How do you handle expressions that would be impossible in Eorzea?

[Zelmanov]

This happened to me recently in combat. In order to prevent someone from getting past, Orrin was trying to keep them pushed back. He decides to give him a good baseball swing with the blunt end of his very top heavy spear to do the job.

 

 

problem is...I don't want to describe it as a baseball swing. Yes saying it like that would make it very clear to a reader the intention and image of the movement, but I feel it breaks immersion because the narration no longer gels with the world. Since there is no Baseball as far as we know, how would you go about describing it? I ended up saying it was a very powerful, full bodied, horizontal swing.

 

 

If anyone else ran into similar issues in expression that they want to share, feel free!

[Aya]

As long as it isn't in spoken dialogue? You just use it

[Roen]

I know what you mean!

 

There are terms that I want to use, but then I pause to ponder if it even exists in Eorzea. In one RP scene, Roen was talking about the waltz. Does a dance like the waltz exist in Eorzea? It is a classical ballroom dance, so I just ran with it.

 

But I likely would not do the same with foxtrot (are there foxes in Eorzea...) or the rumba (latin influence) and or modern faster paced dances like the jive. I would be making up the descriptions for that type of a dance if it ever came to it. Although a "jig" would be okay to use in my book.

 

I also sometimes wonder if I can use the same equestrian terms like canter and gallop for chocobos. A canter probably not... since it is a rhythmic gait, but likely gallop and trot I can? I might be overthinking it a little when it comes to these.

 

So yes, I come across this problem often. I usually avoid terms that I know would break immersion, like a reference to a baseball swing.

[allgivenover]

A baseball swing is performed by the batter. A batter is someone performing the act of batting. The act of batting comes from an old term that got rolled up into English ages ago; bat. To bat something means to beat, strike, or hit something (usually out of the air). It's not a modern term and doesn't require the word baseball to convey properly.

 

So you'd write it this way.

 

He decides to give him a good bat with the blunt end of his very top heavy spear to do the job.

 

This will do, but if you want to give the exact mental image of the motions a baseball swing would be, you could do it this way, among many other ways:

 

...decided to lower his grip on the spear, so low that he was able to wind it in a wide arc behind him and give him a good bat with the blunt end of his very top heavy spear to do the job.

 

(that reads a little meh to me, but I didn't want to change your sentence completely, anyway)

 

I prefer not to use modern real world references even outside of dialogue as it does a good job ripping me out of the scene. But that's just me and not everyone is going to mind.

[Jana]

I think it's possible to express such things in general ways, but I also think we shouldn't overdo it. Tomatoes exist in Eorzea and are named "tomatoes," but the word comes from the Aztec "xitomatl" and as far as we know, the Ixal aren't the ones that introduced tomatoes to the rest of Eorzea (or Hot Chocolate to Ishgard, or Nopales which are from the New Continent). Unfortunately, the Macuahuitl remains a mystery.

 

Obviously I wouldn't describe something as "Chinese" IC, but we can also appreciate SE giving us little "outs" for this kind of thing. A Gatling Gun could be justified by the fact that "Gatling" was the name of an alchemical smith in Eorzea, for example.

[Faye]

If it's narrative? For immersion-purposes and what not, if I can find a more lore-friendly way to describe something, I do. If not, I just use the expression, even if it doesn't really fit the setting. For actual IC dialogue? Find a different way to put it that fits in Eorzea.

[Coatleque]

You can also break down whatever you are doing into it's simplest form. A bat is just a glorified club. So use club instead. I'm pretty sure the club as a weapon is a fairly universal term in any setting. Nothing more than a long, blunt object to swing.

 

I've used waltz in-game before (as another example given above), but you can even break this down if you want. The dance is set to a 3/4 time signature. If you watch the /balldance emote, that is also set to a 3/4 time (or at least 6/8), so we know such music exists. If you don't want to call it a waltz, just say it is a simple ballroom dance. I idea remains the same.

[GloryRhodes]

"Out flew a red-golden dragon--not life-size, but terribly life-like: fire came from his jaws, his eyes glared down; there was a roar, and he whizzed three times over the heads of the crowd. They all ducked, and many fell flat on their faces. The dragon passed like an express train, turned a somersault, and burst over Bywater with a deafening explosion."

 

That quote, from The Fellowship of The Ring is very similar to what you're talking about, and it's been discussed by scholars of his work for a long while.  We doubt that hobbits, despite having access to both gunpowder and clockworks, obviously the most technologically advanced of the peoples of middle earth, knew what express trains were, but there it is in the text.

 

There are two methods of handling this kind of anachronism.  You can either go with it, as Tolkien did in this passage (but no others), risking jarring the reader out of their immersion, or you can "localize" it.  Either Orrin swung his spear like a baseball bat, or he did a heavy, full bodied horizontal swing.

 

The question here is the audience to whom you are writing.  If you feel that you are writing to an audience that desires immersion, then you should localize.  What bursts through a wall like an unstoppable tank might instead crash through the masonry like a raging behemoth.  If your audience desires clarity over artifice, then more modern terminology might be more appropriate.  If, for example, someone new to the lore heard the line about a behemoth, it would do them no good if they were unaware of what, exactly, one was.

[Caspar]

I definitely agree it's a matter of the audience's ability to separate the tone of the narrative from the work. For instance, if it's a work that purposefully cultivates an anachronistic tone that uses modern slang, it could be to invoke a certain kind of mood, or just be accessible. Other writers try to keep the narration's style consistent to the language used in-setting. That sort of objective differentiates between whether you use Giraffe to describe an Elezen in your narration or Dhalmel... I think it's really just a matter of what sort of impression you're going for. I like to keep the narrator separate from the setting's vernacular, but I'm not practiced enough yet to keep things consistent.

