“Jesus christ eat the goddamn mac and cheese.” scowls the hero “I can hear your stomach growling through your armor, you know.”
The villain blinks “You-”
“Are feeding you, yes. If all I wanted to do was punch people and throw criminals in jail, I would’ve become a vigilante. Heroism involves kindness, dipshit.”
“Heroism involves kindness, dipshit” is the most amazing phrase I’ve ever read. I need to incorporate it into all my work.
This straight up sounds like something Spider-Man would say
here is a concept that I’m still trying to flesh out: medieval science fiction.
not, of course, aliens land during the middle ages, though I’ve read and enjoyed that, but something much more difficult to execute, if it’s possible at all: space opera (exempli gratia) as written by Bede or Gildas or Geoffrey of Monmouth.
The challenge is, of course, that you have to get into the medieval mind (ok, I know that talking about “the” medieval mind is fallacious) and figure out what they’d keep from their world and what they’d think to change – what is the analogue to ‘50s writers giving us faster than light travel & radioactive planets & psionics and still having gender and family politics that are identical to ‘50s middle class American politics? I have a feeling it’s the Church – it’s true that there are several books with Space Popes, but it tends to be a rebirth of the Papacy. I doubt a medieval science fiction writer would have the Church decline or even guess at the Reformation.
Also, sci-fi tech tends to be, both aesthetically and functionally, an extension of tech the society it’s from already has – does a medieval space ship look like a siege tower? How do they envision the instant communication I’m sure they’d have to have as working? Would it be through magic (which is often the case in modern sci-fi)?
And what would the spirit of it be? I would argue that, while you can’t really generalize over an entire field, and there is certainly some bleak sci-fi, the general tenor of American sci-fi is hopeful & enamored of the human spirit. Is the point of medieval space travel to find God*? Will leaving Earth leave behind Original Sin? Are we going to convert the Martians?
DO they need instant communication? I mean, even star wars still has people carrying thumb drives around. There could be a pigeon analogue – sleek little machines flitting between the stars carrying messages, or perhaps creatures already native to the higher spheres suited to the task. Venusian swallowtails, mercurial spirits.
I’d love to see the heavenly spheres as a setting for this all on its own, too. What’s the first moment a traveler hears the music like?
I could see a lot of it through the lens of knights on impossible quests – why not ascend the sky? Knights riding on bright steeds of golden fire known as comets. Knights finding allegorical realms on the various planets, like the Kingdom of Love from Capellanus’ Treatise on The Arts of Courtly Love, but set in the golden mountains of Venus, and you could have a Kingdom of War and a Kingdom of Wit and a Kingdom of Time on Mercury and Mars and Saturn. Prester John could be from Jupiter!
I’m not sure about the ways I would expect medieval scifi to be subversive, but I might look at Marie de France for ideas, she plays a lot with expectation and obligation and the implications of gender in her Lais, in very clever ways.
medievals didn’t have the concept of vacuum, let alone know that space doesn’t have air. everything is open ships and space sails. gravity isn’t oriented to the planet, there’s a universal ‘down’. engines are driven by people or animals or wind or water, not burning fuel; your space chariot is pulled by cloud horses or sun lions.
other planets are not other earths, they’re allegorical locations populated by allegorical creatures. angels, demons, dreamers, cannibals, a planet of all women and a planet of all men – but not for 1950′s bikini shenanigans, more as a parable about how the sexes can’t get along without each other because men’s work and women’s work are both necessary. no concept that men could do women’s work and vice-versa, or at least do it competently. the men on the men’s planet would like, grow children in their fields, but wean them on burnt bread soaked in beer because they’re terrible at milking cows and kneading dough, or something like that.
there’s a Renaissance thing, Orlando Furioso, in which the knight Astolfo gets to the moon in Elijah’s burning chariot. (He goes to the moon because everything that has been lost on Earth can be found there, including Orlando’s sanity, because of course.)
I think I’d argue that theological allegory, like the Divine Comedy or the Vision of Piers Plowman, pretty much is medieval science fiction: speculations and warnings and encouragement, based on what is known-or-believed-to-be-known. As I understand it, the general opinion of medieval European scholars was that theology was THE most important thing to know about; studying the Creator more fervently than the creation was considered pretty much the same degree of Obviously Sensible as, say, studying birds doing bird things and being birds instead of just looking at empty nests and eggshells would be to us, like, why study mere side-effects when you can study The Entire Truth And Cause Of Everything? So I would argue that theology is the medieval version of twentieth century rocket science and atomic physics as The Coolest Thing To Know About, and thus spec fic based on it is the equivalent of science fiction.
