Learn You Some Realism · 4:28pm Apr 16th, 2019
Ok, I don’t think I’ll be able to convince many of you to come all the way over to my level of obsessive realism, but I hopefully can convince some of you to either find people like me to help you or to do the heavy lifting yourselves.
So, why should you add realism to your stories? The simple reason I can give is that it makes things more interesting. I am a biologist by trade, so I can only speak for biological realism here, but the same concepts can be applied to other areas of science. So let’s start with my favorite animal, dragons.
One of the major things to remember about dragons is that there are no references for dragons as they do not exist in real life. Shocker. But what we can do is design one from our imagination. But with the infinite possibilities of my imagination, why would someone ever choose to limit themselves with realism? I’m glad you asked. The answer is that you are asking a stupid question. Realism doesn’t entirely limit your possibilities, in fact, in many cases, it opens more up. Let me give you an example.
One of the first things I did when developing my personal OC, Senthorix, was figuring out how he could breathe fire. Now, I could have left it is “it is magical and stupid hot, the end” but instead, I figured out a semi-feasible way for him to functionally breath LIQUID THERMITE! Let me repeat that, liquid, thermite. I figured out a way for my OC to create a fire so hot that there is a legitimate argument that it could be used against dragons to kill them DESPITE their resistance to fire as was seen with them bathing in lava. If you think I’m over exaggerating, thermite burns at around 2,000C up to 2,500C and lava tends to be 700C to 1,200C. How about making my OC able to fly silently? Let’s take the wing designs of owls and convert the mechanics behind that and utilize those to add to the reptilian bat wings. How about we add nictitating membranes, rods able to perceive infra-red, and model the eyes off a hawk’s so he will have a 280 field of view with 50 degrees of binocular vision with 115 degree monocular vision on each side with a stupid depth of field.
But wait. You’re making it sound like I can add realism and that will just make everything overpowered as fuck. Well, I would like to ask you, does it? By utilizing realism, you also incur the wonderful downsides associated with these benefits. With a fire that hot the energy required to produce the necessary substances is high. And on top of that, do you honestly think that a body that was engulfed in a flame hot enough to melt metal would be very edible, and even if it was, would it have much nutritive value after about half of the body was turned to ash? Those wings are really quiet, sucks he can’t really fly all too fast. And finally, those are some fairly impressive eyes, too bad they’re completely immobile in the skull and require him to move his entire head to change his field of view. For every benefit you add to a character or organism, an inherent disadvantage is incurred. There is no real need to try to ‘balance’ an organism if you are going for a high degree of realism as mother nature already nerfs the fuck out of traits.
Back on the idea of fire, If you want a colder (in comparison to thermite) fire that can easily refill, is gas based rather than liquid, and only travels so far, then base your dragon's fire in methane. Make it acetone, formaldehyde, and ethanol based and now you have a liquid fire that can go farther and burn hotter than with methane. Heck, if you want your dragon or other animals to have a venom gland, just look at the different types of venoms that exist. While you could be boring and just say the venom attacks the heart and brain and causes them to shut down, you could instead be cool and give your animal a neurotoxin that attacks the nervous system in a way that the neurons in the heart are over stimulated and drastically raises the heart rate as well as causing the veins and arteries to contract. This would cause the blood pressure to rise and capillaries to rupture all across the body, including the lungs and kidneys, causing the individual to bleed out internally and possibly die from drowning in own blood while in excruciating agony, and that’s only if they don’t die from having a stroke with all those blood vessels popping. Hell, almost all venom is about the body naturally being able to do something and the venom either saying “let's do that now when you shouldn’t do that” or “how about we don’t do that”. If you gain a better grasp on how the body works, you can better understand how to break it and develop new interesting conflicts for your characters.
Realism can also be one of the biggest areas of conflict for your story (or at least add an interesting facet to the story). For a story I am working on, one of my characters is highly venomous, a wyvern, and one of the central areas of conflict for him comes from the fact that his venom is a highly potent cytotoxin. For those of you that don’t know, a cytotoxin digests cells and leads to necrosis (i.e., his venom is basically stomach acid without being an acid). This has led to several problems in his life; needed to learn self-control before he could fly, his digestive system relies on him injecting his venom into his food, he can’t become blood brothers with another dragon as he would kill them, and finally, he can’t engage in a full-blown make-out session with a potential mate as venom + their mouths = not good.
I actually got into a (quasi) debate over how the offspring of a dragon in the MLP universe would be able to derive nutrients from gems and meat if the conditions of their birth prevented them from acquiring the right gut bacteria. Think about that, you could design a dragon that literally would have no reason to consume specific things just because the gut flora was not right. Imagine the possible conflicts and stories that could come out of just ONE thing not being right in an organism that you would have never even considered if you wouldn’t have learned a little realism or gotten some help or advice.
But what about creating a new organism, aren’t those hard to do if I don’t know that much biology? Wouldn’t it be easier to just make it up without trying to make it real? Not at all, let me give you two organisms I came up with for Azure Drache that literally anyone could have come up with by just following some simple lines of thought.
Bacteria/Archaea
This should be able to infect dragons and only dragons. This means it has evolved to only target dragons. Dragons have their own ways of dealing with an infection, like using lava. But if this has evolved with them for a while, then this would also be immune to the heat of lava. It targets the base of the scales and progresses in several stages. At the first stage, it travels down the scale and finds the base of the scale through following chemical pheromones released from the flesh around the base around scales. In stage two of the infection, the bacteria buries into the area between the scale and the flesh, this causes the skin to inflame, causing irritation and itching. In stage three of the infection, it produces acids causing a softening of the surrounding scales and leading to more scales becoming infected. In the final stage, the acid and biomass causes the body to permanently lose the infected scale and expose the infected tissue underneath. Alcohol and strong antimicrobial ointments are used to treat infections.
Reptile
This animal should be able to survive on its own so it should not have been domesticated too long ago. TBD lives on a mountain and in a dark cave so the animal should be able to survive low temperatures. It should not be flammable as TBD is a dragon and his child might be able to breathe fire. I’m going to make this a reptile for that reason. At larger sizes, reptiles become more endothermic simply due to their mass, so hypothermia from living in a cave shouldn’t be an issue. Since both parents can fly, this reptile should be able to fly. If I want it to be fast, I will need to reduce drag. To do that, I need to minimize the number of limbs. The reptile will be a snake with wings. Since it will be fast, it would have evolved that trait to take down things like birds and small things that could easily evade it. Since birds and small quick animals do not have robust bone structures, a constrictor will be more than adequate to take them down after slamming into them at high speed.
Now was that really so hard? While for the bacteria, the full reason as to why it would be able to survive comes down to endospores and heat shock proteins, you don’t really need to know this. All it takes to learn how to design a new species are these things.
1. An organism evolves to better survive in its environment.
2. An evolved trait will only ever go away once it begins to be selected against
3. If a trait is not helpful but does not actively hurt, then the trait becomes vestigial due to resource allocations
4. Categories of organisms tend to have very little differences between them. When in doubt, look for the genus or species it is most closely related to and take hints from that.
5. You can have yetis in the desert if you know what you are doing (only do things like this if you have an advanced understanding of biology and ecology)
6. And as a personal note, sexual dimorphism is a thing with a purpose and consequences.
Now, I hope I convinced at least some of you to at least consider adding realism to your works to make more vivid and complete worlds that don’t just follow the rule of cool.
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