Credit: Ivan the Terrible and the Souls of his Victims by Mikhail Petrovitch Klodt
Yes, there are that many G monsters. Even splitting this into three parts, each post will be ridiculously long. This letter also has the highest density of "Dwiz's favorite monsters ever" in it, unsurprisingly. Apologies in advance if I get carried away with some of these entries. On the other hand, once I finish up the G's then I reckon I'll be about halfway done with this series (at least in terms of monster entries).
Credit: photo by ampflo on DeviantArt, not sure of the sculpt
Gargoyle
These are in a weird situation because they are both one of my favorite monsters ever and yet also not even really a monster. Like, this is just a regular thing found in the real world. Much like scarecrows and shadows, we just see this sinister-looking thing and imagine it as a monster of some kind. So what kind of monster do we make it?
TSR's answer was "a wizard enchanted some gargoyle statues and brought them to life," while WotC's answer is "it's an earth elemental." Good god how are they so bad at this.
It's a simple matter to just make them into a common type of demon (like the ones from Ghosts 'n Goblins or HeroQuest or Dark Souls). But I think I still prefer to keep them specifically sculptural and made of rock, and I especially like the idea of a mad artist carving stone bodies to serve as vessels for demonic spirits to run around the human world.
Since I'm really big on "environment as the monster," I would be inclined to make them a naturally-occurring growth on any structure situated around great holy or unholy power, meant to protect it from intruders. Also, rather than just swooping and clawing, I'd give them a water vomit attack where they hose you down and disfigure your face. That way, even if you survive, you spend the rest of your days bearing a Mark of Cain, so everyone can see that you trespassed the places of the gods. In other words, they make you into a grotesque, a deterrent in your own right.
Gas Spore
Traditional D&D mimics are employing "aggressive mimicry," where they appear as something tempting in order to attract attention. As I understand it, this is much less common in nature than "defensive mimicry," where a species mimics something nasty in order to repel attention. So it only makes sense for there to also be dungeon mimics meant to scare away dumbass adventurers. Gygaxian trolling at its finest, right?
Except then they ruin it with the lore. The gas spore depends on predators attacking them as a part of its reproductive cycle, depositing its spores when it gets popped. So then why the fuck would it look like literally the most intimidating monster of all time? I don't have much taste for the "monster ecology" school of fantasy worldbuilding, but if you're gunna go that route then don't just half-ass it.
Gelatinous Cube
D&D's classic ooze categories derive their legitimacy from the gelatinous cube. It's been carrying D&D's ooze game for far too long.
Credit: Joe Sparrow, from Dungeons & Drawings
Ghast
Surprisingly, this is not a case of Gary just assigning a new monster entry to every word in his thesaurus. Lovecraft already did that for him. But the end result still doesn't justify its own existence. Old video games relied on palette-swapping because of limitations of the medium. RPGs don't really have the same excuse.
Ghost
Another one of my favorites. One of the only "real" monsters in the manual. Not to say that, y'know, souls are real. But memories are. Nostalgia. Trauma. A ghost is a trace of something gone. It’s the effectual presence of something despite its tangible absence. You won't ever get turned to stone or mutated into an aberration, but there's an all-too-real chance that one day you will be haunted (if you aren't, already).
Counterintuitively, I can't stand the vast majority of ghost-centered horror. There's a particular set of "haunted house" tropes rooted in Victorian-era American folklore that I just find unbelievably shallow and played out, and yet it completely dominates all popular depictions of ghosts. Nothing else in classic gothic fiction seems to get resurrected without some twist to keep it fresh. The only time vampires do the Bela Lugosi thing anymore is in comedy depictions like Sesame Street. So why is there still an appetite for the exact same set of boring ghost clichés repeated again and again and again and again?
I've tried the Conjuring movies, I've tried Sinister, I tried Lake Mungo, I tried Poltergeist, I even tried The Legend of Hell House. Every one of them was the exact same set of recycled, boring-ass ghost story shit. Every last one of them is just Shirley Jackson's Haunting or the Amityville horror. I'm so tired of jump-scares and seances and ouija boards and shitty camera footage spooks and vengeful spirits and needing to help a soul make peace with its unfinished business so that it can move on. There are few other monsters this trapped in one formula. It's kinda meta, in a funny way.
There are so many other interesting things you can do with ghosts.
They show up in Shakespeare a lot without anyone ever mentioning ectoplasm. In Richard III, homeboy is visited by visions of those he's killed. It's not that their souls are lingering and can't move on. It's Richard who's cursed, not his victims. Their memory resides within him, as they're just a manifestation of his guilt. But that's not the same as the tired-ass "it's all psychological, it's just in their head" reading that gets applied to every ghost story. The very distinction between supernatural and mundane is meaningless.
In The Shining, it's the hotel itself that's evil, seemingly drawing strength from horrible violence and fear. That's why it's not just possessing Jack to kill on its behalf. It shows the family terrifying visions of the previous residents, of the previous trauma. Because trauma echoes through history. It continues to damage us long after it was originally inflicted.
In Lord of the Rings, the ring wraiths never even actually died. They just used the power of the rings to achieve an unnatural, unholy immortality, stretching their lives thinner and thinner as they slowly pass between the living world and the ethereal one.
Ben points out how refreshingly different A Christmas Carol is, of all things. Most of the ghosts are simply echoes of your deeds throughout time. They're not the souls of people who once lived. Except of course Jacob Marley, who is a spirit bound to this world. But not because he was the victim of some violent crime or he has unfinished business or whatever. It's a punishment for living a wicked life. He forged his own chains with each of his sins.
Probably my favorite depiction of ghosts comes from Hellboy. That comic is filled with them. Sometimes it's just a living memory of an event. A piece of history that speaks to you. In The Wolves of Saint August, Hellboy's partner is spoken to by one of the village children who was cursed to be a werewolf back in medieval times. It's not good, it's not bad, it's not even really motivated. Conversely, sometimes, by your actions, you resurrect something that had been dead. In The Conqueror Worm, as Hellboy embarks on a mission to fight some Nazi remnants, he's join by the WWII hero Lobster Johnson. Although long-dead, his quest to fight Nazis is eternal. And about halfway through the series, Hellboy himself becomes haunted. Everywhere he goes, the dead speak to him. Everywhere he has nostalgia for over his life, he's joined by old friends and loved ones.
-Dwiz
No comments:
Post a Comment