@betterbemeta are you able to translate this? Is it true horses can see netherbeings?? Will we ever know the extent of their powers???
I think I have reblogged this before but I’ll answer it again bc its a fascinating answer I feel and i was more funny than informational last time.
The truth is that horses see what they think are nether beings, I guess. They have a perfect storm of sensory perception that, useful for prey beings, marks false positives on mortal danger all the time. Which is advantageous to a flight-based prey species: running from danger when you’re super fast is much ‘cheaper’ than fighting, so you waste almost nothing from running from a threat that’s not there. Versus, you blow everything if you don’t see a threat that is there.
Horses also have their eyes positioned on the sides of their heads, which gives them an incredible range of peripheral vision almost around their entire body with only a few blind spots you can sneak up on them in. But this comes at the cost of binocular vision; they can only judge distance for things straight ahead of them. Super useful for preventing predators sneaking up from the sides or behind, but useless for recognizing familiar shapes with the precision we can.
Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety its going to get attacked at any second, that can see almost everything, but mostly only out of the corner of its eye. It has a few blind spots and anything that suddenly appears out of them is terrifying to it. Combine that with that it actually has far superior low-light vision than us, and that its ears can swivel in any directions like radar dishes, and you’ve basically given a nervous wreck a highly accurate but imprecise danger-dar.
To be concise: all horses, even the most chill horses, on some level believe they are living in a survival horror.
This means that you could approach it in a flapping poncho and if it can’t recognize your shape as human, they mistake you for SATAN… or you could pass this one broken down tractor you’ve passed 100 times on a trail ride, but today is the day it will ATTACK… or your horse could feel a horsefly bite from its blind spot and MAMA, I’VE BEEN HIT!!!… or you could both approach a fallen log in the woods but in the low light your horse is going to see the tree rings as THE EYE OF MORDOR.
However, they actually have kind of a cool compensation for this– they are social animals, and instinctively look towards leadership. In the wild or out at pasture, this is their most willful, pushy, decisive leader horse who decides where to go and where it’s safe. But humans often take this role both as riders and on the ground. They are always watching and feeling for human reactions to things. This is why moving in a calm, decisive way and always giving clear commands is key to working with this kind of animal. Confusing commands, screaming, panic, visible distress, and chaos will signal to a horse that you, brave leader are freaked out… so it should freak out too!
On one hand, you’ll get horses that will decide that they are the leader and you are not, so getting them to listen to you can be tough– requiring patience and skill more than force. On the other hand, a good enough rider and a well-trained horse (or a horse with specialized training) can venture into dangerous situations, loud and scary environments, etc. calmly and confidently.
The joke in OP though is that many horses that are bred to be very fast, like thoroughbreds, are also bred and encouraged to be high-energy and highstrung. Making them more anxious and prone to seeing those ‘demons.’ All horses in a sense are going to be your anxious friend, but racehorses and polo ponies and other sport horses can sometimes be your anxious friend that thinks they live in Silent Hill.
Reblogging some horse knowledge for certain people who write fantasy books but know nothing about horses *cough cough*
This is more of a joke on Thoroughbreds than horses in general. Thoroughbreds are stereotypically scared of everything.
Like, if I wanted to do this meme with Appaloosas I’d be like
lol I love Appaloosas so much
and meanwhile all ponies are just satan incarnate
I found a quality pony meme:
It is fucking amazing that people managed to get horses to regularly RIDE INTO BATTLES in the olden days of war honestly
Every time I see a cavalry charge in an old war movie I’m like “God look at those horses ignoring every fear instinct in their bodies like some motherfucking heroes”
Imagine someone rewriting Horse Club as a Survival horror from the horses perspective
Anonymous asked: “What would be the best way to write a character who develops PTSD? She was abducted for a couple of weeks, and I thought it’d make the story more realistic. She’s a pretty strong character, but I’m also stuck with how her colleagues, especially one who’s particularly close to her, could help her.
