Trope Talk: Cursed Artifacts
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- čas přidán 24. 03. 2022
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Some items are macguffins, and some items are EVIL macguffins. Whatever they are, they're statistically going to be reskins of The One Ring or Stormbringer. Let's talk about the deets!
Got a favorite cursed artifact? Drop it in the comments!
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That thing of people trying to negotiate with cursed artifacts reminds me of SCP-738, which is two chairs and a table and if you sit in the chair a person appears trying to negotiate a deal. Only all the deals are monkey paw wishes.
So at one point a person from legal tries his hands at it, he refused to disclose the exact nature of his wish only that it was a 900 page long document and that he passed out from exhaustion while negotiating a precise technical definition of the word "shall".
The entity left him A red leather envelope, smelling of sulphur, which contained a handwritten note reading "Please come back any time. I haven't had so much fun in years."
I loved that one too. Just fun of the negotiation, no need to actually make a deal
I'm um... Gonna have to go read that now. Sounds fun.
That's fucking adorable.
That is amusing…and terrifying, but that’s probably the point.
Five bucks says the guy thinks the cost turned out to be the 1200 hours it took to negotiate the contract, and will be horrified when he realises the REAL cost is that now he is the designated guy-who-deals-with-the-Mephistopheles-type on every occasion.
Marie Curie's cookbook could be classed as a cursed artifact, it is so irradiated it can't be handled without protection and has to be kept in a lead box.
"Hello Mr Lovecraft. No I'm not Irish, my hair is just red. NO it's not because of inbreeding. N-no Sir, i'm just here to tell you there's a book in the real world with knowledge about the properties of an unseen world and reading it slowly kills you, even being in close proximity to the book is dangerous."
I misread that as "Marie Antoinette" and my thought was "Did she get near the cake?"
Forbidden recipes
Book also helpfully glows in the dark.
@@eveakane6563 yellow cake
MC: "So will this affect my moraility in any way?"
Demon: "Eh. Maybe?"
MC flies off
Demon 2: " So will it affect his morality?"
Demon: "No not at all. I just find removing his feeling of responsibility for his actions does."
ah yes order of the stick.
That is how demons like to entertain themselves. Much more amusing if the silly mortals try to make excuses for their actions after they’ve already tied their own noose together.
headology
This makes so much more sense.
my problem exactly with the cursed artifact. If a character is evil or flawed, I prefer it to be because of what she is rather than through unexplained influence of some malevolent object that serves as an excuse.
In my DnD setting, there's a cursed sentient shovel. In the same way that sentient swords often try to get their wielder to kill because they are swords and that's what they're meant to do, this sentient shovel tries to get its wielder to dig in the ground.
It is currently being wielded by a rabbit.
PLEASE elaborate I'm begging
I would also like to hear more of this O.o
That sounds amazing. I'd imagine it would try to get the wielder to dig a grave for themselves, the classic "6 feet under" deal, but I'd also imagine a rabbit could easily jump out of the standard body burying hole, easily evading death via curse. Right or wrong, a cursed shovel sounds rad
If the villain has the shovel its gonna say "I'mma dig your grave!"
But when someone got it for revenge the shovel says "Remember if we are killing him for revenge I'll be digging a lot of graves.. Including yours".
Who has it now?
"Take this object, but beware. It carries a terrible curse."
"That's bad."
"But it comes with a free frogurt."
"That's good."
"The frogurt is also cursed."
"That's bad."
"It comes with your choice of free topping."
"That's good."
"The topping contains potassium benzoate."
"..."
"That's bad."
"Can I go home now?"
"That doll is evil I tells ya! Evil! EVIL!"
Where is this from. I’ve heard it before
@@nikoclesceri2267 simpsons
@@chrisdaily2077 you said that about all the presents
“But I’m different” that’s honestly such an amazing feature of the cursed artifact trope. It puts the audience in the position of someone tempted by it.
Cursed artifacts and zombie apocalypses: The two implausibly difficult scenarios 99% of readers "would" survive with ease.
I am definition affected by it. I like thinking about Genies and how I would get the most out of my wishes.
Another added layer to that trope is a character that knows that they aren’t different and are just as susceptible to the curse item’s allure as anyone else so they do whatever they can to avoid using it
@@alexyadayada4487 agreed, but I think a better trope is the decent character that chooses to use "it" with the full expectation that it will cost them everything.
Then is doesn't. At least right now, but then they have to deal with the fallout. Lots more possibilities for character development and showing that kind of decisions effects, one way or the other.
I'm built different
I'm fairly proud of my solution to the "I could beat the monkey's paw by being super specific with my wish" idea. I introduced one in a tabletop RPG I was running, and they were convinced they could get whatever they wanted, even though they were explicitly warned that no one has ever had a wish with this thing gone completely the way intended. They worded something very very carefully, but then found out that the language that the artifact translates it into is a completely dead language that no one knows, and the wish's wording has to go through a translation that is extremely imperfect. It's very satisfying when phrases like "Google Translate killed the king!" happen.
That is amazing, and actually makes a lot of sense. Even the best and most good-willed translation might change meaning a lot
That sounds like so much fun! 😆 And you can make this evil laughter before revealing the truth! 😈😂
Onestly, to me it's seems like a bad decision, because you take away the players choice in a way that seems lazy, cheap and unpredictable. Even tough It depends on the contest: Was it a old school campaign? How much effort did it take to have It? How much was the translator property of the object hinted at? Were the players encouraged to think creatively trought the campaign? What do your players want in a roleplay game?
@@lori0747 it was introduced explicitly as a bad idea to use as is, but was kind of a keep away mcguffin that an early BBEG was going to try to use for nefarious means. Even if the BBEG didn’t get what he wanted, it didn’t guarantee safety if he used it. They weren’t told why it was dangerous, just that every time it was used ended horribly. Did I expect them to use it? Honestly, yeah, but only once or twice, and I didn’t have it go wrong TOO bad the first time, and the second was a disaster but not as bad as the third time. The king died on try seven.
@@Veelofar So when did they discovered about the google translate aspect of wish?
When she said, "Destroy, Contain, Uncurse", my first thought was the SCP foundation in a fantasy setting. It mostly deals with cursed objects, but it can deal with others.
One thing i do love about the SCP foundation is that it's pretty standard to include "can it defeat/destroy the unkillable lizard" as a test, where applicable.
So The Bureau of Balance from Adventure Zone then?
the Warehouse in Warehouse 13 then? its basically a Thaumiel SCP.
