Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

lsunnyc:

celynbrum:

somethingdnd:

lsunnyc:

can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?

You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.

You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.

You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.

You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?

Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog? 

Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.

Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.

But man.

That stuff is scary.

shit just got creepy

Or maybe magical healing doesn’t leave scars or damage. It is magical, after all.

So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.

And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.

Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?

How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.

How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.

How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?

And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?

How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…

…what makes me so different?

Here we go someone who GETS IT.

Not gonna lie, this is my number one consideration when I’m constructing magical universes.  If magic can heal, what effect does it have?  Do you retain some of the damage?  Can it only heal to a point?  Does it heal EVERYTHING, right down to the aging of your cells?  Does it force your body through the usual healing process, just really really fast, and leave behind knotted scars and damaged bone?  Does someone else have to take on the damage so that a soldier can keep fighting (and what does that do to the soldier, when a mage walks out onto the battlefield and dies of blood loss without a blade laid on them)?  Does magic stop working at ‘death’ or can you raise someone whose heart is stopped?  Does magic take time to heal–if someone is bleeding out from a slit throat, could they die during the healing?  What price does the healer pay for the healing?  Are they weary, are they injured, are they sick?  What price does the healed pay for the healing?  What kind of trauma does that leave?

Magic is only interesting if you pay a price.

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

Helpful things for action writers to remember

berrybird:

• Sticking a landing will royally fuck up your joints and possibly shatter your ankles, depending on how high you’re jumping/falling from. There’s a very good reason free-runners dive and roll. 
• Hand-to-hand fights usually only last a matter of seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s exhausting work and unless you have a lot of training and history with hand-to-hand combat, you’re going to tire out really fast. 
• Arrows are very effective and you can’t just yank them out without doing a lot of damage. Most of the time the head of the arrow will break off inside the body if you try pulling it out, and arrows are built to pierce deep. An arrow wound demands medical attention. 
• Throwing your opponent across the room is really not all that smart. You’re giving them the chance to get up and run away. Unless you’re trying to put distance between you so you can shoot them or something, don’t throw them. 
• Everyone has something called a “flinch response” when they fight. This is pretty much the brain’s way of telling you “get the fuck out of here or we’re gonna die.” Experienced fighters have trained to suppress this. Think about how long your character has been fighting. A character in a fist fight for the first time is going to take a few hits before their survival instinct kicks in and they start hitting back. A character in a fist fight for the eighth time that week is going to respond a little differently. 
• ADRENALINE WORKS AGAINST YOU WHEN YOU FIGHT. THIS IS IMPORTANT. A lot of times people think that adrenaline will kick in and give you some badass fighting skills, but it’s actually the opposite. Adrenaline is what tires you out in a battle and it also affects the fighter’s efficacy - meaning it makes them shaky and inaccurate, and overall they lose about 60% of their fighting skill because their brain is focusing on not dying. Adrenaline keeps you alive, it doesn’t give you the skill to pull off a perfect roundhouse kick to the opponent’s face. 
• Swords WILL bend or break if you hit something hard enough. They also dull easily and take a lot of maintenance. In reality, someone who fights with a sword would have to have to repair or replace it constantly.
• Fights get messy. There’s blood and sweat everywhere, and that will make it hard to hold your weapon or get a good grip on someone. 
• A serious battle also smells horrible. There’s lots of sweat, but also the smell of urine and feces. After someone dies, their bowels and bladder empty. There might also be some questionable things on the ground which can be very psychologically traumatizing. Remember to think about all of the character’s senses when they’re in a fight. Everything WILL affect them in some way. 
• If your sword is sharpened down to a fine edge, the rest of the blade can’t go through the cut you make. You’ll just end up putting a tiny, shallow scratch in the surface of whatever you strike, and you could probably break your sword. 
• ARCHERS ARE STRONG TOO. Have you ever drawn a bow? It takes a lot of strength, especially when you’re shooting a bow with a higher draw weight. Draw weight basically means “the amount of force you have to use to pull this sucker back enough to fire it.” To give you an idea of how that works, here’s a helpful link to tell you about finding bow sizes and draw weights for your characters.  (CLICK ME)
• If an archer has to use a bow they’re not used to, it will probably throw them off a little until they’ve done a few practice shots with it and figured out its draw weight and stability. 
• People bleed. If they get punched in the face, they’ll probably get a bloody nose. If they get stabbed or cut somehow, they’ll bleed accordingly. And if they’ve been fighting for a while, they’ve got a LOT of blood rushing around to provide them with oxygen. They’re going to bleed a lot. 
• Here’s a link to a chart to show you how much blood a person can lose without dying. (CLICK ME) 
• If you want a more in-depth medical chart, try this one. (CLICK ME)

Hopefully this helps someone out there. If you reblog, feel free to add more tips for writers or correct anything I’ve gotten wrong here. 