This is a very good question. Writing a character with a psychological disorder can be confusing and difficult at first, it is definitely not impossible.
A tip you often hear is, “Write what you know.“ That’s great, but sometimes you want to write something that you don’t know. Rather than producing a very inaccurate/unrealistic depiction of a serious mental disorder, it’s best to learn everything you possibly can about it. That said, I’m glad you asked!
I want to give you something to chew on:
Fiction is the means by which we can escape reality by immersing ourselves in it.
You are taking on the task of creating a character who develops a very human disorder, because you want it to be true-to-life, to be realistic. Great! Realism is a worthy aspiration. I’d be worried if a character who was abducted for two weeks showed absolutely no signs of damage from the experience.
The first thing I would encourage every writer to do—no matter what kind of character you are creating—is research. Always, always, research. We have an article pertaining to writing mental disorders. Hopefully that can answer some parts of the question, so once you’ve read that, proceed (or ignore us and proceed anyway)!
In this article, we will try to examine writing PTSD specifically, starting with how to research psychological disorders. Yes, that was plural. It is possible for a person to have more than one psychological disorder after experiencing a trauma. That is why it is important to brush up on a variety of disorders related to PTSD. You want to pinpoint the character’s symptoms so you can best depict her experience with the disorder.
Find someone qualified. Do you know anyone (family/friend/acquaintance) who is a qualified social worker/therapist/counselor/psychologist? If you do, reach out to them. They not only possess experience in working with people who have psychological disorders, they can fact-check the realism of your story.
Find someone who lived/lives it. If you know someone who is willing to talk about his or her PTSD, that person would be a terrific resource for you. Be very careful, however, of the way that you approach the treatment of a person’s mental disorder, especially in a dialogue face-to-face. Prepare specific questions, vet these questions through another person who knows your resource personally to be sure that they don’t cross a line, and remember that, while you strive to write something fictional, your resource actually lived/lives their trauma. Behave yourself and be respectful.
Google! Search terms like “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” “Mental disorders,” and “Survivors of assault”. It’s important to learn about the disorder itself, and the people who actually experience(d) it. There are support groups online. We don’t want to say infiltrate them, but there are good resources and first-hand accounts of experiences with it that may benefit your writing.
Read up. Books covering a wide range of mental disorders can be found in most any book store–the most famous being the DMS-IV-TR. Self-help books are also a valuable place to look, although PTSD is best when treated with help from a trained professional. See also: Every TV show that brings in counselors after a traumatic event occurs. Not everything you see how TV is accurate, but that part is at least worth watching.
Researching the disorders in question will allow you to consider your character more realistically, which leads to more realistic writing.
Secondly, you need to research your character. That must sound odd, because unless this is a fan fiction piece and you can look up a backstory or biography, your character is original, a.k.a. created by you. Trust me, you’ve got plenty to do.
Questions to ask yourself on this front:
What was the character like before the abduction? Was she very outgoing and gregarious? Shy and reserved? Understanding your character is key in terms of understanding how she will react to trauma. Let’s take a look at the meaning of psychological trauma, as explained by Dr. Kathleen Young:
Psychological trauma is the result of extraordinarily stressful events that shatter your sense of security and result in you feeling helpless, alone and vulnerable in a dangerous world. (x)
This is important because experiencing trauma in any case causes a change in the victim. It can impede the emotional development in adolescents, and snap an adult into a depressed, sometimes child-like state. You want to show that change in the character. Perhaps, your character is facing the hardships of piecing herself back together in the aftermath of the abduction – being “strong” as she was, the experience will undoubtedly be a blow to her perception of herself.
What’s the character like after the abduction? How do you show these changes? In many cases, the effects are obvious (anxiety, nightmares, etc.) There will be more subtle differences as well. For example:
Eva Mendez Kor, a Holocaust survivor (check out the documentary, Forgiving Dr. Mengele.) She experienced PTSD after her experiences in Dr. Mengele’s despicable twin research endeavors. Friends and family notice long-term effects from the trauma she sustained at Aushwitz. These include: a heightened sense of resourcefulness and never leaving her plate with food left on it.