@@Mini_Squatch I love how the foundation fucked up testing the crystal thing on the lizard which resulted in the lizard becoming immune to the crystal
@@Mini_Squatch "We found this very dangerous anomaly"
"Great! Throw it at the lizard"
"What if we had a lawyer to phrase the request to the monkey's paw?"
I'm now picturing an urban fantasy environment where this is literally a legal specialization. Malevolent wish-granters are so valuable and (relatively) common that people spend their entire lives figuring out how to get one wish with manageable drawbacks with them.
The idea of a whole legal firm dedicated to producing wishes that result in as minimal or no drawbacks at all just comes off both funny and interesting at the same time. Since the idea of a lawyer writing out a wish in a long, drawn out, contract format just seems super hilarious.
Someone get leagaleagle on this
@@jojotheswede8444 Was thinking the same thing, maybe a short with a full legalese script wishing for a nice house or something.
This is literally an episode of Fairly Oddparents
Not exactly this, but a legalistic approach to magic is central to The Craft series by Max Gladstone. The senior partners in the big magic/law firms are effectively liches.
The ancient Greeks was probably on to something when they said that hubris is the most dangerous character flaw
"Oh, a cursed artifact that kills everybody trying to get its perks? I am sure I can get the perks without getting the curse!"
Imagine writing a character and they're like "Oh, a cursed artifact that kills everybody trying to get it's perks?
Guess I'll Die."
@@StarshadowMelody Imagine an immortal trying to die by using artifacts that only just makes him even harder to kill
@@metaparalysis3441 shoot, that necklace of strangulation was cursed, now I'm regenerating and I can't take it off. :(
Pride (Hubris) is also the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, so the Christians got something right too.
P.S my auto-corrupt tried to change sins to SUVs and I find that too funny not to share
Moral essentialism is the worst human flaw, actually. The tendency to believe that good and bad are immutable qualities of a person or an action regardless of context - it's a little bit of unrefined ape brain that remains in humans and leads to uniformly terrible judgment, because having some actual sociological understanding proves how ridiculous an idea that is.
An awesome twist is when historically a cursed item WAS used for good by a famous previous user. But it's revealed later that either A) that user was an unmatched paragon of virtue or B) that user WAS in fact corrupted, but those details didn't make it into the legend, and our heroes find thaf out too late.
Or they were just very creative
LuckyLadybug played with this when talking about the Millennium Ring from Yu-Gi-Oh. Thief King Bakura famously had it and got corrupted, Alexander the Great had it for a while and he got corrupted - the only person who wasn't is Maahad, the original Ring holder who Thief King Bakura stole it from, who by all accounts was a paragon and overall great dude who seemed completely unaffected by it. However, in one of LuckyLadybug's Yu-Gi-Oh fanfics, Thief King Bakura (who has turned full good guy by this point) tells normal Bakura that Maahad **did** get corrupted in small but key ways throughout his fight with Thief King Bakura, deliberately attacking to kill and even cheating in order to get the upper hand, and both Bakuras infer that the only reason Maahad didn't go nearly as bad as some other Ring wielders did was because he died before he could have it for too long, something that is haunting for normal Bakura because Maahad was always **the good guy**. The paragon of loyalty who gave up his eternal rest in the afterlife to serve the Pharaoh he loved even after death, and the idea even he couldn't control the Rings influence is disheartening to say the least.
I actually think that is where the elder wand pops up in that regard. People have been ruthlessly killing each other to get a hold on the most dangerous wand of all but the one person who actually used it responsibly was Dumbledore. He had the wand for decades and no one even knew he had it until after his death specifically because he made sure to never boast about having it. He didn't use it to become a duelist or anything of that regard. He just... Used it like a normal wand. He never once bragged or even mentioned anything about having it in his possession. And so ultimately, while he was still murdered, he did end up dying on his own terms and wasn't killed over the wand.
Maybe the artifact is an incredibly dangerous power tool and the instruction manual for using it safely perished along with the first owner. For example, a stick welding machine could be an impressive cursed artifact if you didn't know what it was or how to use it.
12:48 There's an SCP that includes a story about "Asshole wish granting entity VS Lawyer".
_Approximately forty-one hours after the commencement of the test, Mr. Katz lapsed into unconsciousness due to exhaustion. Mr. Katz described the appearance of the entity as identical to his first-year contracts professor from law school, but he declined to describe the nature of the offer that had been made. He reported that just prior to his blacking out, he had been in the midst of negotiating a precise technical definition of the word "shall". Katz stated that the current working draft of the agreement that he and the entity had been drafting was at least nine hundred pages long at that moment, exclusive of exhibits and schedules, and that he regretted not keeping a copy for his form file. A red leather envelope, smelling of sulphur, was found on Mr. Katz's person, which contained a handwritten note reading "Please come back any time. I haven't had so much fun in years." Mr. Katz has requested reassignment._
738, One of my favorite SCPs. Such a fertile ground for interesting stories with how versatile "an asshole wish-granter" can be.
Spoilers for season 7 or Supernatural-
This sounds like when Crowley and the head Leviathan were negotiating a deal and instead of with a kiss he made him review a physical paper contract, lol
This is the dumbest thing I've ever read, and it is hilarious.
Marvin, SCP-738 if you would?
@@dylanfooler I love how much of a dick Crowley was. One of my favorite parts of that show.
I liked having the deathnote mentioned while discussing how the audience feels like they would handle cursed items, because that's exactly how Light approaches the deathnote, "I know I have a cursed instakill button but if I only use it to kill bad guys then I'm making the world better" aaaand spiral....
A perfect scenario of when a genius handles such artifacts.
There's a certain road to a certain fiery place that is most certainly paved with the best of intentions.
it was less a spiral and moreso a slipe and slide he dove headfirst into.
The real requirement to properly handle a cursed artifact is a solid understanding of moral philosophy, so as to realize that individual virtue and vice are foolish concepts rooted in human bias; and an equal understanding of sociology, so as to understand that the world's problems can't be addressed through anything short of systemic action and there are no "bad people" you can magically fix the world by eliminating.
That solves a lot of the artifacts. For one thing, the Death Note is pretty useless as a solution to systemic social issues, so it can be safely disposed of or just not used. For another, a sentient artifact isn't going to be particularly convincing if you're sufficiently aware of how stupid its arguments are. You also learn about the calculation problem in economics and realize rather quickly that you can't possibly make a wish that's comprehensive enough to solve economic issues for everyone, because your brain literally can't fit that information, so you don't make the stupid mistake of trying it directly.
That's honestly a lot of why most artifacts need to cheat, because mind control or cosmic predestination are basically necessary to really make it impossible to outsmart them.
@@marctaco2624 On the contrary. The fact that he still believed killing a few "bad people" could ever conceivably solve a single social problem implies he wasn't nearly as smart, or at least not as educated, as he thought.
