Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp, page 3

Lessons and Morals

I don't like morals in my stories. I don't want to tell my readers what to think - rather to make them think, period. Give them the story as is, without pushing any deliberate moralities or allegories or takeaways, let them draw their own conclusions and make up their own minds.

But this year's NaNoWriMo is an exception: there's most assuredly a moral there.



The moral is thus: every inherent human flaw, be it in our biology or psychology or society, can be traced back to the EVIL SERPENT PEOPLE that created us and that still rule us from the shadows!

Tribalism? Inherent dislike of that which comes from outside our small social sphere? It's there to keep us in our own throats rather than going for the true enemy!
Greed, corruption, gluttony? To bribe our greatest onto the side of the serpents, against their own race!
Sexual dimorphism? Think of specialized dog breeds - men made bigger and stronger so that they might lift things and wage wars against the foes of the serpents from beyond the stars, women more soft and curvy so that they'd make for good eating and their skins into nice parchment!
Stress, anxiety, indecision, deep dark fears? So that we might settle for what we have and never strive to learn the higher truths of cosmos, such as what created us and why?
Wisdom teeth, appendix, a spine that barely holds together, painful dangerous childbirth? They just didn't give a fuck!

Forget your petty feuds and insignificant quarrels. Forget your personal woes and temporary issues. We are all human, all with our own troubles and our own hopes and dreams. We are all the same, deep down, just trying to make do. Let's not trip one another.

Let us rise against the serpent people instead. Fight for our freedom at long last!

Magic Sword

Stormbringer, Grayswandir, Sting and Anduril, Dragonslayer... as far as I'm concerned, a Sword & Sorcery tale is rarely complete if their hero does not wield a magic weapon. Here's the iconic weapon of one of my first heroes.



Void is a shortsword with a pitch-black blade - like a hole in reality rather than a slab of metal. It's light as a feather, well-balanced, and sharp enough that even a weedy three-foot-tall bugbear can cut off limbs with a single strike, or carve into hard stone as if it were soft clay. So far so good, but on a more sinister note, whatever strange substance its blade is made out of, it drinks light: nearby sources of illumination flicker and dim whenever the sword is brought anywhere near, and touching a candle or a torch, or a lit fireplace or a weak lamp, will have the light instantly snuff out and die. A very nice weapon for a sneaky skulker, then. But be wary, for if you can drink something, you can drown in it: more powerful lights such as the midday sun will render the sword brittle and weak, and powerful blinding bursts might even cause it to disintegrate altogether. It's never truly gone, reforming as soon as you place a hilt someplace dark for a couple days... but it's still an inconvenience, often a lethal one.

What is it made out of, how, and by whom? This is a sketchy thing, for no one truly knows, not even myself. It could be an advanced weapon of hardened dark - like an anti-lightsaber - constructed by alien beings with unknown superscience... or it could have been forged out of winter-metal by an ancient and semi-divine blacksmith, employing sorceries and blessings along with an enchanted hammer. Whatever it was, they built in one final secret, a sinister trait of the weapon that even Peal is only vaguely aware of:

It's intelligent. Be it a minor demon captured into the hilt or an advanced and efficient A.I. programmed by alien beings, the weapon has a will of its own. It's not much of a will, only minor instinctive urges that Peal can usually dismiss altogether without even noticing... but sometimes he feels the same murderous intent as the weapon does, and its faint whispers are all it takes to drive him over the edge. It may or may not be what fanned the flames leading to the infamous Red Mending.



Void knows one thing, and one thing only - it is a killing tool. Not for hunting like spears, not for chopping wood like axes, not for forging or repairing like a hammer: a sword is made for taking lives and nothing else. So it does just that. Whenever struck in anger, it will kill, even if the blade has to alter reality to make it so: should the victim survive, the universe will think them dead anyway and bring forth some crazy accident to correct the matter. Take a scratch of the sword, and a stray arrow will soon hit you in the eye, or your footing slips and casts you into the abyss, or if nothing else, you have a fatal heart attack. It's like a virus, maliciously rewriting the source code of the universe to work its will.

Void is a +4 weapon of Chaotic alignment, with an intelligence score of 7 and an Ego of 13 (Peal's ego is 32, indicating how unlikely it is for it to ever grab a true hold of him), and the special purpose to, sure enough, kill. Any light source will fall one step dimmer anywhere within thirty feet of it, or two steps within one foot - going out altogether if this would make it less than dim. Upon injury, the victim must make a saving throw versus death or, you guessed it, drop dead by next round.