You guys might enjoy a book I remember reading ages ago…Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial Matters. I honestly can’t remember whether I liked it or not, but it’s basically “What if ancient astronomy was totally legit? Okay, adventure time.”
And, going in the opposite direction, for a modern example of someone writing in the style of a medieval travelogue but as if it were true science, check out Umberto Eco’s Baudolino. If you love history and sly wit, Eco’s your man.
I’m drawing a blank at how many people in Medieval Europe knew the Earth was round, and coming up with the possibility of a Universe shaped like an hourglass of sorts, with Earth as the flat plane through the smallest point in the middle, and the Infinite Heavens above and the equally-infinite Infernal Hell below, with “space travel” in two parts: man flying up to the realms of angels and heavenly spheres below the gates of Heaven, and man flying down to the realms of demons and diabolical spheres and, eventually, the gates of Hell.
These spheres would be I suppose something like the Death Star: round castles without an internal center of gravity, composed of layers on which people (or other entities) live and work. There would be spheres ruled by particular angels and demons, saints and noteworthy sinners, whose populace, society, and behavior are all based on that particular entity’s attributes.
The heavenly realms would have a lot of abundance and flying around on angels’ wings, and the infernal realms would have a lot of torture and riding on chariots of fire, and there would probably be a lot of stories focusing on what happens when a person from one side is displaced to the other, sometimes with them settling into (or succumbing to) their new environment, other times reshaping it into something more like themselves (an angel gets taken to hell, takes control of a sphere, and it rises into Heaven, full of rejoicing former-sinners filled with the Love of God, or a demon is brought to a celestial sphere by someone who wants to show off their power, and the demon carefully subverts the whole population and they rejoice as their sphere sinks down into Hell), and other times escaping back to their own place, or just travelling—perhaps there are Captain Jack Sparrow style characters that simply wander through and cause chaos through their “corkscrew in a world of straight lines” breezing through rules not meant to apply to them.
Dammit I want to write like six books’ worth of this now.
can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?
You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.
You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.
You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.
You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?
Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog?
Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.
Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.
But man.
That stuff is scary.
shit just got creepy
Or maybe magical healing doesn’t leave scars or damage. It is magical, after all.
So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.
And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.
Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?
How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.
How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.
How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?
And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?
How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…
My biggest shiver from magical healing is that it’s usually JUST physical. So that person who just got gutted and healed still has the psychological/psychic shock of near-death, without the benefit of any downtime to deal with it. You ever watch a roller coaster movie on an IMAX screen? It’s like that – your body thinks one thing is happening and your mind says another, and when the two don’t match up bad things can happen. There are layers and layers of trauma that magical healing doesn’t usually deal with – and that’s where good stories start.
A werewolf film written by a woman wouldn’t be as interesting because they know how unrealistic it is to be caught by surprise by something that happens regularly every damn month.
And then there’s that werewolf who goes three full moons without transforming, then transforms one night during a waxing crescent moon.
Now I’m imagining some on the werewolf form of the pill and having to regularly keep up their schedule and one werewolf telling another that they used to have such irregular changes but the pill now makes things so much easier and the other werewolves being like oh man I should talk to my doctor about this.
All i imagined is some poor fucker that’s like “you think you have it bad. I got my first change at 9 and change sporadically every 4 months or so. For 2 weeks. Sometimes it happens randomly so i just gave up.”
Wake up pissed and agitated with a headache and slam some aspirin with no real thought to the matter because it must just be a shit day. Halfway through the day they just “…oh shit that explains so much fuck fuck fuck”
@teland
I don’t usually reblog stuff, but this is just golden.
