Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?

[Remedy]

And there's no reason a vampire with syringe teeth couldn't drink from wine glasses.

*tips glass, dips teeth into liquid, sips through teeth*

[Segev]

I suppose the "syringe" version I always conceived was kind of a hybrid. Essentially, the "suction" is done by blood grooves in the fangs that pull it into and direct it towards the back of the mouth, letting them taste it and drink "normally" without the mess of having to try to treat the neck like a straw. This would also let them sip from wine glasses normally.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Bacon is far from the first scientist. To pick just one example: Al Hasan ibn Al Haytham did a lot of genuinely scientific research on optics centuries before Bacon.

Fair.
Bacon is credited with the creation of the Scientific Method, and I thought it made more sense to reference someone who everyone would instantly recognize as "that Scientific Method guy" than to search for a history of the Method and mention someone almost no one would recognize.

[goto124]

Come to think of it, I've always thought vampires used syringe teeth, I just didn't use the word 'syringe', exactly think that hard about it, or realize how weird it was. It seemed normal.

[weckar]

My version of the snake-like syringe teeth went quite far, to where they actually folded back like some venomous snake fangs.

[Kitten Champion]

When I was pretty little, I used to think that witches were non-human magical creatures like fairies, ghosts, and vampires. Probably because they kind of got portrayed that way in some kid-friendly media and that's the general impression I got from stereotypical Halloween decorations and the like.

I even wrote a crayon-based picture story about a lonely Witch, Vampire, and a Ghost coming together as friends because each had the requisite skill/items to solve the other's dilemma - the Vampire gave the Ghost her enchanted mantle and gloves so she could touch things as a gesture of kindness. the Ghost could then find and bring the Witch's wand after it had been taken by an unruly crow to make its nest, and finally the Witch magically grew a field of giant tomatoes for the Vampire to sate her hunger, and everyone lived happily ever after in a big scarecrow of their design amid the tomato fields.

[weckar]

I even wrote a crayon-based picture story about a lonely Witch, Vampire, and a Ghost coming together as friends because each had the requisite skill/items to solve the other's dilemma - the Vampire gave the Ghost her enchanted mantle and gloves so she could touch things as a gesture of kindness. the Ghost could then find and bring the Witch's wand after it had been taken by an unruly crow to make its nest, and finally the Witch magically grew a field of giant tomatoes for the Vampire to sate her hunger, and everyone lived happily ever after in a big scarecrow of their design amid the tomato fields.

I know a little girl who would love to read that


Cultural thing: I thought elves and fairies were the same thing for the longest time.

[hymer]

When I was pretty little, I used to think that witches were non-human magical creatures like fairies, ghosts, and vampires. Probably because they kind of got portrayed that way in some kid-friendly media and that's the general impression I got from stereotypical Halloween decorations and the like.

D&D hags are this way.

[digiman619]

I know a little girl who would love to read that


Cultural thing: I thought elves and fairies were the same thing for the longest time.

Depending on which version of the mythos you read, they are. But I'm assuming that you thought Tinkerbell-type pixies were the same as Legolas-type elves? In that case, yeah, that'd be odd.

[erikun]

So what're some of the wackiest theories and silliest misconceptions about elements common to fantasy and fantasy gaming that your young self, your own children, or other kids you've known pulled out of seemingly nowhere?

As a kid, I did not realize that "Cleric" and "Clerk" were different terms. As such, I'd assumed that D&D had a bunch of merchants running around healing people as a profession. I'd just assumed that they were using their money to purchase healing potions or the components and making them themselves, like herbalists! I didn't exactly get the connection there.

It wasn't until much later that I'd found out just what a "Cleric" was.

[Segev]

Depending on which version of the mythos you read, they are. But I'm assuming that you thought Tinkerbell-type pixies were the same as Legolas-type elves? In that case, yeah, that'd be odd.

Actually, a race that was a dual-form fey with "(D&D) elf-like" and "tinkerbell-like" forms would be interesting. Kind-of makes me think of the three good fairies from Sleeping Beauty (how they would go from human-sized/wingless to winged mouse-size...and sometimes smaller still).

