What Is This Weapon Called?

[Mad Swede]

That's why I said, 'plausible.' There is a difference between suspending disbelief and taking it bungee jumping.

There is, but suspending belief is easier when your readers (or viewers) don't know enough science to appreciate that something is implausible.

It's like the war hammer you pictured at the start of this thread (or indeed a big mace or large battleaxe). As a weapon, it is plausible, but you would leave yourself open to a parry and riposte when you swung it hard enough to do damage. That's because the hammer needs the momentum (weight and velocity) to do damage when it hit the target, and once you start a swing like that you don't have much control because of that momentum. You can swing a hammer like that in a much more controlled manner, but then it won't have as much power behind it when it hits the target. But most readers won't know that so in conjunction with the general image of dwarves in fantasy literature you can get away with suspending your readers belief and so have some fairly implausible fight descriptions.

Interestingly, suspension of belief and plausibility is something C S Lewis (of all people) lampshades in Prince Caspian when he describes the sword fight between Edmund and Trumpkin.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

There is, but suspending belief is easier when your readers (or viewers) don't know enough science to appreciate that something is implausible.

It's like the war hammer you pictured at the start of this thread (or indeed a big mace or large battleaxe). As a weapon, it is plausible, but you would leave yourself open to a parry and riposte when you swung it hard enough to do damage. That's because the hammer needs the momentum (weight and velocity) to do damage when it hit the target, and once you start a swing like that you don't have much control because of that momentum. You can swing a hammer like that in a much more controlled manner, but then it won't have as much power behind it when it hits the target. But most readers won't know that so in conjunction with the general image of dwarves in fantasy literature you can get away with suspending your readers belief and so have some fairly implausible fight descriptions.

Interestingly, suspension of belief and plausibility is something C S Lewis (of all people) lampshades in Prince Caspian when he describes the sword fight between Edmund and Trumpkin.

I don't think it's a matter of ignorance on the part of the reader. I think it's an intelligent readership willing to jump off that bridge with you. Everyone knows that the wildly outsized weapons in games like Final Fantasy aren't physically plausible, or even possible, and yet we let ourselves be taken along for the ride.

We're entertainers. Storytellers. We lie for fun and profit. I'm not going to sweat the physics of magical weapons too much.

 

[pmmg]

Generally, when i cannot suspend disbelief, its because i know some implausible thing is too far beyond credibility. That stems from greater knowledge, not less.

 

[Mad Swede]

I don't think it's a matter of ignorance on the part of the reader. I think it's an intelligent readership willing to jump off that bridge with you. Everyone knows that the wildly outsized weapons in games like Final Fantasy aren't physically plausible, or even possible, and yet we let ourselves be taken along for the ride.

We're entertainers. Storytellers. We lie for fun and profit. I'm not going to sweat the physics of magical weapons too much.

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Intelligence isn't the same as experience or knowledge. Most of our readers have never swung a heavy hammer for any length of time. They may have used a small hammer to knock in a few nails, but most will never have used a big sledge hammer. And most of them have never used an axe to split wood. They don't really appreciate just how much skill these things involve, or how tiring it can be.

It's like the example you quoted earlier. If all you've ever done is drop a square block of wood or a brick out of a window then you won't understand why a spaceship entering the atmosphere like that would tumble, simply because the block of wood or brick doesn't fall far enough or fast enough to start tumbling. You need to have studied aerodynamics to understand.

Yes, a lot of our readers could reason out that some of the weapons our characters use or some of the things they do just aren't realistic. But they tend not to do so, because that isn't why they're reading our books. As you write, they're reading to be entertained, to relax, to enjoy themselves, and they won't want to think too much about realism. That's why we can get away with suspending belief, getting away with cool depictions of things which we deep down know just don't work.

Personally I try to keep things reasonably realistic, mostly out of a personal desire not to suspend my own belief too much when I'm writing. I don't think I could ever write a phrase like "he punched the man across the room" knowing that it isn't realistic.