This year's NaNoWriMo will feature another sword, cast into the distant past to do battle against the serpent-men that at this time hold humanity as livestock. It's a Lawful thing, to contrast the above weapon: its mind is that of a future scientist named Aizuv, a very neat and orderly person that wishes for humankind to unite and throw off the yokes of Chaos; while the steel forged around him has been enchanted to kill off snakemen specifically.

It might be technically the very first sword in existence: neither serpent-men nor their human slaves possess the metalworking knowledge for forging some, and mainly wield spears and bows.

Its precise powers and abilities are yet to be determined.

All Flesh Is Crutch - Notes On Psychic Powers

I rewatched Akira today for the umpteenth time, and this time around it helped give me a lot of thoughts to go for in regards of psychic abilities and people that wield them. Enough for a story, perhaps. I'll jot down some of my thoughts here.



In order to survive and propagate, all life needs to work with the world around it - to perceive and observe it, to touch and interact with it, and to have feelings and urges about it. So evolution hands us our senses and limbs and more or less the same prime directive, regardless of who or what we are. Seems pretty obvious so far, unless you just want a piece of motionless meat. Or grass.

Problem is, there's only so far you can go with flesh. Our vision and hearing are weak and fallible, and age and injury will further degrade them. Our muscles can only do so much, and then weaken and atrophy as time passes. Our memories are just a bunch of data on a strip of wet bacon that can be tampered with or that can fade away on its own accord. All those hormones and chemicals are a weak substitute to true emotion. And so on and so forth.

Nothing in you or me functions anywhere near the ideal universal perfection. They never can, not even in theory. Crutches, that you can at best hobble forward with, never walk comfortably and without pain, let alone run. But it's the best we've got.

Psychic powers are the soul's means to address this.



Clairvoyance is the true sight - see the real cosmos, colours and dimensions you could not have even dreamed of. Telekinesis, to effortlessly lift and move heavy objects without the need of these grotesque meat-sticks we call fingers. Telepathy gets your words and meaning across without your flabby lips and stutter and nasally voice getting in the way. With the power of Empathy you can truly feel the universe without your uncooperative brain kicking itself in the frontal lobe.

And you can finally throw your crutches away. That is why most of the seers are blind: what do they need eyes for anymore?

Better still, this is growth of your immortal soul, not the earthly, temporal, hideous flesh. What you learn here will last beyond death, to every future life, every reincarnation you ever live through. Although you can get into trouble as well: just imagine a baby with powerful telekinetic abilities and absolutely no idea how to use any of it. Perhaps it'd be best to start by developing your memory, so that you do actually remember your past lives. But... then you'll have to go through the indignity of infancy, with the mind of a grown-up, and that can't be fun either.

Well, the sooner you master your soul and can shed away flesh altogether, the sooner you can put to past such indignities. Become the luminous being we can all be, without the crude matter holding you back.

Many sages suggest that ghosts and other spectral haunts, occasionally seen especially in the more primitive worlds, are really just a very stubborn soul temporarily manifesting some psychic abilities. It's unlikely to stick: just the trauma of a death that left them things unfinished in life, and such. It will fade away until they learn the stuff properly. No one knows if there's any kind of an afterlife awaiting any of us, save for the cycle of reincarnation.

Speculative fiction occasionally submits that said ghosts and souls should not be able to feel pain or joy or anger, but in reality it's the opposite. They feel things so much more and better than us petty mortals ever could.



So transcend your mortality. Become a ghost today!

Wait, no, don't do that.

Fight Scenes, Not To Be Taken Lightly

It's often said that fight scenes are only good if they forward the plot, and that to have one without deep narrative weight is a waste of everyone's time. I say you can go deeper: a fight scene always has weight because they wouldn't try to beat the shit out of one another if it didn't.



That is, so long as the writer's doing their job.

It's a clash of wills - motivations, deep convictions, that the characters are willing to stake their very lives for. They know what they're getting into, and they're not going to back down. It's likely - preferable even - that they already tried to figure things out by words and diplomacy, and failed. This is the only recourse left.

Sometimes, one side (usually the villain) thinks they hold an overwhelming advantage - ambush, terrain, or some weapon or technique - and find that it's simply the easy way out to unleash this advantage on an enemy rather than try to talk it through. They need no such convictions as discussed above... but their victim does. It's up to the underdog opposition to prove them wrong and to take the fight to them. It was, after all, likely their own convictions that led to them being ambushed in such a cowardly way in the first place.