As a kid, I did not realize that "Cleric" and "Clerk" were different terms. As such, I'd assumed that D&D had a bunch of merchants running around healing people as a profession. I'd just assumed that they were using their money to purchase healing potions or the components and making them themselves, like herbalists! I didn't exactly get the connection there.

It wasn't until much later that I'd found out just what a "Cleric" was.

I think the two words actually do share a root. "Clerical work" is still the term for the kind of paperwork clerks perform.

But that could be an interesting setting conceit, as well. Or maybe just Wuakeen's MO. "FEEL THE HEALING POWER OF WEALTH!"

[TheTeaMustFlow]

But that could be an interesting setting conceit, as well. Or maybe just Wuakeen's MO. "FEEL THE HEALING POWER OF WEALTH!"

Presumably the evil clerics of the setting would channel negative energy through the dread power of Das Kapital.

[Kami2awa]

There is, IRL an alloy called "invar" which has a very low coefficient of thermal expansion - that is to say, it doesn't expand when heated. The first I ever heard of it was in Terry Pratchett's story Thief of Time, and when I read this I assumed invar was like mithril, or dilithium - a completely made-up material. In fact, it's entirely real.

[1337 b4k4]

Not a misconception of the fiction, but of the rules. The first time I read an RPG rule book and it was describing passage of time for various events, healing from bullet wounds, travel etc. And it gave them in days and months just like they should be. Young me thought this literally meant that you couldn't play you character for that much IRL time as well. So if your character got shot, you couldn't play the game again for another few weeks or months while they recovered. Made me wonder why the heck anyone would actually want to play these games. Ooops.

[Longes]

There is, IRL an alloy called "invar" which has a very low coefficient of thermal expansion - that is to say, it doesn't expand when heated. The first I ever heard of it was in Terry Pratchett's story Thief of Time, and when I read this I assumed invar was like mithril, or dilithium - a completely made-up material. In fact, it's entirely real.

I'm about to blow your mind. There is an easily accessible, cheap, virtually omnipresent material with a negative coefficient of thermal expansion. We call it "ice"

[Knaight]

I'm about to blow your mind. There is an easily accessible, cheap, virtually omnipresent material with a negative coefficient of thermal expansion. We call it "ice"

Ice has a positive coefficient of thermal expansion over every bit of temperature range I've seen data on. Liquid water goes negative between 0 and 4 C at 1 bar, and ice is less dense than water over a fairly high temperature-pressure range (which is anomolous), but ice itself has a positive coefficient of thermal expansion. There are things that go negative though: zirconium tungstate at STP and surrounding temperature-pressures is.

[Inevitability]

Presumably the evil clerics of the setting would channel negative energy through the dread power of Das Kapital.

That's only the lawful ones, though: CN and CE clerics are casting through Atlas Shrugged.

[GreatWyrmGold]

D&D hags are this way.

I'm pretty sure there's a Witch class somewhere in the books, too. Let it never be said that D&D shies away from doing multiple different passes over the same concept!

That's only the lawful ones, though: CN and CE clerics are casting through Atlas Shrugged.

So, D&D deity Ayn Rand is basically the opposite of D&D deity St. Cuthbert?

[Rizban]

I never thought that vampires had hollow teeth, though when I was older, I did logically reason out that it would be somehow more efficient at siphoning it from the victim's body with less blood loss if they did.

My campaign setting does something similar if for no other meta-reason than to make the equirectangular projection equidistant at any latitude. The world, seen from e.g. a moon, is a sphere, but due to the confluence of ley lines (the in-universe explanation), space is magically warped as you approach the poles - passing through the pole still deposits you on the other side of the map as normal, but stand even one 5-foot-square away and walk due east or west and it'll take you just as much time to go from longitude line to longitude line as it would on the equator.

This makes your world generally take the shape of a torus.

