You can't fool the metal
Aug. 16th, 2010 04:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI been thinking today about fight scenes, fantasy elements, and a particular scene from Falling Free. I've been trying to figure a way you can balance the admittedly cool and kick arse things you can do in an urban fantasy setting with the cold truths hard SF is better at, the ones where you can fool most of the humans most of the time, but you can't fool the metal. Math, physics, chemistry, it doesn't care for rhetoric or reasons, so you can only push it so far before it all crashes down. Too much magic in a story forgets that, and that loses something important.
I saw a film once, I think Jet Li was in it but I don't really recall, and I'm not sure I ever knew what the film was called. It had two paired fight scenes. The first was a challenge, kind of a game, where the guys had to fight without touching the ground. There was a frame with poles and stuff to fight on. But when one guy got pushed off his friends ran up and caught him before he hit the ground, and carried him around to do more fighting, and then the other guy ordered his minions to do the same, and they continued the fight within the rules but bending the hell out of them. It was fun and clever and revealed character and stuff. Nice fight. But then at the other end of the film there was a much more desperate fight scene, and in this one you could see why the fight on the frame was a necessary skill set. Instead of being all colorful and shiny and set up in front of people it was at night in the rain over water. If they slipped they'd go down hard into the river. If they wanted to survive it they couldn't rely on their friends or bend the rules of the game, it was man vs man but all under nature, and they could not fool nature. Illustration in fight form of the principles - friend trickster did well in the first fight, human rules and loopholes, but in the second it was pure skill, because you can't fool the metal, or the wood, or the water.
(I'm not sure the movie was exactly like all that. That's how it is in my head. The stuff from my head is the useful stuff today anyway.)
Martial arts movies where they're all flying and flipping and changing direction mid air and everything annoy me. I want to see the extremes of what human skill can achieve, but when it crosses over into magic, they lose me. I say this as a perennial F&SF reader. But I can't go along with that one. In a gravity switching environment, like Inception or on a starship under thrust, you've got physics changing the rules on you and skill making the difference. But the idea that skill can change physics? That's tying on Superman's cape and thinking you won't go splat. On balance I just can't enjoy that much.
So I was thinking this through with a plot I'm mulling where there's a ghost and a fleshy alive person working together. And I think there's some great opportunities in that setup. The ghost has to work by some kind of self consistent rules, have limitations to push against, but they're not subject to fiddly things like gravity. But their partner is. So whatever the ghost can get around, their partner is right there slogging through the hard way, because she still can't fool the metal. Twists the two layers of truths, the poetic and the physics, right up together.
So in my head you get another pair of fights. A ghost can only do things by burning fatigue, and it can only get fatigue when it is donated by a living human. So we have the initial phase of fight where the ghost burns through its reserves, starting out looking 3d and full color but getting reality shaved off the way ordinary fights take cuts and bruises. Fight on a balcony above a club, visible but distant, getting kicked back into black and white and fading, and then kicked over the edge and plain falling cause it's too weak to do owt else. Falling into the crowd. And then it hits them, all these lives, and they catch it. Crowd surfing *ghost* style, fatigue refreshed, willing donation of massed energy. They lift her up, and up, and up. Filling out, 3d, full color, and glowing with health... so to speak. And then a little tables turned arse kicking can be had.
But a human in a fight can't do that. They get their arse kicked over a balcony, they're staying down. So they're dodging and ducking and trying to stay alive and in one piece, but their options are strictly limited. They're not flying anywhere. It's down to their skill and their mastery of their environment.
So you'd mix the two sorts of fight. Each character with their own strengths and weaknesses. And ghost versus ghost you'd get full on gravity optional magics, but humans still have to sweat every little thing.
It's hard to keep the stakes up in a 'verse where you can't see the limits. If everything is possible then how can anything get particularly dangerous? There's always a way out. So whatever magics are in play there has to be cost and consequence, predictable and unavoidable.
Reckon it's pretty costly if you're a mundane in a magical world, especially if only mundanes can provide the fuel for it all.
Still working on this one.
I saw a film once, I think Jet Li was in it but I don't really recall, and I'm not sure I ever knew what the film was called. It had two paired fight scenes. The first was a challenge, kind of a game, where the guys had to fight without touching the ground. There was a frame with poles and stuff to fight on. But when one guy got pushed off his friends ran up and caught him before he hit the ground, and carried him around to do more fighting, and then the other guy ordered his minions to do the same, and they continued the fight within the rules but bending the hell out of them. It was fun and clever and revealed character and stuff. Nice fight. But then at the other end of the film there was a much more desperate fight scene, and in this one you could see why the fight on the frame was a necessary skill set. Instead of being all colorful and shiny and set up in front of people it was at night in the rain over water. If they slipped they'd go down hard into the river. If they wanted to survive it they couldn't rely on their friends or bend the rules of the game, it was man vs man but all under nature, and they could not fool nature. Illustration in fight form of the principles - friend trickster did well in the first fight, human rules and loopholes, but in the second it was pure skill, because you can't fool the metal, or the wood, or the water.
(I'm not sure the movie was exactly like all that. That's how it is in my head. The stuff from my head is the useful stuff today anyway.)
Martial arts movies where they're all flying and flipping and changing direction mid air and everything annoy me. I want to see the extremes of what human skill can achieve, but when it crosses over into magic, they lose me. I say this as a perennial F&SF reader. But I can't go along with that one. In a gravity switching environment, like Inception or on a starship under thrust, you've got physics changing the rules on you and skill making the difference. But the idea that skill can change physics? That's tying on Superman's cape and thinking you won't go splat. On balance I just can't enjoy that much.
So I was thinking this through with a plot I'm mulling where there's a ghost and a fleshy alive person working together. And I think there's some great opportunities in that setup. The ghost has to work by some kind of self consistent rules, have limitations to push against, but they're not subject to fiddly things like gravity. But their partner is. So whatever the ghost can get around, their partner is right there slogging through the hard way, because she still can't fool the metal. Twists the two layers of truths, the poetic and the physics, right up together.
So in my head you get another pair of fights. A ghost can only do things by burning fatigue, and it can only get fatigue when it is donated by a living human. So we have the initial phase of fight where the ghost burns through its reserves, starting out looking 3d and full color but getting reality shaved off the way ordinary fights take cuts and bruises. Fight on a balcony above a club, visible but distant, getting kicked back into black and white and fading, and then kicked over the edge and plain falling cause it's too weak to do owt else. Falling into the crowd. And then it hits them, all these lives, and they catch it. Crowd surfing *ghost* style, fatigue refreshed, willing donation of massed energy. They lift her up, and up, and up. Filling out, 3d, full color, and glowing with health... so to speak. And then a little tables turned arse kicking can be had.
But a human in a fight can't do that. They get their arse kicked over a balcony, they're staying down. So they're dodging and ducking and trying to stay alive and in one piece, but their options are strictly limited. They're not flying anywhere. It's down to their skill and their mastery of their environment.
So you'd mix the two sorts of fight. Each character with their own strengths and weaknesses. And ghost versus ghost you'd get full on gravity optional magics, but humans still have to sweat every little thing.
It's hard to keep the stakes up in a 'verse where you can't see the limits. If everything is possible then how can anything get particularly dangerous? There's always a way out. So whatever magics are in play there has to be cost and consequence, predictable and unavoidable.
Reckon it's pretty costly if you're a mundane in a magical world, especially if only mundanes can provide the fuel for it all.
Still working on this one.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-16 09:39 pm (UTC)