Random Questions Thread

I'm not a native speaker so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I'm OK with the name of Bruce Stormer. It's not overtly subtle, but it is very far from something like Killer Mc Blowstuff.

I think it does fit the comic book feel.

I was recently thinking of a character of mine and a slight detail occurred to me. The character in question has a powerful Healing Factor that lets her reattach lost limbs and perfectly heal minor wounds in minutes and larger traumas in hours—-if it's really bad it may take days or weeks. Now then, this character does a lot of manual labor and projects that involve working with her hands and has done so for pretty much her entire life.

My question is...am I accurate in portraying her hands and fingers as deeply calloused from the lifetime of hard work? I know it seems like a minor detail, but it intrigues me because I've never seen or heard of rapid-healing characters ever addressing little things like this.

While I'm on the subject....

• Does it mean that hangovers will be healed too? What about cancer? A point made during an argument to make her quit smoking was that she is at risk of developing an immortal, regenerating cancer that would be impossible to treat if she kept up the habit.

What is your grandmother's brother to you? What's the word?

Great Uncle

And my question?

I don't know how cancer works, but i think Deadpool has that exact problem. If the Healing Factor doesn't recognize cancer as a malignant thing, it's propably going to keep regenerating. That's what even the regular cancer does.

Thanks. It's odd, I actually thought of Deadpool when I was constructing the "why you should stop smoking" argument for her about cancer so I'm glad I was on the right track.

It really depends on the inner workings of her Healing Factor. Because you could also rule out that the original lesion that will cause cancer will heal before it has time to develop (to my knowledge we still don't know exactly what causes cancer at the cellular level). And, likewise, that her hands would never have the time to develop calluses since the wear and tear to the skin that causes them heal before that. Then again, they could be not perceived as a damage, and therefore not being healed. This is I think close to gaining muscle mass through training (training could be seen as damaging the muscles).

Getting drunk and hungover also depends on whether the healing factor impacts the capacity of the body to flush out damaging substances or simply heals their damages on the body.

Edited by C105 on Nov 24th 2020 at 10:33:47 AM

Well, the Healing Factor is pretty much a "damage only" sort of deal. For example, it doesn't protect in any way against infectious diseases (although it will fix physical/structural damage caused by a disease). It's actually why she (and her family members, who all share the same power) die of old age. Only wounds are regenerated but natural wear and tear on the body is ignored. A broken hip caused by brittle bones in old age will be fixed in a few hours, but the healed bone will be just as brittle as before.

With that out of the way, your point about the skin on her hands not being damaged enough to need to form calluses was what caused me to ask this. I think I'll just chalk it up to "not counting as damage". One of the character's problems is drowning her sorrows a great deal, so I figured that the effects of alcohol on the body is a natural physiologic process that wouldn't count as damage...although I might skip the hangover aspect since that may or may not be damage? Either way, it adds an extra layer of difficulty in getting her to stop drinking to excess.

The thing with cancer is...interesting. I didn't know that it's cellular origin was still unknown. I suppose I may just leave that up in the air as speculation by the characters themselves since it never happens anyway, and was merely a speculation made by someone who was just basing it on the logical conclusion that her body would regenerate damage to all of its parts and since cancer technically is part of the body...

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Nov 24th 2020 at 9:18:23 AM

Would it make sense for ghosts to still be affected by gravity?

Everything is affected by gravity, some stuff is just lighter, but there's a reason there's less oxygen the higher up you go. If your ghosts are gaseous then there's no reason they wouldn't be affected, just to a much lesser extent than humans.

@Purple - I hate to sound cliched, vague, and unhelpful, but it depends.

Or to be more specific and helpful, it depends on the physical composition of ghosts in your setting. If they can do things like phase through complete solid materials, it means that they don't abide by typical rules and restrictions of physics, so that means it wouldn't be affected by gravity anyway.

Edited by dRoy on Nov 25th 2020 at 1:42:47 AM

Double post for a question of my own.

Which academic field would cover the history and development of eastern martial arts? Asian/Oriental studies?

I would imagine that some branch of anthropology/sociology would cover them, though I must disclaim that this is only my guess. If you wanted a character to academically study both of these things, they could be a multidisciplinary individual who pursues studies in both fields.

History of the Martial Arts is a pretty narrow, esoteric field. I don't think that any formal academic discipline covers it routinely. I have an interest in what is called "Historical European Martial Arts" and so far as I know there are no research institutions that specialize in it, outside of the British Museum of London (and they focus mostly on the arms and armor).

I don't know what the situation is in Asian countries, however. Perhaps their history departments do a better job than ours.

I'm sure Asian Studies would cover it; though it would also depend on which angle you approach it from. For example, if you're studying martial arts with religious roots, like Shaolin kung fu, then the study of the surrounding monastic institutions and school(s) of Buddhism might put it under Religious Studies. While if you're studying something that was meant for war, like the illustrated weapon techniques in the Wubei Zhi, then that might fall under Military History.

