Final followups. Thanks again for the very detailed feedbacks!
Let us try to put things a little more coherently. The segues and transitions and cross-cuttings are getting really good -- hardly any seams showing now.
Thanks! I think we must be improving with practice.
I really like the combination of the mythical and action elements -- and if you have more underworld trips, that's cool.
I think we're more or less done for now; our story planning indicates lots more mythology and a fair amount of action, but not so much of the vision quests and underworld trips for the immediate future. Heh heh, vague hintfulness...
BUT THE HUGE PILE OF BONES WITH THAT THING CHOMPING ON THEM KINDA FREAKED ME OUT A LITTLE BIT.
I'm not sure whether I should apologize or gloat, so I'll do a bit of both (apologloat?). I'm pleased we were able to put some menace back onto the bones of that whole "From Beneath You" tag line, and if we were able to make The First actually scary instead of boring and lame, then so much the better.
In case you're curious, the image of the corpse-gnawing serpent was more or less inspired by Nidhoggr of Norse mythology fame, and the setting was further refined by swiping from the Aztec legend of how Quetzalcoatl created the current iteration of humanity by retrieving the bones of the previous race from the underworld. I can definitely see the parallel to real-world skull shrines - I think they have memorials like that in Cambodia, as well as Rwanda - but also to ossuaries, which range from the functional and neutral (like the Catacombs of Paris) to the whimsical and benign (like Sedlec in the Czech Republic)...
The representation of the nameless, numberless dead as stacks of bones seems pretty universal, and the connotation attached to it really seems to depend on how the owners died. The bones of genocide victims are horrifying because they're testimonials to mass murder; the cartoon skeletons of the Mexican Day of the Dead are more like jolly ghosts, reliving the activities they enjoyed in life. Most of us end up as bones in the end, and I'd like to think that these relics don't automatically have to be evil and scary - after all, they're part of our physical legacy to the world. (For that matter, as creepy as this chapter may have been, one might wonder whether what Xander is witnessing is really "evil" so much as simply a natural process.)
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Re: even more commentses
Date: 2004-05-11 02:02 am (UTC)Let us try to put things a little more coherently. The segues and transitions and cross-cuttings are getting really good -- hardly any seams showing now.
Thanks! I think we must be improving with practice.
I really like the combination of the mythical and action elements -- and if you have more underworld trips, that's cool.
I think we're more or less done for now; our story planning indicates lots more mythology and a fair amount of action, but not so much of the vision quests and underworld trips for the immediate future. Heh heh, vague hintfulness...
BUT THE HUGE PILE OF BONES WITH THAT THING CHOMPING ON THEM KINDA FREAKED ME OUT A LITTLE BIT.
I'm not sure whether I should apologize or gloat, so I'll do a bit of both (apologloat?). I'm pleased we were able to put some menace back onto the bones of that whole "From Beneath You" tag line, and if we were able to make The First actually scary instead of boring and lame, then so much the better.
In case you're curious, the image of the corpse-gnawing serpent was more or less inspired by Nidhoggr of Norse mythology fame, and the setting was further refined by swiping from the Aztec legend of how Quetzalcoatl created the current iteration of humanity by retrieving the bones of the previous race from the underworld. I can definitely see the parallel to real-world skull shrines - I think they have memorials like that in Cambodia, as well as Rwanda - but also to ossuaries, which range from the functional and neutral (like the Catacombs of Paris) to the whimsical and benign (like Sedlec in the Czech Republic)...
The representation of the nameless, numberless dead as stacks of bones seems pretty universal, and the connotation attached to it really seems to depend on how the owners died. The bones of genocide victims are horrifying because they're testimonials to mass murder; the cartoon skeletons of the Mexican Day of the Dead are more like jolly ghosts, reliving the activities they enjoyed in life. Most of us end up as bones in the end, and I'd like to think that these relics don't automatically have to be evil and scary - after all, they're part of our physical legacy to the world. (For that matter, as creepy as this chapter may have been, one might wonder whether what Xander is witnessing is really "evil" so much as simply a natural process.)