Some are escalation, others like Ruby's knife are kind of a side grade since it only works on demons as opposed to the Colt which works on everything.
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Cliches you can't stand
- Thread starter Mithras
- Start date
He does all of those things tho
Like, his best friend asks him to repair stuff around the school for free all the time and yells at him for contantly doing favours to help others, like repairing electronics, without getting anything in return or much respect for it. His "friend" Shinji at the archery club gets him to clean, repair, and maintain their archery range through attempted bullying, and he does it anyway because it can help people.
And the whole "likes the yakuza" bit is less wonky when you remember that yakuza are in many ways respected community members and arbitrators of disputes between citizens in Japan because the court system is overloaded with cases, they own shittons of properties and land, hand out loans for start-ups, employ the outcasts of society and give them a fair shake (like the burakumin), finance and own companies with their illicit profits, and also act as a sort of unofficial police in some areas with a somewhat vague code of honour and respect that they self-police to the point of mutilating members who break it.
IRL, the yakuza are undeniable scum (drugs, prostitution, human trafficking, racketeering, violent protection rackets, the works), of course. But characters like Shirou having a rosy view of the Yakuza -- and remember, the local boss is his next-door neighbour, and Taiga is the man's... daughter, I think? -- is not as weird as you may think. Quite a lot of Japanese society shares his attitude of romanticising the yakuza or considering them the devil they know.
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Morphic Tide
Crazy Brainstormer, Munchkin and Wannabe Min-Maxer
- Location
- MI, USA
Yeah, from what I've heard, the Yakuza are basically the epitome of villians with good publicity. The legal system is almost FUBAR, so taking things to the court is a bad idea, the government can be somewhat slow to respond in comparison and being a crime organization makes a lot of PR moves much less risky, as they can explicitly break the law to uphold deals that look good at first glance, and may well actually be great deals when you don't try to break the deal. There's also the holdouts from being partially founded by disgraced/conquered nobility who didn't become complete scum. At least, that bit's a common myth...
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I am always reminded of the Doctor McNinja comic page where the spoiler text makes a remark on how maybe if the vampire had spent some of those centuries learning martial arts he wouldn't have gotten defeated in one move by the protagonist. I'd like more stories where its made clear that no, the hero can't just go through some super-tough training and beat the thousand year old dude, if he wants to win he's gonna have to cheat. A lot.
I recall someone mentioning a story where "fantastical adventure in another world" is a whole thing, complete with there now being a powerful and sinister organization made up by former kid adventurers, but then it wastes it all on harem antics because muh otakus. It'd be interesting to explore. I'd totally expect there to be endless mayhem as you dump young adults who are at best PTSD-laden and at worst lost their minds 'fighting the good fight'. You'd probably have a lot of violence and rebellion done simply because fighting the evil authorities is all they know and they can't adjust to living in a nice 1st world country where the 'evil authorities' are largely asshole cops and sleazy politicians not literal Evil Overlords. Meanwhile people in developing nations might well overthrow governments and establish new ideologies entirely.
I've commented on that before in my rant on SI characters, though it also applies to fiction in general. To use Mass Effect as an example, I'm pretty sure that limited militia training or self defense training in no way prepares Tali or Liara for killing hundreds if not thousands of sapient beings over the course of the games. I mean in some ways I'd argue that shooting roomfuls of mooks is just an unrealistic videogame caveat, much like the 3-man squads, but the plot is still built around the assumption that what we see is what actually happens.
You know, if I ever did an SI, it would be a 'pacifist run' for good or ill... and its kind of sad that such would be a fairly unique premise as far as SI fics go, not counting those in settings which deal little with violent conflict to begin with. Embracing the violence is the norm, you maybe vomit once or twice and then you are ready to be teh FPS herodude.
My perspective is that the military would survive, but that a lot of said remnants would end up somewhere between the Enclave and Immortan Joe in behavior, which would be entirely fitting with the "humans are the real monsters" stories that the zombie apocalypse genre loves. But the zombie apocalypse genre loves authorities and contemporary society being weak and useless even more, unfortunately.
Yakuza's niche is in many ways a substitute for lawyers. Take that as you will.
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Shanejayell
Yuri Fan without a Pause
- Pronouns
- He
Ran into a story today (professionally published too) with the 'magic indian' trope. A magic using native american with healing powers who serves as the spirit guide to the white anglo saxon heroine.