So, maybe your character is more alert of her surroundings, more jumpy, very sensitive to what are called “triggers” or, things that can set off the disorder such as; yelling, being touched, hearing about abductions, hearing a phrase or term used by her abductors, etc.
Now for that close friend of your character’s. Support is very important to the recovery from a disorder like PTSD. I would encourage you to go through the same research process that I outlined for researching the disorder to find resources on what a loved one can do to help a friend coping with PTSD.
A couple of suggestions:
Can this person be a confidant? Maybe he/she is the first person your character really opens up to about the abduction – that’s a great way to show that there is trust in the relationship.
Is this person silently observant? Maybe this person takes special note of the changes in her character after the abduction and they have some kind of “unspoken trust” about it, where the moment she begins to falter, the friend is at her side.
Or, of course, whatever you think of as an alternative.
Once you are equipped with all of your shiny new knowledge about your character and PTSD, the next feasible step is to write! Implement what you learn into your story.
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?
I think it’s hilarious when people are talking about height differences in ships and they think it’s all sunshine and rainbows, but as a friend and I were just discussing: I am tiny (at only about 5'2") while my husband is tall (6'3") and built like a house. I know what it’s like to be in a relationship like this, so please consider:
*The tiny one trying to reach something on the top shelf and the big one coming by to scoop them up and lift them with one hand so they can reach it.
*The big one has a bigger vehicle so they can stretch their legs out and the tiny one has to run and hop into it
*The big one can’t get their shoulders through a doorway and gets stuck like twice while the tiny one just slips through and laughs at them
*(my husband does this to me every so often) the tiny one caught in an uncomfortable conversation so the tall one just comes over and picks them up, puts them on their hip like a toddler, and carries them away.
*The tiny one is the scary one
*The big one is a big softie and a nerd and he just loves the tiny sarcastic one to bits
*The tiny one let’s the big one rest on them every now and then but careful don’t smoosh them
*The big one carrying the tiny one away from an argument over their shoulder
*The tiny one will fucking fight you don’t fuck with their massive teddy bear don’t get stabbed hoe
“We take a dance class together and our next routine calls for partnerwork, and we got put togeth-STop standing on my foot!” AU
“We live in adjacent apartments and our bedrooms are on opposite sides of a very thin wall and one night I heard you crying and talked to you through the wall” AU
“We live in adjacent apartments and one day I accidentally knocked a hole in the wall and into your living room I’m really sorry oh my god you’re naked” AU
“We’re both cosplayers and we somehow always manage to meet each other at cons dressed as a popular ship and people want photos of us in compromising positions and oops now we’re kissing” AU
“We sat next to each other during a really sad film and now we’re sharing tissues silently whilst we cry at the cinema” AU
“You and I both got arrested for holding up traffic to let a duck with ducklings cross the road and now we’re in the same holding cell” AU
“I was on my balcony playing music and you were walking past and stopped to listen because it’s your favourite band too” AU
“We bonded on the train through our mutual exasperation at another spiderman reboot” AU
“I work at a fruit store and you come in at almost every day and rearrange stuff on the shelves then leave, and we let you because it gives us something to do but today you made the apples spell” call me"“ AU
“I just came out of surgery and I’m convinced you’re my partner but you’re the just the long suffering (and super hot) trainee nurse” AU
I mean, dystopian stories about revolutions and redefining social order in the wake of worldwide catastrophes are cool, but you know what’s #1 on my list of wasted post-apocalyptic plot devices?
This is a thing that exists right now and was created as a safeguard against accidental loss of crop diversity. 700,000+ seed samples from all over the world are stored inside a giant concrete vault in a remote location in permafrost conditions so in case we fuck up everything like we’re probably going to we’ll be able to re-invent agriculture from scratch.