Spoiler: torus

Show

I used to have a very narrow view of witches, because my Oma convinced me that she was one. I thought that witches were very nice people, who kept slugs as pets, and always had a cowardly cat and a mean cat. I also thought that they had 2 brooms, made all of wood, one for flying and one for sweeping. I thought that they all had hooked noses, and that they all originally came from Germany.

This was similar to my early view of witches as well. Evil witches also only happened because they never got married and couldn't have kids. Therefore, any unmarried woman over the age of 30 had the potential to secretly be an evil witch looking to snatch away children, particularly if they also owned cats.

-Dwarves had no beards because they need to work on the forge without obstruction

I, on the other hand, believed that dwarves had beards because they worked on forges and that their beards acted like aprons that protected them from the heat and sparks when working with hot metal.

This led to me wondering what dwarf beards were made of, because I knew human hair burned. I soon learned about asbestos, which is hair-like and nonflammable. My young mind thus concluded that dwarf hair must therefore be made of asbestos. Therefore, companies that used asbestos to make things were plundering dwarf tombs to steal the beards from dwarf corpses to make flame retardant materials.

By extension, I was also convinced that associating with dwarves caused lung cancer.

I once, long ago, ran across a couple of kids who believed that invisible people could see other invisible people and that it was only visible people who could not see invisible people. That never made any sense to me.

If an invisible creature reflected only wavelengths of light we couldn't perceive, it would appear to be completely black, not transparent.

Nonsense. You're assuming that they're absorbing wavelengths that we can normally see. If, however, they are perfectly transparent to normally visible light, it would pass through them unhindered, leaving them completely invisible.

Alternatively, they could be made of a material that bends normally visible light around them, allowing you to see what is behind them, much like gravity can bend light around massive objects. However, some wavelengths just wouldn't be bend enough, and such creatures are capable of perceiving those.

How do you put on gloves that turn rigid when you touch them?

Cloth of gold

[Bohandas]

This makes your world generally take the shape of a torus.

Spoiler: torus

Show

I think you're thinking of something else.

I think he means something closer to a cylinder in a highly truncated projective plane with the points at infinity moved to finite points

At any rate it wouldn't be that kind of torus anyway, it would be a clifford torus

[Douglas]

Wait, you're telling me vampires don't have syringe teeth? That's news to me.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I, on the other hand, believed that dwarves had beards because they worked on forges and that their beards acted like aprons that protected them from the heat and sparks when working with hot metal.
This led to me wondering what dwarf beards were made of, because I knew human hair burned. I soon learned about asbestos, which is hair-like and inflammable. My young mind thus concluded that dwarf hair must therefore be made of asbestos. Therefore, companies that used asbestos to make things were plundering dwarf tombs to steal the beards from dwarf corpses to make flame retardant materials.
By extension, I was also convinced that associating with dwarves caused lung cancer.

...
I want to steal this idea.

Nonsense. You're assuming that they're absorbing wavelengths that we can normally see. If, however, they are perfectly transparent to normally visible light, it would pass through them unhindered, leaving them completely invisible.
Alternatively, they could be made of a material that bends normally visible light around them, allowing you to see what is behind them, much like gravity can bend light around massive objects. However, some wavelengths just wouldn't be bend enough, and such creatures are capable of perceiving those.

The problem with both of those is that the invisible person would also be blind.
The only story that I can think of which properly addresses this is the original Invisible Man, which has the titular character's retinas still be visible.

Cloth of gold

I got a mental image of King Midas putting on cloth-of-gold gloves which promptly turned to solid, non-cloth gold.

[Rizban]

...
I want to steal this idea.

Feel free.

The problem with both of those is that the invisible person would also be blind.
The only story that I can think of which properly addresses this is the original Invisible Man, which has the titular character's retinas still be visible.

Not necessarily. They simply see in different wavelengths, as with the example earlier in the thread of glass being almost entirely transparent in visible light but opaque in infrared. They would be blind to "normal" light that we see, but they could still see perfectly fine otherwise.