I thought that went away in the 90's....
I thought that went away in the 90's....
It's pretty rare to see thousand year old beings - good or bad - actually show experience that should come with such age. It's as if they stopped caring after the first century and spent rest of their lives watching TV. Raw power might be there, but none of the cunning. Even the supposed masters of their crafts are just barely better than experts with normal lifespan. After certain point (which is "slightly longer than typical human lifespan"), all those extra years are pretty much wasted.
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Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
I dislike sliding down ropes in games where you only use your hands, or a gun, or a sword, or whatever, instead of the actual piece of equipment. The biggest offender was Dark Souls 2, where your Havelmonster who weight as much as a house was just as graceful as someone wearing normal clothes.
Annoys the living hell out of me.
Annoys the living hell out of me.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
To be fair, you could justify it. I mean, think about how Doctors have to read a shit-ton of new studies and journals and etc every year just to keep up with the changing state of medicine. It could be that they just started slacking off a little and so on.
And meanwhile other fields have a cap. Like, if you're immortal and immortally young but have no super-strength or reflexes or whatever, you can become a really, really good swordsman and gunslinger, sure, but it's going to be within human bounds. At most the upper end of it, after all.
Not so much something I hate as feeling uncomfortable when I see it, people being ripped out of things like mechs and tanks or having armour ripped off them piece by piece. Even when it happens to bad guys it usually makes me feel bad.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I mean yes there are tons of good explanations for why an immortal is not inhumanly skilled. Maybe you hit the limits of memory and are constantly forgetting things, maybe you don't even want to learn new things for fear that they might overwrite treasured memories. Maybe there's a limit to how many skills you can have not be rusty at any given time, I mean heck it can take a significant fraction of one's waking hours just to stay fit. Maybe immortals just tend to get stuck repeating the same comfortable behaviors over and over. Maybe immortals are paranoid and refuse to do anything risky that could endanger their eternity. These are all interesting questions explore.
They are also questions which works with immortals in them almost never explore, instead pursuing deep philosophical questions like "is it ok to fuck my loli waifu if she's actually 1000 years old?". Even works which do indulge in oh woe is me I'll outlive all my friends don't seriously explore immortal psychology or how eternal life would really work with regards to knowledge and expertise.
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- Location
- Canada
And that's assuming your consistent throughout your immortal years. I think there would be a desire after a while to completely reinvent myself every couple of hundred years to stave off boredom.
I like in Schlock Mercenary how Rod, a millions-year-old alien (with a fair sized amount of senility-by-design for mental stability reasons), has no medical training, it's just, by *trial and error* over time he's got a very good working knowledge of how biologies work.
Old beings should have an odd mix of knowing a lot/or at least enough to wing it, and gaps in knowledge and skill due to being out of date. And yea, most stuff doesn't handle immortality all that well.
Negima/UQ Holder, every ancient being is a powerful fighter, by necessity if nothing else... not all powerful fighters are immortals but immortals become powerful fighters, and we see some young beings gifted with immortality making that transition. Some of the older ones we know are quite multi-talented too. One of the key techniques in the series is one Evangeline *used* to rely on, but eventually discarded in favor of techniques that more suited her. She's also a puppet master, a completely different skillset, plus we've heard some of her titles cover things we've never seen, so it could very well be that she's had other discarded specialties.
Oh, in Dr. Who, there's Ashildr / Knightmare / 'Me', a pretty good one. She's an immortal with relatively short memory. Ashildr is multi-skilled, but for her history, she writes it down in journals to keep track, and basically moves with the times and often spends time just doing what's fun for her. She also destroys journals of memories that are too hard to keep. So, that was clever.
I wish!
Old beings should have an odd mix of knowing a lot/or at least enough to wing it, and gaps in knowledge and skill due to being out of date. And yea, most stuff doesn't handle immortality all that well.
Negima/UQ Holder, every ancient being is a powerful fighter, by necessity if nothing else... not all powerful fighters are immortals but immortals become powerful fighters, and we see some young beings gifted with immortality making that transition. Some of the older ones we know are quite multi-talented too. One of the key techniques in the series is one Evangeline *used* to rely on, but eventually discarded in favor of techniques that more suited her. She's also a puppet master, a completely different skillset, plus we've heard some of her titles cover things we've never seen, so it could very well be that she's had other discarded specialties.