Light should have gotten a sociology degree and minored in philosophy, because maybe then he would have realized that killing individuals is useless as a means of sociological improvement and that judging someone's essential character is frankly delusional.
this can summarize the sentient cursed artifact in a nutshell
“what would you like to order sir?”
“THE SOULS OF THE INNOCENT!!!”
“a bagel.”
“NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!”
“two bagels."
But the souls of the innocent are pretty refreshing.
Maybe just one innocent soul as a snack...
Where is that from again? I get the feeling it's a Discworld fan-comic
It’s a vine
It’s a vine that Red turned into a De-Vine even, with Egyptian gods.
Have a Presbyterian fire-and-brimstone preacher deliver a sermon informing said entity of sentient cursed artifact that there "are no innocent souls". Then it would starve because, therefore, nothing is palatable by that definition.
"A curse is just what uncreative people call magic."
-The D&D party I play with
Ring that gives you delusions of power? Slap a tag that says "ring of unlimited wish (99999 Gold)" on it and make bank.
Cursed mirror that traps people inside it? Point it at your enemies! Boss monsters, gotta catch em all!
A rug that smothers you to death upon touching it? Portable death trap!
Ring that gives you dark magical powers but slowly drains your sanity? ...What sanity?
S tier comment, this one
'Ring that gives you delusions of power? Slap a tag that says "ring of unlimited wish (99999 Gold)" on it and make bank.'
Explain how this is beneficial? I really don't get it, because it says delusions of power, which implies even with the tag that says that, you still would get a ring of unlimited wish, I just don't get it.
@@rampantsarcasm2220 You scam people with it. The ring convinces people that it gives you unlimited power, so you tell people that it's a ring of wish and sell it to them for a ridiculous amount of money.
I love it! Anyone who buys that ‘Ring of Unlimited Wishes’ is begging to be taken for a ride. As if anyone would actually sell something that powerful!😂
Reading through these and laughing along, *reads the last one* “oh”.
I love that the "General Mistfortune" variant is represented by stepping on LEGO.
Well amusing I think there are better examples. If someone steps on a lego it is not a case of misfortune but someone did not clean up after playing with them. A nail would be a better case I think for bad luck.
@@phantom-ri2tg Stepping on a nail isn't really misfortune, some just didn't clean up after hanging something
"The Gods Must Be Crazy" has a regular glass bottle as a "cursed artifact" the protagonist quests to dispose of, simply because he's from an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe and the single hard bottle results in a fight over it, hence it was evil in their eyes.
I watched the first half of that it a social studies class and I haven't heard of it or seen it since.
And then you have the "Antichrist"!
I’m shaking my head yes!
Yay Xi! One of my favorite characters.
Holy shit I watched this in highschool and it felt almost like recalling a dream thinking about it now. iirc the quest was literally to "walk to the end of the earth and throw it off the edge" which is amazing to think about now.
I’m still hoping for a trope talk about companion animals. So many of them are loaded with meaning and they show up everywhere.
I mostly mean mascots, mounts, and objects that act like animals. Anything that holds literary meaning as a living creature, but doesn’t strictly have sentience. I guess a better way to put it is non-human (or not fully sentient creature) that people pack-bond with. How do you you make a definitionally non-character endearing to an audience, and why does it work so well?
agreed
This.
Are we counting mascot characters here?
Animal companion is a pretty broad concept since it ranges from ''a cute pet because the show needed merchandise'' to ''literally a piece of the characters soul that says something about who they are as a person''. So there's a lot to talk about.
Ooh that would be great!
When I was in animation class back in the fall, I found a random key laying in the courtyard area just outside my classroom. Its teeth were jagged, pointed. It looked otherwise like a regular housekey. I saw it, and picked it up, and I had only one thought in my head; 'a key laying around like this is bad news. I better give it to someone important.'
I gave it to the tech guy responsible for keeping the computers in the lab online. I often think about what that key went to, what it did. When I make animations, or write stories or scripts, I often think about if that key was cursed or not.
Sounds like some solid inspiration for an animated story
@@whiteraven181 Perhaps.
when i was in school one day, i noticed a little white crocheted doll that looked kind of weird. I pocketed it and went on with my day. I then almost got suspended and had CPS called on me by complete accident. Once i lost the doll (on the last day of school) pretty much everything returned to normal. yeah it was probably a voodoo doll
@@wren_. I found an orange Pierrot doll in a gutter once. It looked miserable so I took it home and cleaned it... And put in with my other, slightly larger Pierrot doll. At some point I lost both dolls. Maybe, instead of cursing me, they became friends and ran away together? Tbh it's none of my buisiness!
NGL, you probably dodged a bullet there.
I'm a big fan of Terry Pratchett's approach, where they're not malevolent, but just magically radioactive and everytime someone leaves some magical thing somewhere, the magic tends to leak out and fuck up the plants and animals in interesting ways
Although I would like to point out that Terry Pratchett also plays the trope completely straight with things like the Gonne in Men at Arms or the Guitar in Soul Music. Both of which are actively malevolent and corrupting to there holders.
Gotta love Discworld's way of portraying magic. It is alive and doesn't care what you want, you better treat it carefully... and it leaks!
The Gonne was actively malevolent
And then there's Kring, who's not evil, just unfathomably irritating
@@peterstorm8089 I wouldn't call the Guitar actually malevolent, it's simply far too tied to the fabric of the Universe for a mere living being to wield.
Psychologists have shown, through studies, that people are actually really bad at predicting how they would act under certain conditions. Everyone says - or likes to think - they would do the morally upright or logical thing. But actually being in the situation creates psychological pressures that aren't present in an abstract discussion thereof. Peoples' decision making is far more dictated by context than by nebulous concepts like "personality" or "character".
Fortunately, as with much of human psychology, knowing about the psychological forces at work in one's brain allows one to identify when they are exerting influence, and to actively resist them. Which is why I always advocate that Social Psychology should be taught in public school.
Amen, brother
Are you talking about the Milgram experiment?
In a way, winning the lottery can be considered a psychological experiment, because obviously everyone playing the lottery thinks they can handle being super rich.
It's like those guys who say that they'd totally win in a fight, despite having no training or experience in a fight. They've seen action movies and think "well, how hard could it be?" and because they have no experience, don't realize that those fights are highly unrealistic. Then when they actually get into a fight, even if they had everything perfectly choreographed in their heads they can't execute it because their nerves are going crazy, their blood is pumping, they're in fight or flight mode and all that mental preparation goes right out the window. And even if everything starts out all according to plan, all it takes is one thing they weren't expecting to happen and now all that planning is worthless.
