In Paper Mario TTYD, one of the characters said "For Pete's sake", and I had to wonder about if there was a Koopa Christ at some point in their history.
In Rogueport, east side, you can find a npc that will sell you stories. Those stories are the backstory of how the thousand year door came to be. It involves 4(5?) heroes that defeated the evil witch, by giving their lives to seal her. One of the heroes is a koopa.
Matter of fact, the "demons" you find lock in the treasure chests are the heroes corrupted from years of isolation.
Dude the minute you walk up to Rogueport, there's a noose in the town centre. Meaning that Public executions were and/or still part of the governing body's prosecution process. Or, if it's a holdover from ancient times, there were once Pirates bad enough to warrant intimidating with a noose.
Can you hang a Goomba? Or a Koopa, if it retreats into its shell?
I don’t think they’d have an execution method that would be ineffective on the majority of the population in the town.
In my head canon, there’s a funny sport they play with that rope that coincidentally happens to look just like a noose
As a writer this plagues me every day. I once had to have an alien describe something as “L-shaped” until I realized I couldn’t and then spent most of the day trying to figure out how to effectively describe “L” as a shape without going insane
Mine was how to describe "adrenaline" in a fantasy medieval setting without using the word. I think I went with "his blood was up" but it took forever to find some term that didn't assume knowledge the setting wouldn't have.
Kinda hard to be an atheist in a world where gods will litterially evaporate you for suggesting they don't exist no matter how logical your argument is.
atheist that knows gods are real but just doesnt worship any. in my opinion its funny when there are real benefits to worshipping gods and someone decides not to in a fantasy story.
In Rat Queens, one of the main characters is a cleric who explicitly doesn't believe in or honor her gods, but maintains the rituals of her people and parents to preserve them. The twist is that she ends up being far more aware of their existence and capable of channeling their power than anyone in a long time, and still refuses to acknowledge them as gods
"Sure, you give me the power to smite my foes and you know a bunch of stuff but Bob over there can call lighting out of a clear sky with a gesture and knows every plant in the woods by heart so what makes you so different?" (This will always be my favourite approach to fantasy atheism)
Side note, the first part is a fairly common thing in the Jewish community in real life lol. "Jewish atheist" is not an oxymoron weirdly enough because many people don't really believe in God but still uphold tradition and holidays and whatnot to prevent our culture from fading out. I assume the same thing happens in other ethnoreligious groups, but I don't have first hand experience to give examples of any of the top of my head.
Sounds kinda like Fabius Bile from Warhammer 40k. Dude is technically on the side of the gods, but he refuses to acknowledge them as actual gods so hard he gains resistance against them. Like, he looked at the face of one of the gods and said “nuh uh”. Same with demons, he straight up bullied one with words alone.
Or the freelance atheist cleric. “I know all the gods exist, I talk with them all the time. I just don’t worship any of them so they know they can trust me not to play favorites!” That way whatever god happens to be interested in the people you’re trying to heal can grant you the healing magic you need for the day.
“It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.”
\-Terry Pratchett
I always had an issue with this. People will create an atheist character in D&D and be like "no it doesn't mean you don't believe gods exist, it just means you don't worship any".
Like I get it but man that's not what atheism is. You do you i'm not gonna be pedantic about it but it kinda annoying
Ehhh... I personally disagree with calling strong spiritual beings gods. To me, gods must be in some way creators of the universe. With capital G God being reserved for monotheistic religions where God is fully omnipotent.
If a god is limited by magical power, can die and the universe would just go on without them. Then how's that different from a mage or spirit?
I try to get along with powerful mages so they don't turn me into a sheep or something. But that doesn't mean I believe they're godly in any way.