(via amusewithaview)

pilferingapples:

marauders4evr:

See, the problem with people who aren’t in wheelchairs writing about and/or drawing people who are in (manual) wheelchairs is that the people who aren’t in wheelchairs tend to think that there’s only like four movements that you do in a wheelchair. You can either push forward, push backwards, turn left, or turn right. And the characters do it all while sitting up straight or bending forward so that their noses touch their knees.

But the amount of motions that I go through on a daily basis are actually amazing. And the body language…you could write an entire book on the body language of someone in a wheelchair.

Like right now, I’m more relaxed, so I’m slouching slightly. I’ve got my right foot on its footrest and the left foot on the ground. Every so often, as I stop to think of something to say, I’ll push with my left foot to rock the chair slightly.

But usually, I sit mostly upright with my upper-half slightly leaned forward. When I’m wheeling across the campus, especially if I have somewhere that I need to be, I’ll lean and shift my weight in whichever direction it is that I’m going. It helps make the wheelchair glide that much more smoothly. How far/dramatically I lean depends on how fast I’m going, the terrain, if there’s a turn, etc.

Plus people who don’t use wheelchairs don’t understand the relationship between grabbing the wheels, pushing, and the chair moving. Like I’ve seen things written or have seen people try to use a chair where the character/that person grabs the wheel every single second and never lets go to save their lives. Which isn’t right. The key is to do long, strong, pushes that allow you to move several feet before repeating. I can usually get about ten feet in before I have to push again. It’s kind of like riding a scooter. You don’t always need to push. You push, then ride, then push, then ride, etc.

And because of this, despite what many people think, people in wheelchairs can actually multitask. I’ve carried Starbucks drinks across the campus without spilling a single drop. Because it’s possible to wheel one-handed (despite what most people think), especially when you shift your weight. And if I need to alternate between pushing both wheels, I’ll just swap hands during the ‘glide’ time.

I’ve also noticed that people who don’t use wheelchairs, for some reason, have no idea how to turn a wheelchair. It’s the funniest thing. Like I see it written or, again, have seen people ‘try’ a wheelchair where they’re reaching across their bodies to try to grab one wheel and push or they try to push both wheels at the same time and don’t understand. (For the record, you pull back a wheel and push a wheel. The direction that you’re going is the side that you pull back.)

Back to body language. Again, no idea why most people think that we always sit upright and nothing else. Maybe when I’m in meetings or other formal settings, but most of the time, I do slightly slouch/lean. As for the hands…A lot of writers put the wheelchair user’s hands on the armrests but the truth is, most armrests sit too far back to actually put your hands on. There are times when I’ll put my elbows on the edges of the armrests and will put my hands between my legs. Note: Not on my lap. That’s another thing that writers do but putting your hands in your lap is actually not a natural thing to do when you’re in a wheelchair, due to the angle that you’re sitting and the armrests. Most of the time, I’ll just sort of let my arms loosely fall on either side of the chair, so that my hands are next to my wheels but not grabbing them. That’s another form of body language. I’ve talked to a few people who have done it and I do it myself. If I’m ever anxious or in a situation where I want to leave for one reason or another, I will usually grip my handrims - one hand near the front , one hand near the back. And if I’m really nervous, you’ll find me leaning further and further into the chair, running my hands along the handrims.

Also, on a related subject - a character’s legs should usually be at 90 degree angles, the cushion should come to about their knees, and the armrests should come to about their elbows. You can always tell that an actor is not a wheelchair user when their wheelchair isn’t designed to their dimensions. (Their knees are usually inches away from the seats and are up at an angle, the armrests are too high, etc.) Plus they don’t know how to drive the chair.