Also it looks like this
and it might as well have FREE PLOT DEVICE TO GOOD HOME written all over it, because can you imagine a bunch of exhausted, discouraged, hungry and injured kids travelling thousands of miles in search of this place they weren’t sure even existed, coming up a frozen slope and finally seeing it
walking through this tunnel in stunned, reverent silence because they’re afraid to let themselves believe this is real
coming inside the actual vault that’s lined floor-to-ceiling with the stuff that’s going to feed what’s left of humanity and jump-start new ecosystems.
If you know about this place and can’t imagine a fantastic post-apocalyptic story of hope and discovery and spiritually-tinted science about the equivalent of present-day millenials pulling the world out of darkness by learning to grow kidney beans
This writing advice was so helpful that it deserved its own picture heading.
A huge part of writing is cause and effect, but when worrying about conflict, resolution, characters, the plot as a whole, and more, we tend to forget about this and our stories end up being described as “this happens and then this happens and then this happens…”
So a piece of writing advice from Matt Stone and Trey Parker addressing this completely changed the way I plot and I ended up flying through my outlines with full plots in a very short amount of time. Here’s the advice:
When you are outlining/summarizing your story, you should be able to put “because of this” or “therefore” between each scene/event.
This keeps the story going. It connects everything together to make it one narrative instead of a series of slightly connected short stories. Once you start describing your story as “this happens and then this happens”, then you’ve got a problem. Everything should transition easily in a connected narrative.
This might seem like an obvious thing, but I know a lot of writers, including myself, who tend to forget about it.
reblobbing because this is something I routinely fail to do.
I…I recognize the joke, but these are totally different kinds of bows, each with its own benefits and suited to its user.
Bard’s using a longbow.
Longbows are awesome and take a fuckton of regular practice to use, because the muscle strain required to be a longbowman(/woman) actually deforms the arms and back of the user.
“Bard the Bowman” is still known by that sobriquet even though he’s low status, his family’s life and profession changed when the dragon attacked. Why would he be called that, if not that he’s still in regular practice and people see him using the thing over and over and over?
Longbows are less-damaged by damp than composites, being made of once single piece of wood rather than layers of material, which is handy if one lives in the middle of a freaking lake.
The longbow changed the face of warfare in real life, esp. for England. They’re effective killing machines over long distance, even against armored enemies.
Conclusion: Bard’s a tank-muscled distance shot used to fighting with good sightlines.
Legolas and Tauriel use recurve bows, albeit in different styles.
Legolas’ looks like a Turkish bow, though I don’t recall seeing him use a thumb draw (which is not mandatory if you’ve got super strong elf-fingers, I guess).
Tauriel’s looks to be a Scythian composite bow by the shape.
Composite recurve bows are much easier to use in confined spaces and at odd angles.
They have been historically used by folks who specialize in archer tricks like multiple arrow shots (a thing we have seen Legolas do).
Because of the curves, composites pack heavy draw weight (the factor that determines with what force, i.e. how fast and far, the arrow will travel) into limited space.
Short draw (the distance you have to pull back the arrow to shoot it) means a quicker release time and quicker time to get your next arrow on the string.
Legolas and Tauriel fight in a forest, not know for long sight lines or easy travel, nor for enemies who can be seen coming. They need weapons that won’t be getting caught on a bush at an inopportune time. Likewise, you see fewer spears and longswords among the elves of the Greenwood.
Conclusion: Legolas and Tauriel are guerrilla fighters from a heavily-forested territory and their weapons reflect that.
Kili also uses a composite recurve bow.
For practical purposes, note that Kili has significantly shorter arms than any of the other archers here mentioned. Long draws, like on Bard’s longbow, are not feasible and that means he’s not going to get the power he is capable of producing.