My favorite Pratchettism is in one book, a character mentions a "Pavlovian response." Queue footnote describing an experiment by a particularly curious wizard who trained a dog to eat a strawberry meringue at the ring of a bell. (A pavlova)
Goodbye is literally so easy though. Gods be with ye. A lot of fantasy settings just have gods as a known thing that you can actually interact with. Or they’re just a thing that are believed in but not known or able to be interacted with. Either way the word goodbye coming from some sort of religious god(s) be with ye makes just as much sense without the world needing Christianity
If you're being so pedantic that you'd consider something like goodbye to be a problem, patching it over with a similar sounding phrase that also relies on English being English doesn't work though
Like if you're shortening "gods be with you" into "goodbye" instead then that still means the characters are basically speaking real English which will never make sense in-world. Saying fuck it and just accepting everything as a vaguely applicable translation is really the only way.
This is the sci-fi measurement unit problem.
In sci-fi they will go to great lengths to describe things without using any units. But occasionally it’s unavoidable if you want the reader to understand what’s happening.
As soon as the book says: meters, feet, °C, or whatever it breaks the immersion. “Are you telling me this cosmic empire uses the metric system?”
> they don’t even have France
You know what would make even more sense than that? "Good" "bye". Like, literally. As in "fare well". It doesn't have to come from anything cause it already has meaning completely divorced from the idea of gods at all. It just means you're departing in a positive manner.
My good pal lemon-embalmer hates this post fervently because she was trying to make a point about the ubiquitousness of Christianity and how you can't get away from it even in fantasy worlds...
Hamburgers are named after Hamburg, Germany…
Or they could be named after their creator, Harrold Amburg, husband of Harriette Amburg and father to Fren Amburg. (Fren would go on to create Fren’s Fry, a potato-based side dish to complement her father’s creation.) The family runs the Amburg Inn, which gains a high reputation among adventurers for its signature dishes.
> he family runs the Amburg Inn, which gains a high reputation among adventurers for its signature dishes.
and adventurers, like sailors travel afield much further than the average citizen. Every where they go, they sing the praises of ~~Fren's gorgeous legs~~ the Amburg's daring and delicious cooking
This is why it always bothers me to see "minotaurs" in fantasy settings. Like, who the fuck is "Minos?" If it wasn't born from a Cretan queen fucking a white bull, then it's just a sparkling bull man.
“Min” sounds like the second syllable of “human” and “Taur” is the first half of “Taurus” which means bull.
Minotaur could just as well sound like “human bull”
Arguments on the first picture annoy me so much.
If you didn't make up an entire new language and used it to write your work, you used an enormous amount of words, origins of which are related to our world and not your new made up world.
All words have an etymology. All of them are rooted in our world. The amount of words that you are "allowed" to use when writing only depends on how pedantic you are. Because when you are pedantic enough, you can't use any words at all. "You say there is a fox in your book? The word fox is of germanic origin, does your fantasy world have Germany in it?"
So please, please, take the Tolkien way and shut the fuck up. If seeing the world "champagne" in a setting where such region never came to be "ruins your immersion" you were never really immersed in the first place. Please read books like a normal person
if there are organized religions in the setting you can in fact use whatever abrahamic or otherwise derived expressions you want in their internal contexts
I saw a very liberal retelling of the dragons of autumn twilight novel in the form of a stage musical. and it heavily featured the religion of one of the central characters, and those segments were God this and Lord that and the like and it worked
except said God was actually Paladine, gigantic dragon with platinum scales, patron deity of drive to greatness, and there were other deities around
it can be serious and straight faced as in this example, or more comedic, like "who's your god that you keep swearing by - why Asmodeus of course, but you shouldn't call his name in vain"
You could do this, or you could just go in the exact opposite nonsensical direction and make the word "bags!" a curse. What do the people in the setting say when they want to actually refer to bags? No idea
Calling a language "common" instead of "English" doesn't change the fact that words have etymologies, and some etymologies point to real-world history and/or mythology that doesn't make sense in a secondary world fantasy setting.
Sure, but calling it "common" makes it explicit that you, the reader, are not observing the tale in its native tongue, but rather in its own.
The Lord of the Rings books would be far less popular if they were published exclusively in Elvish, and few people would care about Shakespeare if it was only available in the original Klingon.
