It has been a WEEK guys, so I want to bury myself in the bed and not come back out again until… June, maybe? Sadly I can’t do that, because they pay me not to do that, and I suppose I would miss out on reading quite a few books. Also I need to get a haircut, or else my mother’s going to my head with scissors pretty soon.
I did finish the main story on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. I’m thinking I might try to finish some stuff up on it, but for the most part I have very little motivation to keep playing the way I did in Odyssey? Look, something about playing a Nordic colonizer pillaging other people’s stuff just isn’t as much fun.
Anyhow. Maybe I’ve talked about this in a Note, but I am very tired and the third part of my Witcher 3 review hasn't been started yet.
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Immortals and Famous People/Events
So I was reading the Dragonology Handbook again and there’s a bit about determining dragon age. In the lore established by Dragonology, many dragons are capable of speech and are incredibly long-lived. Dragonologists of Ernest Drake’s (the “author” of Dragonology in the 1800’s) time didn’t actually know the age cap on Chinese Lung. So when talking to dragons, a way of determining their age is to try to ask them about world events--ask them if they remember things like when railroads were built through the countryside, or when ships arrived from a certain direction or with certain colors, or if this or that building was constructed.
Drake warns students that they absolutely shouldn’t ask about specific individuals, especially famous ones. Dragons aren’t part of human society, so it isn’t as if they’d know about that. Or care. The example of what not to ask about is if a dragon remembers Lincoln being President or being assassinated.
I’ve talked a bit about how immortals in fiction are always done in a way that’s incredibly obvious and sometimes quite annoying. Atticus in Hounded explains that he knew Galileo, went and saw Shakespeare’s plays during the Bard’s lifetime, and rode with Genghis Khan’s Mongols pillaging Asia enough to lower humanity’s carbon footprint. And yet he also turns around and tries to tell us that he’s spent his entire life running, trying to avoid attention or being noticed by people. He even tells us that he hasn’t bothered to learn anything about American politics, despite living in the US for years.
If he’s trying to avoid attention and risks, why on Earth does he spend history hanging out with all of the biggest name leaders, artists, and controversial figures that he can find? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Furthermore, as I point out in the spork, it’s always names that anyone on the street would recognize, not people like Paracelsus, or ibn Fadlan, or Marie de France, or Olga of Kiev, who were all people that were famous and influential in their time but aren’t as famous today.
Really, if a character was immortal, unless he or she was a glory hound of some kind, I don’t know why he or she would bother hanging around famous people? Sometimes people become famous by accident, to be sure, and sometimes fiction has an explanation as to why this or that person attracted supernatural attention. But often there’s not a reason other than the audience needs a household name to hang onto for reference.
And I think that people don’t really grasp as much that an immortal character would have seen a lot. People always try to make it so that immortal characters always knew all the famous people (or in the case of Stroud’s Bartimaeus or Moore’s Orlando, claimed to have known all the famous people). And I think the real questions I would ask an immortal would be much more… well, along the lines of what Drake instructs students to ask dragons.
There’s this absolutely lovely bit in Gunnerkrigg Court in which Jones explains her backstory to Annie, revealing that she’s as old as the Earth itself and mentions that she has seen dinosaurs, but tries not to divulge information about the past like that. Much to Annie’s disappointment, really, because she wanted to know about dinosaurs. It doesn’t help that Jones hints that the scientific community actually has quite a lot wrong about them.
How long did it take to build certain monuments? What was it like when the railroad was built? What was it like after toilet paper was invented? What was it like after firearms became commonplace? And heck, what about language? There are plenty of languages that aren’t widely spoken now that are in danger of dying out that might have been basic for a 700-year-old immortal.
Those are things that would have to be a part of an immortal’s life, inescapable parts of everyday life that everyone has to deal with, unless they managed to be buried for all of that time (which, with mythical creatures like vampires, is a possibility).
Very often in urban fantasy there are societies or government agencies dedicated to dealing with the supernatural. You’d think if they found an immortal or ancient vampire or something, they’d sit this person down and ask all the questions. I’d expect something like what we see in Kingkiller Chronicle (which is admittedly not about an immortal), in which there’s a long interview about the entire life story and what’s changed over time.
And if your fictional immortal is a people person, very interested in spending time with others, you would think that thinking about friends thare dead would be a bit of a downer and he or she would avoid talking about it? And instead maybe would be more willing to talk about how great indoor plumbing and air conditioning are?
Those, I think, are more interesting things to talk about with immortal characters. Not what famous people they knew, but what they witnessed. And sometimes those things may seem like small things to us at the moment, but in the long run are very important to certain people or places. Like, no, at the time when the new library building in town opened it wasn’t a big deal to me, but on reflection, that’s an important part of the town’s history.
Now imagine that, but for like historical churches in Charleston or Reynolda House in Winston-Salem.
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