This week: Consequences Edited by: Waltz Invictus  
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When anger rises, think of the consequences.
—Confucius
Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.
—Margaret J. Wheatley
Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.
—Alfred A. Montapert |
Actions have consequences.
Thoughts have consequences too, especially when you translate those thoughts into a story. It pays to think through what those consequences may be.
I've been playing FRPGs for a long time, almost since the introduction of the original Dungeons and Dragons. And one of the common tropes of those games is the concept of resurrection.
Such a concept is useful in games involving swords and sorcery. Or lasers and death rays; my comments here are equally applicable to science fiction and fantasy. Point is, your character can "die," so there's an in-game mechanism to bring them back into the game if the player and gamemaster want that to happen. It's also a convenient way to recycle old villains if the gamemaster is feeling lazy.
That's fine. It's a game. It's part of the rules, like what you need to do to get out of Jail on a Monopoly board.
But if you're writing a story, the concept of resurrection can be tricky. If it's available to everyone, it has the potential to lower the stakes. So if you use it, it's a good idea to consider both in-universe (what happens when death isn't permanent) and meta (how to still get the readers to be invested in the story).
Superhero comics, in particular (which tend to mix tropes from science fiction and fantasy), are notorious for never leaving anyone permanently dead. It's gotten so it's hard for me, a fan of such material, to keep track of who's alive, dead, in limbo, replaced by an alt-universe copy, cloned, restored via time travel antics, etc. within any particular continuity.
I'm not saying "don't use it," mind you. Just consider the repercussions.
It's not just that particular trope, of course. Any magical, technological, or techno-magical element that's not a part of our consensus reality has the potential to change other aspects of the world, just as the introduction of, say, passenger air travel all but destroyed the ocean liner industry; or how automobiles relegated horses to racing and hobbies.
So if you introduce, for example, teleportation, what need would your society have for horses, cars, airplanes, or ocean liners?
Sometimes we introduce something new to help write ourselves out of plot holes, only to find we've dug the hole deeper. Try not to do that. |
Consider the consequences of reading these:
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Last time, in "Preservation" , I talked about food preservation in a Fantasy/SF context.
Seems like everyone was too busy canning their produce for the winter to comment.
So that's it for me for December! See you next year. Until then,
DREAM ON!!!
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Fantasy: December 10, 2025 Issue [#13485]
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