Oh, in Dr. Who, there's Ashildr / Knightmare / 'Me', a pretty good one. She's an immortal with relatively short memory. Ashildr is multi-skilled, but for her history, she writes it down in journals to keep track, and basically moves with the times and often spends time just doing what's fun for her. She also destroys journals of memories that are too hard to keep. So, that was clever.
I wish!
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DezoPenguin
Text Wall
- Location
- USA
One thing about immortality: I very rarely see the idea that an immortal's memory works like a non-immortal's.
Like, think about languages that we use. If you go a few years without speaking/reading/writing a language, you'll be very clumsy at it. You can't remember the specifics of a conversation from five or ten years ago, let alone fifty, unless something planted it firmly in your mind.
That is, without some secondary magic, a thousand-year-old immortal would probably remember very little from way back when. Seminal events, sure. Maybe some general details, or a really cool memory about how the sunrise looked over the minarets of Constantinople in 1143 or something. But specific knowledge? Details of history? The kind of things about daily living and culture that would make an anthropologist salivate? "Hell if I remember" ought to be the natural response.
The example @Q99 gives from Dr. Who above is one I'd really like to see more often.
Edit: Also, on the personalities of immortals, one thing that would be interesting to explore is how we now understand that areas of the brain develop over time, through adolescence and into adulthood. So if you have an immortal who was 17 when they turned immortal, if their particular flavor of immortality deals with preservation of the condition of the body at that time, then while they might have a lot of knowledge and experience gained over the passing years, they'd still have the critical thinking skills of a teenager because they literally don't have an adult's brain. Which would actually justify some of the behavior of immortals in YA novels, come to think of it. But I'd like to see it discussed in greater depth. Peter Pan Syndrome, you could call it.
Like, think about languages that we use. If you go a few years without speaking/reading/writing a language, you'll be very clumsy at it. You can't remember the specifics of a conversation from five or ten years ago, let alone fifty, unless something planted it firmly in your mind.
That is, without some secondary magic, a thousand-year-old immortal would probably remember very little from way back when. Seminal events, sure. Maybe some general details, or a really cool memory about how the sunrise looked over the minarets of Constantinople in 1143 or something. But specific knowledge? Details of history? The kind of things about daily living and culture that would make an anthropologist salivate? "Hell if I remember" ought to be the natural response.
The example @Q99 gives from Dr. Who above is one I'd really like to see more often.
Edit: Also, on the personalities of immortals, one thing that would be interesting to explore is how we now understand that areas of the brain develop over time, through adolescence and into adulthood. So if you have an immortal who was 17 when they turned immortal, if their particular flavor of immortality deals with preservation of the condition of the body at that time, then while they might have a lot of knowledge and experience gained over the passing years, they'd still have the critical thinking skills of a teenager because they literally don't have an adult's brain. Which would actually justify some of the behavior of immortals in YA novels, come to think of it. But I'd like to see it discussed in greater depth. Peter Pan Syndrome, you could call it.
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Or it might just be that they learned it once, stopped training once it stopped being relevant or they got bored, and lost what they learned after a few decades or centuries of being undead.
Martial arts is very much a "use-it-or-lose-it" skill. Stop training for a while, and lose a lot of proficiency. And considering undead monsters seem to have a lot of time to forget things in...
Or, another possibility: they were so used to having supernatural strength and using that to stomp faces into the curb that they never bothered acquiring skills in martial arts.
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ApocalypticFish
Been reflecting lately.
Related to the immortality discussion:
Writing Better Immortal & Long-Lived Characters - Springhole.net
Tax: Only the main characters being important with no justification. Not so much that I can't stand it, but I just want to let out a sigh whenever I see it. It's bad writing.
Writing Better Immortal & Long-Lived Characters - Springhole.net
Tax: Only the main characters being important with no justification. Not so much that I can't stand it, but I just want to let out a sigh whenever I see it. It's bad writing.
It's also a bit 'riding a bicycle.' If you're still in shape, you'll pick it back up fast.
If that was the case, I would be a lot better at martial arts than I currently am.
Riding a bycicle is simple in term of biomechanics. Fighting? Not so much.
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
The eternal bane of LN protagonists. Sadly it does the MC as much a disservice as everyone else since a character tends to be defined by how they play off of other characters, which usually requires them to need something from those other characters be it material aid, specialized skills, or simple companionship.
