Natural History of Dragons Audiobook Review
Tiktok is all about fantasy with dragons in it right now and I love a band wagon (so long as that wagon contain a dragon)
@somebogwitch / somebogwitch.tumblr.com
Tiktok is all about fantasy with dragons in it right now and I love a band wagon (so long as that wagon contain a dragon)
Tiktok is all about fantasy with dragons in it right now and I love a band wagon (so long as that wagon contain a dragon)
I love the idea of dead gods. Not in the sense of “hey i killed something supernaturally strong” but in the sense of “i killed it and it’s still a god.” It is still worshipped. prayers are still answered. miracles are performed in its name, even as it lies pierced by a thousand swords and burning with chemical fire. even as it drifts through vacuum, decapitated and bleeding molten rock. in cosmic spite of being shot through each eye and hurled into a plasma reactor, it still radiates the power of the divine in a way that primitive death cannot smother. the nature of godchild is not so simple as to be tied to the mortality, or immortality, of any living being.
No one warned the worshipers the day their god died. The day that incomprehensible cosmic forces came into conflict somewhere far from them and left the entity they prayed to like a wound on reality. No one warned them and so still they prayed.
First the miracles changed. They were granted only to be sucked into a void, into that screaming rift where once something gargantuan had been part of the weave of the universe. Nightmares came to the devoted. Those entering the temples claimed time slowed there. It grew worse, the dilation of hours so strong that petitioners were thought lost for years only to appear one day, completely unaged, except for their eyes, and the way light seemed to be sucked towards them and into their shadow.
There was still power there. Still divinity. But it was energy made dense and crushing in the vacuum. The rift where light once was which might devour you and might tear into your world like a cataclysm...
A popular cousin of the “terrible English accent by an American actor in a fantasy movie” is the “this elvish thing is kinda Irish but only whatever I remember about Ireland from that one Wiccan girl I dated in college”. Why does how Irish language and mythology is used in Western Fantasy matter?
It is common to drawn on folklore for fantasy writing. Irish mythological characters and monsters…
Tá col ceathrar móréilimh ag “aisteoir ag dhéanamh blas Sasanach i scéal fantaisíocht” is ea “tá na Elves seo seas Éireannach ach thuille an seas Éireannach a chuimhníonn thú ón cailín Wiccan amháin sin a shiúil tú amach le san ollscoil”. An fadhb an balach go bhfuil béaloideas and teanga Éire san áireamh I fantaisíocht Meiriceánach?
Tá carachtair mhiotaseolaíocha na hÉireann coitianta i…
Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.
On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.
In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.
In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.
Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.
Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.