Seriously, this would be such an ideal set-up because everyone knows the plot and it’s almost entirely set up to show off a group of characters and let them do a ton of badass stuff.
There’s a group of bandits led by a single charismatic leader who routinely raid a farming village and take a tribute of their crops, put your villains in there.
There’s a group of farmers including a plucky group that go to hire mercenaries to defend their village, put your less fighting-oriented heroes there.
Then there’s the samurai themselves, masterless badasses who come to town and fight for these peasants for nothing but all the rice they can eat and a chance for one last stand.
The samurai training the villagers, the bandits attacking and being scared off, the final battle scene where practically everyone dies, there’s SO MUCH here that makes for great creative fuel.
I mean, we’ve only got two au’s for this that I can think of:
Western AU
Everyone is Bugs AU
Although honestly that one’s amazing because it adds the twist that the “samurai” are actors, which is frankly brilliant. Also while I’m at it, we need more “everyone is bugs” aus.
But come on, fandom people! This is some highly exploitable awesome shit, who wants on this bandwagon with me?
I got a lot of concerned messages regarding the recent happenings in Berlin since y'all know I’m from Germany, so this is the little update that I am fine and I’m sorry to worry anyone! I live in NRW, so I was far from there and luckily all my Berlin friends were safe too.
god i can never stop thinking about certain sculptures used in modern art and how they can be used to elicit the beautiful and terrible feeling of true and genuine horror in ways that a lot of horror movies can never do
like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.
but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror.
it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”
or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”
like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:
“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.
and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.
anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.
The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.
I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.
Anyway this is such a great post thanks for putting the whole idea into words so well. <3
This is how I feel about wind turbines (I tried to walk up to one once and felt the most inexplicable terror I’ve ever felt in my life), or most things that are ridiculously large, for that matter. Ships fascinate me but make me feel very uneasy. Certain buildings, especially if they look old-timey in any way kind of freak me out.
Examples: The Halifax shipyard building made me feel almost nauseous, and I have to drive past this cold storage building in Winnipeg every time I go to visit my boyfriend’s parents. I do not like it one bit.
Also, I got to see that sculpture of a giant newborn baby last year. That was very surreal in the way that is described here.
WHAT AMAZING ADDITIONS TO THIS POST, thank you! I didn’t know of Kalus Pinter’s work and now I REALLY want to see it for myself, goodness.
Honestly, I’m so glad so many people have responded and reblogged this post with examples and stories of their own!! It’s so cool to see just what people think and perceive as this horror of “wrongness”. I also see some people saying that this is essentially the uncanny valley effect, which is only an aspect of this kind of horror - the uncanny valley primarily deals with something we perceive that looks close to human and yet doesn’t quite make it there. It’s just one subset of a really uneasy sort of horror that can be found in so many forms, which may really honestly differ from person to person.
Overall, THIS HORROR IS WIDELY UNDERUSED IN FICTION and I’m so glad to see so many examples of it posted here!!
I feel this way about kangaroos. If you really look at a kangaroo for a minute it’s deeply unsettling, they’re bipedal and they have insane abs and they move wrong, it’s too human and I get that creeping horror that this thing exists. If I look at kangaroos too long I feel like I’m going insane
Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculptures did this to me, a bit. It was less the shape than the form–the lumpiness, the uneven shine–but mostly it was the scale. Most of these examples of horror don’t feel quite so wrong when they’re at a scale we can look “down” on. But when they overshadow us, or at least when they overshadow our general certainty of control, even for just a moment, the disorientation can slip suddenly into horror.
consider the Gelitin collective’s enormous pink rabbit left to rot in the Italian alps for the next 10 years
Eoin Mc Hugh - The Ground Itself is Kind, Black Butter, 2014
Kiki Smith’s lilith sculpture is more humanoid but i feel like it belongs on this post because walking into the stairwell in the met and seeing this fucking thing was one of the most unnerving experiences in my life
If “the horror of wrongness” makes your soul sing as it does mine, read literally anything by Robert Aickman. My favorite is “The Hospice”.
in terms of literature, my favorite example of the horror of wrongness is ‘declare’ by tim powers. if you want to be slightly creeped out by concentric circles for the rest of your life, read it. it’s… mostly a spy novel.
Isn’t this the entire basis of Lovecraftian horror? People love to use Cthulhu as the premiere example of Lovecraftian horror because it’s a big scary monster, but a lot of his stories have more to do with things being inexplicably wrong, non-euclidean structures, anachronistically old-timey places, etc.
This is actually the sort of thing that comprises my biggest irrational fear. There’s three things about me: I love deer–if able, I will stop my car in the middle of the road to greet and observe any deer–more often than not I’m stuck driving or walking outside at 1 AM or later, and I have terrible night vision.
My worst fear is that, some day in the middle of night, I’ll be walking near the edge of the woods in the middle of the night, and I will see something shaped like a deer, and I will stop for it, and it will not be a deer.
I see all of these and my mind goes to surrealism. After all, the idea of surrealism is to illustrate thigs that are dreamlike; things that on one hand appears absolutely real, but at the same time out of this unverse.
It makes me wonder what it would be like to run into real physical versions of Salvador Dalí’s “The Face of War” or “The Temptation of St. Anthony”, for example.
Ask me about my up and coming pathfinder character who is going to be a horse barbarian.
Okay I’ll take this as your blessing to proceed
So my Character is named Reinault VIII he was the mount of my previous character a Human Gunslinger who was particularly bad at getting horses killed. During the campaign when I got this horse I rolled handle animal to see if I could bond with the horse in which I rolled a nat 20 and the GM stated that my character stared deeply into the horse’s eyes and forged an unbreakable bond that would transcend death (seeing as this was my eighth horse we assumed it would be his and not mine.)
As luck would have it though the horse did not die but the gunslinger did. Several of the party members got pissy at a meeting with a council of powerful sorcerers that we really weren’t supposed to fight and attacked one of them and they responded by disintegrating my Gunslinger and throwing the rest of the party in jail once they yielded.
So the horse who was waiting outside instantly felt a deep pang of sorrow and once they got out of prison one of the party members with a heavy heart told the horse of his master’s terrible fate. Upon hearing of his master’s death the horse ran off into the wilderness to die in the harsh wilds
Only he didn’t die
There in the woods the horse trained getting stronger and stronger braving the dangers of the world on his own. With the grief of his dead master forever in his heart he dove into hatred for those who slew his masters. He tapped into the Primal insatiable rage of the barbarian.
To this day Reinault carries a deep seated hatred for arcane casters and attacks any and all users of arcane magics on sight.
Mechanic wise he is a Barbarian 9/ Mammoth Rider 1
Feats known:
Power Attack Improved Overrun Greater Overrun Nature Soul Animal Companion
So what is a Mammoth Rider? It is a class that gains access to a Huge Sized animal companion. This is useful because a horse is large sized and in order to have a mount a creature must be a size category smaller than their mount
The horse traveling through the harsh and wild world came across a mammoth and saved him from a group of raiders whom he slew in his blind fury. The mammoth now owes him a life debt and serves as his companion and steed.
I’m sure that a lot of the other people come game time will have some neat and interesting characters with unique motivations but I’m gonna be the guy playing a horse riding into battle atop a wooly mammoth
• goodnight/ goodmorning texts • I miss you’s • I hope you’re okay’s • thinking about you • when someone goes out of their way to show you they care • when someone shows a real interest in you • feeling wanted • feeling like what you feel is validated •feeling important