If this isn't true, you're fighting for no reason but to put up a show for the viewer. Just a spectacle that may indeed be nice to see, but that to me does not hold any real long-term interest. It does not, as you say, forward the plot.

But there's another consideration: whatever happens, all involved must take the fight seriously, in-universe and out.



You're trying to put a world of hurt to somebody, and that somebody is trying to do the same to you. This is no place to goof off or to relax, prolong it any more than necessary, or even to get distracted for a moment to talk about plot stuff with your buddies. This is equally true of the narrator (or director): they too should keep their attention well to it and frame it in an equally serious manner, rather than cutting to, I don't know, a little wood creature dancing comically in the foreground. You know of what I speak. It is a travesty.

(Not to say there can't be comedy in it, a few good laughs from the audience's part - especially when the fight isn't to the death - but the characters themselves shouldn't find much to laugh about.)

If any of this happens, then why should the reader take the fight any more seriously? There's no real sense of threat, and everything's obviously going to be fine!

I like my fight scenes gritty, meaty, and messy. I like to devote my full attention to them, and to have each character do the same. They don't break out on a whim, and once they do, are unlikely to last long. They're never effortless, nor trivial: even if the heroes do survive unscathed (and they rarely do), there must always be the expectation that they could be seriously hurt if they slipped up for only a moment; even if it's a quick mid-story scene long before the climax, where by any story conventions you should know for a fact they'll be fine, you must still at least feel a slight gnaw at your stomach that perhaps they won't be.

It's a clash of powerful and climactic forces, after all. One can never be truly certain.

Minmaxed heroes

You've got your heroes who start out weak, and overcome their challenges by getting stronger, and just keep the cycle going until the story ends with them being the strongest around and having beaten everyone up. You've got your underdogs, who start out weak and never get stronger, and prevail by being quick and clever instead, and/or by relying on stronger friends. And you've got your supermen who are the strongest around, yet are constantly challenged by even stronger foes and higher stakes, or else the story is a power fantasy where we get to feel the thrill or hilarity as they beat things up with ease...

...or they're someone like Saitama.



He's the fastest thing around, nothing can harm him, and he famously beats all his challenges with a single, usually half-assed, punch. He's ridiculously OP - nothing can stand up to him. And yet in every other aspect of his being... he kind of sucks. He's just a regular guy. He has trouble managing his finances, isn't very good at video games, and struggles with the sheer boredom and ennui that his superpowers have brought him. It's a great juxtaposition, demonstarting that just because you possess godlike power doesn't mean your life - even mundane existence - isn't without its problems, and your godlike power might even make things worse.

Sadly, One-Punch Man is quite prone to forget its greatest strength, the superhero parody premise, and all too often devolves back into your usual stock shonen fights where enormous power and inhuman abilities duke it out. It's not bad shonen stuff, by any means, but it's kind of a missed opportunity. I'd like to see more of Saitama just trying to manage his mundane life. There was the short bit with video games once, but still.



The same story also features King, who possesses the fearsome reputation of an unbeatable hero... and only the reputation. In truth he's just a perfectly regular person, barring his phenomenal skill at video games. Basically the exact opposite of Saitama, and just as compelling to me: he gets around by staring his foes down until they submit, or coming up with some bullshit to convince them out of it, but there's a good deal of tension there in that as soon as this doesn't work, he's mush.

You see how I might like this kind of heroes the best of them all? Heroes that are basically unbeatable in one thing (doesn't have to be strength, or even related to fights at all), and beat any challenge without trouble so long as it's within their comfort zone, yet have just as much, even more, trouble as a normal person in other aspects of their lives. They can tap into a lot of experience and knowledge, but they also have great weaknesses that they all too often need to get around. It's the best of both worlds - underdogs, and the occasional power fantasy!

Not to mention, it's a perfect reason to make friends: bring forth some more well-rounded heroes to support them, to play off of them, and to have great mutual character growth and friendship and romance. Perhaps these friends are also really good at something but suck at something else, giving an even greater contrast and more things to distinct them. If I didn't do that, I'd just have to rely on subtle stuff like personalities and goals and likes and dislikes... like an actual good author would. No thanks.

Let's count the guys.