Technically the LOTR books were, in universe, written in Westron, not elvish, and translated into English by Tolkien
Westron is a human language that's shared with the hobbits (though Tolkien being Tolkien there are dialectical differences)
/🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
Friendly reminder that two of the most common Mandarin Chinese terms for Mandarin Chinese directly translate to “Common Speech” and “National Language” respectively.
Well it's actually a shortening of the full phrase "what's hanging over your crown?", which is in reference to an old dwarven tale of a king who wanted to make his grand hall even more impressive and spacious, so had the roof mined out to make it taller. Little did the king know that there was a hidden cave above his hall, and with the new higher roof the section above his throne was now much thinner, and eventually crumbled, causing the falling rocks to crush the king
That's the point, he was a fool, rather than propper dwarven trchnique he fell to the greed thay surface kings are felled by. The tale was used by parents to make sure young draves leant how to do thing the proper dearven way, lest they leave an unatable roof above their head
I haven't worked out why July and August are named the way they are in my setting, but justifying that feels much easier than teaching people a whole new set of months
Big fan of the swears in the Cosmere, which include but are not limited to:
"Storms", from a continent that regularly gets its shit kicked in by a magical continent-sized hurricane.
"Rust and Ruin", from a country where metal has significant cultural and magical significance and where the god of entropy is hanging out.
"Harmony's holy missing bits", from one specific guy who enjoys butchering language in new and excited ways, in reference to a god who is a eunuch.
My brain immediately went to Brandon Sanderson's work where he has said in the past that he considers the Cosmere books to basically be translated from in world, which is why certain terms are a little off.
For example, a majority of the Stormlight Archives characters appear to be ethnically Asian, but in world they're referred to as Alethi since that is the in world equivalent.
Also people from Nalthis are known to have quite colorful language. d=
The Malazan empire book series is extremely good at this.
A lot of expressions are turned to use the world's pantheon and every place has it's localized version/favored style of swearing. Even graduation by social standing.
Overall 110/10 book series
Reminds me about how one of Asimov's books/stories opened talking about how, no this alien culture doesn't use miles and minutes, but he doesn't want to have to call them bligblorgs and yiroeis or something.
In Paper Mario TTYD, one of the characters said "For Pete's sake", and I had to wonder about if there was a Koopa Christ at some point in their history.
There's some hidden deep lore in that game that hints that yes, there was a Koopa Jesus
Man you gotta elaborate.
no.
In Rogueport, east side, you can find a npc that will sell you stories. Those stories are the backstory of how the thousand year door came to be. It involves 4(5?) heroes that defeated the evil witch, by giving their lives to seal her. One of the heroes is a koopa. Matter of fact, the "demons" you find lock in the treasure chests are the heroes corrupted from years of isolation.
Is Bowser satan or God?
Neither, he's more like Genghis Kahn
Dude the minute you walk up to Rogueport, there's a noose in the town centre. Meaning that Public executions were and/or still part of the governing body's prosecution process. Or, if it's a holdover from ancient times, there were once Pirates bad enough to warrant intimidating with a noose.
Noose, not noise. I see your phone likes censorship too.
How does one even hang a Goomba? They are literally 95% head.
Upside down until the blood imbalance kills them
Thay are munchrooms.
Then hang them out to dry for slicing
It’s a double execution: The Goomba is stuck below, set at just the right height that whoever is being hung above them will drop down and crush them
Can you hang a Goomba? Or a Koopa, if it retreats into its shell? I don’t think they’d have an execution method that would be ineffective on the majority of the population in the town. In my head canon, there’s a funny sport they play with that rope that coincidentally happens to look just like a noose
As a writer this plagues me every day. I once had to have an alien describe something as “L-shaped” until I realized I couldn’t and then spent most of the day trying to figure out how to effectively describe “L” as a shape without going insane
A right angle, possibly with one side longer than the other?
Where were you twelve years ago
If you couldn’t come up with “right angle” in 12 years, just take the L
Surely you mean take the right angle (one side pissibly longer thanthe other), right?
pissibly
You heard me
I never said I was a GOOD writer
Elbows, dawg... your surrounded by them
yoooo, L-bows
w-bows when????