Which is also why from what I can tell (pardon me if I'm wrong since I've only skimmed it) Saitama is such a good portrayal of an overpowered character. The story isn't just about Saitama. In fact a lot of it is about other people playing off of him.
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Ah, that link covers most of my issues with "immortal" characters perfectly. It's not so much that they get their asses kicked by teenagers, because they didn't get black belt in every single martial art in history (while inventing most of them, too). It's about them not acting like actual adults - nevermind ones that lived through centuries, observed the world around them, adjusted to changes and made sure no overeager do-gooder stabbed them during all that time. You don't do that by attracting attention to yourself in most juvenile ways, being absurdly overconfident and careless.
The "sex" part is also pretty spot on - although probably not in the way the author intended. It's more of "oh, this loli? actually thousand year old, it's totally fine to oogle her non existant chest... she's so pure and innocent, it will be so great when she finally falls love in
- Location
- Singapore
This page by Awkward Zombie?
- Location
- Singapore
- Location
- BaWü
I found that the link has some problems like for example the every moment counts part, where it ignores that it would have been pretty easy to ignore progress for some years and don't change much.
If you don't look to young you can easily do a job for twenty years and just have a routine in doing it.
- Location
- Charlotte, NC
I dunno, I think the
I dunno. I wasn't really a fan of the immortality bits there, because you could apply everything in microcosm to, say, middle-aged people, and it's not necessarily true.
I kind of want to read a story where the immortal is macking on the teenager and justifies it with "Look, from my perspective, the difference between 15-year-old stupidity and 45-year-old stupidity is really, really small, and this way, I've got a great chance to stop my partner from falling into bad habits early. Plus, you know, they're hotter, and since it's been perfectly legitimate to mack on teenagers for 95% of my centuries-long life, I'm not going to stop now.", and keeps with all of the designed-to-appeal-to-teen-romance cliches as a nakedly cold-blooded tactic, treating the whole thing simply as steps in a dance they know very, very well.
And depending on the style of immortality, if it comes with a large enough serving of superpowers, such that the immortals in question are just ridiculously hard to kill, then it's not necessarily true that they'd be attrited down and necessarily be reasonable and less aggressive. Telling stories where Centuries-Old Mid-Boss opposition vampire sasses the PC and gets staked out of hand is quite terrible, of course, but I feel like most of the items in the list are super-specific, and that there's a lot of hidden genre assumptions encoded there. You can tell reasonable stories in which you ignore every single point the article makes, but each time you make that choice, you're saying something specific about the world.
I dunno. I wasn't really a fan of the immortality bits there, because you could apply everything in microcosm to, say, middle-aged people, and it's not necessarily true.
I kind of want to read a story where the immortal is macking on the teenager and justifies it with "Look, from my perspective, the difference between 15-year-old stupidity and 45-year-old stupidity is really, really small, and this way, I've got a great chance to stop my partner from falling into bad habits early. Plus, you know, they're hotter, and since it's been perfectly legitimate to mack on teenagers for 95% of my centuries-long life, I'm not going to stop now.", and keeps with all of the designed-to-appeal-to-teen-romance cliches as a nakedly cold-blooded tactic, treating the whole thing simply as steps in a dance they know very, very well.
And depending on the style of immortality, if it comes with a large enough serving of superpowers, such that the immortals in question are just ridiculously hard to kill, then it's not necessarily true that they'd be attrited down and necessarily be reasonable and less aggressive. Telling stories where Centuries-Old Mid-Boss opposition vampire sasses the PC and gets staked out of hand is quite terrible, of course, but I feel like most of the items in the list are super-specific, and that there's a lot of hidden genre assumptions encoded there. You can tell reasonable stories in which you ignore every single point the article makes, but each time you make that choice, you're saying something specific about the world.
DezoPenguin
Text Wall
- Location
- USA
Which is fine, if your immortal character is a villain. That attitude is "borderline sexual predator attempting to get laid," which is not precisely the character trait for a romantic lead, which itself falls into your point of:
Because obviously, yeah, the question of "why would an immortal fall in love with a teenager?" is directly centered on romance novels (both YA, where the protagonists are teenagers, and historicals, where they can often fall in that c.18-y.o. range) where a vampire/fae/whatever is the romantic lead.