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A weird question!
🕑 Added 2023-03-04 21:50:51 +0000 UTCHello all you lovely patrons! It's Red!
So I just finished a trope talk that's a full half-hour about a subject I think is really interesting, and I'm excited for you guys to see it when it goes up, but I have no idea what to title it.
This is a weird problem for me to have, but it's legit. This isn't about a standard TVTropes installment, it's a pattern I picked up on myself. Unfortunately that means I don't have ready access to a punchy name.
The gist is I noticed a serious uptick in recent media - within the last two decades, basically - of the protagonists getting or contriving access to a way to instantly and effortlessly communicate with each other across long distances. Magic crystals for communication, invisible earbuds, always-on telepathic links, magic mirrors, a friendly tech genius making everybody fantasy ipads, whatever. It's mostly noteworthy because before about two decades ago these franchises did not do that, frankly because the writers clearly didn't think of it until it became their lived reality. A lot of older stories hit a little bit weird now when characters have access to long-distance comms but do not use them to contact their allies or escape danger, because the writers didn't realize how that kind of tech could actually shape those beloved tropey scenarios. The invisibility of normalcy is very interesting.
I've been calling this phenomenon "Magitech Cell Phones" in my notes, but I don't think that's descriptive enough. "Magic Phones" might make people think I'm talking about some Mirai Nikki nonsense, and "Always On Those Dang Phones" has "old man yells at cloud" energy. So I'm opening this up to suggestions, if you guys can think of a snappy way to sum up this phenomenon in five words or less!
-R
Comments
Nick Mussert
Perfect.
Robert Cook
Magicomm hotline? Manacomm servces? Magicomm service hotline?
Nick Sophner
I'm super late to the party, but I wanna throw one out there: "Captain America's Data Plan" - because the one that seems most egregious to me is Avengers Endgame, when all five billion heroes magically show up, some of whom had never even met the Avengers before getting dusted, and yet they all have magic invisible earpieces set to Captain America's frequency. Seriously, his data plan to get all these devices linked up must be unreal.
