Vulgar language in fantasy

GSHamster said:

This quote is interesting. If you published that sentence in Dragon, why did you feel the need to censor it on this board?

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There's nothing interesting about it. The reason I censored it on these boards and not in Dragon is because the two venues have different content guidelines. As I understand it, the language to be used here is subject to the "Eric's Grandma Rule." The language to be used in Dragon is subject to the boundaries of a PG-13 rule.

Hypersmurf said:

Huh?

Saga of Old City, chapter 1, page 1, paragraph 2, has Gord cursing.

One word sooner, it would have been in the very first paragraph of the book. And even in paragraph 2, it's still the first word we ever hear out of Gord's mouth.

-Hyp.

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I dunno. I've never read the books. I just figured it was D&D fiction, so cursing might be considered naughty. I had to Wikipedia him to even know who he was.

(Also, for some reason my mind turned Gord into gordo, Spanish for 'fat,' which made me think of that fat innkeeper hero from the Forgotten Realms, who was too cuddly for me to think he would curse.)

RangerWickett said:

I dunno. I've never read the books. I just figured it was D&D fiction, so cursing might be considered naughty.

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Why not ask Gary his thoughts in the Ask Col Pladoh thread in General? He's the one who had Gord cursing, after all...

-Hyp.

G.R.R. Martin uses them with some of his characters quite often. Sex too. He's writing about human beings and we urinate, defecate, swear and fornicate. In fact, we do it often. His characters do all four of those things in the world they live in.

GRRM would be my favorite fantasy author. Looking at the sales of SoIaF, I am not alone in that judgment. He is currently El Presidente of the genre.

Still, I must say I have become so disheartened with the genre as a whole that it is rare that I bother with it these days. Historical fiction has become more my cuppa in the past few years.

And they swear in those a lot too. *shrug*

RangerWickett said:

I'm curious. A discussion on another forum prompted this statement:



What do you think? I mean, people swear in real life, and few of them go to the effort to come up with creative but non-vulgar curses, so why is it so rare to see vulgar language in fantasy compared to other genres? Sure, the occasional "By Crom!" is fair, but I think Conan had to have some word in his vocabulary for situations when we would just exclaim, "Holy s***!" or "We are so f***ed."

If you were reading a fantasy novel and someone used the same sorts of swear words we use in our everyday life, what would you think? (Assume that the curses are being used in a reasonable way, and not in some Tarantino-esque marathon of obscenities.)

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I was thinking about this a week ago, before this thread. I had a rather rambunctious NPC whom was spewing off the F word. A PC spewed it back.

My synopsis was that a fantasy world is your fantasy world. You and your pcs come up with what belongs and what doesnt. Heck, there is no true what is right and what is wrong in fantasy because it is fantasy.

If it fits its fine, Conan would swear I think, so would Croaker or Raven from the Black Company. If its just there for shocks sake then the author is probably a hack, a condition that afflicts the majority of fantasy writers unfortunately IME.

Darn good question, actually. I have two children at the age where they are hearing more swearing at school. But, there is no way I'd let them read Martin right now, but that is as much for the sex than the swearing.

Here's how I view swearing in general: it's lazy and easy. There are times when it is appropriate for a character(s), and there are times it is not. Frankly, it isn't actually all that polite to swear. Just as I teach my kids to chew with their mouths closed, despite the fact that others are chewing with their mouth open, I teach them not to swear.

An occassional swear word in a book isn't going to kill a child, but constant use requires a parent to engage in a "teaching moment". Those aren't all bad, as discussions about Huck Finn demonstrate, but you don't need constant swearing. There are plenty of good books without it, and they aren't all censored, just as there are good books with it. I admit that at times I tire of it even in Martin's books, books I consider great reads.

As for those that say that others shouldn't be offended by some language, that isn't up to you. People are free to fee offended anytime they want. They may have religious, or culutural, or just personal reasons for feeling offended. An author or speaker needs to be aware of her audience, and to make choices about theme and words based upon that audience.

All you saying you don't mind the words, just curious, do any of you have kids?

PaulKemp said:

The first sentence of my story, "Confession," published in Dragon 356, elicited a similar discussion on the Paizo boards. The first sentence went like this:

"I sloshed through sh** up to my ankles."

Some readers were (and are) offended by that sentence.

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This is a really good example of the kind of profanity that doesn't bother me in a fantasy book. As Paul said, it had a purpose, it set tone and character, and was used in-context.

Had he toned it down; say, something like "I sloshed through crap up to my ankles", THAT would have bothered me. This sounds like an out-of-place, modern usage to me, and takes me out of my suspension of disbelief.

Use the same word in a different way ("No sh**, there I was, in muck up to my ankles") and it sounds like cheap hackery.

It's not about the word itself, for me, but the care the author takes in using it.

My issues with it, it can become a substitute to dialog and can be a sign of lazy writing in some fantasy. The exception to this would be if it was modern fantasy, then I could see it being part of the character's profile and the envirnoment.

..Conan swears, it does not have to be translated to the current swear word of the week, I know what he was saying. His swearing adds to the world myth and adds flavor to the world.

..Dresden swears, hey, it is modern times and he is a modern wizard, he gets PCed about it. His swearing is part of the world myth and part of the culture.

Hand of Evil said:

My issues with it, it can become a substitute to dialog and can be a sign of lazy writing in some fantasy. The exception to this would be if it was modern fantasy, then I could see it being part of the character's profile and the envirnoment.

..Conan swears, it does not have to be translated to the current swear word of the week, I know what he was saying. His swearing adds to the world myth and adds flavor to the world.

..Dresden swears, hey, it is modern times and he is a modern wizard, he gets PCed about it. His swearing is part of the world myth and part of the culture.

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But in the rpg world, whose to say what is and what isn't talk in that time period. What brought on my pondering of this was when one of my pcs called another pcs mom a real b!!!!!. In all honestly it was exactly what the character was. Could that pc have used another world, probably, but what type of role playing do we expect from pcs. Some, but certainly not the ability to write up dialogue that exceeds the normal level of roleplaying.