Basically, its easy to solve the puzzle/win the fight/do the right thing, when you're comfortably sitting on your couch watching everything go down with inherently more information then the protagonist has. Its like when you take a test in school, you could spend days memorizing facts and formulas, but your mind might still go blank once the pressure to preform is weighing down on you. Can't tell you how many times I walked out of a test and suddenly remembered something that would have helped me only after that pressure had lifted.
I agree, psychology should be part of the education system. As a former psych major, I learned so much that I was able to apply to my daily life. You'll increase the number of armchair psychologists unfortunately, but I think it is beneficial for people to understand how they and others think.
Please don’t tell me that people in horror movies make realistic decisions.
I second that1
I pretty much always find it laugthable when people claim they would never . . . what they think they would do, is what they wish they would do, who they hope and want to be, not who they truely are. It is astonishing how little many people know of the human nature and how psychology works . . .
people tend to be really bad at watching and analysing themselfs . . .
Even going of of evidance, like I am very prone to state my mind if I dissagree with something, find it moraly wrong, even if it gets me into trubble and I have nothing to gain from it. Like defending someone I dislike, for I feel like the attack on them is unfair or in that case baseless. I m known and disliked for that not going with the stream tendency . . . . based on that I would like to think, that I would not have been a bystander or enabler of the crimes inacted by the nazis . . . but the stakes there would have been way higher then being disliked, called for a talk to the schooldirector, losing a job or getting disowned . . . yeah I do tend to risk stuff for what I think is right, but what I have been exposed to has nothing on that, I can not know what impuls would have won out there. If self preservation would finaly kick in, if the thought of risking my loved ones would have paralised me . . . I cant know, the data is simply not there . . . and that is a thing people should be aware of!
The less data there is, the easyer it is to fool oneself into making a rash but very uninformed and inacurate judgment while feeling compleatly confident about it, and that is what makes it is so so treacherous.
Studies showed again and again how the worst of human nature is resting just under the surface and waiting to be triggered, history teaches that all people of all colors and backgrounds are capable of terrible evils(good deeds too, but those are not the point right now) but still one is inclined to think of oneself as different and otherising those who done wrong. Percive them as a totaly different breed so they do not have to ponder the implications of themselfs not being that inherintly good of a person. No one is inherintly good, it is always a choice and sometimese your choices are the worst, or your options worse still . . .
it should be part of everyones education, both to teach sympathy towords people who made choices, that are easely dismissed as "evil", but also for undertsnading the workings behind it helps prevent a repitition both in yourself, as in others you might get out of their situation of only bad options to chose from available.
My favorite example of a "cursed" artifact is Excalibur from Soul Eater. It is an absurdly powerful sword that anyone use, but... it is so unbelievable annoying that noone can stand to atune to it.
Same as The Bane in Borderlands 2.
Except Arthur, but he's also so annoying nobody else could stand to attune to
Just get someone who's had lots of little siblings
Oh that's just Jack [sumarbrander] from magnus chase :]
(ﺧ益ﺨ)
"It's not the writer's job to convince the reader of anything, just just have to tell the story" is something I need to tell myself when I'm stressing over whether my ideas are smart enough or subversive enough
It's important to remember that some people will never be engaged. You just gotta make the best version of the troupes you love for the people who also love those troupes
Another word of advice?
Don't worry about the tropes or whether your ideas are good enough.
If *you* like the story, your ideas are already good enough. :)
“A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument...and the occasional bar fight.”
― J. Michael Strazynski
"Some people will never be engaged" is also good advise for teachers. You try to create the best possible lesson that will be interesting for your students, and it is for most, but there's always that one student. You can see it from the frustration that all your other students have with that guy not participating or taking it seriously. You just have to accept it.
“This trope has some staying power” I mean, it wouldn’t be a very good cursed Artifact if you could simply get rid of it easily
I think there are many cursed artfiacts that are easy to get rid of, but the idea is that they are too tempting to do so. Case in point, monkey's paw, throw it in the sea, done.
I don’t know. I find throwing unwanted things in a volcano to be pretty effective.
Hard drugs are a real life cursed artifact. Tempts you, gives you a short-term perk but slowly destroys you with each use, its corruption compels the user to use it more, it's extremely difficult to get rid of when the corruption has run too deep. It's no wonder that some classical cursed artifacts are treated the same way hard drugs are.
The atomic bomb is also one hell of a cursed object. Tempts all nations, could destroy them.
First hit's free, second hit will cost you $20, 50th hit will cost you your body
Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker has Nightblood, which is a sentient sword of Subtype 1 who is functionally corrupting but is practically a parody of Stormbringer and The One Ring mixed together. The twist is that Nightblood was created explicitly to destroy evil, but the problem is that its creators only realized too late that _a hunk of steel doesn't know what evil actually is._ The end result is a jet-black sword that is repulsive to good people to the point of often making them vomit if they're even exposed to a bit of the steel nearby, but draws in evil people who are relatively weak-willed and cause them to kill everyone else around them and then impale themselves on the sword without even drawing it. It can be used as a ridiculously effective weapon in the right hands (to the point where actual gods are terrified of it), but it will drain the user's 'Investiture' (aka whatever local source of magic there is) and can kill the user if not handled properly. But in the hands of someone who can passively resist it and can consistently use it, it turns out it is more annoying than anything once you actually start talking to it and the extent of it is deliberate "corruption" is childish whining and goading in trying to desperately urge the wielder to kill someone evil already (and to its credit, it's slowly getting better at identifying evil people, but it isn't inherently capable of detecting evil). And in many situations its users have found that it's more efficient to just basically use it like a hand grenade by tossing it into a group of enemies and letting them destroy themselves with it rather than use it in the way a sword is normally used, or just kill people with it as a blunt weapon while it's sheathed because it basically allows you to hit people with superhuman force even when it's sheathed. It's genuinely hilarious.
i love nigthtblood so much
@@pandoragoldspan7012 Hear Hear
Spoilers
Never mind gods being afraid of it, It has been used by an uninvested person to kill a god. (Actually, does the old magic count as being invested?)
also spoilers @adrian roed
yes I‘d say that the old magic, especially in the way that Taravangian, Dalinar and Lift received it, is a very strong form of investiture, as it is not the Nightwatcher, but Cultivation herself who gave them their powers, with the intention of changing/influencing the future of Roshar.
@@j_c_h8651 But did Dalinar and Taravangian actually receive powers or did cultivation only change their soul? It feels hard to believe that Odium wouldn't notice if Cultivation had invested Dalinar, especially with how much time he spent planning the conversion of Dalinar.
