Modern Day Fantasy World

both

Turns out selling your soul on e-bay is actually illegal due to E-bay'sEULA. Note, this is mostly illegal for the seller, not the buyer and might not apply to other sites in other countries. Strangely, this would be easier to deal with since vendor sites often save shipping addresses.

Popups would probably be illegal since clicking on a popup really doesn't count as consent. However, popups are usually distributed by ad exchanges which tend to be markets in and of themselves. Tracking down the original publisher could be difficult.

edited 28th Sep '16 4:25:20 PM by Belisaurius

Holy shit. I figured selling your soul is illegal because it's a human-rights violation since you're technically selling YOURSELF, akin to becoming a slave. Their explanation ALSO makes a lot of sense.

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Contrariwise, what I find lacking is the more religious aspect, the implication that these are matters indicative of far greater concerns. Typically, this results in the protagonist being the Chosen One to save the world, but I don't think it has to go down like that. Instead, what if the character is an actual priest - someone who is not chosen, but chooses to deal with the dark denizens willingly, based on genuine faith rather than the usual guilt complex.

Hellll yeah, I'm not the only one who wants more religion in my urban fantasy! That's why Moonflowers has so much religion in the first place.

Takotsubo also has a lot of spirits. The Four Winds do set/costume changes and act in the play, the Golden Gate Bridge has an Anthropomorphic Personification, there's a lot of ancestor-worship, there are spirits who watch over foster-children, and eventually I'm going to start Playing With The Chosen Many trope. Cord Cai and Juliana Juarez get tapped by the Chinese and Filipino pantheons not because their names were picked from a cosmic hat, but because the gods noticed how two members of the Asian-American diaspora have become superheroes without godly help, and they're like "Daaaaaaaaaamn, kids, you're awesome." (They're not actually kids, but they're in their mid-twenties.)

If your protagonist has to be The Chosen One (or one of The Chosen Many), why do so many stories always follow the random schmuck that needs to be trained from scratch and has no distinguishing abilities? I like seeing The Everyman have Character Development as much as anyone, but there's a lot more ways to round out characters than making everyone Take a Level in Badass. Juliana gets tapped by the Filipino deities because she's actively seeking out her heritage and they love her enthusiasm, while Cord starts to see a lot of Chinese deities because despite his many emotional issues and his shitty life, he HASN'T become a broken shell and they're floored at how resilient he is.

Stories follow the random shmucks because they're built around the changeling fantasy that they're secretly speshul and they only need a mentor to show up and tell them how speshul they are and to train them into being even more speshul so that they can defeat the villain who also wants to be speshul but clearly will never be as speshul as them... Ugh.

Dunno about others, but in my case it's the reverse - the protagonist is an ordinary person, either self-taught or trained in the countryside, and their relationship to the local clergy is mostly amiable, like between government handlers and deep cover spies.

Second, what I strive to avoid is having the hero be a generic magical warrior, particularly as the Browning Short Recoil is the modern mystical mechanism of choice when you want to deliver divine wrath at 250 m/s. Instead, the character is a sort of magical bomb defusal expert - some cursed tome has been uncovered, or crop circles form an arcane symbol while the neighboring farm's cows grow extra legs, that's when you call the mage. You need a dragon killed, you call MHI.

Finally, rather than maintain a full masquerade, I tend to keep public knowledge (or lack thereof) at the spy level - in the town the mage lives, people are well aware of the job description, but not too anxious to know the details. It's smiles and nods and politely vague answers to politely vague questions. Kinda like a mortician... which, given the similar professional fields, isn't a bad comparison altogether.

edited 29th Sep '16 12:14:54 AM by indiana404

@Tungsten 74: I really like the taxi monks and see where you coming from with why you made them. Are there other things that have the same level of symbolic significance to have similar groups based around them?

@thread: I have a setting that's technologically modern but not Earth, which is kind of what I thought this would be about at first. That choice had more to do with distinguishing it from other secondary-world works rather than Urban Fantasy, and I wanted it to have it's own history anyway.

I was thinking about another approach to modern fantasy, one that would actually be pretty high on the Moh's scale, mostly using mutagenic substances to explain certain events and creatures. Instead, the fantasy aspect would stem from how said events and creatures are perceived. Biblical plagues may all have viable scientific explanations, after all, but there's a reason natural disasters are still listed in insurance policies as acts of God.

Essentially, I'm going for the total reverse of traditional urban fantasy - rather than have explicitly supernatural elements be a common sight and part of daily life, I want to evoke the sheer sense of wonder and awe over things that technically aren't supernatural at all. Maybe there's a strange mutant octopus slithering around an underground river system near a small quirky town, feasting on whoever is foolhardy enough to look for it; yet its glandular secretions increase the topsoil's fertility tenfold, so the townsfolk both fear and revere it. Maybe there's this random forest wanderer with a hyperactive immune system and a body-hair problem who can shrug off buckshot to the chest, yet is terminally allergic to silver. Maybe there's a plesiosaurus with disabled chromosome deterioration, agelessly residing in a Scottish lake. The explanation isn't important; what matters is the legend.

To that effect, when going back to the city, I'd start by asking what sort of urban legends can evoke the same sense of awe, especially by today's jaded city mice. Perhaps a strange florist whose flowers never wither thanks to a family fertilizer recipe, or a mysterious cat that's been napping every morning on the same spot for decades, always regarded as a descendant of the cat today's elders saw in their childhood. And of course, there's always sewer crocs. There are things in this world that civilized folk were not meant to know... and a whooping majority get washed up on the banks of the Hudson.

So I lost my post by accidentally clicking a link, but your thing sounds like Demythification or Magic from Science and it's AWESOME.