 

This is actually sort of a tricky sticking point for me as I'm pretty fond of allusions to other work in my writing, and it even worked its way into my background storywork without me really thinking twice about it. It was totally reflexive for me to start adding connections to old kabuki plays and folklore that haven't been confirmed to exist in setting. When I started writing a background piece that I really should bring over here from my other forum, I used a children's game that I couldn't confirm to exist in setting. It's sort of walking a tightrope, but the way I see it, it's like reverse translation convention. If I can't find an equivalent idea in setting, I like to think there is one, and by invoking its real world counterpart, one can assume that the Hydaelyn version is in effect. That helps me also with things like the existence of vampires (I'm always going to come back to that...) in the setting; even if the flavor text of things using the word "vampire" was never visited in-depth, I could assume that a similar mythological motif existed in the world and by using "vampire," I'm using shorthand for that equivalent. Thus "baseball" in narration could be shorthand for some similar sport that probably exists in Hydaelyn.

[Nero]

My personal preference is that all voices in a work are to be written from an in-universe perspective, and that includes the voice of an omniscient third person narrator. While I understand that using modern equivalents in analogies can be preferable since it's easier to form an image with a familiar equivalent to reference from, I personally find it incredibly jarring when a sudden real-world reference is made.

 

So I do my best to simply describe it e.g. a "batter's stance" would be "so-and-so hefts the weapon over one shoulder, grasping the hilt/shaft/haft with both hands, feet spaced somewhat apart in preparation for a mighty swing" or some such nonsense. I'll completely admit that it's not very concise and can potentially be confusing to readers, but I prefer it that way.

[Valence]

Some are either easy to replace, by using more generic terms or changing the expression for a similar, less fourth dimensionally loaded one.

 

We encountered that problem a lot on eve online, with scientific laws and formulas. Some are a nightmare to translate, like Occam's Razzor, etc, without dedicating a whole paragraph as a replacement. 

 

Well, I remember to have seen in the MSQ the authors themselves replacing a word with an ingame equivalent (like God <-> Twelve something), but I can't quite remember the specific example I have in mind...

[Zelmanov]

"Out flew a red-golden dragon--not life-size, but terribly life-like: fire came from his jaws, his eyes glared down; there was a roar, and he whizzed three times over the heads of the crowd. They all ducked, and many fell flat on their faces. The dragon passed like an express train, turned a somersault, and burst over Bywater with a deafening explosion."

 

That quote, from The Fellowship of The Ring is very similar to what you're talking about, and it's been discussed by scholars of his work for a long while.  We doubt that hobbits, despite having access to both gunpowder and clockworks, obviously the most technologically advanced of the peoples of middle earth, knew what express trains were, but there it is in the text.

 

There are two methods of handling this kind of anachronism.  You can either go with it, as Tolkien did in this passage (but no others), risking jarring the reader out of their immersion, or you can "localize" it.  Either Orrin swung his spear like a baseball bat, or he did a heavy, full bodied horizontal swing.

 

The question here is the audience to whom you are writing.  If you feel that you are writing to an audience that desires immersion, then you should localize.  What bursts through a wall like an unstoppable tank might instead crash through the masonry like a raging behemoth.  If your audience desires clarity over artifice, then more modern terminology might be more appropriate.  If, for example, someone new to the lore heard the line about a behemoth, it would do them no good if they were unaware of what, exactly, one was.

 

 

Just wanna say for this one, J.R.R. Tolkien establishes in the first chapters of his series that he is relating a "lost" history to the world. Middle Earth existed to some degree, then it all the magical elements disappeared with the age of man. So the freight train is less jarring because the narrator already establishes himself in a far off future past the events of Frodo and the ring. But I do get what you are getting at.

[Branson Thorne]

If I'm emoting an action, as using an example above "He swung his club towards the man as if it were a bat" then I feel just fine using that as it's simply describing an action

 

But if it's an IC statement that is meant as worda instead of action, I'd prefer going with something else.

[C'kayah Polaali]

I'd say go ahead and use metaphors relating to modern things like a baseball bat. You're trying to make the actions read well and be understood by people living in the modern world, after all.

[murasaki]

How about something along the lines of "In an attempt to push back, Orrin committed most of his body weight into a wide-arced swing of the blunt end of his spear"?

 

That said, I can imagine myself not being able to come up with any alternative in the heat of the moment either.

 

Edit: Added second line because I accidentally posted before I finished typing :3

[-no longer matters-]

I find the best method is to try to describe the action for example "XXX swings the spear quickly, blunt end first towards YYY's midsection in a non-lethal manner." it may end up longer, but it's more descriptive, but you get to remove that element of non-fantasy from it.

 

There are times I will look a modern term up as well, to get a less modern version or use the definition in a more descriptive manner as well.

 

Hope this helps.

[S'imba]

I'm a scrublord when it comes to my posts, but I honestly prefer information to be conveyed in clear to understand words. Especially if I'm trying to interpret an action to respond to. Making a comparison to a baseball bat tells me a lot more information than trying to make a description of every movement. I can immediately imagine what swinging a baseball bat looks like. Easy to picture every movement that's occurring instantly, I can imagine foot placement, movement of the hips posture, and pretty much any other part of that action. In order to convey that same message without an analogy there has to be a lot more words used and then my brain has to process a lot more especially if the information turns out to be extremely vague. 

 

To be honest long posts that have have information that could be said in a much more clear and direct manner ruin the mood for me. I lose the feeling of a sense of time passing. Especially if a post feels like it has a lot of unnecessary filler because the standard seems a person's skill as an rper is judged on the length of the post. Really just use the amount of writing it takes to tell the story.