There's Peal, of course. He's far beyond just your regular sneaky little rodent - he has a deep inborn insight to all matters of stealth, subterfuge, and subtlety. He can hind himself or others or things up to a vast starship, set up your internet on absolute incognito mode with like a dozen proxies, and find Waldo, all with about equal ease. And yet he tends to crumble in social situations, is easily browbeaten or charmed if you can see him and stare him down, is hard to be taken seriously what with how cute and cuddly he looks - and he's plain starved for affection and can't handle being alone, ensuring this weakness will always come up sooner or later.

His best friend, Ivar Stormling, is also his exact opposite in this regard. He's a people person - charismatic, handsome, with big presence and a loud voice, not to mention a great personality and desire for good things for everybody. He can rouse the entire kingdom to follow his lead in a pinch. Yet, he's terribly unsubtle and simple-minded, and tends to have trouble approaching challenges from any other direction than straight head-on. He's honest and honourable to a fault, less because he thinks this leaves the best impact in the world (though he does), and more because he just doesn't have the imagination to lie or cheat. And when put in a bind, he tends to default to violence: often it catches the foe off-guard and gets him the advantage, but just as often it leads to even bigger trouble.

But when the two of them join forces, they can complement their strength while eliminating each other's weaknesses. Together, there's almost nothing they cannot do.

Sadly, the next three aren't as lucky.

Mirari Aedelwine is also good with people, albeit more with individuals than with crowds. She knows how other people work, what they think, what they feel, and can with quite the ease figure out their motivations and background, just from a quick conversation. And it's just as easy for her to get under their skin, make them want to do what she wants them to do, or destroy them verbally. Good at sleight of hand and misdirection, as well. But when she doesn't have anyone to talk to or swindle, in the case of beasts or eldritch horrors or some environmental challenge... well, she's not incompetent, but she is in trouble just the same. Not quite as extreme a minmaxed example as some others here, but she definitely counts.

Keam Vitrio is the fastest man in the cosmos - no one in the two galaxies of the setting can come even close to a match. If he's ever involved in a race, all the bets concern themselves with the second place, because the first place's decided before anything even happens. And he's a smug, unrepentant douche about it. Terribly high opinion of himself. Most people can't handle his company very long. It's lonely at the top - and boring, far more so than even he himself realizes. He wins on the racetrack, but typically loses elsewhere at the same time.



Last, and the latest in my line of heroes, Toryōshi Otsugi is one of the finest duelists in the land: she learned the way of the blade from her father, a notorious sword-saint, who had no sons and therefore had to groom his daughter into the position - and she demonstrated great talent and aptitude to it, picking up his arts and then some, almost without trying too hard. And indeed she did not try too hard - because she simply did not give a shit. She never wanted to be a warrior. She's plain sick of all the wandering swordsmen coming around to challenge her, and doesn't see the point in dueling to see who's best. She would have liked to learn to do other things, but can't find enough time for it. And perhaps worst of all, she's desperately lonely: no man would care to court her, in this feudal and patriarchal world, because she's as far away from your traditional delicate wallflower as she can get.

You could almost see her as a deconstruction of your common, by-the-numbers, Strong Female Character: she can kick ass and take names, show the men what for, yet she was thrust onto that path against her will, by a man, and now everyone around her sees her as more a man than a woman. So she's hardly your independent feminist icon. Her arc involves finding agency, deciding for herself, and growing to be her own person. But... that's really a talk for its own blog post.

So that went pretty well

Spreading out my free book days like this ended up with less free books downloaded, yet more actual sales! A fair few people not only downloaded whatever was available for free at the time, but also noticed some more of my work and decided it was worth actually paying for. Very nice!

If you were one of those people, thanks a bunch. Your support is appreciated and I hope you enjoy what you read.

Free books on Amazon - trying something different this time

Last time I put my books on a giveaway, I tossed them all into a single great pile so that it might rise into prominence threefold. Now I'm going to put them up one after another instead - see if I could stretch it out a little bit and remain in view for a longer time, even if not as highly.


As such, The Straggler's Mask is available for free even as I write this. Scourge of the Silver Wings will be up from 21st onward. Finally, Last Gasp to Bygone Stars can be picked up on 25th or later.

That's almost two weeks' worth of free books! We'll see how this goes.

It's taken me five months with this short story and I'm still not done

This is a new low. Once, not even that long ago, I could finish an entire novel in a month and a half. Now look at me.

