Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="JConstantine" data-source="post: 9820313" data-attributes="member: 7052620">[USER=6879661]@TheSword[/USER] opened with referring to The Witcher, and the stories revolving around monsters tend to come in one of two broad varieties:The first is "monster-as-menace". Some monster is a terrorising a local village and its surrounding environs, and needs to be dealt with. However, it's often a case that it's the result of some human action that provoked it: nest disturbed by loggers, lured in by a bitter person looking for revenge, etc. A real world equivalent might be a bear drawn into a town by human refuse, or a lion escaped from a zoo, who then goes on to maul a person. Yeah, it needs dealing with, but it's not really the creatures fault. For The Witcher, that's typically typically killing it rather than capture, because monsters aren't native to the world of the Witcher, but also, you know, they don't have tranquiliser guns.The ankheg situation in the OP is an example of this style, as was my FR sculptor.The second is "monster-as-victim", where a person is victimised because of their monstrous appearance/nature, but upon investigation, it's often found that they're rather humane, and the victim of a curse, very much in the vein of Medusa, or Asterion (The Minotaur), or the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. Sometimes, this overlaps with the previous, such as a striga terrorising a town, but it only exists because a pregnant woman was cursed.For my own part, I love tropes; you can't subvert a trope without it existing in the first place, and I find subversion works best when the trope is fresh mind, so I like a mix. But also different settings have different expectations.</blockquote>

Verification