#narrative causality

If you’ve ever found yourself chuckling at a grumpy, anthropomorphic Death or a suitcase on hundreds of little legs, then you have fallen under the spell of the late, great Terry Pratchett. His legendary Discworld series, a mirthful, satirical romp through an absurd universe teetering on the back of four elephants (all of whom are perched on a giant turtle, naturally), has left a lasting imprint…

The Tropes Are Hungry: The Collateral Damage of Narrative Causality

Here’s one of Chris Riddell’s illustrations from the poem “Instructions” (or, what to do if you find yourself in a Fairy Tale).

victoriansword said: 

“Imp door knockers are/were a thing, which strangely makes me like this even more. Maybe because it adds a sense of wonder to otherwise common Victorian/Edwardian door knockers. Next time I see one on a door I’ll be careful!”

Knockers in the shape of the Lincoln Imp were, and may still be, very popular - one of my aunts had a brass one on her door, a souvenir of a visit to the Cathedral...

...and there are numerous demon-, dragon-, bull and lion-heads with the knocker-ring clenched between their teeth or through their nose.

That said, this bull may be just a handle - the ring’s shiny from being touched (like the snouts of the bronze boar and carp outside the Huntin’-an’-Fishin’ Museum in Munich, or indeed Molly Malone’s burnished bronze bosom in Dublin) but there’s no matching bright spot on the door to show where knocking happens - unless it’s out of view behind the ring.

These are Ancient Roman, and may also be handles not knockers...

...since a doorknocker often has a striking-plate on the door, or a reinforced section at the bottom of the ring, and sometimes both, while a handle has neither.

Therefore this next one is definitely a knocker, confirmed by being attached to a door and a pretty famous one at that - No 10 Downing Street, home of Larry the Cat and his predecessors in the post of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, as well as numerous rats, mice, shrews and an occasional mole...

However there are plenty of images of actual knockers without reinforced rings or striking-plates that just thump against the surface of the door. The only sure way to tell if it’s just a handle is if the ring can’t actually make contact...

There are numerous ways of being careful around door-knockers: for one, there’s the business of not being rude to visitors. In Thackeray’s “The Rose and the Ring”, the doorman Gruffanuff refuses to announce the arrival of Fairy Blackstick (a tetchy fairy godmother) and behaves like this instead...

...whereupon she puts him in a position where he’ll announce everyone whether he feels like it or not...

There’s the business of not getting nipped by nasty little teeth as "Instructions” warns. I photographed this one in Chur, Switzerland, and even getting your palm licked by that brass tongue would be an unsettling experience...

...while here be dragons, who might also bite, or might breathe a tiny but troubling jet of flame up your sleeve. They’re from Pownall Hall, England....

...Powis Castle, Wales...

...and Orava Castle, Slovakia.

However this doorknocker was the one that would worry me more that the others if encountered in a fairy-tale or fantasy novel...

...because it instantly reminded me of this door-handle...

...and I’ve read (and written) enough in the genre to know that this is a set-up needing treated with great caution.

Make the wrong number of raps with that knocker, or be the wrong sort of character, and the apple might coming flying like a bullet.

Alternately, if a Wicked Person grips the matching handle their own hand might be crushed to a pulp and even a Good Person might be unable to let go and run away. That - according to The Theory of Narrative Causality™ - should happen humorously just as it starts to rain, snow or be otherwise unpleasant...

Or enough-seconds-for-drama before The Resident comes to answer their door, which interval should be just long enough for Surprising to become Scary, after which the raspy breathing and ponderous footsteps approaching down the hall make it clear The Resident is someone (or some thing) the visitor would really, really rather not meet.

Cersei would have insisted both direwolves were too dangerous to live, sorry.

I don’t have any headcanons on the subject of Lady living and staying with Sansa, or any fics that I can recommend as anything other than wish fulfillment,* because narrative causality requires that the girls not have their direwolves in King’s Landing, because Nymeria needs to be a queen of a wolf pack to fight the Others, and Lady would have been killed during Cersei’s coup anyway (and wouldn’t that be a joy, for Sansa to see Lady’s head up on the wall next to her father’s and Septa Mordane’s). Or to be clear, Lady is one of the story’s narrative casualties.

Spoilers below!

The most important quality for a story to have is to be interesting. If it's not interesting, then nobody is going to want to hear it.

Train of thought that brought me here:

The shift in focus from "action"/moral power struggles to interpersonal relationships over the timeline of the MCU. The expectation has been for a long time that <action/violence/good vs evil> is the draw for the whole genre of superhero movies, but like I feel like we hit fatigue-inducing levels of saturation on that years ago. Hell, thinking about it, I almost wonder if there was a collective yearning for "the good guys win" after 9/11, and we're now just so fucking tired of everyone claiming to be "the good guys" and all of the mental and emotional effort that it takes to gather enough information to make an informed decision about whether or not the latest claimant is, actually, attempting to meet a societal-level definition of "good".