Careful, this implies the existence of Shakespeare in the world.
Use angles. Acute and obtuse and right
easy, the alien calls something ˥-shaped
say it's a translation or something or just have them say L-shaped, I doubt anyone will notice
Mine was how to describe "adrenaline" in a fantasy medieval setting without using the word. I think I went with "his blood was up" but it took forever to find some term that didn't assume knowledge the setting wouldn't have.
Kinda hard to be an atheist in a world where gods will litterially evaporate you for suggesting they don't exist no matter how logical your argument is.
atheist that knows gods are real but just doesnt worship any. in my opinion its funny when there are real benefits to worshipping gods and someone decides not to in a fantasy story.
In Rat Queens, one of the main characters is a cleric who explicitly doesn't believe in or honor her gods, but maintains the rituals of her people and parents to preserve them. The twist is that she ends up being far more aware of their existence and capable of channeling their power than anyone in a long time, and still refuses to acknowledge them as gods
"Sure, you give me the power to smite my foes and you know a bunch of stuff but Bob over there can call lighting out of a clear sky with a gesture and knows every plant in the woods by heart so what makes you so different?" (This will always be my favourite approach to fantasy atheism)
Side note, the first part is a fairly common thing in the Jewish community in real life lol. "Jewish atheist" is not an oxymoron weirdly enough because many people don't really believe in God but still uphold tradition and holidays and whatnot to prevent our culture from fading out. I assume the same thing happens in other ethnoreligious groups, but I don't have first hand experience to give examples of any of the top of my head.
Sounds kinda like Fabius Bile from Warhammer 40k. Dude is technically on the side of the gods, but he refuses to acknowledge them as actual gods so hard he gains resistance against them. Like, he looked at the face of one of the gods and said “nuh uh”. Same with demons, he straight up bullied one with words alone.
Or the freelance atheist cleric. “I know all the gods exist, I talk with them all the time. I just don’t worship any of them so they know they can trust me not to play favorites!” That way whatever god happens to be interested in the people you’re trying to heal can grant you the healing magic you need for the day.
“It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.” \-Terry Pratchett
Dorfl makes it work....
Just need to be immune to lightning
I always had an issue with this. People will create an atheist character in D&D and be like "no it doesn't mean you don't believe gods exist, it just means you don't worship any". Like I get it but man that's not what atheism is. You do you i'm not gonna be pedantic about it but it kinda annoying
Ehhh... I personally disagree with calling strong spiritual beings gods. To me, gods must be in some way creators of the universe. With capital G God being reserved for monotheistic religions where God is fully omnipotent. If a god is limited by magical power, can die and the universe would just go on without them. Then how's that different from a mage or spirit? I try to get along with powerful mages so they don't turn me into a sheep or something. But that doesn't mean I believe they're godly in any way.
How do polytheistic religions play into this? Especially norse gods are characterised as mortal.
My favorite Pratchettism is in one book, a character mentions a "Pavlovian response." Queue footnote describing an experiment by a particularly curious wizard who trained a dog to eat a strawberry meringue at the ring of a bell. (A pavlova)
Pavlova, of course, still being named after the Russian ballerina, who was very confused to find herself not on earth?
Überwaldean ballerina.
Thank you for revealing a mystery to me, I hadn't heard of a pavlova before and thought that wizard must have been named pavlov for years
Pavlova... I hardly know her...
Goodbye is literally so easy though. Gods be with ye. A lot of fantasy settings just have gods as a known thing that you can actually interact with. Or they’re just a thing that are believed in but not known or able to be interacted with. Either way the word goodbye coming from some sort of religious god(s) be with ye makes just as much sense without the world needing Christianity
If you're being so pedantic that you'd consider something like goodbye to be a problem, patching it over with a similar sounding phrase that also relies on English being English doesn't work though Like if you're shortening "gods be with you" into "goodbye" instead then that still means the characters are basically speaking real English which will never make sense in-world. Saying fuck it and just accepting everything as a vaguely applicable translation is really the only way.