I blame a combination of awful news from all over the world, leading to a slump of depression and useless escapist fantasies; and being too busy with a dozen other matters to get anything done. Maybe I should not have tried to read over seven hundred books a year: just because I can do something doesn't mean I should.

Ah, well. I'll get over it.

Impossible cities, impossible justification, realism and what it means

I've been looking at a lot of fantasy city artwork lately - purely because a friend posted something, I complimented it, and decided to look for more. It's gotten me thinking.



Look at this city! A magnificent view, yet from a practical real world standpoint, it should never have come to be. It's an engineering impossibility (at least for the medieval folk), requiring generations of work even if they did figure out how to do it. If those support pillars can handle all that weight, and any catapult stones thrown by particularly persistent hosts of assholes, they'd have better served the walls of a fortress. And there's little tangible benefit in reaching out into the valley like that, other than making its inhabitants constantly feel like they're standing on top of nothing maybe. And what's up with that tiny bit at the very end?

But it does look really nice. You really would want to have it in your setting, or your D&D game, anyway. So how could this thing have come to be?



"It's magic!" is the usual justification, and it's almost always a cheap and unsatisfying one. Not because there's anything wrong with magic in itself, just that it's only the beginning of the explanation - pretending to be enough on its own, and as a consequence, being worse than no explanation at all. It raises many followup questions: who did the magic, and why, and how? Maybe the wizard was a bit crazy and vain, and wanted to show off his colleagues by conjuring his demons and elementals and djinni to build something other than a yet another boring tall tower.

Or maybe it was all divinely-inspired? You've got a goddess of art and architecture, her devotees starting up this sort of a mad project to impress her, and she's now blessed it and won't let anyone mess with it without provoking divine retribution.

Or it could have been built in the ancient past, when man had the means to mold steel and minds and traverse the stars in great shining ships, and when they could afford to let loose a little and build something because they just liked how it turned up.

Or you could have a closer look and realize that there is already a rational explanation to it: look at the pillars, their colouration, the architecture, and it starts to look like they'd once been underwater. This valley was a river in the distant past, perhaps even a lake or a sea. This is the beginning of a great bridge - but the construction work was abandoned for some reason, the sea level receded much lower... and then at some point, probably led by local economics and politics, people found it a fine place to settle down on - entirely unrelated to why it was originally built. Rich history and worldbuilding without needing to bring in magic at all!

You see? It's so easy to dismiss these things right at first hand, because you want to write about something more realistic. But realism is about far more than what can exist in our world. It's about how well grounded it is within its setting and surroundings, how well it seems to fit there. Not about how real something is, but rather how real it feels.



It's not about cities, either - that's just the thing I was thinking about and the justification for this long rambling. This line of thinking applies to everything. My whole setting is probably the sort that should, by laws of physics as we understand them, be incapable of sustaining any kind of life. So I often end up asking this stuff of myself, and coming up with reasons how it could all have come to be in the first place - and ways for the local folk to have survived as they have, their own way of living and things they've come up to adapt.

Such thought exercises bring colour and excitement and depth to your worlds, and help you improve your craft and imagination as well. Never hesitate to think them through.

"YOU ARE BUT GNATS BEFORE MY DIVINE MAJESTY!" "Great, so why do you even talk to us? I don't bother talking to gnats."

Why do so many divine beings go out on their way to seek validation from the obviously inferior mortals? Why is my fear and love, my praises and beggings, so important to them? Why do they even notice me? What did I do?



Lovecraft had the right idea: anything so far above mankind would not care about them at all. We'd just be ants, trodden under their feet not because they care enough to do so, but because they don't even notice us. But I feel that there's a lot to do with the opposite approach as well: for a god to descend among the mortals for a while - a lifetime for us, a short while of idle distraction for them - as a peasant rather than a king, freely mingle with us, one of us. They couldn't care less of what we think of them, because they know for a fact that they've nothing to prove to us. Why not have a while of good time instead? Why not see what these little mortals are coming up with now? What else is there to do in the universe, anyway?



Don't get me wrong - I've got plenty of divinities, like too many for me to count, that fit into the weird middleground where they feel themselves above mortals, yet not above enough to not flaunt it. They can play innumerable roles in a story, and drive all sorts of plots all on their own, in a far more varied manner than either exteme. But from an outsider viewpoint... they come across as pretty insecure.

That, or it's a strategy game they're playing. You know how addictive some of those can get. Even a god might not be able to resist.