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Valuable Resources for a Realistic Fantasy
Severian4Scadrial replied to Alderant's topic in Reading Excuses
Great stuff, Alderant! Shad for one has this series called Fantasy Rearmed, where he comes up with realistic weapons for fantastical monsters: really gets the gears turning. I'll add a few resources -- some light reference books, mostly-- just for grins: - A Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer is a fantastic resource if you're gunning for that authentic High Middle Ages feel. It's funny, readable, and full of references, and because it's meant for a hypothetical "traveler," it includes a lot of practical details -- the type reenactors obsess over and normal social historians don't -- that you might want to filch for a fantasy setting. - Kristina Sessa's Daily Life in Late Antiquity lacks the premise but fulfills much the same function for an earlier era. It condenses a lot of archaeological studies and denser social history work into a few short chapters that give you a surprisingly vivid picture of what it might have been like to live in the 4th-6th centuries in the Roman Empire. - For rural settings in an early industrial world (something we never quite think about -- it's always Bas Lang Steampunk, I find), check out Jack Larkin's The Reshaping of Everyday Life. It's written by the resident historian at a living history museum representing an 1830s village in rural New England, and damnation is this thing detailed (I can now tell you, for instance, why my Necromantic Blacksmith's Apprentice does not, in fact, wear gloves). -
James Purferoy as Kelsier if he's not too old. Aaaaaand wait for it... Denzel Washington as the Lord Ruler in his older form.
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The old man from the plantation Kelsier meets in the beginning should be... SAM ELLIOT
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Personally I'd rather go for Fassbender as Kelsier. He gets typecast a lot as the Resident Creeper (probably because of Prometheus), but he can also pull off Kelsier's joking side, and the man is, after all, supposed to be dreadfully intimidating. Chris Pine wouldn't be bad, but I'd be getting way too much of a Captain Kirk vibe. As for Hoid, I'm all over Paul Bettany (if you're skeptical, check out his performance as Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight's Tale).
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So can I just say I love this forum already? I've been getting so much in-depth feedback on my first submission -- especially my problems writing a world filled with horrible bigots -- it's kind of crazy. I'm in the middle of a frantic worldbuilding session which has presently turned to two characters from rival but oddly similar cultures having a really gawdy fashion show-down. One's quite possibly the most powerful woman in the Sporavian League, and the other's this gruff warrior who's slaughtered his way through just about every conflict in the past twenty years; the ambassadors on both sides are face-palming furiously. This is a good day.
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Thanks for the tip @industrialistDragon, I'll definitely check out those articles. Come to think of it, I haven't yet introduced any characters who would bat an eye at this sort of stuff, but I might make some of the surrounding cultures less amenable to it, to the point where they could confront E over her treatment of E2 and others like her. I generally tend to shy away from dropping a character with mostly modern worldviews into a place like this just to give the audience a reference point, but it would actually be an interesting gimmick to slather on all sorts of other horrible things to the said person and watch our two characters joust. That, at least, might reasonably be presented through a neutral lens and not attract recrimination. And you're right, for seven years E pretty much exclusively interacts with E2 (well, outside of M, who she also considers sub-human, which enables her to not be horribly paranoid around him). E2 appears in book one before she's tortured, her tongue is cut out, and she completely breaks down (hers is less a born disability than WW1-veteran level PTSD, which I'm still working on portraying properly). She also teaches E most of her practical knowledge, especially her mad gambling skills, which come in handy later It's not entirely cruelty and dehumanization on E's side either. She does teach E2 how to read and write, it just comes across (hopefully), as rather like teaching a dog to sit or roll over; it's less hatred than E positively refuses to let herself love the woman. ---> Edit: damnation you just prompted what's probably going to be a whole night of straight worldbuilding. I'd been looking to flesh out the neighboring Kingdom to which E and co. eventually flee after a coup, and I think the outline's actually got rolling now... all because I had to think of a viable culture that would get really, really offended at E's attitude towards disabled people and R's caste-ism. They're horribly patronizing, because they hold up the "weakest" members of their society as examples of their parent clan's strength (the analogy one character uses, I believe, will be like male peacocks trailing about with all those extra feathers). I think, though, that horribly patronizing but outwardly if selfishly kind vs. overt discrimination might produce something closer to useful commentary than I had with my background meanness. So uh... thanks.
