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How though
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
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.
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
Counterpoint: Stargate
Ds9. A wormhole is just a fancy word for a portal in space.
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.
This one does. There are other wormholes in trek that are just straight up portals. Unless you are of bajoran faith and calling it the celestial temple, it a portal with a twist. Every portal has a twist
portals have always been lame. A top tier lazy plot device.
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.
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.
City on the Edge of Forever, highest rated original series episode, portal.
Stargate did a ton of interesting stuff with the gate. Also they get cool spaceships later on.