• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Immortality

vaiyt

Scribe
Yeah, but after you've been through a thousand years of Rome, five hundred more of Byzantium, a couple centuries of Spain, another couple of the British, etc. etc. and you're going to roll your eyes when those newfangled Americans start thinking they're so exceptional.
Just to expand on what was my actual point: for an immortal, a lot of things people in the here and now view as unchanging or as good as eternal, are obviously transient to them. Humans love to project their own time and place across spacetime. Legends of the past, and fantasies of the future, have always said much more about the people that wrote them, than about the ones supposedly being written about. You think pink has always been a girl color? To an immortal, the time when pink was a boy color was like last Tuesday. You think the nuclear family is an universal institution that existed since ever? He's been there and knows you're full of it. I'm just picking obvious examples to make the point clear (and because I'd need some extra research).
Of course, not all immortals are going to think the same, but actually being able to see transitions that are too slow for normal people might give one a different perspective. Key word being might. Nothing keeps an immortal from having their tastes and mores set during adolescence so they go all bah-humbug at any development younger than 5000 AC. Let's remember that complaining about the new generation is older than writing, and think about how insufferable can a person who has been through a thousand of them be XD
 

Creed

Sage
There's an immortal example from R. Scott Bakker's The Second Apocalypse series that I think would be beneficial to bring up. The Nonmen were a race of humanoids who, and I won't spoil any of the beautiful history here, through some happenstance became immortal, faced the First Apocalypse (and barely survived) approximately 2000-3000 years before the plot of the series.

The thing is, the Nonmen only remember so much of their lives. The fate of so many of the Nonmen is that they don't remember who they are or what's happening around them. Bakker describes them as souls filled to the brim with water, and only the sediment gathers at the bottom. The sediment is what can be understood as heavy emotions; memories of pain, loss, and horror. Considering what happened to their race...

What's left are Erratic immortals: confused, trying to remember, constantly reliving all the soul-shattering pain in their long lives, and to top it off some of them are very powerful mages. Kind of like time bombs.

It raises some interesting questions about the nature of immortality, if perhaps a little singular to the case. It's definitely worth pondering. What can your immortal character(s) remember? What's stopped them from going insane?
 

vaiyt

Scribe
A similar thing happens to elves in Tolkien lore: since they have perfect memory, they feel every misfortune and loss they've ever experienced like it was yesterday, which contributes to their gloominess.
 

Drakevarg

Troubadour
I've never liked the gloomy immortal trope. People are, by nature, adaptable, so I think that in the long run most immortals would either become enormously eccentric or just get over themselves. Perhaps both.

Which is to say, it's easy to look at an immortal's life from a historical standpoint. Y'know, they've cameo'd in half the major events to have happened in their lifetime. But there's nothing about immortality that causes them to want to play Where's Waldo in history textbooks. For most, unless they're like the Doctor and become terminally bored when the world isn't falling apart around them, just go on with their lives.

I don't think if you chatted up random grandparents and 90-year-olds you'd find many who are looking forward to death because they ran out of books to read or meals to eat. Life goes on. You wake up, you go about your day, you sleep. Repeat. Some days are boring, some exciting, some relaxing, some sad, some happy. But it goes on. The scariest thing about growing old isn't tedium, it's losing the physical or mental faculties to live a full life. With immortality, that's out the window.

The usual argument against immortality is outliving all your loved ones. But really, how is that different from being mortal? I've never had a friend die, but I'm only in my 20s and I've had beloved pets die on me and lost more friends than I can count. They aren't dead as far as I know, but they're out of my life and probably never coming back. So what? I make new ones, knowing full well most of them won't be for life. What's stopping an immortal from doing the same?

I guess it's just hard to picture such a fundamentally fantastic entity as an immortal living a fundamentally mundane life, where their main concerns at the start of the day is the same as yours: their mouth feels like a rat died in it, they want breakfast, and for the bird outside the window to shut up. The fact that they've lived a thousand times longer than you won't change the moment-to-moment realities of living.
 
Top