Author: "The Malevolent Scimitar of Ghrimgour the Flame-blooded, Demon Lord of desolation and bloodshed, is possessed by the souls of the ten thousand demon-worshipping barbarians who sacked the great civilisation from the Age of Legends; it will drive any who wield it to commit horrific acts of barbarism and violence."
Audience: "Yeah, but I'm built different."
Ghrimgour is just the war-hammiest name.
@@paulsmart4672 I'm pretty sure there's an orc in warhammer fantasy named Grimgor Ironhide so that checks out
"Guaranteed not to fuse to your hand or whisper dark, forbidden secrets in your ear."
Darn. That's what I was looking for.
Don't judge my interests, you!
"Does that qualify as ASMR?"
@@Alias_Anybody Sure.
What? Of course this sword is fine! Yes the red eyes are just temporary. The black veins are perfectly normal too. The orphans? Well, I had the test the sword on something and who wouldn't want to be killed by a sword?
I like dark forbidden secrets
No kinkshaming here, you're fine.
One of my favorite examples of this is the "Demon Core". It was originally created to power a city-leveling superweapon, but the conflict the weapon was meant for ended, leaving its creators with a power source they barely understand beyond its capacity for destruction. Those creators spend the next several years trying to unravel the Core's secrets and whether its power could be harnessed for anything other than large-scale devastation, but two characters in particular approach this study with such hubris that they each accidentally unleash a fraction of the Core's power, dooming themselves.
And if you're thinking "that sounds like a cool story, what show/movie/book is that from?", this is the part where I tell you that it happened in real life, the Demon Core was a subcritical chunk of plutonium that two American scientists died from experimenting with (one literally dropped a brick on it, the other decided to perform a delicate test by wedging a screwdriver into its casing), and yes, they really named it the Demon Core.
and people did eventually come along and use it's power for good, engineering their way around all the downsides.
@@QuantumSeanyGlass People don't use Plutonium in nuclear reactors
@@QuantumSeanyGlass I'm sorry to say, that the demon core specifically was just recycled and used in other nuclear weapons. Kind of an anti climactic ending for an irl evil artifact.
@@testaccountpleaseignore2653 Actually you're wrong. Plutonium is extensively used in RTGs - radio-thermal generators. Almost all of our space probes that go to mars or beyond are powered by them, simply because there literally is no other internal power source that can power a space probe for a decade, while also keeping them from freezing.
That said, it's not the same isotope used in nukes.
@@QuantumSeanyGlass If I remember correctly, the Demon Core was melted down and used for further open air nuclear testing by the US in the South Pacific.
"Is it a Bug? Or is it a Feature?"
Bethesda: "Yes"
I think early Adventure Time's approach to this trope with Ice King's Crown was brilliant. Seeing it corrupt Simon as he tries to balance using the Crown's powers to protect young Marceline while desperately clinging on to his sanity being warped by the crown very much recontextualizes the goofy, demented nutcase the Ice King was in the show before they explained his backstory.
You rarely get the "villain of the week" type of character fleshed out beyond the rare standout episode, so it was such a great plot thread having lasting effects on the characters. Sadly imo the writing of Adventure Time took a nosedive, but I'll always appreciate what it did early on
Btw side tangent: Can we take a moment to appreciate Tom Kenny's villain roles? He seems to only get credit for his protagonist roles as Spongebob, Lazlo, and Heffer, but I much prefer Tom Kenny's roles as long-nosed bad guys like the Ice King, The Penguin, Twobrains, etc.
Lazlo was voiced by Carlos Alazraqui. Tom Kenny voiced Lumpus.
I love the fact that when the crown got reset, one of the most evil characters in the series just chose the exact same wish for it to grant.
@@thirdstrike000000 I always get Lazlo and Lumpus's VAs mixed up, my bad
What about the wishes as granted by Prismo?
He even outright tells Jake that it’s a Monkey’s Paw thing.
Here's a thing: Allegedly, the Monkey's Paw was created by a mystic who wanted to show that fate was immutable and that trying to go against it would bring only misfortune. So, it's hard to say if the Monkey's Paw itself is actively misinterpretting the wishes, or that fate itself is visiting vengeance upon anyone who attepts to change destiny by inflicting the worst possible timeline on anyone who makes a wish.
Honestly? If I was writing that story, where the Paw was created by a mystic who wanted to show fate's immutable, I'd have it just... not misinterpret the wish, despite it's creator's intention.
@@StarshadowMelody if it's less than 6000 words I'll read it, but out of the gate I don't have much fate in that hook.
Maybe would make sense under different circumstances, but is being poor or not having even a little bit of spare/luxury money really an immutable fate? In the original story the guy wished for enough to pay off his mortgage, not to win the lottery or be a gazillionaire, not to heal a sick person or lead the free world, just 200 pounds to pay a bill.
@@Ceares it is a corruption of his humility, but it's certainly a pretty damn harsh and cruel lesson.
Now there has to be a story of someone who goes on a quest to kill fate just to get their damn monkey's paw to work right.
You know what would be interesting: a character using two cursed artifacts. I imagine it would be like and shoulder angel and demon except they're both demons but they have vastly different methods of solving problems.
A corrupting evil versus a blunt force "destroy everything" evil. The corrupter is constantly scheming and wanting the user to do political things whereas the blunt force weapon only screams "SMASH" at whatever's being an inconvenience at the time.
@@measlyfurball37
Corruptor: Ok I have an idea. Bang his crush to de movitavate him from fighting.
Destroyer: Just break his kneecaps and crush his dick!
@@measlyfurball37 A stiletto dagger and a mace
@@taylor_green_9 I'd read that story.
Reminds me of that one sound on TikTok that’s like “I don’t have an Angel and a demon on my shoulders. I have a 50’s housewife and a Viking. Both of their solutions is murder they just disagree about how”
The Berserker Armor is probably one of the dopest cursed artifacts in fiction
"In rare cases, the artifact's personality might be totally chill, but the effect it has on the people around it is still generally negative..."
Hmm...where have we seen this before? Oh yes! There was this certain sword...
"Hello, would you like to kill some evil today?"
Excalibur!!!!! Excalibur!!!!!!
"tsk tsk tsk, so much evil."
I still remember how my jaw dropped the first time I read that scene in Words of Radiance. Szeth was the worst person possible to have access to Nightblood, I thought. Then Rhythm of War came out and I learned how wrong I was.
STORMLIGHT REFERENCE LETS GOOOOOO 🗣️🗣️🗣️
Considering the One Ring had variable weight, Legolas probably couldn't have fired it into the volcano. Also apparently one of the first ways it corrupts you is that you can't choose to damage it
That's a good point about the weight.