#these tags come back to my dash every now and then and y’all I am so proud of them you don’t even /know/ #I was so tired that night I almost didn’t even write them but then I was like ‘no for real though we all know how this would go’ #wolves written by people who have actually dealt with these kinds of problems would be faaar more interesting #wolves who were malnourished as children and now don’t always shift when they should because sometimes their bodies can’t support it #wolves who make it to unreasonable ages without their bodies pulling the plug–their first century’s looming on the horizon #and still every month like clockwork they rip and rend and bleed and their grandchildren are terrified this is the future they’ll inherit #wolves who spend a day with their heads in a ghirardelli box trying just to inhale the scent #because they know if they eat the chocolates they’ll be sick but god they want them /so bad/ #wolves who splurge on steak and fresh spinach and glare at anyone who side-eyes them while they shovel it in #they need iron dammit and anyway you have no idea what they’ve gone through these past couple days buddy you wanna stare a little harder? #wolves who get hella irritable vs wolves who become unbearably anxious vs wolves who just wanna stay in bed and cuddle forever #I have so many thoughts about this and maybe I shouldn’t babble about it constantly but fuck it I refuse to let the boring werewolves stand (more tags via @ereborne )
This is priceless
Going to work one day and changing the shift for the new were who’s been around you just long enough.
One month it’s just some body hair and the next month changing so hard it takes two weeks to remember what being human was like
man i had a dream that magic was discovered in the near future
but it was like. shitty unbalanced fantasy magic. like within a few weeks people had wikis and guides up on how to glitch in immortality potions and time spells. people are just tossing homemade black holes around. i looked on the news and saw some speedrunner made it to the edge of the universe
you know the trope of the old retired warrior squeezing into their armor for one last fight?
i just had a mental image of me digging up my old leather jacket and my bass guitar and giving myself a mohawk at the kitchen sink, and joining a party of old adventurers as the punk bard. pretty sure i still remember the bass line for ‘wave of mutilation’.
which really should be a dnd spell, btw.
oh!
it is always the warrior that does it isn’t it? I really like the idea of some other class (retired) gearing up for one last adventure. But I suppose the thing is, Warrior is one of those classes that might retire? Wizards just get more wizardy after all, monks get more monkey you don’t expect other classes to stop and take up another job the way warriors do.
even the trope of the bad ass old gunslinger is essentially a warrior, isn’t it?
gonna think on this if you don’t mind.
i mean, not every old bard settles down to open a guitar shop, but we can’t all be henry rollins. 😀
was going through my gaming tag and found this, and it got me thinking on the trope some more. the old bard would have different challenges than the old warrior. the old warrior has skill and patience and combat reflexes, but is no longer as fast or strong as they once were. the old bard, though, unless they have arthritis in their fingers, they’re only going to get better and better.
imagine a story that kinda leads with the old-warrior-comes-out-of-retirement trope, and he’s got his old adventuring party with him. the wizard just got more wizardy, after all, so the narrative has to sideline that guy early on to maintain the challenge. the healer’s still trucking too, but uses up half her spell slots every day just keeping the rest of them upright. the rogue’s fingers aren’t so quick anymore, but she’s the wiliest creature alive. the bard knows all the songs; ALL of them. together they get the warrior to his Fated Last Battle, but there’s one more obstacle – a penultimate group of villains who have a goddamn rock star of a young bard who challenges the old bard to an improv duel. no old standards, grandpa; just music versus music.
the young bard is fast, REALLY fast, death metal fast, and pulls out all the stops devil-went-down-to-georgia style. he weaves a bewildering wall of power, a wild wailing force of pure rage. it seems like there’s nothing the old bard can do against that. even if he could pick that fast, he doesn’t know that style, he’s a support guy, what can he do? but he looks really calm as he brings his guitar around and sits down on a handy chunk of rubble.
young bard: you’re SITTING DOWN? you better take me seriously, old man! *plays even faster*
old bard: … all right, son, if that’s what you want.
blue smoke coils around the young bard’s fires and extinguishes them one by one. somewhere in the wreckage a neon beer sign flickers fitfully, even though neon hasn’t been invented. everyone finds themselves nodding. when the final chord falls silent, someone says, quietly but with feeling, “yeah.” the young bard is appalled to realize that it was him.
the villains stand aside to let the heroes go through. the old bard touches his hat and the young bard nods. it’s like the song says: ain’t no shame in being beaten by a master.