I'd like to ask if anyone knows a way to ensure that a character's reaction to an insult isn't misinterpreted as something it isn't.

To set the scene:

The members of the story's Heroes "R" Us group have captured two minions working for a powerful criminal organization headed by the Big Bad. Now, the two minions in question are not high-ranking by any stretch of the imagination but they are not garden-variety Mooks either; they call shots and have information of importance to the heroes. The fight to capture them is intense and one of them doesn't survive the battle, however this is not known to her partner. The heroes trick the surviving minion into giving up the information he knows through playing on his concern for his friend who they convince him is being actively tortured just a few cells down, even simulating her screams. This psychological torture works and he breaks, eventually giving up his knowledge. He is then informed that it was all a ruse and his partner died before the two of them were even taken to the headquarters of the heroes and he has betrayed his boss for nothing. Enraged, he curses the character who conceived this ruse as a "devil" for having deceived him. She immediately explodes in rage and curses him out.

Now then...

What I am trying to convey here isn't that the heroic character in question was angry at being called "a devil". What she is angry at is the absolute hypocrisy of the villain who has been tricked. He and his partner, as part of their job for their organization, regularly condemned people to a Fate Worse than Death with the same nonchalant attitude of shift-workers—-they were both Punch-Clock Villains to an extremely dark degree. She is furious at the idea of him having the audicity to complain about ill-treatment when he has done so much worse for over 80 years.

I just don't want it to look like she's angry at being insulted herself and give a wider picture of the whole thing.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Nov 26th 2020 at 8:52:01 AM

All right, thanks everybody for the answers.

@eagle - The character in question is an Olympic judo gold medalist and also holds a black belt in BJJ. So his specific, primary interest is the old school Japanese grappling, aka jujutsu (it's the martial art that judo, BJJ, sambo, derived from). In addition, he also has interest in karate, or more specifically, how it originated from Okinawa and was influenced by Chinese martial arts.

All in all, I guess basically Asian anthropology might cover this specific field.

I thought about it and came to a conclusion. My artwork is sloppy and unrefined, I'd be better working on something aimed towards children for now.

My concept is the Greek gods banishing mythical creatures to the world above while tormenting the humans bellow. A human goes to the world above to save the world bellow from the wrath of the gods. My idea is that he teams of with a group of mythical creatures who agree to help his cause if he joins their crew.

I don't know how to put a good twist on this. I'm scared that I'll be too much like Jake and the Neverland Pirates or One Piece. Granted, I've seen neither, what can I do to make my pirates and concept different? Aside from Greek mythology, what else should I research?

Hmm. Well, if you want some real variety throw in some other mythologies as well. A lot of them, especially in Europe, are a blend of other mythologies. It'd be really cool to see some versions of other-mythology myth creatures in the story, and you can definitely get away with using Roman mythology too.

Otherwise, don't be too concerned with originality. It's hard to perfectly copy works you've never seen before, so just focus on making a fun, pirate mythology story.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 26th 2020 at 1:23:00 PM

Anyway, I've my own question: How much time is needed for something to be considered a "drought"? Or how extreme does the situation have to be?

See, in my fanfic there are two Gods fighting over the weather. There were worldwide storms for a while that got turned into worldwide sunlight once the sun god got involved. However, now the storms are back, which is meant to be a bad thing. One of the protagonists noticed when looking online though that there was an article about a drought in Africa cured by this return of the rain, and she realized that maybe the sunlight was also a bad thing.

How realistic is this? The sun was only up for a few days in story-time, maybe a week or two at the longest. Can a drought happen that fast? Should I change it to something else? Keep in mind that by "worldwide sun" I don't mean that it never turns to night anywhere in the world, just that whenever it's daytime, the sun is up and there's no other weather.

I'd say it would take extemely close proximity or extreme intensity of the sun, and that that'd be felt in places other than Africa too.

.

Do you people think that a political thriller/war story with Funny Animal characters would be too niche?^note  I mean Alfred J. Kwak has already done it -kind of- and been very popular in it's country of origin and in my home country (we Finns seem to like animal characters both anthropomorphic and realistic, but this is no Donald Duck). It still stayed PG-rated, while my concept would go to logical conclusions and have more realistic consequences. I went with Funny Animals because Alfred J. Kwak inspired me and because making people birds gives the characters narrative/functional opportunities i wouldn't have with human characters (like flight, symbolism, etc.) and because it's supposed to be a comic and i still both suck at drawing humans and my facial blindness makes it really hard to design human heads anyway.

Edited by Nukeli on Nov 26th 2020 at 9:41:09 PM

I mean... this is Ra we're talking about, and I did keep describing the weather as particularly hot and dry, meaning the water from the storm probably evaporated abnormally quickly.

If that's not realistic, what about wildfires?

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 26th 2020 at 2:35:37 PM

I dunno, "worldwide storms" to me doesn't sound like something that is possible within a realistic climate. And in a realistic climate, "sun" is needed for "rain" in Africa (the monsoons).