Trope(s)-a-Day: Awesome, yet Practical & Boring, but Practical

Alistair Young

Mar 1, 2012 — 1 min read

Awesome, yet Practical / Boring, but Practical: Rather than attempt to come up with a large ad-hoc list here, I shall just point out that the Empire’s hat, or one of them, is largely based on playing the former as straight as possible while averting the latter, inasmuch as the people responsible for making things know their own cultural predilections quite well, and thus that making it awesome (or at the very least sprinkling it with some awesome like fairy dust) will sell infinitely more units than its boring but equally functional equivalent.

(Others simply go the route of “what do you mean, it’s not Simple Yet Awesome?”, such as pointing out that the hanrian, the second-sword, has been the canonical short blade/combat knife/utility knife/first general-purpose tool for millennia, from practically the Iron Age until now In Space, and the design has changed remarkably little over all that time. Anyone want to argue that that’s not awesome?)

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