Typing up my next post later.

I'd describe it more like remythification. I wanted to break out of the notion that the physical world is mundane and boring, or that you need explicitly paranormal and unexplained events for proper fantasy. For one, it requires a growing heap of masquerades or further supernatural explanations as to why humanity hasn't jumped on it like Garfield on lasagna. I also didn't want for any protagonist to become a smug secret keeper or go mad from the eldritch encounter so as not to reveal it to the general public. I tried going with ancient aliens (original, I know), but any solid evidence of such a discovery would be revolutionary even more so than finding an actual werewolf or vampire.

More importantly, however, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the people bringing about the original legends, because I don't think they were really more superstitious or naive than most of modern society. One way or another, what they saw was probably real, certainly enough to make an impression, and the magical way to describe it was their idea of science. Nowadays, there's concrete evidence of cyclopia (never mind the original idea probably stemming from elephant skeletons, because sans ivory, they do look like giant one-eyed humans), twin-tailed cats, cats with wing-like skin flaps, and of course, little Indian girls with a full set of extra limbs that cause a religious event among locals.

Even for storytelling purposes, too much of modern fantasy is just harlequin romance tales or superhero soaps with robes and candles instead of spandex, all hinging on artificially dividing people into mages and muggles, societies into enlightened and ignorant, and the world itself into mythical and mundane. I'm going for the reverse of that - full-fledged mythical sagas or macabre investigations that don't actually break the known laws of reality. Tomes of ancient lore and alchemical recipes that work, provided one can decipher them and find the exact ingredients in great enough amounts. And essentially, stories that even in an age of satellites and supercomputers, could still be taking place somewhere in the real world.

I've done stuff like that myself. I just treated magic and supernatural entities like another branch of science, examples of phenomena that were clearly real but perhaps poorly understood. If you read up on Spiritualism from the 1800's, that's kind of the approach some of them took, a lot of mingling of scientific jargon and methodology with supernatural ideas (the whole idea of ectoplasm, for instance, is based on the very reasonable notion that if something can be seen, or can physically effect objects, it has to be composed of something physical).

That's part of it, yes, but I'm going at it the other way around - with already existing (and not too unreasonably mangled) scientific concepts, while the bulk of the actual story is about the legend surrounding a particular entity or event.

In essence, I wanted to do a paranormal mystery, but this is actually an oxymoron, since a proper mystery needs concrete natural rules, otherwise it's just random events tied to a MacGuffin search. I also wanted easy serialization, and any revolutionary discovery would shatter that far too easily. So instead, everything is grounded in slightly fictionalized science, while the mystical part is about the relationship between the unusual phenomena and the people surrounding them.

The typical story goes like this - a series of bizarre natural disasters occur in a Town with a Dark Secret, so the protagonist - a local county biochemist with an interest in mythology, cryptozoology and ancient alchemy - sets out to assess the damage and eliminate any harmful pathogens before the local agriculture suffers. He comes across a slimy trail, or a known natural mutagen, or listens to tales of a local strange creature, and works his way down to the source. The encounter itself is hardly ever dangerous, let alone lethal, so long as precautions are taken, and the focus isn't on monster-slaying, so much as fixing whatever caused the specific problems in the story, using the acquired knowledge of biochemistry and logical reasoning from the legends heard along the way. Typically, there's even no antagonist, save for the effects of the mutagens or some accident that caused the initial trouble.

All things considered, I'd describe it as Sector General in Lovecraft country or Überwald. It's a medical mystery, not a monster mash.

Remythification sounds pretty awesome.

I'm also pretty fascinated with the updating/reinterpretation of myths, and the outright creation of new ones in urban society.

I learned from my favorite webcomic Digger that street-children make up folklore as a way to cope with their hardships, so I've been throwing in all these spirits and rituals that the gangs and foster-children of Takotsubo use to reinforce both sides of "Urban Fantasy." Full stories are pretty bare-bones right now, but I'm guessing that since my cast is 80% minorities, there's a lot of room for Alternative Character Interpretation regarding the various cultures' myths. For now I'm just inventing my own spirits.

Apparently it's working, since my friend who read Takotsubo specifically mentioned that the environment was a really strong part in the prologue.

Mind you, there's also a darkly sinister and selfish reason for going that route - namely, that I wanted easy as mad-libs off-the-cuff serialization with no prerequisite research whatsoever. There's always room for another mysterious mutant or mythical phenomenon to sort out, another folktale or legend to discover. More importantly, though, there's always room for another quirky scientist to be doing the same things in any preferred region. I wanted to break out of the enforced exclusivity typical for modern fantasy protagonists - not only is it a bit too Sue-ish when the world seems to revolve around one particular person, but it also frequently brings about the kind of messianic baggage that turns such wish-fulfillment escapist characters into self-destructive jerkass woobies - as Harry Dresden and the Winchesters may attest.

Instead, the mood I'm going with is, in a word, inviting - there's no big secrets to keep, no global problems to solve singlehandedly, just some labcoats roving around their designated areas, basically the sci-fi equivalent of the Midsomer Murders. In short, it's the anti-Lovecraft - and my reasoning for it is that, while Lovecraft was racist and xenophobic even by the standards of his time, other writers' stories taking place in ostensibly the same world had vastly different tones and interpretations of the mythos, just as more educated scholars would view the "savage heathens" of ages past in a much more favorable fashion. Consequently, I wondered how a full-fledged mythology buff with an adoration for creepy cute critters and no social prejudices to speak of would react to a typical Lovecraftian encounter. Besides, when you mix and drink hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide as a party trick, it takes more than a couple of tentacles to get you unsettled.