 

[skip.knox]

There's another factor that's relevant here. There are aspects of realism that simply do not matter to the story. The standard example is that we don't bother to have our character stop in a "realistic" way to tend to necessities. The story doesn't need to see them urinate, blow their nose, and so on. If, otoh, they go out beyond the camp to urinate and so get captured by an enemy, then it's relevant.

Relevance is more important than realism.

But story needs can also run headlong into realism. The story may need the characters to travel a hundred miles, but if the author has them ride horses fifty miles a day for two days without consequences, they are going to get readers who complain. Maybe not all, but some. Perhaps too many. That's a bit of authorial algebra that is tough to resolve.

It's a difficult calculation and one that different writers will make differently. What is scarcely noticed by one reader will be viewed as an inexcusable gaffe by another.

This is why I balk at saying this or that must absolutely be done. The author must satisfy themselves first, write the most persuasive and believable prose they can. The more the story pretends to realism, the more important it will be to get beta readers, for no one writer is going to know everything about everything. And if experience is the best teacher, then we would never have writers, for they would all be out learning a hundred different crafts, twenty different cultures and, well you get the idea.

This is an on-going debate among writers. Readers of these threads are advised to read all sides ... advisedly.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Yeah, this is a wire we walk constantly. We write urban fantasy, so in some things we need to be accurate to the real world and to conventional physics. I need to know a Glock doesn't have an external safety and that you can perform a tracheotomy with a ball-point pen. But we also have magic, and that changes things. We have a character who can heal by touch, and a magical, named, revolver that has some interesting bells and whistles. It's all on a case-by-case, what-can-kill-this-thing basis. We have dragons and shape-shifting rabbits, and they work very differently. And from these differences we make worlds.

 

[Devor]

I don't think it's a matter of ignorance on the part of the reader. I think it's an intelligent readership willing to jump off that bridge with you.

There's a wonderful example of this... honestly, read it two or three times. He's the one saying it's bad science, but he still thinks it's so cool that he wants to see it.

For those who don't know, the spaceship Battlestar Galactica has to save people who are trapped on a planet, so the ship lowers into the atmosphere, releases fighter planes when it's just above the surface, then "jumps" into hyperspace before it can crash.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Even cool has its limits.

Indeed. It's 0K

Sorry, couldn't resist...

Suspension of Disbelief is mainly about consistency, internal logic, foreshadowing and getting the details right.

If your interal logic works and is consistent then people are willing to suspend their disbelief. The whole concept of Hyperspace and jumping into it is scientifically shady at best. But as SciFi viewers we're willing to accept it as a thing, as long as it always works the same way in the story. If you establish early on that you can jump into it from pretty much any point then you can use it to escape imminent death in the mentioned scene.

This is also why in one of the latest Star War films they got a lot of crap about scene where they used the hyperspace jump to destroy the enemy fleet (or something like that. Didn't see it...). They broke their internal logic and rules to get the characters out of a tough situation.

Same with the warhammer. Mention it's a magical weapon wielded by a dwarf and people don't care all that much about how you would wield it in real life. Some weapons expert might of course, but in my experience they are so used to weapons being used wrong that they've become numb to it. However, you need to be consistent in how it's used. If it's slow and unwieldy at the start of the book, you can't have it win a high speed fight with a sword by being more nimble* than that sword.

*the one exception here being that if the plot arc for a character is that they need to learn how to wield this weapon more quickly, then you can definitely do this. But then you're foreshadowing this option and work towards it in the novel...

 

[Puck]

A lot depends of course on how "realistic" you want your world to be. It is fantasy after all.

In many ways no writer, writes realistically. Dialogue is a case in point. Writers tend not to reflect the reality of how people actually speak in dialogue. Dialogue is often well written. But a lot of people don't speak coherently in real life - they repeat themselves, they say 'erm' and 'err' a lot, they pause mid-sentence for no apparent reason, they lose the thread of what they were trying to say, they change the subject without warming, they pause whilst they try and remember someone's name. Writers don't reflect that reality in written dialogue because it would just be far too annoying.

