Everyone's idea of disgusting and beyond the bounds of decency varies. We talk quite freely of child murders and intra- and interspecies rape in this list, and of death in a variety of imaginative fashions, and this could all be interpreted as quite, quite sick if we were not at some remove from it, objectifying it in a sense as a fiction.
Given that, I think it is fair to disagree with Martin's opinions about the Vadeli, or Humakti, but not to slip into personal jibes etc. And also to get some perspective on what is gross or not. It seems alright to talk about the Vadeli murdering their children and sleeping with their mothers in a detatched manner, but not to go into detail. Perhaps the deatil will give people a truer sense of the horror of the situation and the Vadeli culture.
Another example of this sort of situation would be the Kingdom of War (Hoorah! Where's Mark Smylie?). It can be presented as a bald set of statistics, like '50,000 people were killed during the invasion of X, as part of the Total War'. Or you could present just one farm, where nothing moves but the wind, where the bloated corpses of men, women, children, dogs, cats, cattle, hens and rats lie everywhere, tangled and intertwined, as if in death they sought the company of _any_ living thing so they didn't die alone at the hands of inhuman murderers. Perhaps you could even introduce a straggler from the army, or a wounded trooper left as a 'booby-trap', who shoots the first person into the farmhouse, and keeps shooting until he is hacked to death, laughing, himself.
Now that, to me, is grosser than 'plunging his purple tool into the still corpse ... ', in that it seems more real, closer, more human, and it's the empathy that we needto make it real, and horrific.
Longer than I expected, but just some thoughts. Creativity needs room to breathe.
David Henderson
Powered by hypermail