I was unsure if I’d be able to compose this Saturday Note on time, as I’m out of town this weekend. But here we are! Hooray!
Let’s talk about a writing issue I’ve noticed.
Remembering Physicality in a Fictional World
I recently re-read The Lost Years of Merlin by T. A. Barron (which is generally quite good, but I ranted about this a lot last week so we’re talking about it here), and the last book has a villain with swords for arms. Not swords for hands, which is how I imagined them for years, no; re-reading, I found again the description that the swords are attached right at the man’s shoulders. The man has swords for arms.
Sorry, dear readers, and to Thomas Archibald Barron, but I will go back to imagining sword hands. Because let’s face it, swords for arms are ridiculous. Every scene with him is supposed to be scary, but if his arms are literally blades, I can’t help but imagine his silhouette as being like a sinister penguin. His fight scenes try to paint him as a terrifying, skilled warrior, and that just doesn’t work.
Alright, friends, here’s an idea. Stand up. Pretend your arms are swords. Now try to attack a target with your “swords”. Said target can be a wall or a chair or something. You have to get close just to attack, and you’ve got to swing your whole body to make any sort of maneuver. Your technique is less Errol Flynn, and more like an ineffective, possessed top. Now consider that most of the targets this villain goes after are children, meaning he has to lean over to attack them. Imagine trying to lean over and attacking with your arms like that. Imagine if one of these kids managed to knock you over. How would you even get up?
Even stranger, there’s a scene where this guy dramatically unmasks himself. How? How does he do that when he doesn’t have hands? Even if the sword arms have movable joints (???), how does he remove a mask off of his face?
I’m getting worked up, perhaps unreasonably, but I hope I’ve made my point. A lot of times writers will create a character or device or something, without actually considering how this thing physically exists or interacts with the rest of the world.
T.A. Barron, while mostly a pretty good author because he does understand how to craft a good story, sometimes misses the mark on this. Another instance is that he keeps having Merlin putting his staff onto his belt when he needs both of his hands. How you walk, run, or climb around with a giant walking stick on your belt is never really clarified.
Some authors, who don’t know how to craft a story at all, also have this problem. Take Hounded by Kevin Hearne. The main character has a magic sword that can cut through anything. Its scabbard is explicitly magic, too, which lets it be sheathed without causing problems. And yet very often, the author and the protagonist forget that this sword can cut through anything. At one point after the final battle, his friends are tied to a tree with chains. Not magic chains, just chains. Atticus, the hero, decides he’s got to find the key to the chains’ lock. That he’s carrying a cut through anything sword doesn’t occur to him in this equation.
Likewise, the duel with the villain at the end is a swordfight. Atticus is dueling the guy. With his magic cut-through-anything sword. This should not happen. His weapon should shear through the enemy’s blade, but it doesn’t because the author wanted a cool sword fight at the end. What makes it worse is that there’s a similar scene in in The Dinosaur Knights by Victor Milan, in which one of the characters is dueling a villain with a blade that cuts through anything, and one of the spectators notes that the hero is explicitly not letting his weapon touch the edge of the villain’s weapon. There is a way to do this.
I could give a bunch of examples in fiction: the size and shape of Percy’s sword in Percy Jackson and the Olympians seems to shift around. In the first book, it’s about three feet long, and yet a twelve-year-old has no problem with it; as he grows up, it seems to stay proportional to him, and the sequel series reveals it’s got a leaf-shaped blade, and implies that it’s a traditional Greek short sword. Yet the way he uses it, two-handed, makes me think Riordan was definitely assuming it was a classical heroic sword, a knightly arming sword or something similar. He also has Roman demigods dueling with their swords and spears, despite Roman swords not really being meant for that (they’re very short and broad), and their spears definitely not meant for that (the pilum, the weapon specified, is a throwing weapon and is designed as such).
In Eragon, it’s told to the audience that the dragon Saphira has trouble carrying more than two people. For the final battle, though, she’s equipped with armor. Metal armor. She has no apparent problem flying in metal armor with a rider on her back, which is quite an accomplishment, I think!
Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel has a couple of scenes in which characters handle swords. They often describe these swords as being immensely heavy. That’s not A Thing! Your sword should not be this heavy! In the case of magic, artifact swords, sure, they don’t have to follow normal rules; normal metal swords, though, as Joan uses, should not have this problem! Swords are meant to be carried around! If they’re so immensely heavy, they’d be too much of a burden for anyone to use! It also doesn’t make sense that characters are running around with these immensely heavy objects, sometimes stashed in their coats like they’re Connor McLeod.
Or, the crowning terrible example: in the otherwise fantastic Batman: The Long Halloween, we’re told that the serial killer’s signature is a pistol with a homemade silencer: a baby bottle nipple. How the bullet doesn’t rip through the “silencer” is never explained. How this thing functions at all isn’t clear. I’m utterly baffled that this got through editors; not only does this not work, I can’t imagine how anyone thought it would. How would it silence the gunshot? How it would it stay in one piece without ripping a hole? This isn’t even a common urban legend, so the author just… thought this was a thing that was plausible? How??
[I had some Angelopolis examples, but I don’t know if that’s quite the same thing, and also I don’t want to ruminate too much on Angelopolis because it’s terrible and hurts my soul.]
Again, the authors have created something that they think sounds cool or intimidating, but doesn’t think about how to apply it other than in a way that they intended. Even though it clearly causes problems in the story if you think about it.
My advice is to try to act out things so that you have an idea of how things work in the story. Obviously, this doesn’t help for things like magic items, or extreme stunts, or martial arts moves (unless you’re a martial artist, I guess?). But for things like grapples, basic fight moves, or basic movements? You can try it out in slow motion in your own space. If you have characters using historically-based weapons or tools, I ask that if you can’t handle replicas, that at least you look up these things and see what they look like, and how they function.
Otherwise, you look very silly for things that can easily be fixed! Or things that don’t make sense, like homemade silencers made from baby bottles what the fudge how do you think a gun works?!
Just… do some homework and run it by people who are experts.
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