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Animated skeletons and suspension of disbelief

Peregrine

Troubadour
My setting is a low fantasy where magic is rare, where wars are won by swords and not by magic and where
dragons, woolly rhinoceroses, giants, serpents and other creatures exist in one setting.

I was willing to suspend disbelief for dragons (two-legged winged dragons, not four-legged winged dragons), so I included them.
Not only was I willing to suspend disbelief for such physically impossible creature (mostly because of fire-breathing) but I also had a strong urge to include them in my setting
because dragons are the coolest and most beatiful fictional creatures in my opinion.

I have revenants, revenants are corporeal undead and their decomposition varies from individual to individual,
they can be slightly decomposed like vampires or very decomposed like zombies, but they are not mindless and
slaves to a so-called "necromancer".

Skeletons do not have bones, there is no muscles or tissue, they have no organs. I am against the idea that
somehow a "necromancer" performs magic and that the skeleton just happens to move on its own.

I like skeletons, it is a cool idea, but its terribly unrealistic, its 10 times more unrealistic than dragons.

Suspension of Disbelief in Sci Fi and Fantasy | I Am Your Target Demographic

One thing is certain, animated skeletons can not be explained without magic.

My idea of explaining animated skeletons:

The purpose of animated skeletons is to be minions for the army of revenants, the skeletons are slaves to the
revenants in the same way that wights from Game of Thrones are slaves to the White Walkers.
The revenant is a "puppeteer", while the skeleton is a "puppet". The revenant raises a human skeleton from the
ground by using telekinesis.
The skeleton should be able to attack and use a sword and a shield.
A human can defeat a skeleton by sufficiently dismembering him.
If a human kills a revenant "puppeteer" before he dismembers a skeleton, the skeleton will fall on the ground
and return to a inanimate state.

Please note that the skeleton is in no way "alive", skeletons are just bones and "empty shells" moved by
telekinetic magic.

Even with all my attempts to rationalize this I find it very hard to suspend my disbelief, I find it hard to
grasp how a bunch of bones can be coordinated by a wizard to move, attack or do anything.
Does anyone have a better magical explanation?
 
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CupofJoe

Myth Weaver
Personally... If I am reading a story with [fire-breathing] Dragons and Giants in it, I'm not going to baulk at animated Skeletons unless there is a reason for me too. If everything else in the story was normal and mundane and suddenly they appeared it might strike me as odd.
If I was writing the story, I would be tempted to introduce them in to a story early on as a possibility [this sort of thing happens here, like Dragons and Giants, and a little magic] so when I get to page 250 and they suddenly appear and attck the MCs I'm not wondering why and how they exist but why they are attacking...
 

Vaporo

Inkling
Well, a decomposing corpse has no right moving around on its own to begin with. It's dead for a reason. The dead and decaying flesh would probably become chemically inoperable. Plus if your revenants were to try and use their decaying muscles to lift something, realistically they just would just break apart. With those in your world, I have no problem suspending disbelief so that I can accept mobile skeletons.
 

Peregrine

Troubadour
Well, a decomposing corpse has no right moving around on its own to begin with. It's dead for a reason. The dead and decaying flesh would probably become chemically inoperable. Plus if your revenants were to try and use their decaying muscles to lift something, realistically they just would just break apart. With those in your world, I have no problem suspending disbelief so that I can accept mobile skeletons.

From the point of real life you are correct.

But I am talking from the perspective of fantasy.

The revenants are not corpses, they are alive, the more correct term for them would be half-dead not undead.
And not all revenants look like zombies, many revenants look freshier like vampires, but some due to frostbite and some other things look a bit rotten.

If I was to tell you what all revenants are, it would take me a lot of unnecessary info-dumping.

The revenants are far more better at suspending the belief than skeletons, one of the reasons is that revenants live in polar regions. Have you ever seen mammoth bodies trapped in ice for thousand years and even after thousand of years, these mammoth bodies still look undecomposed. The bodies of revenants are oftenly decently preserved like some "mummified" mammoths.

I consider revenants living beings, I used the term undead only to describe to people so people would be familiar what I am talking about.

General question:

Can a skeleton be considered a creature if it is not alive as a human, revenant or a animal, but a bunch of dead bones coordinated by magic?
 
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If the revenants use telekinesis to do all this, then why not simply use that telekinesis to animate stones and other inanimate objects, or to toss foes to the side?

How large is their skeleton army? Are there really enough bones lying about to make up an army?

You could maybe do a kind of horcrux + possession thing, in which each revenant splits his soul into many parts and one part can reanimate/possess a skeleton. In a way, the skeleton gains "life," but only a part of its master's life.
 

Peregrine

Troubadour
If the revenants use telekinesis to do all this, then why not simply use that telekinesis to animate stones and other inanimate objects, or to toss foes to the side?

How large is their skeleton army? Are there really enough bones lying about to make up an army?

You could maybe do a kind of horcrux + possession thing, in which each revenant splits his soul into many parts and one part can reanimate/possess a skeleton. In a way, the skeleton gains "life," but only a part of its master's life.

Obtaining skeletons is not a problem, if there is a graveyard, the revenants could dig every grave from the graveyard and animate the skeletal corpses. With that in mind, the revenants could amass about 300-600 band of skeletons just from a single graveyard.

