if i lived in the wild west i would be kicked by a horse and the sharp edge of the hoof would give me a deep wound and i would die of necrotizing fasciitis at age 17
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if i lived in medieval times i would be kicked by a horse and lose my balance and crush my skull on a large rock and die of brain trauma at age 17
but i live in the computer age and im immortal babey!!!!!!!!!!!!
Whenever friends say “I wish I could’ve lived in the ancient/medieval times to see what it was like”, as a person of colour I always think to myself “Nah, I’m good”
I worked with toddlers and pre schoolers for three years. Sometimes I accidentally slip and tell a friend to say bye to an inanimate object (“say bye bus!”) & occasionally they unthinkingly just do it.
I’m glad there’s a teacher version of “accidentally called teacher ‘mom’”
when I worked at Medieval Times occasionally I would slip in real life and call people “my lord”
One time during family prayer, dad began: “our father who art in heaven, American Airlines, how can I help you?”
“Authors can’t use it in fantasy fiction, eh? We’ll see about that…”
–Terry Pratchett, probably
Try to implement anything but a conservative’s sixth grade education level of medieval or Victorian times and you will butt into this. all. the. time.
There was a literaly fad in the 1890′s for nipple rings for all genders(and NO, it was NOT under the mistaken belief that it would help breastfeeding–there’s LOTS of doctors’ writing at the time telling people to STOP and that they thought it would ruin the breast’s ability to breastfeed well, etc). It was straight up because the Victorians were freaks, okay
Imagine trying to make a Victorian character with nipple rings. IMAGINE THE ACCUSATIONS OF GROSS HISTORICAL INACCURACY
people just really, REALLY have entrenched ideas of what people in the past were like
tell them the vikings were clean, had a complex democratic legal system, respected women, had freeform rap battles, and had child support payments? theyd call you a liar
tell them that chopsticks became popular in china during the bronze age because street food vendors were all the rage and they wanted to have disposable eating utensils? theyll say youre making that up
tell them native americans had a trade network stretching from canada to peru and built sacred mounds bigger then the pyramids of giza? you are some SJW twisting facts
ancient egypt had circular saws, debt cards, and eye surgery? are you high?
our misconception of medieval peasants being illiterate and living in poverty in one room mud huts being their own creation as part of a century long tax aversion scam? you stole that from the game of thrones reject bin
iron age india had stone telescopes, air conditioning, and the number 0 along with all ‘arabic’ numbers including algebra and calculus? i understand some of those words.
romans had accurate maps detailing vacation travel times along with a star rating for hotels along the way, fast food restaurants, swiss army knives, black soldiers in brittany, traded with china, and that soldiers wrote thank-you notes when their parents sent them underwear in the mail? but they thought the earth was flat!
ancient bronze age mesopotamia had pedantic complaints sent to merchants about crappy goods, comedic performances, and transgender/nobinary representation? what are you smoking?
lets clear up a common misconception:
when i ask if something looks “good” i’m not asking if it makes me sexually appealing. im asking if it makes me look like the modern remix version of a medieval fantasy novel protagonist
lets clear up a common misconception:
when i ask if something looks “good” i’m not asking if it makes me sexually appealing. im asking if it makes me look like the modern remix version of a medieval fantasy novel protagonist
Anonymous asked:
never have i ever written a magical girl au? sparkle sparkle
bosstoaster answered:
“No.”
The winged mouth pauses, lips pursed. How a mouse manages to purse their lips is beyond Pidge, but maybe it’s magic.
Eugh. Euuugh.
“No?” The talking, winged mouse says, in its soft accent. Her. Whatever. “You can’t say no. Is it about the outfit? We can change the outfit.”
Pidge stared down at the fluffy green dress, complete with white mary-janes and dainty white gloves, then scowls back down at Allura-the-magic-mouse. “I- yeah, the dress is part of it. You want me to fight a giant monster in this?” She tugged down impatiently on the bottom, but the layered interior doesn’t let it lie flat to cover her knees. “But that’s not the main problem. The real one is that I’m not magic.”
This time, Allura looks smug, or as smug as an impossible creation can. “Oh, but you are. I can sense it. You hold the spirit of the Green Lion.”
Pointing the stupid staff at Allura, Pidge scowled. “No. How does this work? Where’s its battery?”
“You are the battery. Or, rather, your magic is.”
Pidge grit her teeth. “I can’t be magic,” she shot back, voice tight. “Clarke’s Law.”
Horror blooms on Allura’s face. “It’s illegal to have magic on your planet?” She breathes.
“What? No. That’s not- sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But it’s technology anyway. So how does it work?”
Allura throws up her tiny brown paws, her white wings fluttering. “Magic! I don’t know otherwise! Can you just deal with the monster and then we’ll argue semantics?”
Looking over, Pidge watches the giant, humanoid creature wave it’s staff. A ball of lightening crackles out and smashes into a nearby park, sending up grass and sand in a huge wave. She thinks she sees other cracks in bright colors, but at this point it’s too far to tell where they’re coming from.
That is… not something she really wants to get caught up in.
Finally, Allura clears her throat. “If you use this power, you can use it to find your family.”
Pidge freezes.
Too many questions pile up in her brain, stuck before they can reach her mouth. How did Allura know about that? What did her family have to do with this monster? How could she use magic to find them?
But in the end, only one thing rises to the surface.
