Biological Sense

Darzian said:

edit: Oh, and I've also come across main characters who've lost enough blood to fill the atlantic ocean suddenly jump up and have a vicious sword fight with the evil overlord and somehow overcome and kill him despite the oxygen deprivation that the MC's brain would be experiencing.

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People who collapse due to oxygen deprivation are pussies. Real Men breathe their own Awesome, and hence can fight underwater, in space, with all their blood on the floor, or all three at the same time, which is so cool it doesn't even make any sense.

stones statues return to life.

Let's consider the last one. A body requires so and so to live, and thousands of metabolic reactions keep it going. If it becomes frozen into stone, and is awakened hundreds of years later by some magic, would you accept that easily?

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There goes cryogenics

Yes, yes I would. I don't need / want every letter of the magic law explained to me, as long as I am made sufficiently aware that in the book's universe this makes sense. Because there's a few scientists reckon it could work in this one

People who collapse due to oxygen deprivation are pussies

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It's not a real man's injury unless it involves undead viking pirate ninja dragons.

IdiotsRUs said:

It's not a real man's injury unless it involves undead viking pirate ninja dragons.

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Careful! You don't want to cram too much pure Awesome into any one sentence. You might crash the site...

I think it's a matter of consistency. If the novel is written sort of lyrically and all this crazy shit is happening, then I think it's ok to have statues coming to life and people filling lakes with blood or whatever. But if it's more achored to the real world, then I think that there has to be a little science.

Mr. Chuckletrousers said:

People who collapse due to oxygen deprivation are pussies. Real Men breathe their own Awesome, and hence can fight underwater, in space, with all their blood on the floor, or all three at the same time, which is so cool it doesn't even make any sense.

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IdiotsRUs said:

There goes cryogenics

Yes, yes I would. I don't need / want every letter of the magic law explained to me, as long as I am made sufficiently aware that in the book's universe this makes sense. Because there's a few scientists reckon it could work in this one


It's not a real man's injury unless it involves undead viking pirate ninja dragons.

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<<ALERT: COOLNESS EXCESS BREACH: NOMINALLY A NOMINAL EGG: TRUE EXTENT: NOT ESTIMABLE>>

IdiotsRUs is right, if in the given universe it makes sense, then that's fine.

I think it really depends on the audience, and on what you're trying to convey.
If your story is very poetical, and deals with abstract themes, it might be fine to use these as tools to that purpose. If everything makes down-to-earth sense during the whole story and at the end the MC suddenly transforms into a ninja and kills the villain, then you'd have a problem.

I would say that it's safe to assume that cryogenics is still in experimental stages. I sincerely doubt that today's technology is enough even for the freezing stage, but perhaps I should study the matter more before commenting.

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Oh it's experimental now yes. But completely accepted as a near future possibility no? Demolition Man, Austin Powers, Alien/s ( ie suspended animation I don't think it was actually explained the method), Sleeper....I never once though 'Impossible!', because theories suggest that it may be possible, just we haven't figured it out yet.

Of course that's by the by - it depends on your universe and how you've constructed it

you're using Austin Powers to hold an argument?

Koganei said:

you're using Austin Powers to hold an argument?

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Yeah, I was sort of blown away by that too.

Lol, ok, fair point ( it just popped in my head) but what about the others?

And even in Austin Powers did you think 'That could never happen in this universe?' - well other than a man with such bad teeth got laid so much obviously. And the clincher? It worked for that story.

Hehe, it was a good point. I was just jesting

It's conceivable tech, that's for sure.
Even if it's not possible, if it obeys its own rules (as in, if it's a self-consistent system), you'll be fine.

"I've seen books where your guts are torn out but you still move,"

It takes quite a while to die after disemboweling, as long as no major blood vessels are injured and the intestines aren't ruptured (maybe days). In the jolly old days of "drawn and quartered", the prisoner was drawn (disemboweled) and hung up in a cage so people could watch him die, slowly, and then cut into pieces afterward.

Darzian said:

Let's consider the last one. A body requires so and so to live, and thousands of metabolic reactions keep it going. If it becomes frozen into stone, and is awakened hundreds of years later by some magic, would you accept that easily?

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Yes I would accept it easily. It's MAGIC. You said so yourself.

I have an extremely willing ability to suspend belief. In fantasy.

Now if it was a say, a real life thriller where some of those things happened, no, not so much. People die in real life from shock from wounds.

I must confess, my MC seems to withstand an unusual number of possible concussions and still gets around just fine. Thing is, I'm just about certain she wouldn't be as...sturdy?...as she is in her real world (she enters an alternate world in my stories). So there must be something about the act of entering the fantasy world that makes her better able to withstand injury. I haven't explained this in the stories, mind you, though I really should.

I'm with other opinions--if it fits into the physics of the world then I don't care how implausible it is. People can come back to life under certain conditions in my fantasy world and, even though in real life there would be a LOT of physical things to explain, in my fantasy world I see nothing wrong with it. (Giant birds also cause thunderstorms in my fantasy world. That totally confuses my "real-world" MC when she learns of it--but the fantasy world occupants laugh at her real-world explanation of how thunderstorms are formed because they find it so silly.) Now, of course, the same conditions don't apply in the "real world" my injury-prone MC comes from, so I'd find such things as repeated concussions or resurrection from the dead harder to believe if they took place there (unless under certain conditions or with an explanation in place), and in completely different stories I write, such events would make no sense at all.

I guess what I'm saying in my usual blathery way is it depends. I'm a real fence-sitter, aren't I?

ETA: I just came up with a better way to put it. In one scene of my fantasy story, another "real-world" character demands to know how a rock formation's interior is bigger, areawise, than the outside circumference of the rock. To which my aforementioned MC snaps, "I didn't come here to do math!"

Adrenaline can make a person able to do extraordinary feats of strength or endurance for minutes, but the flip side is days if not weeks of recovery for millions of stressed/torn/decimated muscle fibers. Lifting a paper cup of water would beyond that person's ability for days.

As far as stone to flesh--and back--magic and faith. If you accept centaurs, satyrs, 4-armed giants or any stretch of the human form, there's a close real medical match: Calcification in muscles and of embryos happens all the time--turning the soft tissue into rock. Women have carried 'stone babies' unknowingly. Children are born with extra limbs and twins are fused in many ways, often with a parasitic sibling whose only appearance is a body or part coming from the torso of the survivor.

People drop dead from strokes & heart attacks --or was it a spell or an elf shot?

With a little work and imagination, anything goes in fantasy, just like in RL.

I don’t have a problem with incidents mentioned earlier happening in a fantasy as long as it doesn’t feel like Deus ex Machina. If these miraculous physical feats come out of no where and solve the plot I feel it weakens the story significantly. If for whatever reason it’s possible in the fantasy world I’m fine with it. As long as the worlds rules are in place and contain a logical consistency within the story I’m fine with pretty much anything.

Human innards are gross and absurdly fragile and diseasable, I think the idea of a 'human' body that is more spiritually-powered and regenerative and doesn't have much inside besides blood and a soul is an important positive ingredient of escapist and wish-fullfillment fantasy. I know that after having gone through a cat-scan and an MRI and several sonograms the results of which were several incomprehensible pictures of blobs which I was assured were my liver, and no 'cure' because after all that they still didn't really know what was wrong, I would really prefer not to read about realistic injuries or medical problems.