Subject: That's a really interesting way to consider the idea.
Author:
Posted on: 2018-06-04 23:53:00 UTC
Making old characters that came from humans (folklore, depictions of concepts, etc.) very human because they came from humanity is a really cool way to tackle the challenge of humanizing inhuman things. You guys make me want to read more Terry Pratchett stuff more and more every day.
-Twistey
Or species? That strikes me as more accurate. Also, probably replace 'new' with 'old'. Very old.
Anyhow!
Have you fellows heard of the Cynocephalus?
Ancient Greek furries.
But, actually, I'm really surprised I've never seen any mention of these chaps in any media anywhere. You don't even need to worldbuild, because Greek physician, Ctesias, seems to have already done it:
'They speak no language, but bark like dogs, and in this manner make themselves understood by each other. Their teeth are larger than those of dogs, their nails like those of these animals, but longer and rounder. They inhabit the mountains as far as the river Indus. Their complexion is swarthy. They are extremely just, like the rest of the Indians with whom they associate. They understand the Indian language but are unable to converse, only barking or making signs with their hands and fingers by way of reply... They live on raw meat. They number about 120,000.'
And it goes wayy further on than that, too, where he details their general mode of life - hunters who keep sheep, goats, and so on, along with dried 'fruit of Siptakhora' (I haven't a clue what this fruit might actually be.)
They send the sweet amber of this fruit, the fruit itself, purple flowers, and purple dye, to the king of India, and then trade the rest of it with other Indians for food and weaponry. The king, every five years, sends them a present of heaps of weapons - 300,000 bows and spears, 120,000 shields, 50,000. They could probably also bite you with their dog-teeth. They supposedly lived around India and North Africa, and places in between.
He describes them as being good with bows and spears, and, generally living in 'lofty and inaccessible mountains', outright calls them undefeatable in war.
They seem to be a kind of hunter-gatherer society kind of deal, living in caves, outright chasing their prey down and overtaking it, sleeping on leaves and grass and so on. Only their women bathe, and only once a month. The men just sorta stink.
They wear tanned and fine skins except the few rich, who wear linen.
Apparently they live pretty long, too - up to 200 years.
He emphasises a lot that they're quite just, and, well, they seem pretty chill, ay? In the face of the barking and raw meat eating, they seem to fiddle around a lot with sweet fruits and flowers and dyes. In fact, one of them supposedly became a Saint - Saint Christopher! One of the theories is that Saint Christopher was depicted as a dog-headed chap due to a language misinterpretation - Cananeus (as in, Canaanite) misinterpreted as canineus - y'know, dog. People took this depiction and ran with it and now everyone reckons he's a dog-guy.
Marco Polo has also sighted them, in which they are depicted in a less positive light: 'they are a most cruel generation, and eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race.'
This sighting took place on the island of Angamanain, thought to be part of the now Andaman Islands - which are around India.
Perhaps these chaps Marco saw were a sort of nastier, distant tribe, long ago branched off from the fellows Ctesias saw, ay? Or maybe Marco was just really racist. Maybe they're just not real at all, but that's a bit boring, innit?
Anyhows, they are gone nowadays, both physically and in media. Which is a shame, because I'd certainly be a whole lot more into a race of just dog-headed hunter-gatherers who live in mountain caves and who have mean island cousins than the old elves and dwarves!
What do you lot think? Are there any other old, weird races and species that just don't seem to appear in any fantasy or anything at all, when they really probably ought to?
I wish that a lot of the more popular old mythology races/species would be portrayed closer to the original myths. Not to mention the old gods. Have you noticed how in so many movies, ancient gods of death (Hades, Hela, etc) are always portrayed as evil and wanting to take over everything? When in fact, if you look at the myths that some of these death gods came from, many of them are just fine where they are ruling the dead. This is likely because a lot of these ancient cultures had a less "scary" view of death than the modern Western version. I don't know exactly why this is, as many mythologies had the same judgement-based placement of their dead that Christianity does, but I remember for a fact that neither Hades nor Hela wanted to overthrow everything until Percy Jackson, Disney, and Marvel came along and put a Hollywood spin on things. (Not saying that these continua aren't good, in fact, I love Rick Riordan's stuff so much. Just saying that they do something kind of cliche with portrayal of death gods.)
-Twistey
I was in a class on corpses in theater last semester, and something we ended up talking about was the switch, in Europe, from death as a commonplace and rather public occurrence to the current Western conception of death as something private and associated with shame. I wonder if death being less a part of everyday life makes it more frightening and contributes to the trend of “evil” gods of death.