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True. It might be a bit difficult because both narrators (R and the mysterious fellow from this chapter) are actual characters in the story who are just as manifestly Godawful as everyone else, but, given this, I think there is a way to solve it. For one thing, this issue only really comes up in book two with E, and The Narrator only really merges with E over time; the bigotry of the narrative voice, or at least, the report of the Narrative voice given in the story, might actually be a good metric of him starting to take on E's opinions. I'll certainly check out Kindred to see how Butler does it. For another, having a bigoted character narrate the story doesn't, I think, exclude presenting this sort of thought as cruelty. I'll just have to remember to include as much material as possible that we the audience would find problematic to highlight the contrast between what the narrator is trying to tell us and what he or she is actually doing. When Frankish Chroniclers celebrate the Sack of Jerusalem and start crowing about the victorious knights' kill counts, modern audiences understand instantly that theirs is an evil perspective, at least according to our perception of the world, because the said Chroniclers had gleefully described how the Crusaders had slaughtered thirty thousand men women and children and piled their bodies in the streets. What I really need to avoid doing is sort of brushing over the cruelty of the narrator's perspective, as I do believe I did here. To drive the point home, I might, for instance, have E say something terribly demeaning offhand to E2, but then make sure to record the other character's reaction; even if the Narrator, by way of E, hardly notices it or thinks it's "only natural," we're meant to notice the incongruity. So yeah, head up that's what I'm juggling -- all the characters, including the narrators, share some awful beliefs -- so please feel free to look for that in the upcoming submissions if you like. > skin tones (not quoting because quote doesn't want to work). Oh I agree. I'm kind of experimenting with the whole skin tones thing, because skin tone doesn't really play much of a factor in these peoples' worldview. They can be horribly, horribly racist, but in a more Graeco-Roman way; Hippocrates, for instance, really closely linked physical and moral characteristics, linked both to land, and believed that by moving from one place to another you could only go downhill (thereby a German will always be strong and emotionally-compromised, even if he moves to perfectly-balanced Greece), but he never really connected this to skin color. I may apply some good old Tacitean Geographic Determinism here, but I'm hoping to describe skin color as just another physical characteristic, like hair or eye color. Most people in this series look sort of Mediterranean and darker, though if you head far enough North they start going white. I've pictured E as having darker skin than most people in the capital, and R, who's from rather a Northerly region, as quite a bit paler, but I'm not sure how much of a marker to make that. People with pale skin are usually associated with a stereotype of barbaric brutishness, because people from that climate usually have pale skin, but it's not discrimination against the skin color, per se, as people who come from an area cold enough to be white.
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Thank you all for your wonderful feedback; it looks like I've got my work cut out for me! I know I'm not really supposed to respond to these things, but in times like these, one may have to ask for a bit of proscription, or at least a bit more advice going forward, as well as, as I have seen other posters do, explain some of the ways I might go about fixing these issues. Agreed. I'm thinking of moving up the connection between the bodies and E's visions; I didn't have her connect them at first because it would feel too much like a paranormal mystery story, but I do agree it needs a bit of urgency. The other thing I'm getting overall here is that most of this chapter doesn't work without a hefty helping of Part One. I'm actually thinking, partly based on somebody's comment that E comes across as eleven or twelve, of just blasting away the timeskip between Parts One and Two and making them one long damnation book, thereby giving E more time to interact with M and come into her full abilities (and full ability to not be a passive character) before the wedding. The looming threat of war was there for added urgency, but everyone's feedback that it all comes too fast is making me think that the last thing we need right now is another layer of plot just to ramp up the stakes; it means, if anything, that the murder plot won't get sufficient treatment, when this is what turns E into, uh, what she becomes later. Hrm. This is interesting. Thank you all for this one, because in my current outline the Narrator is introduced in a sudden transition from R's first-person narration in book one (R stops writing, and this mysteriously semi-omniscient thing just picks up where he left off). I'll have to make sure this is considerably less jarring than I'd originally planned it, especially since it all happens in one of Part One's most important scenes, and that said shift comes across as a first-person character shift from the get-go, not just a sudden jump to third person. The Narrator is rather a complicated character (yes, he, or part of him, appears in this chapter, for everyone asking), who isn't really comfortable with the pronoun I just yet -- he won't be for a long time; this is, in