The idea of a bunch of bones gaining life is like saying a metal statue could get a life. Both bones and metal are matter from which life is not made and you are basically saying its a kind of "golem". So that idea of yours is not suspending my disbelief.
 
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pmmg

Myth Weaver
So...A Revenant kind of is an undead thingie. The origin of the term means returning, as in returning from the dead. But 1) you are free to define them any way you wish, and 2) the question was not about them.

I have no issues suspending disbelief to accept that a necromanced skeleton could animate and dance about, and if it had one, swing a sword about. I had no issue with this when I saw it in Sinbad, and back then, they were not only skeletons, but they were poorly animated too.

A better explanation than telekinesis? (which by the way, is fine if you want them to be purely something animated, but not actual returned undead, but you will have to answer questions as to why not animate other things instead. For instance, why not just animate a sword rather than a whole skeleton to pick one up and swing it about.)


So follow this logic. There are lots of undead baddies. Ghosts, ghouls, vampires, zombies and all. Some of them have no physical form at all, such as ghosts... But I would expect a necromancer could raise ghosts and vampires and zombies, or at least that would be in the job description if they the skill and knowledge. Now a ghost, having no physical form, still would not challenge my suspension of disbelief enough for me to say a ghost could never pick up a sword, or strangle someone, or shake the bed I am hiding under the covers on.

So a necromancer, who can call up dead spirits, I would think ought to be able to call up a dead spirit and put it into something else. Such as a doll like Chuckie, or body made out of clay, or even a pile of bones. Which is all to say, perhaps the bones are not themselves the true undead force, but mere the last container of a spiritual dead force that has been summoned back into them (and perhaps that force is also the original source of the bones.) And if a ghost residing in bones can shake beds, it can also pick up shields and swords.
 
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Peregrine

Troubadour
So...A Revenant kind of is an undead thingie. The origin of the term means returning, as in returning from the dead. But 1) you are free to define them any way you wish, and 2) the question was not about them.

I have no issues suspending disbelief to accept that a necromanced skeleton could animate and dance about, and if it had one, swing a sword about. I had no issue with this when I saw it in Sinbad, and back then, they were not only skeletons, but they were poorly animated too.

A better explanation than telekinesis? (which by the way, is fine if you want them to be purely something animated, but not actual returned undead, but you will have to answer questions as to why not animate other things instead. For instance, why not just animate a sword rather than a whole skeleton to pick one up and swing it about.)


So follow this logic. There are lots of undead baddies. Ghosts, ghouls, vampires, zombies and all. Some of them have no physical form at all, such as ghosts... But I would expect a necromancer could raise ghosts and vampires and zombies, or at least that would be in the job description if they the skill and knowledge. Now a ghost, having no physical form, still would not challenge my suspension of disbelief enough for me to say a ghost could never pick up a sword, or strangle someone, or shake the bed I am hiding under the covers on.

So a necromancer, who can call up dead spirits, I would think ought to be able to call up a dead spirit and put it into something else. Such as a doll like Chuckie, or body made out of clay, or even a pile of bones. Which is all to say, perhaps the bones are not themselves the true undead force, but mere the last container of a spiritual dead force that has been summoned back into them (and perhaps that force is also the original source of the bones.) And if a ghost residing in bones can shake beds, it can also pick up shields and swords.

Thank you for advice.

They will possess only corpses in my setting as I have no interest in scarecrows or tin woodsmen.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
I’ll chime in with others, no big whoop unless you spring it on me or it somehow doesn’t make sense in the world as presented. There doesn’t need to be spells in order for there to be a magic rich environment.
 

Horus

Scribe
Well, I wouldn't say anything is biologically impossible, including moving skeletons. Not sure how the physics of your world explains the Revenants, but Skeletons can also be done with micro-organisms that adhere to the organic materials in bones. Instead of a bleached clean skeleton, you'd end up with something that looks like it had tendrils of organic tissue interlacing the skeletal frame. But I'd shy away from explaining these kinds of things in detail, unless you're looking to go into syfi fantasy.

My broader point is that you don't need to take the obvious way out and go with the traditional. You can always redefine things a bit, explaining only enough to leave a sense of real mystery to the methods behind the madness. There is a certain fear in the truly unknown that such things can exploit. As someone brought up, if it is telekinetic in nature, why not animate rocks? But then again, a soldier is more likely to deathly afraid of something that mysteriously seems to have mastery over life/death as opposed to something that can move rocks. The psychological effect of a weapon can be just as potent as its practically effect. Then there is the effect of disease control on an enemy that has undergone/undergoing decomposition.

I don't find skeletons (and especially not dragons) to be particularly hard to believe in from a biological point of view, but it all relates to how they are written in a non-magical way. It requires fringe-physics, but nothing too out-of-the-box.
 
Do you need to 'explain' how skeletons exist? Is it explicit that the world is low on magic?
Could it be something that, even though the people in this world don't believe in magic, the skeletons just exist?

As Cupofjoe mentioned, you already have dragons, so I don't care about skeletons or zombies or whatever
In fact, I find dragons way more unbelievable than skeletons. Skeletons are just 'animated' corpses, dragons need to be a fully living organism.
 
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