But I expect that if someone tied the ring to an arrow and Legolas immediately fired that arrow, it wouldn't have time to influence Legolas not to damage it. (Gimli didn't have trouble choosing to damage the ring he had never interacted with before.)
"hey Legolas! Got some target practice for you"
@@abbieb8130 Dwarves are know to be much more stubborn and harder to influence, although it might be that part in particular was just in the film (can't remember off the top of my head).
@@abbieb8130 The problem you're going to run into is, who ties the Ring to the arrow? Who gives it to Legolas? /Someone/ has had the Ring for more than a few minutes, and if they know this is an attempt to destroy it, will they allow that? Gimli wasn't in the Ring's presence for long, and certainly no one around expected him to try to destroy it.
Also, the Ring's powers definitely cover conveniently slipping onto and off of fingers, so while we don't have direct evidence, I'd be very concerned about trusting its destruction a knot.
Don''t know how much good the variable weight element would do for The Ring.
If The Ring was self aware enough to increase in weight to avoid be fired into a volcano, it would also be smart enough to make itself impossible to carry all the way to said volcano.
Evidently, it was not that smart.
There's another way to beat a corrupting artifact. In "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," May picks up an Asgardian staff that fills the holder with rage, but she isn't affected by it, and when asked, she explains that she "always feels that way," so she's already used to controlling her rage.
That very much has the same energy has that scene where Bruce says he is always angry
So basically, to deal with cursed items you need to find someone best equipped to deal with its effects, for instance ascetics are resistant to offers of power and wealth, as they have no interest in them.
@@bluesnake4626 same energy? They copy and pasted
Just to clarify because I think it's really cool: the staff doesn't just make the user angry, it makes them relive their most traumatic experience. May is unaffected because she deals with her PTSD and guilt everyday
@@jamieadams2589 that is better than an angry stick not making you angry because reasons.
I just had a thought. A cursed artifact in the form of a shield that slowly flips the personality of the wielder and changes as the curse takes effect. Give it to a hero and it will do the usual cursed personality shift thing. But what if you gave it to a villain? It could start covered in spikes to impale others, but slowly turn the villain into a hero, using the shield to defend the innocent. Then, when that hero dies, a new hero grabs the shield and becomes more and more villainous until they die and a different villain gets the shield in an endless cycle. TL:DR a cursed shield that makes villains into heroes and heroes into villains.
Here's a fun variation on the "Malevolent Artifact" type: An artifact so old that what everyone around it thinks as malevolence, it thinks of as being honourable and good--in other words, In-Universe values dissonance.
Examples?
@@BlackCover95 I don't know if it has ever shown up in a story, but here's an example: Imagine you pick up a sword that when wielded, fills you with an insane rage and violence, and when you attack you DO NOT STOP until all your foes are dead, even if they beg and plead for mercy. Definitely a cursed artifact, right?
Then you look into its history, and discover this sword, forged by vikings (or whatever analogue you may please) makes you not an evil, merciless butcher, but into a mighty _Berserker_--something its forgers would consider a blessing, not a curse!
@@MrInitialMan So a weapon of war in a time of (relative) peace?
@@zashgekido5616 Indeed. And not only that, but what modern army would have any use for a berserker?
A Jack the Ripper story where at the end you find out he actually had a magical coin that compelled him to be a good and virtuous Christian who did as God commanded... by killing any woman who had sex before marriage.
Red probably never left the relative safety of her iconic red chair because she didn't want to trip, stumble, or otherwise fall upon all the cursed artifacts that were readily available within her general vicinity.
Maybe the chair itself is a cursed artifact.
Maybe red is the cursed artifact, and the chair her eternal victim
Oh no...it can't be...it's...Blue's script for the next Pope Fights video!
@@johnbones3455 she's cursed to forever dissect and document fictional literature for ALL ETERNITY.
When faced with a cursed sword, call it "Chaz" and use it as a can opener. They hate that.
Yeah, but at least this sword does not activelly corrupt his owner. He just can recieve a power-up through evil means.
or use it to spread butter on toast.
@@seanpeacock4290 or attach a plunger head to the scabbard and use it to unclog your toilet
@@seanpeacock4290 you know,as cursed sword i was used to grill cheese,and i liked that.
@@platinumchromee3191 cursed grilled cheese sandwiches? sound like fun depending on the swords curse they might be nice and toasty or cold and moist
The closest real world equivalent to cursed artifacts would be radioactive waste. Even our plan for warning future life about radiation sounds like an ancient curse: _This is not a place of honor._
or drugs too
@@delvi5380sure, or drugs
I read a mlp fanfic where Daring Do discovers an "ancient temple" where the twist is that it's actually a radioactive waste storage facility that's fallen into ruin, and Daring Do doesn't discover this until nearly all of her crew die from radiation poisoning because the ponies couldn't read the warning.
Please do “Warrior Poet” trope. It's a trope that I find really interesting because in western culture, being a proud warrior is seen as totally immiscible with being able to ponder the facets of life. It's always the typical manly masculine man vs effeminate sensitive soul, where as these two paths are in fact complementary in eastern culture and classical civilizations like Ancient Rome or Greeks
What?
In the Viking Sagas, the main character is more often than not, LITERALLY, a Warrior Poet (My mother told me... etc.). I guess maybe that is an exception, since it is Norse?
@@Grubnar Not just Vikings, knights were also trained in manners and poetry. After all if they only learned how to fight there would be barely anything separating them from mere men-at-arms
Klingons?
@@BlackCover95 Partly inspired by Vikings, so I would say yes.
They sure love singing, and although I am sure not all of them are "poets" SOMEONE must be writing all these (drinking) songs!
not just eastern and ancient. Many warrior kings and knights (like Richard LionHeart or Edouard the first for example) were very fond of poetry and music. Think also of the norse skaals. In fact, most elite warrior casts around the world attached value to some form of art, which was part of their training. Same would apply in the middle east. In fantasy, such examples are predominantly found in Tolkien's work.
If anything, that saddens me that warriors (from any civilization really) in media are only represented through their brutish way.
People can't properly proof-read contracts they sign but then they believe they could outsmart an actual cursed artifact.
I like to imagine every "Terms & Services" agreement I sign has some utterly malicious line buried in it somewhere that I would have known about if I had read it, then sign it without reading it, just for the cursed artifact appeal. I would not stand a chance against a cursed artifact.
I don't have to proof-read contracts because I have read the law that binds every contract I sign. And the law says that if I unknowingly beak a contract because it was too difficult to understand, I'm not responsible.