“Fine,” Pidge replies, straightening her shoulders. “But first- you said this outfit changes? How about we start with some armor.”
what if magic was real but it was treated the way music is now with different genres and like “oh youre still into conjuring? thats cool I guess. recently ive been getting into third-wave post-necromancy, it’s some pretty heavy stuff”
“what do you mean you’ve never learned FIREBALL, it’s a CLASSIC”
“idk I’m not really into evocations.”
“how can you not be into ANY evocations?”
“well, it’s kind of dad magic, isn’t it?”
It used to puzzle me why it was such a common element in urban fantasy settings - particularly those of tabletop roleplaying games - that the reason magic stays hidden is because people don’t want to believe in it.
In the real world, people are desperate to believe in magic. You see it everywhere, from spirit mediums on TV to the horoscopes in the daily paper.
The idea that there’d be an institutional refusal to believe in magic is just so alien to the demonstrable facts of human psychology that it would seriously hurt my suspension of disbelief.
Talking cats and setting things on fire with your mind is one thing, but a human psychology that lacks an inclination toward magical thinking is simply bizarre.
Then it hit me.
The public’s refusal to believe in magic in urban fantasy settings is a stand-in for the perennial nerd fallacy that non-nerds are stupid, and only the special, nerdy elite have the objectivity to understand the world as it truly is.
Charming.
This kind of fucked me up.
This is a huge problem I have with any setting that has a Masquerade in place (see also basically any Santa Claus movie where Adults Not Believing In Santa is a plot point, but gifts not bought by those adults mysteriously appear in their houses every 25th of December). If magic is a force in your universe and a non-zero number of people can reliably use it to cause things to happen, then it’s not going to be this mystical thing that nobody believes in except the Chosen Few, especially not if people are kind of vaguely aware of the concept of magic as a thing and everyone just thinks it’s fictional. It’d be like the population of the world suddenly and collectively deciding somewhere around the Renaissance that electromagnetism didn’t exist, and the Chosen Ones making a highly-mobilised effort from then on to cover up lightning strikes. And then the protagonist of the novel zaps themselves on a doorhandle after they walk across a carpet in socks and suddenly they have to travel by bullet train to electrical engineering school and get in huge amounts of trouble if they ever use a battery-powered fan in a Muggle community.
It’s worse than that - often in these settings scientists are reluctant to believe in observable, repeatable magic. Have any of these people met scientists? We would go absolutely nuts for an entire aspect of the universe we hadn’t had a chance to study yet. You’d have to routinely assassinate people to stop magic being studied.
I always thought it was because of capitalisum that it had to be hidden
That humans had to be really passionate or earnest to understand magic
Like if magic was understood capitalists would mass produce it or kill people
this is why I love the Bartimaeus series of books: because magic is known and accepted by everyone but there’s a huge conspiracy in hiding HOW magic works (spoiler: humans have no natural magic, they absolutely need the help of djinni to do anything at all)
there’s it’s actually part of plot that humans, especially wizards who refuse to see this truth, it’s hubris
fantasy book with witches and wizards and magical people but all magic has a price, like
main character, in awe and slightly terrified: what did you have to give up to be able to control storms with your mind?
powerful enchanter, fighting back tears as they pull down the hood of their cloak to reveal a knotted oily mess: my beautiful luscious hair….no matter how many times i wash or brush it, it always looks like this
main character: [horrified gasp]
fortune teller: and speak up when asking your question, these are my cards so they share my partially-deafness
other character, sympathetically: oh, had to trade good hearing for seeing the future?
fortune teller: no, asshole, i was born with it. i got seeing the future for trading in my ability to wink
there’s a legend in this fantasy land about a powerful enchanter who traded their ovaries for the power to create earthquakes. the grumpy semi-sentient force of nature who negotiates these magic deals had thought it was pretty great one, sure to make the recipient of the deal regret making it soon enough (after all, the point is having to suffer a bit in exchange for magic, because life sucks even in magical fantasy kingdoms)
however, soon afterwards, the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature realized the enchanter had been ecstatic to be rid of periods and didn’t care about not having biological children. the GSSFN felt somewhat cheated by this and ever since has had a strict no-trading-internal-organs policy
“fucking humans messing with the system,” it was quoted as saying
actually, cheating the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature out of the suffering it hopes to inflict with the magic deals is a time honored tradition in Magical Fantasy Kingdom, which is primarily made up of sassy little shits. most of the kingdom’s mythology is made up of trickster figures
there’s the legend of the smooth-talking thief who managed, by describing a certain talent of hers as “the ability to form small growths out of her skin and then reabsorb them” with enough quick confusing descriptions to trade the ability to get pimples for the power to become invisible
there’s the boy who brought the GSSFN a bucketful of cold, liquid silver in exchange for the power to cure a certain sickness, only for the GSSFN to realize once the sun had come up that the bucket contained only water reflecting moonlight
there’s the monarch who offered to trade in their power to destroy people with only their words for the seemingly much less valuable power to turn one grain of rice into two grains — only for the GSSFN to realize later it had gotten the ruler’s cutting sarcasm in payment for a power that could end a famine
every year the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature gets visits from tens of jewish witches and wizards solemnly offering to give up eating all foods that come from pigs or eating meat at the same time as dairy in exchange for the powers they want
“DO YOU THINK YOU’RE FUCKING CLEVER” says the GSSFN, who has frankly had enough of this shit
In a single year two maidens and a chaste knight all trade the ability to orgasm for their respective desired powers.
the next year the GSSFN finds out about asexuality. The resulting temper tantrum levels a forest.
