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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
tomandtish
Seriously. Your average vampire on that show kills a human (unless it is a main character) with about 5 seconds of feeding through two tiny holes. They must have industrial strength vacuums hooked up to those fangs!
Well, I'm not sure how much this changes the equation, but as I understand it, a human only has to lose about a third of their blood to be almost guaranteed to die without medical treatment, and if you puncture the right part of the neck a human will lose most of their blood in minutes without any additional help. But I'm by no means an expert.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Vrock_Summoner
Well, I'm not sure how much this changes the equation, but as I understand it, a human only has to lose about a third of their blood to be almost guaranteed to die without medical treatment, and if you puncture the right part of the neck a human will lose most of their blood in minutes without any additional help. But I'm by no means an expert.
Absolutely. The key being in minutes, not seconds.
I'm sure they do it that way because they don't want to waste minutes of screentime showing a feeding, but the result is that they show the victims dying in seconds (incidentally, with no obvious signs of the vampire swallowing).So high strength vacuum that provides the suction for them...
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
tomandtish
Not a misconception, but i always wondered how Midas went to the bathroom...
The same way Lear went to the bathroom. No self respecting king shakes his own willy.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Kid Jake
The same way Lear went to the bathroom. No self respecting king shakes his own willy.
Wait, does that mean he got a gold statue of a really reluctant-looking servant every time he needed to pee?
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Vrock_Summoner
Wait, does that mean he got a gold statue of a really reluctant-looking servant every time he needed to pee?
Well, I'd imagine that he occasionally got a gold statue of an inappropriately excited servant when he needed to pee, but yeah.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
tomandtish
Absolutely. The key being in minutes, not seconds.
I'm sure they do it that way because they don't want to waste minutes of screentime showing a feeding, but the result is that they show the victims dying in seconds (incidentally, with no obvious signs of the vampire swallowing).So high strength vacuum that provides the suction for them...
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8...gsqgo3_250.gif
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
tomandtish
The pirates wearing eye patches for night vision is plausible, except they wear the eye patch during the day as well. So it's either injury or a fashion statement.
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I meant for when they go below deck, where it's supposed to be dark.
Yeah, they'd swap the patch between eyes depending on if they were above or below deck, so they never had to adjust to the change in light conditions.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Grey Watcher
Honestly, it didn't occur to me that the "multi-pronged humanoid mosquito" thing WASN'T how it worked until today. If nothing else, it accounts for how there's never any sign of spillage, which I think would be inevitable with the puncture-then-suck-and-swallow-like-a-living-human-would method.
Plus I figure that vampires don't metabolize blood the way we do food, so the digestive tract is essentially vestigial.
I think we all got this from the two little holes that would be left in vampire shows/movies. If the movies showed that the person had their neck ripped open like they were attacked by a large dog or big cat, I am pretty sure it would have come across a lot less... romantic of a notion.
My contribution: Color itself was invented in the 1950s and before then everything and everyone was black and white.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
GungHo
My contribution: Color itself was invented in the 1950s and before then everything and everyone was black and white.
Nope, the nazis had colour propaganda, and there are earlier colour photographs using triple exposures through colour filters. Yeah, you were joking. :smallbiggrin:
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Kid Jake
Well, I'd imagine that he occasionally got a gold statue of an inappropriately excited servant when he needed to pee, but yeah.
Or maybe, some sort of golden tongs would be in order?
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Don't the legends just say Midas wore gloves? Couldn't a servant just wear a pair of gloves for the... task at hand? I mean, far less humorous a visual but...
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
The Glyphstone
Yeah, they'd swap the patch between eyes depending on if they were above or below deck, so they never had to adjust to the change in light conditions.
And promptly trip and fall down the stairs, or bump into things, because of their lack of depth perception. Hence the stories of them being always drunk.
Wait - you were talking about one of your misconceptions weren't you ? :smallamused:
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
SethoMarkus
Don't the legends just say Midas wore gloves?
How do you put on gloves that turn rigid when you touch them?
In Ovid's Metamorphosis, he didn't have the curse for long. After Midas repented and prayed for help, Dionysus relented and told him how to rid himself of it.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
nedz
And promptly trip and fall down the stairs, or bump into things, because of their lack of depth perception. Hence the stories of them being always drunk.
I can walk up and down stairs/navigate my way around obstacles in broad daylight/play sports/fence/tie knots/fire guns/etc perfectly fine without depth perception, and if I can do it I'm sure pirates can do it also. (Well, I'm a little hindered doing fencing without depth perception, but I could overcome that with more practice, I'm sure.)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Jay R
How do you put on gloves that turn rigid when you touch them?