Dwarves are fucking strong, all right? That wee little bow looks very like the Mongolian horse-bow in size and shape that my friend used with a draw weight of 55 lbs. (I’m not a weakling and I can draw 35 for a decent length of time when in practice). Kili’s could easily be upwards of 75-100 lbs.
Kili’s a hunter. Likely, his main concern with a bow (when not following his uncle on an inadvisable quest) is the procurement of dinner for his family. To do that with a bow you need to be very quiet or very quick on the draw. Dwarves are not known for being super-quiet, though I believe I remember something about Fili and Kili being better at that than is typical.
Anything that can kill a deer can probably kill a person (or an orc). That little horse-bow can easily kill or maim.
Conclusion: Kili is a hunter. He uses a bow that allows for the production of a lot of power at short notice and is suited to his size and strength.
Bigger is not always most effective. Your medieval weaponry rant has concluded for the day, unless someone wants to talk to me about swords.
I do have some issues with the axes and swords used in the movies. Mind you, I’ve not seen BOFA and probably won’t until it comes out on DVD (Poor college student here). I’m no expert, but the chunkiness of Fili’s swords seems to me that they would not be well balanced. Thorin’s sword seems to look kind of like a Falcata in the shape, so it in theory should work well even though it doesn’t look like it would be that well balanced to me.
The big honkin’ triangular holes in the middle of the axe head pictures that I’ve seen don’t seem like they’d have much integrity for battle.
I think you may find the explanation to the shapes of Dwarven swords/axes in the workbooks Weta released. From what I remember (I may be wrong on details) Dwarven weapons are purposefully chunky and heavy as fuck to maximise the force of the hit. Also, due to short height, usually Dwarves are unable to attack the head/neck of an opponent and that leaves the hits on corpus that are actually very tricky to turn onto a killing blow.
So like a butcher’s cleaver, Dwarven sword is supposed to bring the force down and cut/crush the fuck out of whatever happens to be underneath – they even have a lot more/bigger groves to get the blood out of the way than a human sword, yikes. Dwarves have strength, but their range is very limited and they are slower than Elves or Men, so in theory every hit is supposed to be a finishing blow because their fighting style is basically ploughing forward and not looking back or standing in place and watching the bodies pile. See that even their ranged weapons (Dwalin’s hammer, Bofur’s pickaxe, Bifur’s boar spear of Oin’s stick) are very chunky and heavy so that they can deal with massive forces working from both sides.
Swords/knives are built for maximum damage in close quarters and axes have long handles for bigger reach. The ‘holes’ in Thorin’s axe and Balin’s mace are there for the purpose of bettering the balance – they take some weight off the end of the weapon without really compromising it’s power (there’s a whole thing about that the blade with a round holes in the right pace being actually more resilient/flexible than a full one). The ‘arrowhead’ shape of Thorin’s axe makes it a good weapon to fight an armoured opponent – with most of the strength of the hit coming on the point and dealing damage in places that a flat blade might have slid off (chainmail, plate armour). So it’s not as much of a slashing weapon, as a crushing/stabbing one. Also, Weta mentioned that the shape allows for getting a good hook on and dragging the opponent closer – which, taking into account short reach, is a good idea.
All in all, what I understand from the books and personal research, Dwaven weapons for the movie work for their battle style. Dwarves are savage fighters, completely opposite to Men and Elves, they hit slow but HARD, one hit is supposed to finish the fight, they don’t ‘dance’ around the opponent but push forward, they won’t chase their enemy around. Dwarves are very much the “come at me so I can kill you” fighters. With the amount of raw strength they have, perfectly balanced weapons are hardly necessary and everything that will make a hit harder is preferred.
I have a theory that Orcist is only any good in Thorin’s hands because it’s a blade of insane quality and endurance. Was it not an ancient weapon forged from a fabled steel, the blade would’ve snapped in half a while ago because of the sheer force behind every hit.
*if there’s the underline in the first part I apologise, I have no idea how to get rid of it on work PC ;) It just does that>_>
