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a few people have replied stuff to the effect of “damn this looks cool but i don’t know anything about Doom” and that is officially my cue to start nerding out about it

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This is the Doomguy. Demons call him “The Doom Slayer,” but everyone who loves him calls him Doomguy.

Once upon a time, Doomguy was a security guard working for the Union Aerospace Corporation. He was stationed on a remote space base on the Martian moon Phobos. He used to be in the Marine Corps, but he was dishonorably discharged after his CO ordered him to fire on unarmed civilians and he responded by putting his CO in a full-body cast. He spent most of his time as a security guard jerking off to porn on the clock, according to the original game’s manual.

One day, his bosses at the UAC fucked up super bad when experimenting with teleporters and opened a portal to Hell. Demons quickly swarmed the base, possessed Doomguy’s fellow security officers, and started taking everything over. Doomguy thought that wasn’t very cash money of the demons, grabbed a shotgun, and started asking them politely yet firmly to leave.

Doomguy does this on Phobos for a bit, dies, finds himself on the Martian moon of Deimos which had been swallowed in to Hell itself, and gets right back to fighting demons. He rappels down from Deimos in to the depths of Hell, kills more demons, and then escapes through a portal in Hell to Earth.

When on Earth, Doomguy discovers that the demons killed his pet rabbit Daisy. This motivates him to power through a bunch of extremely difficult levels designed by American McGee, a bunch of really shitty rushed ambitious levels designed by Sandy Petersen, three expansion packs designed by fans, a short jog through some levels designed by Nerve Software, and an entire game that was exclusive to the Nintendo 64. During these games he kills a lot of demons, saves humanity, stops the demonic invasion of Earth, and resolves to stay in Hell for the rest of eternity to make sure this never happens again.

And… he does that. He spends eons traveling between Hell and parallel dimensions, putting a stop to demonic invasions across the multiverse. He does this for so long that the demons canonize him as a part of their weird demonic religious belief system, dubbing him The Doom Slayer. The demons chronicle Doomguy’s rampage in a collection of stories called The Slayer’s Testament. He meets an order of alien knights in Hell called the Night Sentinels, whose own home world was pulled in to Hell by the demons and who had become just as effective at killing demons as he had. He pals around with them for a bit but eventually the demons get the better of them all and all that’s left is the Doomguy. This pisses him off really bad, so badly that when he went on his latest rampage he didn’t notice that the demons were leading him in to a trap. The demons drop an entire temple on his head, knock him unconscious, and lock him in a sarcophagus.

An undisclosed amount of time passes, and eventually the UAC from an alternate universe busts in to Hell by accident again. The UAC starts pulling natural resources and artifacts from Hell and using those resources to power all of their technology. Turns out, using Hell Energy to power your electronics makes people go crazy, and eventually this turns in to another full-on demonic invasion. This is where DOOM (2016) starts, with the Doomguy waking up from his nap in a UAC lab where they had been studying his sarcophagus. Doomguy realizes that he’s in a “same shit different universe” situation and gets to work stopping the demonic invasion and angrily ignoring the input of every single person that tries to talk to him. He’s seen all this shit before countless times and is sick of hearing excuses and monologues. He’s through with the niceties of it all. Characters tell him to “carefully deactivate” all of the different science machines that let humanity safely use Hell Energy. He smashes them to bits with his feet. Characters assure him that this was all for the “greater good,” he knows that the greatest possible good for humanity is not fucking with Hell anymore. They don’t know what they’re messing with, he does, and he has to fix the problem in his own special way.

The clip above is from Doom Eternal, set to release March of next year. The clip of Doomguy casually strolling through his UAC base and just sort of asserting himself is the result of the character having experienced several thousand years of this bullshit and being just So Through with it all. He’s not gonna hurt these people because ultimately he’s fighting to protect humanity, but as far as he’s concerned he doesn’t owe anyone in this scenario the luxury of his politeness or respect.