In Ovid's Metamorphosis, he didn't have the curse for long. After Midas repented and prayed for help, Dionysus relented and told him how to rid himself of it.
Woven gloves; the individual threads become gold, which is still quite malleable.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
digiman619
That does make a certain amount of sense from a physics standpoint; invisible retinas shouldn't be able to see light that passes literally through them, so 'invisible' creatures should be reflecting a color we can't pick up, so eyes that are also thusly shifted seeing shades of light normally invisible.
If an invisible creature reflected only wavelengths of light we couldn't perceive, it would appear to be completely black, not transparent.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Strigon
Woven gloves; the individual threads become gold, which is still quite malleable.
Thank you, that was along the lines of what I was thinking. As well as gold being soft enough as to be pliable when thin. It was a nice counter, though! :P
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Midas's curse always confused me. Does his hand only turn the piece of something that he touches to gold? Clearly not, he ended up with people-statues without touching every inch of the people in question. What about liquids? Can they turn to gold? What happens if he touches something really big, like a tree? A house? The earth? Could Midas have caused a Cat's Cradle-esque apocalypse by turning the earth and the sea to gold?
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Rusvul
Midas's curse always confused me. Does his hand only turn the piece of something that he touches to gold? Clearly not, he ended up with people-statues without touching every inch of the people in question. What about liquids? Can they turn to gold? What happens if he touches something really big, like a tree? A house? The earth? Could Midas have caused a Cat's Cradle-esque apocalypse by turning the earth and the sea to gold?
There's a comic about that.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Strigon
Woven gloves; the individual threads become gold, which is still quite malleable.
I suspect that leather gloves were far more common then. It might take some experimentation to come up with the idea of woven gloves.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Just simplify the idea of what a woven glove does here - make an extremely thin glove (even if it's really fragile material not suited to surviving as a glove, it'll be gold in a moment) and then wear a more proper glove over it so it has some shielding and doesn't look too strange.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
I was a teenager at the time, but I was 100 % certain that the kender from Dragonlance looked like fauns or satyrs. As in Pan of the Greek mythology - goat's feet, a little tail, small horns on the head. Possibly reed flutes too. All this from the name "Burrfoot" - he'd have to have fur-covered legs, otherwise he wouldn't have burrs latching onto them, right?
It's not a misconception, exactly, but the way I imagined Ents in LotR they were massive, thick-bodied and wide. Then the movies made them like thin stick-men. The clash between my mental image and the movie's visuals was so strong I still dislike the movies purely because of that. I know it's illogical to go to that extent, but...
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
endoperez
I was a teenager at the time, but I was 100 % certain that the kender from Dragonlance looked like fauns or satyrs. As in Pan of the Greek mythology - goat's feet, a little tail, small horns on the head. Possibly reed flutes too. All this from the name "Burrfoot" - he'd have to have fur-covered legs, otherwise he wouldn't have burrs latching onto them, right?
It's not a misconception, exactly, but the way I imagined Ents in LotR they were massive, thick-bodied and wide. Then the movies made them like thin stick-men. The clash between my mental image and the movie's visuals was so strong I still dislike the movies purely because of that. I know it's illogical to go to that extent, but...
Tolkien said that when an ent isn't moving, you cannot distinguish him from a tree. So they can't be any thicker than trees are.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Jay R
So they can't be any thicker than trees are.
Depending on species of tree, they can become quite thick...
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Jay R
So they can't be any thinker than trees are.
I disagree. Trees can't think at all, and Ents blatantly can. This is the first time I've heard "think" used as an adjective, though...
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
enderlord99
I disagree. Trees can't think at all, and Ents blatantly can. This is the first time I've heard "think" used as an adjective, though...
I think he meant thicker. At least that's how I read it.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
nyjastul69
I think he meant thicker. At least that's how I read it.
I know. I was poking fun at the typo.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
goto124
Depending on species of tree, they can become quite thick...
According to Tolkien, we're talking about beech, oak, chestnut, ash, fir, birch, rowan, and linden. These aren't baobabs or sequoias.
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
Jay R
Tolkien said that when an ent isn't moving, you cannot distinguish him from a tree.
Do you recall where this came up? Particularly the context?
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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Originally Posted by
hymer
Do you recall where this came up? Particularly the context?
For one thing, when Merry and Pippin first wander into Fangorn Forest they walk right past Treebeard, thinking he is a slightly strange looking tree stump. Can't remember the exact description. Later on, other ents are described as slender, especially the younger ones like Quickbeam.