Twisting mythical creatures; how far?

[Finchbearer]

Okay, my take on this is that it’s well worth looking into the origins of mythical, magical and folkloric beings.

The first incarnations probably came about when we were still hunter gatherers and belief systems were rooted in animism. Animism was (and still is in many parts of the world) a belief that all facets of nature are interconnected. The lake or the mountain, or the tree having its own spirit, or its own life force.

I think this would have been a way for ancient peoples to make sense of the world around them, offering explanation of the unknown or a way to teach moral lessons. Oral traditions would have passed down those beliefs with the next generation adding to that system of belief and interconnectedness.

When animism evolved to polytheism and eventually to monotheism those beliefs and all the mythical ‘creatures’ would have changed and evolved too.

I like to think of it as different branches of belief; absolute belief, these creatures are real and we are all connected, which would sit in line with a tradition of religious belief.

Storytelling device; using mythological creatures and beings as a way to teach moral lessons and create various archetypes with them. Eg. Elves as Otherworldy and graceful beings.

Storytelling as a form of art; which is where we have evolved to now, by taking all that we have created and adding in our own version of those original archetypes and ideas. What we have now is subversion. Eg. Let’s have a vampire attend a high school.

And of course there is also a wonderful blend now of all those three factors. I think essentially we can really take any idea of a mythical creature and run with it. Tolkien did it in a very informed way and almost created a sort of formula from which so many fantasy writers still use today. But it’s fun to change things up and to also speak to a modern day audience too.

 

[Queshire]

Orcs don't come from Orcus. They come Tolkien.

And Tolkien's Orcs came from Beowulf's Orcneas which came from Rome's Orcus.

 

[Queshire]

I think it really is the essence that must still be carried. And there one would have to ask, what is the essence of X mythical being and how do I incorporate it into my being to make it work? Or what is the essence of X being that I must not lose if I want to "get away with" using the recognizable word? Hypothetically.

Well, if you're willing to cross mediums then questions a lot like that are behind the creation of abstract and modern art. Of course, considering how often modern art is used as a joke you might not consider that a good thing.

 

[Finchbearer]

Ah modern art is bonkers, that’s why I think it’s fantastic.

Maybe fiction that has taken mythical creatures far from their original incarnations could be described as post-modern, or avant garde, expressionist or pastiche.

 

[Prince of Spires]

You can take it as far as you want, to the point where all you keep is the name, and get away with it. If you can have 100 year old, sparkly vampires attend high school to fall in love with teenage girls, then you can do anything.

There are 2 things to keep in mind:
- The more you twist the concept, the harder you'll have to work at it. Your readers will have a certain idea in their mind when they read the word Orc, or Elf, or Vampire. They will in their mind revert back to that idea each time they read the word on the page. So if you want to have blue orcs that can conjure flowers then you'll have to remind your readers regularly that your orcs are blue and can conjure flowers. The first few times will be the most important of course, and you'll need to make it clear from the start. You don't want your reader to learn after 10k words that the orc they've been following is blue. But even later, you'll want to add in an occasional reminder.
- Concepts change. Someone who grew up reading Twilight will have a very different idea about what vampires are than someone who grew up watching Buffy the vampire slayer, who have a very different idea from someone who read Dracula when it was first released. Some works only have a small and temporary impact on the world and how people view certain creatures, while others have a huge and lasting effect. For instance, Tolkien's elves are now pretty much the default elf, while Twilight vampires will probably fade away and revert back to the default blood-suckers more or less...

One question to ask yourself is why you would want to change some creature. If you twist something until it's no longer recognizable, then why use it in the first place instead of going with something new? Doesn't mean you shouldn't of course. Vampires are a useful stand-in if you want an immortal, physically strong, and mentally powerful figure who's a bit secretive. But doing it just because you can might be a bad reason.

 

[Fyri]

Ah modern art is bonkers, that’s why I think it’s fantastic.

Maybe fiction that has taken mythical creatures far from their original incarnations could be described as post-modern, or avant garde, expressionist or pastiche.

XD I love this. Avant garde fiction. XD

Granted, I feel like that lingers into literary fiction, which I only have a very polite relationship with.

- The more you twist the concept, the harder you'll have to work at it. Your readers will have a certain idea in their mind when they read the word Orc, or Elf, or Vampire. They will in their mind revert back to that idea each time they read the word on the page. So if you want to have blue orcs that can conjure flowers then you'll have to remind your readers regularly that your orcs are blue and can conjure flowers. The first few times will be the most important of course, and you'll need to make it clear from the start. You don't want your reader to learn after 10k words that the orc they've been following is blue. But even later, you'll want to add in an occasional reminder.

Well, I think that the reader will be able to keep track of this well if it is written well. I agree that it must be done effectively early on. If you can successfully create the atmosphere of this creature and connect it to the word, the reader may develop that association with your book. Every time they reenter your world, they remember that the word "unicorn" indicates these bloodsucking beasts that live in caves nearby--due to the context of them being mentioned or the reactions of your characters to the idea of the word.