@@pRahvi0
You're now my hero. I have no idea if this is true, but if it sounds like it'll hold up in front of a jury of my peers then _it's good enough!_
The Elder Wand. Considered a cursed artifact in the Wizarding World due to its reputation of being the most powerful and unbeatable wand in existence, but leaves behind a trail of owners and masters who wind up dead.
Wizards believe its bloody history is intrinsic, while more level-headed people believe it's because those who owned the wand wouldn't stop boasting that they had it.
I'm personally quite fond of the fact that it's never explicitly specified which of the two theories is correct - both are entirely plausible.
@@AnEnormousNerd Yep, especially since the books never truly answered whether the Deathly Hallows were created by Death or just incredible inventions by talented wizards. Either/or and each plausible.
Although what truly matters is the fairy tale's message: everyone has to die someday and it's better to take a healthy perspective toward it.
And of course its history is spotty at best, so it leaves many unanswered questions - Dumbledore himself noted "No witch has ever claimed to own the Elder Wand. Make of that what you will"
@@NobodyC13 I like to think that the Peverell brothers invented the Deathly Hallows and then events happend that where similar to the tale, but with the difference that death is just the concept of death instead of an actual person.
@@SuperSongbird21 Men, always goin' about boasting of their wands.
My favorite Cursed artifact I ever used in D&D was a cursed sword, hovering in an adamantine cage that had openings just big enough to put a human's hand through. It wasn't evil, just lonely. there were many skeletons around it, reaching towards it. If grasped by a character, they'd have to do the whole willpower stat-check + saving throw to let go of it, or they'd be unable to, ever. The Fighter did touch it, got stuck. eventually they chopped his arm off to free him and had to do a long quest to get his arm magically restored. Good times
A fun twist on audience response to cursed artifacts is Death Note. Not the original series, but the sequel one shot with Minoru - it has the character trying to exploit the Death Note without ever write a single name inside. It ends with him dead and the world thinking that President Tronald Dump has a Death Note.
What Minoru does is exploit Ryuuk's conditional invisibility to auction the book off on live TV. He does it in such a way that money goes to him, his mother, and everyone who shares his bank, which protects his identity and helps a bunch of people. He then sends Ryuuk off to deliver the note, and tells him to never come back. The King of Death is so angry at the note being used for wealth that he adds a new rule - anyone who barters for a Death Note dies. Because Minoru told Ryuuk never to come back, Ryuuk decides not to warn him, and he dies when he tries to withdraw the money. Meanwhile, President Dump has to choose whether to accept the note and die - giving a powerful weapon to his country in exchange for his life - or whether to refuse and waste trillions of dollars. He decides to refuse, but lies and tells the world that he has it, using the appearance of power as a bargaining tool.
It's kind of neat how it exists in dialogue with it's prequel and the audience. It starts off with a throwaway comment, "intelligence is complex and isn't easily measured by test scores" as a way to cover the glorification of the appearance of intelligence that happened in the last series. And then it discusses how even if you never kill anyone, even if you only ever provide good things for our loved ones and people around you, the power of death is still a tainted thing. Just as you can't kill only "evil" people and keep your hands clean, you also can't export the power of death and pretend you had no part in it. No matter how you moralize it or pretend to be clean, killing other people remains a heinous act, and the power to kill remains a dangerous one to employ.
It only backfired because the Shimgami King cheated. Which 100% shows that humanity is a doomed species under the thumb of death with no escape.
@@noytelinu3409 It was definitely unfair, but I don't think that negates the message. It shows that rules, even magical ones, are arbitrary and subject to change at the whims of the powerful. Which further continues the dialogue about the relativity of justice from the original series.
But ultimately Minoru died not because of the addition of the rule, he died because he tried to wash his hands of the whole affair and avoid responsibility. If he hadn't rudely dismissed Ryuuk and asked to never see him again, then he would have been warned and could have simply withheld from withdrawing the money. It would still do wonders for his credit score even if he never touches a single yen. However he wanted to abdicate all responsibility for his actions, even though he sold the world's most dangerous weapon to the immoral leader of a military superpower. (The book's views, not mine, though I don't disagree.) He was an arms dealer, and however innocent his motives were he still wanted to sell weapons and pretend he had nothing to do with how they were used.
@Tin Watchman I mean he'd never actually endanger his life for his country and lies, so not much different from the original
The death note hit on two things:
1.) absolute power corrupts absolutely
2.) to a person with a hammer every situation looks like a nail.
If you had a book that could instantly kill anyone in any way you wanted and all you had to do was know that person's real name and face, you would probably make excuses to use it on who you see as truly evil people, but once you actually start to use it you'll begin using excuses to use it on more then just truly evil people.
As an example, Batman believes that if you allow yourself to kill you may begin to see killing as a solution to several problems, and Superman from Injustice essentially does just that, he starts with good intentions and devolves into a tyrant, the whole time believing he was the good guy.
@@Nyghtking It's funny, because as someone who simply doesn't believe in good and evil people, nor in good and evil actions, but only in helpful or harmful outcomes, I really have a hard time seeing the Death Note as anything other than an attempt at cosmic trolling - a virtually useless object that plays off people having very bad ideas about morality.
One of my favourite lesser known cursed artifacts is The King in Yellow, a two act play where the first act is a decent if somewhat typical fantastical story. The second act, however, fully turns the reader insane. Through the story, multiple people read it having heard the rumours that it makes you crazy, often despite not having any desire to read the play in the first place. The narration gives us little hints about the second act that serve to make us want to read the play, even knowing the consequences.
Also it's set in the slightly dystopian not-too-distant scientifically advanced future of the 1920s, which is amusing.
That latter tidbit is exclusive to The Repairer of Reputation, one of the short stories in the King in Yellow collection. The rest of the stories are set in the then-present mid-19th century. It's also implied that the 1920's setting was a part of the protagonist's delusion, since someone in one of the 19th century stories knows about what happened to the protagonist of The Repairer which wouldn't be possible if it was still in the future.
There's a defictionalised version of the play in existence written by Thom Ryng, by the way. It won't drive you insane but it still manages to grasp the eerie, nihilistic tone of the Chambers' short stories.
@@Lightice1 _Why did I read that like "It won't drive you insane" was a FLAW_
One interesting thing about the "future" setting is that it has public suicide booths, 100 years before Futurama came out. I always wondered if Matt Graining read that story, or if it was just a coincidence.
Something cursed mostly makes me think of the numerous unfortunate radioactive incidents that have occurred through history. Sometimes being so radioactive they glow, causes everyone in close contact to get sick with acute radiation poisoning, infecting other objects with radioactivity, giving those somewhat close to it a shorter life. Special people then need to decontaminate the area, tear town buildings, seal away the tainted radioactive stuff from ordinary life.
