"How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine". I wasn't sure how to answer that at first, but I think your comment solidifies it. I can accept ridiculous and unrealistic scenarios as long as they are fun, and held together within an equally ridiculous world.
Theres a fine line between something that is clearly a dramatisation being frustrating or just fun.
Marvel and Star Wars aren't fine--the writing is execrable whenever they aren't outright plagiarizing something else.
Star Wars was schlock meant to sell toys that just happened to become huge. Marvel is pretty much just straight up garbage across the board (some characters are interesting--the stories and world though are pretty uniformly trope-ridden crap).
Modern movies also have the problem that a lot of their revenue comes from overseas--China in particular. They can't risk having writing that is either too subtle for a foreign audience or cover themes that might get them banned by the government.
Thus we get Michael Bay syndrome--spectacle after spectacle and the minimum writing necessary to connect them.
(To be honest--this is nothing new to Hollywood--Michael Bay can trace his roots the whole way back through "Towering Inferno" to "Noah's Ark", etc.)
I'm sure alot of this can be traced back to Manga roots.
When you get down to comic books and animations, the market forces aren't quite so vicious and your "10% okay vs 90% of everything is crap" doesn't get so filtered out. Consequently, you get more of the standard curve--some stuff is bad, most stuff is average, some stuff is good, and a few gems poke up every now and then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Blood_and_the_Holy_Gr...
I remember reading it in the 90s and being very put off by the insanity and lack of logic. As it later turned out: The conspiracy theory of HBHG and DVC was in the end invented by a French document forger who in his own forgery seemed to be the last merovingian king/descendent of Christ:
This is sometimes called conspiracy fiction, and one cool thing about it is that the form as such doesn’t strictly imply or require a specific genre, so it works just as well with any or all of sci-fi / noir / historical fiction. Apparently renowned author Dan brown can easily understand that mixing with actual treasure hunt instead of some kind of forbidden knowledge is part of the formula for giving it the most popular appeal.
It's an interesting book, and it does engage, but it is also quite the trip.
It's been a minute, but I think Hiro Protagonist gets around on a motorcycle with wheels that deform to adapt to the terrain.
The story does have couriers that use skateboards and grappling hooks, though.
I like Stephenson, he's written some great stuff, but even ignoring that scene, Snow Crash is IMO just a bad book to read once you're out of high school.
For me it is less problematic than it could have been, because: YT is shown to be naive, reckless and impulsive, and Raven (is that his name? I think so) is an awful person just in general. The author is in no way implying that sex for those two is a good idea, in any way. It's just a thing that happened in the book.
It's also not a sexy scene, so it's not written to be titilating (IMO), and it's short and it does ~something for the plot.
Hiro doesn't use a skateboard you're thinking of "YT" the courier.
Hiro uses a high-performance pizza-delivery-specific car early on and then later a motorcycle that has wheels that aren't even continuous discs, but made up of many individually coordinated linear actuators with grip-pads on the end.
I don't recall Hiro's motorcycle being much a part of the story, it might also have had the smartwheels but isn't discussed until later...
Excellent book that still delivers 3 decades after it came out.
Hiro: "But you'll never forget it."
(I also think it's great, btw.)
i'm not really sure i grokked the whole 'sumerian is machine code for mankind' thing. might have to re-read it, my last go-through was in high school.
I sometimes get put in a position where i state my favourite book. Snow Crash. What's it about they ask?
Well there's a guy who delivers pizza, 'a deliverator' they call him but his name is Hiro Protagonist (yes seriously that's the main characters name folks). It's set in the dystopian future where you have to deliver pizza in under 30minutes or face public execution for the entertainment of the people who didn't get their pizza in time. He uses a skateboard and grappling hooks to get around and has samurai swords because he studies the way of the blade. He logs into the metaverse where he's a hardcore hacker by night. He ends up meeting a biker who has a nuclear bomb in a sidecar with a tattoo on his forehead that reads POOR IMPULSE CONTROL... (i could ramble on for a while like this trying to explain what it's about but you probably get a sense for it).
I actually think Neil Stephenson was intentionally trying to write the most ridiculous book possible but the truth is the book is FUN. I don't care about clever plots or prose. I want FUN. Da Vinci code is similar. It's an Indiana Jones movie in book form.