So...as proven, I'm kind of bad at noticing plot holes, sometimes. That, or rousing myself far enough to care about them. But the other day Steve and I watched the recent Conan The Barbarian movie (overall verdict: More meh than feh, Michael Wex would say), and the plot-dependent nature of magic in dark fantasy really came rocketing out at me. Granted, that might've been because I just finished writing a 40,000 word-plus sequence which is basically one long fight between magic-users, all of whom are primarily smacking each other down magic-a-mano, because why the hell wouldn't they? But even though the film is not called Magic Pwns Everybody, I still couldn't help but spend most of the climax with my internal narrator saying things like this:
“Marique Zym! You're a hereditary witch with sanguimancy-based powers whose mother aspired to use the lost power of the necromantic Acheron Empire even though she herself was not, one assumes, Acheronian—pretty bad-ass, I must say. It's been shown earlier that you are not above using magic in battle, since you conjured a bunch of sand-golems to try and retrieve Tamara-the-Acheronian-pureblood and kill Conan; now you're chasing Tamara through a labyrinth of tunnels while your Dad's fortress's underside collapses around you. Do you A) take advantage of the fact that Tamara is bleeding, and use her own blood to puppet her back to you? B) Raise some rock-golems, or maybe reainmate some of the many, many partial skeletons and skulls this place is infested with, and bring Tamara back that way? C) Call upon your mother, who's on the verge of possessing Tamara, to possess Tamara and then use her as a weapon/human shield to stave off Conan, who's pursuing you both? Or do you D) try to take her on using nothing but your single set of Wolverine nail-claws, so you can taunt her sadistically throughout, thus pretty much ensuring Conan with cut off your hand and throw you off a cliff onto a spike?”
Or better yet:
“Khalar Zym! Though not apparently any kind of magic-user, you're a legendarily feared warlord prince who lost his witch wife to the stake, then raised an army from nothing, and now tours Hyboria searching for lost fragments of the Mask of Acheron and an Acheronian pureblood to jump-start it, while forcing your caravan of slaves to drag you and your daughter along in a gigantic, useless land-boat. Now you've got both the Mask and the pureblood, so would,'t it probably make a lot of sense to turn the Mask 'on', then give it to your daughter—who is a powerful witch, and loves you to literal distraction—and get her to use it to resurrect your wife/reboot the Acheron Empire/get rid of that pesky Conan? Failing this, however, and if you do insist on sticking such a ridiculously powerful magical artifact on your own face, do think maybe it would make sense to use those brand-new god-like powers of yours to A) stop the underside of your fortress from collapsing, B) bring your suddenly-dead daughter back to life using Acheronian necromancy and C) kill Conan with magic, as opposed to having a big sword-fight with the pissed-off guy whose father you killed and who now has two Cimmerian swords?”
No? No? Bueller?
Well, I'll be over here.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