However, I do think there is a line. Unicorns will be harder to believe if you make them into fish. You'd have to ascribe a type to them: Sea-unicorn.

However, that would also indicate that there is a non-sea-unicorn in your world. What if there isn't? One could play with the history of beliefs; The unicorn as we know it was actually a mythical creature in the fantasy world too, but someone liked the idea so much or the idea just morphed into a different being--a special fish or seahorse is then called a unicorn in that world. And then that fish is discovered to also have magical attributes of it's own.

Perhaps making your writing self aware--you acknowledge the deviations somehow--would help? Acknowledge the original essence that should be attributed to the creature and how it is connected--even if through in-world mistake--to the new creature.

 

[Aldarion]

- The more you twist the concept, the harder you'll have to work at it. Your readers will have a certain idea in their mind when they read the word Orc, or Elf, or Vampire. They will in their mind revert back to that idea each time they read the word on the page. So if you want to have blue orcs that can conjure flowers then you'll have to remind your readers regularly that your orcs are blue and can conjure flowers. The first few times will be the most important of course, and you'll need to make it clear from the start. You don't want your reader to learn after 10k words that the orc they've been following is blue. But even later, you'll want to add in an occasional reminder.

That is why I decided to go back to actual mythology for my own fantasy beings. Sure, more digging required... but if you dig enough, you can find anything you may need.

 

[Finchbearer]

Digging is a large part of the fun, but I think you need to be careful where you like, place the trowel.

 

[Orc Knight]

Way I figure digging also tends to lead to, well, even back then there was just as much variation then as there is now. Little agreement on what made what and even the base stories only codified much later. Then of course, promptly taken out of that codification too. That's why going to even the original ends up with goblins and trolls in the Fey family and the like.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Slightly off topic, but in my view if you do want to stick to the source material of your critters, that makes sense to me. And I really didn't like the sparkly vampires. But I think sometimes you actually have to change original characters simply to write a story that makes sense.

Vampires have always had one weakness to me as a legitimate monster - they can turn people into other vampires. That's actually an infinite power if you think about it. Because if you can do that with a bite, you can turn the entire human race into vampires - which means you then have to start creating reasons why this doesn't happen. Soon you end up with the Borg (yeah I know, different genre) with two infinite powers - infinite growth and infinite knowledge - and then your writers are pulling their hair out trying to come up with ways to defeat an enemy that can't possibly be defeated. By the same token, Superman is a hero who can't possibly lose, so Lex Luthor has to be given the super intelligence to just know things he can't possibly learn! (How does anyone have the faintest clue about kryptonite?)

Which brings us back to creatures like dragons. To explain them as legitimate monsters you either have to nerf them to the point where they aren't really that gloriously terrifying, or else rewrite your entire world as Reign Of Fire. The same with krakens. Do you nerf the original concept of these ship devouring monsters, or write a world where maritime transport doesn't exist?

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Aldarion]

Vampires have always had one weakness to me as a legitimate monster - they can turn people into other vampires. That's actually an infinite power if you think about it. Because if you can do that with a bite, you can turn the entire human race into vampires - which means you then have to start creating reasons why this doesn't happen. Soon you end up with the Borg (yeah I know, different genre) with two infinite powers - infinite growth and infinite knowledge - and then your writers are pulling their hair out trying to come up with ways to defeat an enemy that can't possibly be defeated. By the same token, Superman is a hero who can't possibly lose, so Lex Luthor has to be given the super intelligence to just know things he can't possibly learn! (How does anyone have the faintest clue about kryptonite?)

Justin Cronin explored precisely that in The Passage. But...

Which brings us back to creatures like dragons. To explain them as legitimate monsters you either have to nerf them to the point where they aren't really that gloriously terrifying, or else rewrite your entire world as Reign Of Fire. The same with krakens. Do you nerf the original concept of these ship devouring monsters, or write a world where maritime transport doesn't exist?

Oftentimes, original concept can actually provide a solution.

To use your examples:
1) Most vampires couldn't just turn people into more vampires. Even those that could (e.g. Stoker's Dracula) didn't do so willy-nilly. More often however origins of vampires were far more esoteric, and thus had no connection to their process of feeding. For example, if you look at Romanian strigoi, this is how they were created:

• Be the seventh child of the same sex in a family
• Lead a life of sin
• Die without being married
• Die by execution for perjury
• Die by suicide
• Die from a witch's curse

Notice that none of these allow a vampire himself to create more vampires.

2) For dragons, again - go back to their potential real-world origins: that of giant serpents or crocodiles. Prince Valiant handles its dragons rather well, for example.