I got a mental image of King Midas putting on cloth-of-gold gloves which promptly turned to solid, non-cloth gold.

But gold is already gold, so how does it get more goldified?

[enderlord99]

But gold is already gold, so how does it get more goldified?

It doesn't turn into solidgold, in this case. It turns into solid gold.

Not more gold, just more solid.

Also, he said he got the image in his head, not that he expects that to be the actual result.

[Fri]

Depending on which version of the mythos you read, they are. But I'm assuming that you thought Tinkerbell-type pixies were the same as Legolas-type elves? In that case, yeah, that'd be odd.

Amusingly, the first translation of LOTR in my language translated the elfs there as "fairies"

[Inevitability]

And then to make it all even more confusing, the Fiend Folio gave us the "Fey'ri", who are a subgroup of elves.

[Bohandas]

Cultural thing: I thought elves and fairies were the same thing for the longest time.

Traditionally they are. Like in the ballad of Tam Lin, wherein Tam Lin is described as both as a fairy and an elf.

[Zaydos]

In addition to elves being fairies (the shoe maker and the elves has brownies in it). Elrond was almost a gnome.

By which I mean originally Tolkien called the Noldor (i.e. those elves who scare Ringwraiths and who fought Morgoth) gnomes.

[bulbaquil]

I never thought that vampires had hollow teeth, though when I was older, I did logically reason out that it would be somehow more efficient at siphoning it from the victim's body with less blood loss if they did.

This makes your world generally take the shape of a torus.

Spoiler: torus

Show

No, it does not. In a torus, crossing over the "north pole" (to the extent that term means anything in a torus) would take you to the "south pole." In my setting, crossing over the north pole takes you to a point in the northern hemisphere exactly 180 degrees longitudinally offset from the longitude you originated from, exactly the same way it would in a spherical world. Crossing over the south pole takes you to a point in the southern hemisphere exactly 180 degrees longitudinally offset.

Walking east-west around the world next to the pole, however, takes exactly the same amount of time as walking east-west around the world would at the equator, exactly the same way it would in a cylindrical world.

Effectively, the world is simultaneously a sphere and a cylinder. As you approach the pole, a length contraction occurs in the east-west dimension, analogous to the Lorentz contraction in the real world, to the point where at the poles themselves, you're functionally two-dimensional. Seen from space, outside the influence of the planet's magosphere, the planet is an ordinary sphere, but as any measuring stick you would carry to the pole would undergo the same contraction, it "looks" as though the distance is the same.

This is unnecessarily complicated. Occam's Razor does not apply in my setting. Entities can be and are multiplied beyond necessity, and the simplest possible explanation is usually wrong.

[Fiery Diamond]

No, it does not. In a torus, crossing over the "north pole" (to the extent that term means anything in a torus) would take you to the "south pole." In my setting, crossing over the north pole takes you to a point in the northern hemisphere exactly 180 degrees longitudinally offset from the longitude you originated from, exactly the same way it would in a spherical world. Crossing over the south pole takes you to a point in the southern hemisphere exactly 180 degrees longitudinally offset.

Walking east-west around the world next to the pole, however, takes exactly the same amount of time as walking east-west around the world would at the equator, exactly the same way it would in a cylindrical world.

Effectively, the world is simultaneously a sphere and a cylinder. As you approach the pole, a length contraction occurs in the east-west dimension, analogous to the Lorentz contraction in the real world, to the point where at the poles themselves, you're functionally two-dimensional. Seen from space, outside the influence of the planet's magosphere, the planet is an ordinary sphere, but as any measuring stick you would carry to the pole would undergo the same contraction, it "looks" as though the distance is the same.

This is unnecessarily complicated. Occam's Razor does not apply in my setting. Entities can be and are multiplied beyond necessity, and the simplest possible explanation is usually wrong.

That actually sounds pretty cool.

An actual torus world example would be most JRPG worlds, if you follow the logic of how you move on the world map. Going off the east side brings you on the west side (and vice versa), going off the north side brings you on the south side (and vice versa).