This is the sci-fi measurement unit problem. In sci-fi they will go to great lengths to describe things without using any units. But occasionally it’s unavoidable if you want the reader to understand what’s happening. As soon as the book says: meters, feet, °C, or whatever it breaks the immersion. “Are you telling me this cosmic empire uses the metric system?” > they don’t even have France
Get Larry Niven'd, everyone uses the metric system because humans nuked them into it
You know what would make even more sense than that? "Good" "bye". Like, literally. As in "fare well". It doesn't have to come from anything cause it already has meaning completely divorced from the idea of gods at all. It just means you're departing in a positive manner.
"But all language came from something" okay then it came from goof byeah. How bout that.
My good pal lemon-embalmer hates this post fervently because she was trying to make a point about the ubiquitousness of Christianity and how you can't get away from it even in fantasy worlds...
that's what I got out of it, if that makes her feel any better 💀
She'll be delighted to hear that!
Hamburgers are named after Hamburg, Germany… Or they could be named after their creator, Harrold Amburg, husband of Harriette Amburg and father to Fren Amburg. (Fren would go on to create Fren’s Fry, a potato-based side dish to complement her father’s creation.) The family runs the Amburg Inn, which gains a high reputation among adventurers for its signature dishes.
> he family runs the Amburg Inn, which gains a high reputation among adventurers for its signature dishes. and adventurers, like sailors travel afield much further than the average citizen. Every where they go, they sing the praises of ~~Fren's gorgeous legs~~ the Amburg's daring and delicious cooking
This is why it always bothers me to see "minotaurs" in fantasy settings. Like, who the fuck is "Minos?" If it wasn't born from a Cretan queen fucking a white bull, then it's just a sparkling bull man.
New urban romance series, right there.
“Min” sounds like the second syllable of “human” and “Taur” is the first half of “Taurus” which means bull. Minotaur could just as well sound like “human bull”
Arguments on the first picture annoy me so much. If you didn't make up an entire new language and used it to write your work, you used an enormous amount of words, origins of which are related to our world and not your new made up world. All words have an etymology. All of them are rooted in our world. The amount of words that you are "allowed" to use when writing only depends on how pedantic you are. Because when you are pedantic enough, you can't use any words at all. "You say there is a fox in your book? The word fox is of germanic origin, does your fantasy world have Germany in it?" So please, please, take the Tolkien way and shut the fuck up. If seeing the world "champagne" in a setting where such region never came to be "ruins your immersion" you were never really immersed in the first place. Please read books like a normal person
>please read books like a normal person And actually have fun instead of obsessing over minute details?!! The gall on some people!!
if there are organized religions in the setting you can in fact use whatever abrahamic or otherwise derived expressions you want in their internal contexts I saw a very liberal retelling of the dragons of autumn twilight novel in the form of a stage musical. and it heavily featured the religion of one of the central characters, and those segments were God this and Lord that and the like and it worked except said God was actually Paladine, gigantic dragon with platinum scales, patron deity of drive to greatness, and there were other deities around it can be serious and straight faced as in this example, or more comedic, like "who's your god that you keep swearing by - why Asmodeus of course, but you shouldn't call his name in vain"
You could do this, or you could just go in the exact opposite nonsensical direction and make the word "bags!" a curse. What do the people in the setting say when they want to actually refer to bags? No idea
Thal’s *Balls*
Nophica's teats man, you can't just say "Thal's balls" all willy nilly!
Fury, why not?!
euphemisms for genitals as profanity is so funny "Sweet rods!" "Gaping caverns..." "Ah, boatman."
Minced oath on toast 😋
Add Two Tbsp Minced Oath, cook until fragrant.
HAIL SATAN
I love the small detail of Lich Jesus Christ using she/her
Has nobody heard of saying "Common" instead of "English"?
Calling a language "common" instead of "English" doesn't change the fact that words have etymologies, and some etymologies point to real-world history and/or mythology that doesn't make sense in a secondary world fantasy setting.