3) And when it comes to actual fantasy dragons and krakens, there is one very good cure: rarity. Reign of Fire happened because there were million of very hungry dragons around. But in nature, more powerful a predator is, rarer it gets (humans are the exception as our intelligence allows us to solve problems that prevent spread of other predators). So if you have couple thousand krakens or couple hundred dragons in the entire world... most people will go entire life without ever seeing one. And if krakens only appear in the open ocean, well... majority of maritime transport throughout history was coastal anyway, so even a horde of psychotic kitten-like krakens wouldn't be much of an issue so long as they kept to the open ocean.

 

[Queshire]

I like using vampiric instincts as a reason personally. Vampires are not pack hunters. They're ambush hunters. Sure they can work against those instincts, but mass producing spawn or raising humans as cattle just doesn't make sense to them.

 

[psychotick]

Hi Aldarion,

I hear what you're saying. And so some of the original works do include attempts at nerfing the monsters. But we've still got the basic problems with growth. So maybe the strigoi are originally nerfed. But are strigoi really vampires? Granted they're what the Stoker version comes from but aren't they more risen, restless spirits? But that's by the by. The other concept you've mentioned is that Drac and others limit themselves in turning people. To which my obvious question becomes - why? Why would they not breed? And until you can come up with some plausible answer to this question you're back in a world where vampires should have taken it over, but haven't. Just as the borg within a month of their creation haven't taken over the entire galaxy and ended the Federation before it began.

As for rarity of dragons and krakens, again why? Why are these creatures rare? The reason most predators are rare is a simple predator prey balance. Too many predators eat too much prey and then starve the following year. For these super predators you have to go beyond this. Because once they're out in numbers, they're not going to be stopped. These aren't lions and tigers that the prey can escape. They're monsters that will eat and eat and eat. You see why I mentioned Reign of Fire? It's actually fairly accurate in my view to the world that would exist if there were dragons. Unless of course you nerf them, and dragons don't even reach breeding age for centuries and then only lay one egg every century after that etc.

So back to the OP. Before you write any sort of monster / fantasy critter, you really need to start balancing things out to explain your world.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Finchbearer]

Never been a fan of Twilight, or of high school dramas, not even when I was of high school age. In fact that’s what put me off modern vampire fantasies. So, I’ve remedied that by creating my own. My vampire protagonist is neither the Bram Stoker version nor the Twilight one!

 

[Finchbearer]

What in the world is ‘nerfing’?

 

[Queshire]

To weaken. It stems from the comparison between what you can do with a real baseball bat vs what you can do with a nerf bat. It's most typically used in the context of video games.

 

[Finchbearer]

What’s a nerf bat?? ok I think I understand.

 

[Aldarion]

I hear what you're saying. And so some of the original works do include attempts at nerfing the monsters. But we've still got the basic problems with growth. So maybe the strigoi are originally nerfed. But are strigoi really vampires? Granted they're what the Stoker version comes from but aren't they more risen, restless spirits? But that's by the by. The other concept you've mentioned is that Drac and others limit themselves in turning people. To which my obvious question becomes - why? Why would they not breed? And until you can come up with some plausible answer to this question you're back in a world where vampires should have taken it over, but haven't. Just as the borg within a month of their creation haven't taken over the entire galaxy and ended the Federation before it began.

Yes.

Interestingly, Croatian werewolves (some versions of them) are also the undead - who are also the skinchangers. Werewolf essentially rises up from his grave, divests himself of the human skin, puts on wolf's skin, and then goes to scare people. To get rid of the werewolf you need to cut his human skin into little pieces while he is out scaring people, and as he needs his human skin to sleep, he is forced to go back into the grave never to come out again.

In other versions, Croatian werewolf is a human skin that is filled with blood like a baloon.

As noted, people who become werewolves are evil people such as murderers, rapists, pagans, wizards and witches. When such people die, devil pays them a visit and removes all organs and bones from the body until only skin is left. He then fills the skin with blood and animates it to kill people.

So with most original myths, you really don't have the problem of growth.

As for Borg, their original concept was that they assimilate technology. So they will not have been interested in spreading and taking over the galaxy... you do that, you lose your sources of tech. But then something changed. There is a good explanation on origins and nature of Borg here:

ST-v-SW.Net Tech Archive :: The Borg Have Been Busy

st-v-sw.net

As for rarity of dragons and krakens, again why? Why are these creatures rare? The reason most predators are rare is a simple predator prey balance. Too many predators eat too much prey and then starve the following year. For these super predators you have to go beyond this. Because once they're out in numbers, they're not going to be stopped. These aren't lions and tigers that the prey can escape. They're monsters that will eat and eat and eat. You see why I mentioned Reign of Fire? It's actually fairly accurate in my view to the world that would exist if there were dragons. Unless of course you nerf them, and dragons don't even reach breeding age for centuries and then only lay one egg every century after that etc.

Part of it is predator-prey balance, but part is also that predators need to be more intelligent - and they need to be taught how to hunt. Grass isn't going to run away or fight back... prey animal will. So a predator - and especially eusocial predator such as humans - needs to invest more energy in raising the offspring, which then means that they will have fewer offspring to begin with.

And yes, nerfing dragons the way you describe would be a good way to go.