win was the humiliation of the most powerful military power in the world, a fatal failure in the operation of a complex mechanism called the System and the moral decay of the army.

From the moment I first stepped onto the paved path leading to her peeling little house, which stood on a small hill, like on chicken legs, I entered some kind of fatal, enigmatic and silent world.

Symbolically, one could say that in the year 399 BC, on the day of Socrates' hemlock, the West chose the fatal path.

The fifth type of supernova explosions, which includes thirty-three percent of observations, in other words, one third of them - this fatal fifth type can only be interpreted unambiguously: as a result of the instantaneous destruction of certain planetary bodies - planets similar to our Earth.

The author's fateful mistake

Jack London is an eternal author, that is, he will be read as long as the English language and people capable of translating from it exist, but he also made a mistake that cost his hero dearly. The astute reader will understand what is at stake. Jack London believed: the most important thing in life is love, and when a person is deprived of love, then he has no reason to live. Martin Eden became a victim of precisely this attitude. And this quite fits the definition of “fatal mistake” - this is what predetermined the fate of the hero, played a cruel joke on him. Jack London's system-forming belief about love devalued Martin Eden's entire struggle for the right to be himself.

Fatal flaw

The history of software revolutions from Microsoft, in brief: First there were the Windows API and DLL Hell. Revolution #1 was DDE - remember how links allowed us to create status bars that reflected the current price of Microsoft stock? Around the same time, Microsoft created the VERSION INFO resource, which excluded DLL Hell. But another group at Microsoft found in DDE fatal flaw

– they didn’t write it!
To solve this problem, they created OLE (similar to DDE, but different), and I naively remember a speaker at a Microsoft conference saying that soon the Windows API will be rewritten as the OLE API, and every element on the screen will be an OCX. OLE now has interfaces that eliminate DLL Hell. Remember the disease called “in-place”, where we dreamed of embedding all our applications into one (possibly very large) Word document? Somewhere at the same time, Microsoft believed in the C++ religion, MFC arose, which solved all our problems once again. But OLE wasn't going to stand idly by, so it was reborn as COM, and we suddenly realized that OLE (or was it DDE?) was here to stay - and even included a carefully designed component versioning system that eliminated DLL Hell. At this time, a group of renegades within Microsoft discovered a fatal flaw
- they didn't write it!
They immediately corrected this by creating ATL, which is like MFC but different, and tried to hide all the great things that the COM group tried so hard to teach us. This forced the COM (or was it OLE?) group to rename itself ActiveX and release about a ton of new interfaces (including version control interfaces that eliminated DLL Hell), along with the ability to make all code loadable through browsers, right along with user-defined viruses (to spite these bastards from ATL!). The operating systems group screamed loudly, like a forgotten middle child, demanding attention, saying that we should prepare for Cairo, some mysterious crap that could never even be properly described, let alone released. To their credit, it should be said that they did introduce the concept of “System File Protection”, excluding DLL Hell. But then a certain group at Microsoft found a fatal flaw
in Java - they didn’t write it!
This was corrected by the creation of either J or Jole, or maybe ActiveJ (to be honest, I just don’t remember), exactly the same as Java, but different. It was cool, but Sun sued Microsoft under some decrepit law. This was a clear attempt to stifle Microsoft's right to produce the same products as others, but different. Remember the J/Jole/ActiveJ manager banging his shoes on the table and saying that Microsoft will never abandon this product? Fool! All this meant only one thing - lack of attention to the ActiveX group (or was it COM?). This incredibly cheerful crowd is back with COM+ and MTS at the ready (maybe they should have called it ActiveX+?). I don’t understand why they didn’t put “COM” or “Active” or “X” or “+” on MTS – they just shocked me with it! They also threatened to add + to all the then fashionable expressions. Around that time, someone started screaming about "Windows DNA" (why not DINA) and "Windows Washboard", and screamed for a while, but it all died down before everyone realized what it was. By this point, Microsoft had been watching the Internet with growing concern for several years. Recently they have come to the realization that the Internet has a fatal flaw
: well, you get the idea.
And that brings us to the current moment and .NET (pronounced "doughnut" but different), which is similar to the Internet but with more press releases. The main thing that needs to be very clearly understood is that .NET excludes DLL Hell. .NET comes with a new language, C#, (it turns out that Active++ Jspresso had a fatal flaw
that killed it).
.NET includes a virtual machine that all languages will use (apparently due to fatal flaws
in Intel processors).
.NET includes a unified security system (there is still a fatal flaw
in storing passwords not on Microsoft servers). It's actually easier to list the things that .NET doesn't include. .NET is sure to revolutionize Windows programming... for about a year.