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"...answer first these questions three."
Jun. 28th, 2010 11:55 amAnother bizarre dream last night from which I woke up exhausted and irritated.
The first half of the dream was fun but irrelevant - I was part of a resistance organisation based in a small house in Pickering (a North Yorkshire town) which for some reason more closely resembled Lancaster. Lots of dissembling, evasion and so forth.
The second half of the dream, which I will touch on here, involved me getting involved in a Harry Potter style intrigue set in what appeared to be a Harry Potter theme park. I suppose this isn't surprising considering the amount of RPing I do in what is nominally the HP universe. What did strike me though was the absurdity of some of the tropes of that series, and fantasy fiction in general. Basically I realised as this section of the dream started that I was being called upon to solve a number of cryptic puzzles in order to thwart.. whoever. No idea who I was supposed to be thwarting, there was just a general air of necessary thwartage. The first one, which I remember in detail, was simple enough - a rhyming limerick in one room of this faux-Hogwarts referred to a chess move required on a board in another room - the notation for which move had to be entered into a grid in yet another room.
At which point the second puzzle was revealed.
It was when this second puzzle was revealed (some ridiculous affair involving throwing different coloured stones into a series of targets, and choosing the right stone/target combination based on Qabalistic colour correspondences) that I rebelled. The whole situation was nonsensical. Why on earth would any story require such a bizarre and abstract series of ridiculous challenges? The justification is always tenuous to say the least - in Philosopher's Stone there was a whole series of such things which were designed to prevent Voldemort's gaining the eponymous Maguffin (which needless to say did not even hold up three eleven year olds for more than a few minutes).
I lost my temper in the dream and ended up getting the guy that delivered the second challenge in a choke hold until he agreed to tell me which of the other strange denizens of Faux-Warts would be giving me the next puzzle, and then we went to see him together... It ended up being a lot quicker than working my way through Anagrams, Sudoku, etc etc and I'm sure the ultimate thwartery was just as effective.
I think this lack of willingness to engage with arbitrary trials may hold me back in any attempt to be a protagonist in fantasy fiction, but the time saved is I think worth that loss.
The first half of the dream was fun but irrelevant - I was part of a resistance organisation based in a small house in Pickering (a North Yorkshire town) which for some reason more closely resembled Lancaster. Lots of dissembling, evasion and so forth.
The second half of the dream, which I will touch on here, involved me getting involved in a Harry Potter style intrigue set in what appeared to be a Harry Potter theme park. I suppose this isn't surprising considering the amount of RPing I do in what is nominally the HP universe. What did strike me though was the absurdity of some of the tropes of that series, and fantasy fiction in general. Basically I realised as this section of the dream started that I was being called upon to solve a number of cryptic puzzles in order to thwart.. whoever. No idea who I was supposed to be thwarting, there was just a general air of necessary thwartage. The first one, which I remember in detail, was simple enough - a rhyming limerick in one room of this faux-Hogwarts referred to a chess move required on a board in another room - the notation for which move had to be entered into a grid in yet another room.
At which point the second puzzle was revealed.
It was when this second puzzle was revealed (some ridiculous affair involving throwing different coloured stones into a series of targets, and choosing the right stone/target combination based on Qabalistic colour correspondences) that I rebelled. The whole situation was nonsensical. Why on earth would any story require such a bizarre and abstract series of ridiculous challenges? The justification is always tenuous to say the least - in Philosopher's Stone there was a whole series of such things which were designed to prevent Voldemort's gaining the eponymous Maguffin (which needless to say did not even hold up three eleven year olds for more than a few minutes).
I lost my temper in the dream and ended up getting the guy that delivered the second challenge in a choke hold until he agreed to tell me which of the other strange denizens of Faux-Warts would be giving me the next puzzle, and then we went to see him together... It ended up being a lot quicker than working my way through Anagrams, Sudoku, etc etc and I'm sure the ultimate thwartery was just as effective.
I think this lack of willingness to engage with arbitrary trials may hold me back in any attempt to be a protagonist in fantasy fiction, but the time saved is I think worth that loss.