Yes, I agree! Writing death gods as mustache-twirling villains is pretty boring.
Here's an example of a non-villainous death god, from the D&D game I'm currently playing:
The Voice of Life and Death is an integral part of the universe who probably came into being when souls were created--or maybe she created souls; it's hard to tell. She's the one who maintains the cycle of reincarnation and determines when a soul is ready to pass on to the next world. Very occasionally, someone manages to get an audience with her, mostly to beg for the life of a loved one; she grants these requests sometimes, but only if she really thinks you have a good argument.
She cares about the world and its existence, and cares about keeping order between life and death. She doesn't mind necromancy, for the most part--creating zombies is fine in her book, since it doesn't mess with anybody's soul--but the second you interfere with the cycle of reincarnation, you're on her shit list. This is why necromancers who do experiment on souls often try to achieve immortality--they don't want to be anywhere near the Voice when she is riled up about their twisted experiments.
Nowadays, she presents as a middle-aged, heavyset black woman who is fond of tea and cookies and tries to sneak some reading in between souls. She hasn't always been female, though; she's been male, androgynous, or even an entirely bodiless force, and she's been known to change depending on who's looking at her.
Her clerics are midwives, doctors, morticians, and occasionally serial killers, though the latter don't seem to last long and she treats them more like annoying fanboys than serious followers, and soon sends them on to the next life, hoping they'll grow out of their immaturity. The Voice sees death as a normal part of life, but doesn't like it when the decisions of mortals force someone to die before their time. She dislikes war, partly because it causes so many untimely deaths and partly because it swamps her with work, which always makes her irritable.
Why did I say that? Because The Dresden Files has an excellent portrayal of Hades. It's hilarious.
Dresden also has fun with Odin. And Santa Claus. Dresdenverse!Santa is amazing. And kinda scary.
The Santa makes sense, considering... aren't some older versions of Santa from various cultures scary? I remember hearing that from somewhere a long time ago, but I don't know the details.
-Twistey
There's one where it's this lady - Frau Perchta. She's an Eastern European figure and in fitting with Eastern European things she is horrifying and depressing. Her descriptions vary - in some cases she's a beast, in others, just a tall woman. Sometimes she has literally two faces.
To the good kids she'd leave silver in their shoes. To the bad kids, she'd, er, cut them open and replace their innards with pebbles and straw. And take their innards.
There's also the Icelandic Yule cat, who eats ya if you haven't gotten new clothes for Christmas. Farmers used this as incentive to get their workers to work, because if they didn't, they'd get no clothes gifted, and they'd get eaten by a giant cat.
Also Santa in the Netherlands has a sidekick in blackface with him.
But, uh, otherwise, Santa himself is usually the benign figure. In his most dire cases he has a Krampus sorta figure with him to do the dirty work. Like that guy in blackface. He's the evil one.
Phew.
Meeeerry Christmaaaas!
The Hades sequence is one of my favourite parts of that book, and it's a good book!
... why has it been four years since the last Dresden book? Butcher pretty much did one a year up until then. I know he did Aeronaut's Windlass, but even that was three years back. It looks like he's just been focussing on graphic novels and a short story collection - which, I mean, that's good, but...
hS
Go read Codex Alera. It's great. Full of good characters, it's got a setting that's Cool As Hell (Albeit derivative in some places), and it's got Butcher's trademark snark to go with it. It's great.
...There's also a lot of really horrifying kinda-NSFW stuff, especially in the first book. It's regarded with the proper level of revulsion, but still... squick and horror and such warnings.
^_~ At the 2014 London Gathering, Fractal Dawn spent the entire pre-Gathering period aggressively plugging Codex Alera. Her favourite factoid was the story about where the series came from, which Wikipedia helpfully describes:
The inspiration for the series came from a bet Butcher was challenged to by a member of the Del Rey Online Writer's Workshop. The challenger bet that Butcher could not write a good story based on a lame idea, and he countered that he could do it using two lame ideas of the challenger's choosing. The "lame" ideas given were "Lost Roman Legion", and "Pokémon".
I've read them; they're enjoyable, though I feel like the pacing is somewhat off at times. I've not really felt the urge to reread them, which saddens me a bit.
hS
Which isn't to say they're bad, but they don't star Gandalf on crack with an IV of Red Bull. :-P
I've been waiting for Peace Talks for a while now...
- Tomash
I wonder what is provoking that delay... Still, today Dresden fans can still get Butcher's second short stories books in the Dresdenverse, Brief Cases, to help with the waiting!