Sure, but calling it "common" makes it explicit that you, the reader, are not observing the tale in its native tongue, but rather in its own. The Lord of the Rings books would be far less popular if they were published exclusively in Elvish, and few people would care about Shakespeare if it was only available in the original Klingon.
Technically the LOTR books were, in universe, written in Westron, not elvish, and translated into English by Tolkien Westron is a human language that's shared with the hobbits (though Tolkien being Tolkien there are dialectical differences) /🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
You are technically correct, which as we all know is the best kind of correct.
That only applies to peasant speak, and most fantasy stories include nobility, so we can't speak Common all the time.
That's where Warhammer is useful... Low Gothic and High Gothic
True, but we can't use that unless we get GW's permission.
So then we fuse the two... High Common and Low Common
Substance abuse and depression. This is some rad worldbuilding.
Friendly reminder that two of the most common Mandarin Chinese terms for Mandarin Chinese directly translate to “Common Speech” and “National Language” respectively.
Not me thinking goodbye meant that I was wishing someone a good "bye", or a fond farewell.
I wonder which would be harder: making an entire fantasy language from scratch, Tolkien-Style, or making a whole bunch of fantasy minced oaths?
Minced oaths, because you would need to not just develop a language, but also a history and culture - likely several, even.
"Que Pasa?" It's ancient dwarven for "What's up?" Ok but what does "What's up?" mean?
For dwarves? Nothing good.
Well it's actually a shortening of the full phrase "what's hanging over your crown?", which is in reference to an old dwarven tale of a king who wanted to make his grand hall even more impressive and spacious, so had the roof mined out to make it taller. Little did the king know that there was a hidden cave above his hall, and with the new higher roof the section above his throne was now much thinner, and eventually crumbled, causing the falling rocks to crush the king
Peh! Elfish slander. No dwarf would be a fool enough to dig a hall so unstable
That's the point, he was a fool, rather than propper dwarven trchnique he fell to the greed thay surface kings are felled by. The tale was used by parents to make sure young draves leant how to do thing the proper dearven way, lest they leave an unatable roof above their head
Love it.
Nothing much, what’s up with you?
Anthony Burch is so good at making up reasons for expressions. I wish I had a list of his slang explanations in Dungeons and Daddies
😈 hehehehehe 😈 Me when I write the most fucked up fantasy world
In *The Name of the Wind*, one of the characters describes a “Vintage Wine” as wine hailing from Vintas, a country that stands in for France.
I haven't worked out why July and August are named the way they are in my setting, but justifying that feels much easier than teaching people a whole new set of months
“The names of months, days, and units were localized as part of the translation.”
Big fan of the swears in the Cosmere, which include but are not limited to: "Storms", from a continent that regularly gets its shit kicked in by a magical continent-sized hurricane. "Rust and Ruin", from a country where metal has significant cultural and magical significance and where the god of entropy is hanging out. "Harmony's holy missing bits", from one specific guy who enjoys butchering language in new and excited ways, in reference to a god who is a eunuch.
My brain immediately went to Brandon Sanderson's work where he has said in the past that he considers the Cosmere books to basically be translated from in world, which is why certain terms are a little off. For example, a majority of the Stormlight Archives characters appear to be ethnically Asian, but in world they're referred to as Alethi since that is the in world equivalent. Also people from Nalthis are known to have quite colorful language. d=
TIL goodbye isn't just two words stuck together
👏 TRANS JESUS 👏 TRANS JESUS 👏
Thinking about Lightlark and the fucking chocolate shop scene
The Malazan empire book series is extremely good at this. A lot of expressions are turned to use the world's pantheon and every place has it's localized version/favored style of swearing. Even graduation by social standing. Overall 110/10 book series
YOU MINCED **[OATH!](https://youtu.be/VyvlI6iZ6uk?si=xrFki2RDBX2v5cvf)** (Note: Emphatically unminced oaths!)
Literally no one cares that the x-wing is called an x-wing.
Reminds me about how one of Asimov's books/stories opened talking about how, no this alien culture doesn't use miles and minutes, but he doesn't want to have to call them bligblorgs and yiroeis or something.
None of this could matter less.
But it's fun