Let’s see, what else? Only certain bags can go on the back of the chair without scraping against the wheels, so, no, your teenagers in wheelchairs can’t put their big, stylish, purses on the back. We don’t always use gloves since most gloves actually aren’t that helpful (as stated above, wheeling is a very fluid motion and gloves tend to constrict movements). Height differences are always a thing to remember. If you’re going for the “oh no, my wheelchair is broken” trope, nobody really has ‘flat’ tires anymore thanks to the new material for the wheels but it is possible to have things break off. We use the environment a lot. I always push off of walls or grab onto corners or kick off of the floor etc. Wheelchair parkour should really become a thing. 

This is all of the physical things to think about. I could write a thesis on the emotional treatment of your characters with disabilities. But for now, I think that I’ll stop here. For my followers in wheelchairs, is there anything that I left out?

Also why isn’t wheelchair parkour a thing? Somebody make wheelchair parkour a thing.

This is all REALLY GOOD and I wish something like this would be in more art guidebooks and classes. 

One thing I’d add is that some of the posture stuff here is specific to wheelchair users who have the right chair; a lot of people (hi, past me) have to use chairs that aren’t at all the correct size, and that’s going to change posture, ease of use, etc.  That’s such a broad variable that it’s probably useless to try and cover here, but it’s something to be aware of and research if it seems relevant to a character. 

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

Things I’ve always wondered

swanjolras:

eshusplayground:

1. A gentile vampire turns a promising Torah scholar into a vampire. Is the scholar still permitted to study Torah? Are they still under the yoke of the mitzvot? How does vampirism impact observant Jewish practice? Are they still Jewish, or are they apostates? Would it be permissible for the scholar to turn other people into vampires to cure them of terminal illnesses?
   
2. To what degree are Jewish werewolves morally responsible for their actions while under the influence of the full moon? What must they do if they eat treyf in their wolf form?
   
3. If, for some reason, we must leave earth for another inhabitable planet on the other side of the galaxy, what do we do about holidays and observing Shabbat? Would we go by earth time or local time? What if this planet has no moon or more than one moon? How would we face Jerusalem to pray?
   
4. Can aliens convert to Judaism? If so, does it only apply to humanoid aliens like the greys, or would reptilian aliens and ilithids be able to convert too?
   
5. Can sentient machines like the Terminator convert to Judaism? What about Agents from The Matrix?
   
6. Speaking of The Matrix, are we still obligated to obey the mitzvot even if we are literally brains in jars or living in a simulated reality created by computer programs? What happens if we’re freed and whatever basis for our Jewish identity we had is no longer present or certain. Are we still Jews? Do we still have a covenant?
   

speaking with my minimal scholarly experience but also opening this up for all jews to contribute:

1. i don’t see any reason why such a promising torah scholar shouldn’t be allowed to continue to study torah, but practicing judaism would be difficult: blood of all animals is probably treyf, and blood of humans is definitely treyf, so a jewish vampire would have to break mitzvot on a nearly constant basis to survive. however under pikuach nefesh i feel like were the vampire literally about to die, they could consume human or animal blood. therefore a jewish vampire would have to live in a state of starvation at all times, which would probably have a fascinating impact on his torah study.

2. a shoteh is not held responsible for their actions by human or divine courts. maimonides defines a shoteh as any mentally unstable person - for our purposes, a jewish werewolf in wolf form can probably be seen as under the influence of mental instability, and is not responsible for their actions under the law.

3. this is fascinating because when we face jerusalem in america, we face east - even though, physically speaking, jerusalem is somewhere under us, on the other side of the globe. for this reason i’m inclined to avoid the obvious answer, “face earth”. perhaps it would be possible to face, in general, the stars? going by “earth time” seems logistically impossible, since earth has 24 separate times. i think this will be a separate issue for every planet.

4. we are already a reptilian alien race, this question is moot.

5. if robots cannot convert to judaism i am quitting. more seriously: this seems like a good place for the analogy of the four children: the simple robot asks, “what is all this”, i.e., judaism, and you download information about it into his database; the wicked robot asks, “what does all this mean to you,” i.e., humans, and you reply, “we are doing a human thing; if you were a human, you would not be part of it, either”; the wise robot asks, “can you please explain the laws and customs of judaism to me, fellow sentients” and you do so and allow him to convert if he wishes it; and the robot who does not know enough to ask a question does not pass the turing test, so the point is moot.

6. oh yeah, we’d totally still be jews! it’s like finding out for sure there’s no god - maybe it’s gonna stop some people from practicing judaism, but not most of us.

(via lupinatic)