Unrelated to the stereotype thing, there’s also the absurdity of planets and the sizes of planets. Earth has like 7 billion people spread out over massive land area. Every climate, every kind of biome.
Some ways they get this wrong in lots of #scifi. 1. Some characters are looking for someone or something and they only know what PLANET it is on. Like, imagine finding ONE specific person—even if you have a super high res, high tech holographic photo of them—if all you know is that they’re on Earth somewhere. Then they land on “the planet” and go to the first town or city they see, and that’s where the thing they need is. They never spend months wandering around an entire planet trying to find the one thing.
2. Every real culture makes a single city of their culture the representative for the whole Earth in sci-fi stories. In American movies, aliens come to New York or DC. When aliens attack Earth and Godzilla is needed, Tokyo takes the lead to save Earth. James Bond is the only hero who can save Earth from total destruction (not exactly sci fi, but I wanted another example)
3. If you see extreme weather on an alien planet, that’s because the _entire_ planet has that extreme weather (blizzard, desert, swamp). It’s never like “oh on this continent at this time of year, the rains are super heavy. But the summers are warm and sunny.” You know, like Earth.
They invite us to imagine a planet so homogeneous that the weather never changes, culture never changes, and everyone on the planet looks and thinks pretty much the same.
2/2
