Attack on Titan / Shingeki No Kyojin: What's for Lunch?

[Ramza00]

Could it just be that he's using a map because he doesn't know how to build his unique continent?

And I don't mean that as an insult, since I wouldn't know either. Using a "normal" earth map and flipping some stuff around certainly seems like an easy way around the "How to make X" part, especially if it's not a major part of the story.

I agree with what you are saying, and let me be the devil's advocate anyway even though we are in agreement.

Has anyone ever heard of Catatumbo lightning?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning

It is a location on real life earth and not some sci fi or fantasy place where roughly 3/4ths of the nights of the planet in a year this location will have one large thunderstorm thousands of bolts of lighning, far bigger than a normal thunderstorm, with 250 to 300 bolts of lightning per hour, 10 hours a night / day, and each single lightning bolt producing more energy than a traditional lightning bolt (if I recall it is an order of magnitude more energy for a single lightning bolt in catatumbo than a normal lightning some place else either the median energy for the lightning bolt or the mean.)

How does this occur? We really do not know, we know several of the reasons but we do not know them all and how much each of these individual reasons are.

Well first Catatumbo is a lake, well more of a cove where there is a river on one side of the freshwater lake, and then the lake has a small opening to the sea.





Around the lake on roughly 3/4ths the sides there are very tall mountains. And on the side that is not part of the mountains you have the ocean but it is not just the ocean but the angle (aka north south stuff) where the normal winds of the caribbean ocean is hitting the different types of winds from the mountains, and the different type of winds from the lake and this creates a pressure system that makes it very easy to have thunderstorms and not just have thunderstorms but have really big thunderstorms. Storms that you can see from 400 kilometers away / 250 miles. If you imagine the map of the united states and then imagine kansas in the center of it, the north to sound border of kansas is only 343 km / 210 miles aka it is further than that.



There is also probably other factors in play that makes Catatumbo the famous Catatumbo lightnings like probably the botany that occurs right before the lake around the river. There is a theory it is the biological mass decomposing that may also modify how easy it is to create lightning. There are other places with similar stuff around the world but not to this extreme.

Could it just be that he's using a map because he doesn't know how to build his unique continent?

And I don't mean that as an insult, since I wouldn't know either. Using a "normal" earth map and flipping some stuff around certainly seems like an easy way around the "How to make X" part, especially if it's not a major part of the story.

My entire point of this post was not to nerd-off about this really cool place, but to point out the details matter, and the details matter so much that even if you think you understand all the details a small change can make a dramatic effect. Change the slope of the mountains of Catatumbo, or change the angle of the 3 sides so it hits at a slightly more to the right or the left and it changes everything, or widen the cove output area so there is no big lake of freshwater before it becomes saltwater and so on.

Eventually you have to just handwave it away. The author just has to say because I said so. (Effectively I am agreeing with Quiver). There is a point where the lands you draw on a piece of paper would not have happened naturally, sure the land would still be there but the height of the mountains, or the climate, or something else, would be all wrong for there are so many forces in play we get a perfect example of chaos theory and the power of jerks^{physic term / physic joke}, aka the 3rd derivative of position, or the 2nd derivative of velocity. Aka those sudden lurches where you thought you understand everything but somehow one minor detail, a butterfly causes a "lurch" and we are nolonger talking about a linear system, something that can be graphed with normal mathmathics of algebra or calc 1 and 2, but we have to use higher levels of math aka differential equations, a jerk equation is the ... let me quote wikipedia so I do not butcher this. From the wikipedia article about jerk systems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics)

. It has been shown that a jerk equation, which is equivalent to a system of three first-order ordinary non-linear differential equations, is in a mathematically well defined sense the minimal setting for solutions showing chaotic behaviour [the wikipedia article then links to another article about chaos theory]. This motivates mathematical interest in jerk systems. Systems involving a fourth or higher derivative are accordingly called hyperjerk systems.

There will always be a fly in the ointment, or a butterfly in your system that you did not take into account for.

Ian Malcolm actually likes being the jerk, that is why he choose to specialize in chaos theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

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So my point of my long ass post is to tell the people to stop trying to critique a beautifulish story Hajime Isayama has given us.