Did I mention it has a short story involving Mouse and Maggie's PoV besides Dresden's (I'm not spoiling anything, it was announced to be in that book for a while)?
Aka the only way for French people to have them because we only got the first five tomes of the Dresden Files (at least we've got all of Codex Alera. Now.). Especially on the day it's out.
The human relationship with death is a deeply fascinating one, innit? There's not a culture on the world that doesn't tackle the issue, and it forms a pretty central pillar in pretty much every personal philosophy out there, ay? I mean, even the entire concept of human meaning kinda ties into it! What's after it, after all?
Which is why I'm always disappointed when the villain of something is some cackling git deathgod, and am always really excited whenever someone does something new with them.
Pratchett's take on it, for instance. I haven't even read his Discworld series on Death, but I love the guy. And his appearance in Good Omens, too, was damn good fun.
The setting I'm thinking about would have gods for Light/Darkness, classical elements, and Life and Death...
I'd like to make the Death goddess of that world something more like 'authentic' Hades and Hela, and reincarnation... and having necromancers and undeads on the goodish side.
Namely by having soul-eating demons, so walking corpses without a soul to nom and pretty much laced with death magic wreaking havoc with their 'body' could potentially be goodish. Until you find necromancers deciding 'why not use that on other livings', but hey, duckers are everywhere...
Also, not best thread for it, but hurrah for Dresden!Hades (and Overly Sarcastic on Youtube for spotting that Cerberus pun too!).
to sort of see that kind of necromancy in large scale warfare. The sort of context where it's literally just their culture and how they do wars - just enlist every dead person ever (whether they like it or not) and send them out in a huge army and wall themselves in. I figure you'd just end up with a situation where they're just locked inside forever and there's a war going on outside forever, all the plants and so on crushed into mud. Even if all the dead people all together went on strike and all left for greener pastures they'd just stay locked up, assuming it's still warring out there.
There's a lot of room for dark comedy and satire in there, anyways. Can't even die in peace!
Because a big part of what made Discworld great and special and all that is the humanization of the inhuman. Death (not death, but Death) is a product of humanity, so he is very human. So's... well, everyone. Dwarves and Trolls think differently, but they're still people. Thief of Time showed us how little it took to humanize the most inhuman characters of the lot.
Death is the emblem of that. He's also one of Discworld's finest characters.
Making old characters that came from humans (folklore, depictions of concepts, etc.) very human because they came from humanity is a really cool way to tackle the challenge of humanizing inhuman things. You guys make me want to read more Terry Pratchett stuff more and more every day.
-Twistey
Do you happen to have read that book? It's probably one of the only World War II books I've ever liked, in terms of actual stories, informational texts, and historical fiction. The third is often edged to death, at least judging by the covers I saw before I was too turned off to start reading, and honestly, so is the second kind, in terms of the things that the authors choose for your content. You get a lot of books titled "Hitler's _______," and it gets old. The Book Thief manages to hit the right balance: neither grimdarking the subject nor trivializing it.
But anyway, back from that tangent, another interesting thing about The Book Thief is that Death is portrayed as a deep sympathetic character, and even narrates the entire book. Highly recommend.
Or if you've read it, nice!
-Twistey
It’s a story about reading and writing and growing up in the Third Reich, written by Australian author Markus Zusak. (Trigger warning for death of major characters.)
For further spoilery discussion, with obligatory warning for not always family friendly language, Mark Oshiro read it too. (To avoid confusion, the "fish fighter" is a typo meant to be a "fist fighter".)
HG
Also the ancient Greeks classified romantic love as a mental illness.
Drakaina: A cross between a woman and a serpent. Herakles is said to have sired the founder of Scythia with one of these in exchange for it returning his stolen bow.
Telkhines: Originally inhabitants of the island of Rhodes (namesake of Rhode Island). They were known for their skill at metallurgy and their powerful sorcery. They could shape-shift and summon various kinds of weather, including a sulfurous rain that burned everything it struck. Their use of destructive magic angered the either Zeus, Poseidon, or Apollo, depending on the account, who sent the worst of them to Tartarus and exiled the rest to the sea. They had flippers for hands and the heads of dogs.
Bonus mythology:
The image of Heracles made its way to Japan through India via Buddhism, and the guardian of the Buddha, Vajrapani, is often depicted as Heracles. The Japanese equivalents, the Nio, or Kongorikishi, take inspiration from this. So how have I not yet found a story about the time Heracles traveled with the Buddha?