fact, a goal of his -- but for purposes of clarity I might wind up moving his narration later to allow him to reflect and cross-analyze things (I have been having some difficulty with time, especially in Part One where I'd originally thought of R's narration as a journal, but then got horribly annoyed writing it). Yeah I need a big revision here, even if I wind up introducing it at the end of Part One; there's too many damnation characters! I think a lot of this could be fixed if I just moved E's reveal earlier; I may have fallen into that auld trap the denizens of r/fantasy call false mystery, whereby, for no apparent in-world reason, I try to conceal characters' identity to heighten the tension. I'm hoping this will work out better if I add some explanation about the heist (the idol, for instance, came from the tomb they robbed) and restrict full character descriptions to people who actually talk. ________________ This one I'm looking for some advice on: She is, in fact, human. Alas... The Unfortunate Implications are precisely why I described her as such. E and the Narrator (for complicated reasons that are explained later and that I never really sufficiently introduced here, largely because of E) have an unfortunate opinion of both servants and disabled people. E, in a dreadful amplification of a common trend in her society, tends to view people with physical or mental disabilities as sub-human, something she desperately needs to avoid becoming, because that, in her mind, would justify all the wrongs done to her. It doesn't help that she's got both in spades, and she's only comfortable interacting with people she can look down upon; this comes out in the worst way possible when she goes full Kill Bill later. The problem is... how do I do this without coming across as an absolute asshat? These views are widely held in her society, and they're pretty much never challenged. She's not supposed to grow out of them (in fact much of this story is her, and, in part one, her father, adamantly refusing to do things like grow as a person, and thereby killing thousands), but they are a key and really nasty expression of one of her primary character motives. Obviously I need to axe the "simian" metaphor in the next draft, because it's confusing and offensive, but, overall, are there any suggestions as to how I could do this as a background bit of awfulness that might come out at random moments without seeming like I endorse it? (It might help that part of the plot is the reader slowly realizing that she's kind of the villain here, or the closest thing to a villain the story will actually have, but it's not like anyone else is any better; R and A, both lowborn, think nothing of slaughtering rioters -- and I mean slaughtering, not the normal tear gas and night stick stuff you see today -- because in this world most people are considered, theologically if not literally, the Emperor's personal property).
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So... Osmosis Jones? (Actually, though, please write an Osmosis Jones book).
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Hello Hello Hello, This is the first chapter of the second part of a fantasy duology. The atrociously long summary of Part One (like Aeromancer's timeline from last post, only if necessary) is in the e-mail, as well as some specific questions that reveal plot details and such. I'd love any and all feedback! Best, Severian
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theory Shallan Casts: Speak With Dead
Severian4Scadrial replied to Jimpy's topic in Stormlight Archive
"... I will not make a good pair of boots; please put the knife away."- 7 replies
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- spren
- lightweaver
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theory Shallan Casts: Speak With Dead
Severian4Scadrial replied to Jimpy's topic in Stormlight Archive
Not sure if it would be plausible or not, but Shallan the Necromancer would be absolutely awesome. (Even if she's only raising the dead to chat).- 7 replies
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- spren
- lightweaver
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Mistborn: Directed by Quentin Tarantino, with Samuel L. Jackson as Kelsier, Christoph Waltz as Breeze, Uma Thurman as Shan Elarial, and Tim Roth as the Lord Ruler.
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I liked his gruffer side in book 1 better than his Kingly persona, but I never really minded that too much. What irritated me about Elend was how the moral crisis was handled; he never actually did anything that would make the reader question him. I jumped for joy at the line "if I ever become like the Lord Ruler, let me know," because I expected that Elend would become like the Lord Ruler, and Vin, even though she couldn't care less about human rights and all that jazz, would have to break through to her husband. There was a lot of potential here -- especially if he started to get like his father, but was still really nice to Vin -- and instead we got a whole wad of half-baked internal monologue.
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Reading Excuses - The Self-Maintained Resource Board
Severian4Scadrial replied to aeromancer's topic in Reading Excuses
NICE I may be contacting you when my worldbuilding strays north-westwards. There's some Anglo-Saxon types out there about to come marauding, and when I do get there I'd love help making a society like that somewhat realistic (or just with names -- all my "barbarian" names thus far are just ripped out of old Gothic and Frankish royal lists, and they all end with "ric" or "bert!")