All Shakespeare's characters have well written, finely crafted dialogue. A case in point would be Margaret of Anjou. Compare the eloquent dialogue that Shakespeare gives to her with the letters of the real Margaret of Anjou and you would think they were two different women. The real Margaret rambles, repeats herself, writes quite informally for her time - to the extent that her use of English language actually appears more modern than the language of the lines Shakespeare gives her nearly 150 years later.

There is a limit to realism. There is a limit to how many times you want to read Margaret start making her point (any point) with the phrase "for as much as..."

 

[Mad Swede]

As AE Lowan wrote, we're entertainers. So there is a limit to our realism as well, because as you write it gets to be unreadable if we take realism too far. And thats reflected in how we write and what we write. For almost all of us our writing is contemporary - and so was Shakespeare's. What to our eyes is modern language and dialogue won't be seen that way in a hundred years time.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Readers don't care about realism in the slightest. If they did then they'd read non-fiction.

They might complain about realism if you did something wrong. But the something wrong isn't that your story isn't realistic, since no story is. The something wrong is you broke your own rules, or you didn't foreshadow something correctly or you didn't shape your character correctly.

Just as an example, look at Harry Potter. Tell me where the realism is in a story where a kid finds out he's a wizard, goes to a wizarding school against the express wishes of his legal guardians, and defeats the biggest, baddest evil wizard of all time not just once, but 7 times.

There's no realism anywhere in that story. If you approach it from a realism point of view you can poke so many holes in it that it starts looking like a colander. But it is consistent with its internal rules and characters and the logic of the story.

 

[Puck]

What to our eyes is modern language and dialogue won't be seen that way in a hundred years time.

True. It is also not possible to write in authentic Medieval English because you'd be writing Middle English, which the vast majority of modern English speakers simply would not understand. Shakespeare writes modern English (believe it or not), although he uses an especially complex/eloquent form of C16th English (which was likely his appeal at the time). Most ordinary people of Shakespeare's time spoke more simply.

In case you're wondering authentic Medieval English (Middle English) actually reads like this:

But as they loked in to Bernysdale,
Bi a derne strete,
Than came a knyght ridinghe,
Full sone they gan hym mete.

(from an early Robin Hood ballad, written around 1450).

That's why I never worry about writing 'authentic' sounding dialogue for medieval characters.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

True. It is also not possible to write in authentic Medieval English because you'd be writing Middle English, which the vast majority of modern English speakers simply would not understand. Shakespeare writes modern English (believe it or not), although he uses an especially complex/eloquent form of C16th English (which was likely his appeal at the time). Most ordinary people of Shakespeare's time spoke more simply.

In case you're wondering authentic Medieval English (Middle English) actually reads like this:

But as they loked in to Bernysdale,
Bi a derne strete,
Than came a knyght ridinghe,
Full sone they gan hym mete.

(from an early Robin Hood ballad, written around 1450).

That's why I never worry about writing 'authentic' sounding dialogue for medieval characters.

Always good to see another medievalist on board. My area of study was Arthuriana and the return of English as a written language during the 14th century. Lazamon's my man. lol And yes, you are absolutely right, most people don't realize they can read Middle English fairly accurately, much less Shakespeare's Early Modern English. But if you tell them that the trick is to read it aloud and pronounce every letter, they can hear the words.

In our series, one of our characters is an 1100 year-old faerie knight who's spoken English as it's evolved over time. We get around trying to have him actually speak Middle English like this. (I'm also very lazy and don't want to translate things lol) In this snippet, he is having a dream about his wife.

“Because you love him.” She speaks English, but strange to this modern time, her consonants more guttural, truer to their Germanic roots, each sound tongued in full. He loves the way she speaks. He has not spoken English like this in centuries.

 

[Puck]

But if you tell them that the trick is to read it aloud and pronounce every letter, they can hear the words.

Yeah, you can get 95% of it that way. Although they did have a few words that have fallen from modern use (or changed a lot) that would be tough to work out. Mind you, if you were going for 100% authenticity, you'd have all the nobility and knights speaking in French most of the time.

 

[Devor]

I saw this video on facebook today and thought it seemed relevant to the OP. Unfortunately facebook isn't letting embed the video directly.

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