I thought a big part of the appeal of the super villain fantasy wasn’t your standard of living but in comparative standard of living. It’s boring if everyone has a volcano lair. People want a doomsday weapon so that they are feared and respected.
I think that a major appeal of Minecraft is the pressure toward making volcano lairs. (in a game where many people can have them).
It may have some aspects of ‘I have a cooler house than you’, but I don’t think it’s JUST about that. For example, note how hard it can be to be creative with your living space unless you have a ton of money, and how much McMansions are loathed by people who would prefer one to their own house on strictly hedonic issues.
I remember when I was a teen, my father and I would sometimes talk about different awesome ways our home and those of our neighbors could have incorporated the local terrain. Everyone else’s houses also being awesome would be way better than just our house being awesome.
We despaired at the invasion of the McMansions primarily because the contractors had killed every living thing on the lots and replaced them with very low-grade rock gardens, when the lots had been heavily forested immediately before. For the expenditure they had put in, they could have done way better. If they had spent the same amount and come up with a house that was sufficiently awesome for that price tag, and not killed the local jukes and tree narfs, we would have been stoked instead of dismayed.
THere may be a pressure towards unexpectedness and some other contextual stuff. One fantasy of mine is a tiny apartment with a totally inconsistent-to-the-outside rococo interior, and I have sometimes thought about other odd ways of re-furnishing dense city architecture.
Aren’t supervillian lairs often made in such a way to somehow connect to personality of the supervillian?
Edit: Also, if volcano lairs actually existed, I imagine a lot of other interesting supervillian-worth dwelling ideas would spring up.
I thought a big part of the appeal of the super villain fantasy wasn’t your standard of living but in comparative standard of living. It’s boring if everyone has a volcano lair. People want a doomsday weapon so that they are feared and respected.
I don’t know.
I think that a major appeal of Minecraft is the pressure toward making volcano lairs. (in a game where many people can have them).
It may have some aspects of ‘I have a cooler house than you’, but I don’t think it’s JUST about that. For example, note how hard it can be to be creative with your living space unless you have a ton of money, and how much McMansions are loathed by people who would prefer one to their own house on strictly hedonic issues.
I remember when I was a teen, my father and I would sometimes talk about different awesome ways our home and those of our neighbors could have incorporated the local terrain. Everyone else’s houses also being awesome would be way better than just our house being awesome.
We despaired at the invasion of the McMansions primarily because the contractors had killed every living thing on the lots and replaced them with very low-grade rock gardens, when the lots had been heavily forested immediately before. For the expenditure they had put in, they could have done way better. If they had spent the same amount and come up with a house that was sufficiently awesome for that price tag, and not killed the local jukes and tree narfs, we would have been stoked instead of dismayed.
THere may be a pressure towards unexpectedness and some other contextual stuff. One fantasy of mine is a tiny apartment with a totally inconsistent-to-the-outside rococo interior, and I have sometimes thought about other odd ways of re-furnishing dense city architecture.
Aren’t supervillian lairs often made in such a way to somehow connect to personality of the supervillian?
Edit: Also, if volcano lairs actually existed, I imagine a lot of other interesting supervillian-worth dwelling ideas would spring up.