From: David B. Henderson (db.henderson@dcs.napier.ac.uk)
Date: Fri 09 Aug 1996 - 14:25:50 EEST
Well, here we go again. Martin Laurie seems to have a talent for
exciting passion in others, which is a remarkable skill with many, many
useful applications, but I digress. I have to come down on the side of
allowing the free expression of ideas on this (and most other)lists,
within reason, and nothing in Martin's posts struck me as unreasonable.
Gross, yes, but then a dissected troll corpse a la Trollpak, or a troll
fighting with its intestines spilling out and an arrow in its eye a la
Wyrm's Footprints both strike me as at least as gross.
Everyone's idea of disgusting and beyond the bounds of decency varies.
We talk quite freely of child murders and intra- and interspecies rape in
this list, and of death in a variety of imaginative fashions, and this
could all be interpreted as quite, quite sick if we were not at some remove
from it, objectifying it in a sense as a fiction.
Given that, I think it is fair to disagree with Martin's opinions about
Another example of this sort of situation would be the Kingdom of War
the Vadeli, or Humakti, but not to slip into personal jibes etc. And
also to get some perspective on what is gross or not. It seems alright
to talk about the Vadeli murdering their children and sleeping with their
mothers in a detatched manner, but not to go into detail. Perhaps the
deatil will give people a truer sense of the horror of the situation and
the Vadeli culture.
(Hoorah! Where's Mark Smylie?). It can be presented as a bald set of
statistics, like '50,000 people were killed during the invasion of X, as
part of the Total War'. Or you could present just one farm, where
nothing moves but the wind, where the bloated corpses of men, women,
children, dogs, cats, cattle, hens and rats lie everywhere, tangled and
intertwined, as if in death they sought the company of _any_ living thing
so they didn't die alone at the hands of inhuman murderers. Perhaps you
could even introduce a straggler from the army, or a wounded trooper left
as a 'booby-trap', who shoots the first person into the farmhouse, and
keeps shooting until he is hacked to death, laughing, himself.
Now that, to me, is grosser than 'plunging his purple tool into the still
corpse ... ', in that it seems more real, closer, more human, and it's
the empathy that we needto make it real, and horrific.
Longer than I expected, but just some thoughts. Creativity needs room to
breathe.
David Henderson
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