All right, so you are reaching a pivotal scene - whether against the Big Bad or against a friend because the Big Bad convinced you to do so. You've built up the fight, hinting at it throughout the narrative. How is it going to be end up and will it be as awesome as you think it will be?
If the story is set up such that you can justify sword play, expect the occasional bouts of Sword Limbo. Basically an opponent (not uncommonly the hero) dodges a sword swipe by bending backwards as the sword passes over him.
Obviously for this to make sense, you need to establish that swords are appropriate for the setting. RPGs tend to exploit this very commonly, for example, especially for its heroes. This happens quite often, even if the opposition and the heroic mook army resort to such weaponry as phasers and rifles. To overcome the discrepancy between blade and bullet, it is also quite common to combine a sword with artillery (RPG enthusiasts will undoubtedly find this familiar).
Which does add a dimension worth noting: be sure to know when to fall more towards accuracy or cool when deciding to run with swords. Plenty of the techniques shown in media aren't exactly truthful to reality (enough sometimes to taint the audience's expectations) and can cause massive damage, if not kill a person outright, when performed in real life if they are even possible. Anything from Hammerspace to any variety of cool weapons cause physics to shrivel up into the fetal position but work because they are cooler to watch.
This explains why good fight scenes are so cathartic: they don't break willful suspension of disbelief when accuracy falls to the wayside. Obviously this doesn't always work but then again, sometimes even failure at this can be entertaining.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Biologically Inclined
Sometimes we make decisions regarding creative works that wind up contradicting real life. Whether it is biology, logic or any number of other topics, we realize sometimes what's real doesn't make for a riveting story. Naturally, sometimes this isn't that bad and we should just relax. Other times, it becomes borderline insane and we wonder if the producers were even aware of what they were doing.
Let's take a look at a few of the most egregious examples of people taking the Rule of Cool, Fnnny or Otherwise because they are what work (whether they succeed at using them or not is an entirely different matter). Remember, tropes are simply tools and can fall on any side of the beneficial/detrimental line. It's up to the author to decide whether or not the plot would benefit from the use of a trope.
Oh and be prepared for these to be predominantly biological in nature.
1. Four-Legged Insect/Four-Fingered Hands: Either of these tropes can fall into the Artistic License category, specifically biology. However, they are also acceptable breaks from reality, enough that we usually don't give them any thought when they occur. As such, they are as the name says on the tin: insects drawn with four (or six or eight) legs and characters drawn with four-fingered hands, regardless of (and quite contrary to) real life anatomy. This is often due to wanting to ease up on animation; four legs are easier than six, six easier than eight. It's worth pointing a trope becomes the former if the species of insect in question is drawn with less legs than it has in real life (four tends to be fairly common). The similar is true about four-fingered hands; three fingers may be this, such as it is with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
2. Square/Cube Law: Quite often when you are dealing attacks of fifty-foot anythings, the Square-Cube Law weeps silently to itself. Basically when an object experiences a proportional increase, its volume increase is equal to the cube of the multiplier (if you double something, the volume multiplies by 8 - 2^3 in other words) and its surface area is increased by the square of that multiplier (in the case of doubling, surface area is multiplied by 4 - 2^2). What does this mean for the object in question? Well, for living things it'll need a lot more muscle (more or less a function of surface area) to move itself around (weight is a function of volume) but generally won't get it if you apply the Law according. With attacks from the Fifty Foot Beasts, there's a good reason we ignore this: they would find great difficult getting from place to place if reality is enforced. More shows attempt an explanation - more or less hand-waving and/or lampshading - to get around this, as more audiences become aware of the gist of the Law, but it still means it happens.
3. Longest Pregnancy Ever: It's normally the span of a few months (6 to 9) for a human pregnancy to occur. However, not all stories exist in that sense of 'normalcy.' There are numerous reasons pregnancy may take longer or shorter than what is accepted in real life without any adverse consequences. Time may be highly compressed or stretched out, such that it took the author a year (or a week) to tell nine month's worth of events in-universe. Likewise, as is the case with One Piece (think Ace), sometimes everything is happening in real time (one year's worth of manga releases is one year in-universe, for example) and thus the birth really took that long (or short). For the former, sometimes it's due to letting the schedule lapse. Sometimes it's a matter of authors having difficulty with numbers.
Let's take a look at a few of the most egregious examples of people taking the Rule of Cool, Fnnny or Otherwise because they are what work (whether they succeed at using them or not is an entirely different matter). Remember, tropes are simply tools and can fall on any side of the beneficial/detrimental line. It's up to the author to decide whether or not the plot would benefit from the use of a trope.
Oh and be prepared for these to be predominantly biological in nature.
1. Four-Legged Insect/Four-Fingered Hands: Either of these tropes can fall into the Artistic License category, specifically biology. However, they are also acceptable breaks from reality, enough that we usually don't give them any thought when they occur. As such, they are as the name says on the tin: insects drawn with four (or six or eight) legs and characters drawn with four-fingered hands, regardless of (and quite contrary to) real life anatomy. This is often due to wanting to ease up on animation; four legs are easier than six, six easier than eight. It's worth pointing a trope becomes the former if the species of insect in question is drawn with less legs than it has in real life (four tends to be fairly common). The similar is true about four-fingered hands; three fingers may be this, such as it is with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
2. Square/Cube Law: Quite often when you are dealing attacks of fifty-foot anythings, the Square-Cube Law weeps silently to itself. Basically when an object experiences a proportional increase, its volume increase is equal to the cube of the multiplier (if you double something, the volume multiplies by 8 - 2^3 in other words) and its surface area is increased by the square of that multiplier (in the case of doubling, surface area is multiplied by 4 - 2^2). What does this mean for the object in question? Well, for living things it'll need a lot more muscle (more or less a function of surface area) to move itself around (weight is a function of volume) but generally won't get it if you apply the Law according. With attacks from the Fifty Foot Beasts, there's a good reason we ignore this: they would find great difficult getting from place to place if reality is enforced. More shows attempt an explanation - more or less hand-waving and/or lampshading - to get around this, as more audiences become aware of the gist of the Law, but it still means it happens.
3. Longest Pregnancy Ever: It's normally the span of a few months (6 to 9) for a human pregnancy to occur. However, not all stories exist in that sense of 'normalcy.' There are numerous reasons pregnancy may take longer or shorter than what is accepted in real life without any adverse consequences. Time may be highly compressed or stretched out, such that it took the author a year (or a week) to tell nine month's worth of events in-universe. Likewise, as is the case with One Piece (think Ace), sometimes everything is happening in real time (one year's worth of manga releases is one year in-universe, for example) and thus the birth really took that long (or short). For the former, sometimes it's due to letting the schedule lapse. Sometimes it's a matter of authors having difficulty with numbers.
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