The demons are coming from a portal at the core of Mars? What a coincidence, he’s on one of the Martian moons and there’s a gun designed to blow up planets right outside. There’s also a bunch of demons outside, so that’s gonna need to be addressed. This guy has a key to the door out? Sweet. He’s just gonna borrow that right quick. That guy has a plasma rifle? Doomguy always liked that one. It belongs to him now. Time to go outside and hit things until the industrial metal stops playing.

Bruh this was a fuckin’ sweet info dump to read.

Scott Pilgrim is, I think, the best example I can think of for establishing a setting's Nonsense Limit.

The setting's Nonsense Limit isn't quite "How high-fantasy is this". It's mostly a question of presentation, to what degree does the audience feel that they know the rules the world operates by, such that they are primed to accept a random new element being introduced.

A setting with a Nonsense Limit of 0 is, like, an everyday story.
Something larger than life, but theoretically taking place in our world, like your standard spy thriller action movie has a limit of 1.

Some sort of hidden world urban fantasy with wizards and stuff operating in secret has a nonsense limit around 3 or 4. A Superhero setting, presenting an alternate version of our world, is a 5 or 6.
High fantasy comes in around a 7 or so, "Oh yeah, Wizards exist and they can do crazy stuff" is pretty commonly accepted.

Scott Pilgrim comes in at a 10.

If you read the Scott Pilgrim book, it starts off looking like a purely mundane slice of life. The first hint at the fantastical is Ramona appearing repeatedly in Scott's Dreams, and then later showing up in real life.

When we finally get an explanation, it's this:

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Apparently Subspace Highways are a thing? And they go through people's heads? And Ramona treats this like it's obscure, but not secret knowledge. Ramona doesn't think she's doing anything weird here.

At this point, it's not clear if Scott is accepting Ramona's explanation or not, things kind of move on as mundane as ever until their Date, when Ramona takes Scott through subspace, and he doesn't act like his world was just blown open or anything, although I guess that could have been a metaphor.

there's a couple other moments, but everything with Ramona could be a metaphor, or Scott not recognizing what's going on. Maybe Ramona is uniquely fantastical in this otherwise normal world.

And then, this happens

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Suddenly, a fantastical element (A shitty local indie band finishing their set with a song that knocks out most of the audience) is introduced unrelated to Ramona, and undeniably literal. We see the crowd knocked out by Crash and The Boys.

but the story doesn't linger on the implications of that, the whole point of that sequence is to raise the Nonsense Level, such that you accept it when This happens

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Matthew Patel comes flying down onto the stage, Scott, who until this point is presented as a terrible person and a loser, but otherwise is extremely ordinary, proceeds to flawlessly block and counter him before doing a 64-hit air juggle combo.

Scott's friends treat this like Scott is showing off a mildly interesting party trick, like being really good at darts.

The establish that Scott is the "Best Fighter in the Province", not only are street-fighter battles a thing, Scott is Very Good at it, but they're so unimportant that being the best fighter in the province doesn't make Scott NOT a loser.

So when Matthew Patel shows off his magic powers and then explodes into a pile of coins, we've established "Oh, this is how silly the setting gets".

It's not about establishing the RULES of the setting so much as it is about establishing a lack of rules. Scott's skill at street-fighter battles doesn't translate to any sort of social prestige. Ramona can access Subspace Highways and she uses it to do a basic delivery job. It doesn't make sense and it's clear that it's not supposed to.

So later on, when Todd Ingram starts throwing around telekinesis, and the explanation we're given is "He's a Vegan" , you're already so primed by the mixture of weirdness and mundanity that rather than trying to incorporate this new knowledge into any sort of coherent setting ruleset, you just go "Ah, yeah, Vegans".

"objectively physically attractive but in possession of negative rizz" is one of my favorite character concepts. i think it's so great when there's an absurdly hot person who's just a complete fucking loser. the mood is unsalvageable the moment they open their mouth kind of deal. you get no bitches because you're so sucks.