Romeo: I would die for you. Juliette: Okay, well, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen. THIS SUMMER (Begin upbeat/exciting background music) Benvolio: She’s in love with Romeo but her parents want her to marry Royalty. Mercutio: That’s where I come in. SHAKESPEARE’S GREATEST TRAGEDY Romeo (grinning in realization): A marriage of convenience. Juliette (with hopeful laughter in voice): This could actually work! NOW BECOMES Romeo (to Mercutio): What do you get out of it? Mercutio: My inheritance, my parents stop pushing girls on me, and I get to keep doing your cousin. Benvolio: He gets to keep…yeah. THE GREATEST COMEDY (Shot of the four of them running through the streets, hollering, laughing with masquerade masks on) (Shot of Romeo) Romeo: We just have to avoid getting caught for…ever. (Tybalt talking to Paris) Tybalt: I don’t think they’re actually in love. (Mercutio kissing Ben in an alley) (Romeo taking Juliette’s hand as she smiles) (Back to Tybalt and Paris) Tybalt: I’m going to get to the bottom of this. (Shot of Benvolio) Benvolio: They won’t let us be together to we made things so we can be. (Juliette in a courtyard, to Mercutio) Juliette: You need to be more careful, all four of our lives are at stake here. (Tybalt and Mercutio at the wedding’s dessert table) Tybalt: If I ever find out that you were unfaithful to my cousin I will kill you. Mercutio (music stop):………….cool, cool, good to know. THIS TIME (Another shot of a silly action sequence) ROMEO AND JULIETTE (More comedy) HAVE A PLAN (no music for finishing sequence) Benvolio (denying Merc a kiss in public) We can’t… Mercutio: (playfully) Is it because I’m married? Benvolio: I don’t care that you’re married!…You know, in any other situation, that would make me sound so terrible–
What’s In a Name JULY 2018 PG-13
(Spoiler: Tybalt ends up with Paris and helps guard their secret. Everyone lives)
In the vast world of comics, I wonder if there have been heroes with a “Groundhog Day,” type power. By that I specifically mean a hero who, if they die, immediately finds themselves waking up at the beginning of that day again. If they don’t die, they just continue forward through time.
I’m just thinking of how crazy it would be to have that hero on your super hero team. Like, you go to headquarters in the morning, and it seems like everything’s normal. But then you go to fire off a one liner, and they say it at the same time as you. And suddenly you know. Something went wrong.
And then one day you come in, and your heart drops as you see that their every move looks rehearsed. They answer questions before asked. They are totally aware of everything that’s about to happen. Imagine how scary that would be, realizing you’re starting a day that you’re team mate has failed to survive maybe dozens of times.
The Librarians did this as an episode. It was actually really cool.
Inverted doki doki literature club where you think you’re playing a psychological horror game but it is slowly revealed to be an upbeat dating sim/visual novel
I thought I was playing silent hill but suddenly pyramid head asked me on a date.
Honestly nothing would make me happier than a big scary monster poping out from around a corner only to blush and offer me some of the snacks i mentioned liking in a previous level.
A zombie apocalypse game would be a SUPER good setting, you could have people and dead people and enemy people all be suitors. It would rule! And put a FANTASTIC twist on all the near-death situations, because it’d turn out that what’s really being hunted… is… UR HEART
The survivor who’s heroic and helpful and always has everyone’s back, but everyone seems to die on him… except for you; the zombie tangled in Christmas lights which you notice really early on and keep noticing, and via which you notice before anyone else that some of the dead are undergoing L4D-style changes… and which eventually, as its priorities slowly mutate along with its form, in return notices you; the vicious queen of a deceptively sprawling and well-policed fortification, who’s like totally risen to power with a weighted cudgel and lots of murdering, and whose thugs always cause problems for unsettled survivors by raiding caches… until one day you realize it’s you who’s stolen her heart!!!!!!!! and now there’s a standing order that you’re to be apprehended and indefinitely detained.
for the next Reboot That Makes Men Angry I’d like to submit for your consideration Lupita Nyong’o as Indiana Jones
and she steals artifacts from museums and returns them to their rightful cultures
Oh my god, imagine the Indiana Jones temple-robbing scenes in reverse! She walks through the Scorpion pit, she ducks under the swinging axe, she jumps the spike trap… She pulls the idol from her bag and gently places it back on the altar. Then she walks out without looking back while all around her, the temple settles back down into tranquility.
The beginning of the movie would start with a heist to rob the museum which would make it a double adventure heist movie.
and when she does archaeology, she’s a legit archaeologist
just moving along like everyone else 