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16 points

They used to be cool, mow they remind me of that show and mcu multiverse crap. There’s no mystique to a nice portal anymore

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4 points

portals have always been lame. A top tier lazy plot device.

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7 points

I suppose you’d think it’d fine if it was called a wormhole or whatever? Also in what way are portals always lazy? They can be used for super convenient transportation and that can do it, but usually the portal goes to some weird fucking place that there is no way the protagonist could walk or drive to. Stargate is all about the availability of a portal and it’s consequences, portals can be pretty cool.

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2 points

If you’re going to invent a made up technology, it should be one that increases the cool factor (things like “warp drives”, spaceships, cyborgs, whatever) or or leads to interesting plot points or dilemmas (like time travel, but that’s pretty overplayed as well). At least Stargate has a cool looking portal, but as far as I can remember, all it does is take them somewhere, and it doesn’t even look cool when they arrive. Like Star Trek but without the cool spaceships.

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12 points

I like how in Mercedes Lackey’s books, portals are notoriously hard to manage and maintain. It basically drains you of all your power and then some. But otherwise portals have been kinda basic for me since Diablo II.

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4 points

This is the first time I’ve seen anyone reference Mercedes Lackey, one of my favorite authors of all time. Her system of magic got it all right as far as I’m concerned, fucking Harry Potter throwing spells around with zero effort beyond the right wrist flick and pronunciation

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Counterpoint: Stargate

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7 points

Ds9. A wormhole is just a fancy word for a portal in space.

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3 points

Nah man. Portals don’t have hyper competent, 11D aliens that are actually a bit entitled. Do portals let you just erase your enemies?

Unless you subscribe to the theory that it was just Sisko using 3% of his real power and glared the Jem’Hadar or of existence, in which case the wormhole was incidental.

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