Radioactive things really are cursed things in real life for an ordinary human being.
The Magnus Archives is one of the only pieces of fiction that actually portrays how terrible cursed artifacts would be in the real world, slight spoilers but a big thesis of the show is that if cursed artifacts were real 99.9 percent of encounters would end in complete and utter destruction.
El Dorado from uncharted is also an equally good example. In fact i would say that they executed El Dorado perfectly, especially with this one line "Its the Spaniards Sully, *They Never Left!*
Just when I think “Damn there surely can’t be any more tropes for Red to talk about” and then she hits me with it again!
There's an entire wkipedia-sized website dedicated to tropes. She'll have material for a while.
This playlist HAS TO GROW!! One of my favourites.
@@alexross1816: tv tropes is a never ending wormhole of material haha. Can go on forever in it
I’m still waiting for the multi-faction war trope talk
She hasn't scratched the surface
I love your take on the "if I had the cursed artifact I wouldn't fall for it, I'm built different". I think I'm on team 'make it tempting for the audience to prove a point' because I love the message it sends. We're all human and are susceptible to manipulation, and it feels like a leftover bit of hubris from Greek mythology. It just feels like part of the human condition
I feel like it needs to be a two-parter: have someone sloppily cause their own downfall to tempt the audience into imagining what they could do with the artifact, then introduce a proper audience surrogate to approach it the same way we would -- and have them crash _so much harder._
Seriously, anyone who says i cant be tricked by XY, is the most easy to all into because they ar careless.
I ,ean that about scamd and cults, but its a similar theme .
One of my favorite cursed artifact stories, that nobody talks about, is The Care Bears movie. The main issue of the plot is a cursed book, that offers the young man power. That movie is way darker than people realize.
That movie is dark AF! The audience is little kids! WTF
OMG you’re so right! Most CB villains just wanted to erase emotions or whatever. That book drive people flat-out insane!!
my favorite part of the monkeys paw subreddit is using it not to outsmart it but as a writing prompt. basically putting yourself into the asshole that's able to grant wishes.
the original short story is haunting and it's fun to see how a question like "i wish for there to be an end to world hunger" could play out.
That one's simple. Destroy the world. No world, no world hunger.
I'd probably cause extinction of all life, because then no one would be hungry.
@@dysenutke3714 the monkeys paw curls. nothing has changed. Images of poverty and hunger are still being blasted live by any news station pretending to care. Your fridge looks no fuller than seconds before. Perhaps the change is gradual, machinations of systems shifting in subtle ways that takes a while to express itself. Maybe people are endowed with the gift of not needing food anymore, though you feel just as hungry as you did before. Maybe the paw is just fake bullshit. Your day goes about as normally as the last, it was rather forgettable had you not wished upon a paw. The next day you check up on world events, every news headline is screaming doom. An asteroid a quarter the side of the moon is going to impact earth in a year. This asteroid has been of particular concern for years since it was discovered. It passed "near" earth once but it's trajectory still had a lot of uncertainty. Today they have the results for the likelihood of an earth impact. There's a one in a million chance it misses, even the most optimistic projections spells extinction for the human race. The worst being the extinction of all known life on earth. You look back at the paw, the only digit still raised is it's middle finger. You are certain it wasn't like that yesterday.
Me: oh wow, this shop has everything my heart desires!
Cursed Artifacts shopkeeper: yes, I will warn you... every item comes with a price.
Me: yes, I Know how shops work
Cursed Artifacts shopkeeper: The price may be more than you expect to pay.
Me: Yes, I know how US taxes work, too.
Cursed Artifacts shopkeeper, increasingly exasperated: I'm trying to tell you that I'm evil and offering these wares with no regard for the harm they will do!
Me, also increasingly exasperated: I know what capitalism is too goddammit
This exchange feels like it walked out of a Terry Pratchett novel, and I love it!
love that post
Such a classic
Applause
So, due to high-pressure ads, credit card debt and planned obsolescence, all products are cursed items, without magic?
Who hopes Red talks about the “Toxic Ideals” Trope, the “Tinker Character” Trope, the “Moral High Ground” Trope, the “Characters Who Don’t Go To Therapy” Trope, and the “Characters Who Do Go To Therapy” Trope
Me
Ohhh, I love the last one. My favorite fanfics are the ones where the characters get some semblance of therapy and believable closure.
@@fabulousslob3748 or how fictional characters handle therapy sessions, like Tony Soprano and Michael De Santa in GTA V
One thing I like about Stormlight Archive is that the main character basically invents therapy
“There’s no better therapy than combat therapy.”
Personally I’d go for an exploration of that and psyche/ therapy in media
"The only way to win is not to play" - that's the best advice of course, but I'm one of those who've fallen prey to trying to figure out how to outsmart the artifact. There's probably a flaw in my strategy but like all the other poor fools I imagine it working. It involves sacrificing one wish by saying "my first wish is that none of my wishes will be granted in a regrettable way."
Idea how that backfires: The wish removes your ability to feel regret entirely.
This may not seem so bad, but you will never be able to reflect on your actions or be capable of self-motivated growth and change. Because everything you do, good or bad, will be done with absolutely no regrets or guilt. Even if the world crumbles about around you because of what you have done or your other wishes, you will be incapable of taking responsibility or admitting things have gone wrong or it wasn't what you were intending.
Alternatively, the cursed artifact just refuses to grant you any more wishes. As if it will always grant wishes in the worst way possible in a way the user will regret then by the phrasing of the wish "will be granted" it may just opt to not grant them. Basically forcing you not to play so to say. On the one hand, you did beat it as it can't screw you over, but on the other hand you didn't get any of the wishes you actually wanted to make. But on the other other hand that may be for the best.
That's my ideas for how that wish could backfire on you.
@@peterstorm8089 And both sound likely enough. I'd be lucky if it was the second scenario and not the first.
@@dontaylor7315 alternatively, the artifact can just change your moral compass, making you evil or selfish or greedy or whatever, and now the thing can just grant your wishes without changing them in any way, because while you're wishing something your new self wouldn't regret now, your old self DEFINITELY would. So in a way, the relic is still screwing you over. (also you can't feel regret over the first wish if the change is instant)
Really the question is, by whose standards is it not regrettable? Because the wish giver could easily say "I don't regret it"
@@callmemad4267 Yikes!
I love how *Fairly odd parents* dealt with the genie. To get rid of him Cosmo and Wanda had to bring in the universes best lawyer so the genie wouldn't twist Timmies last wish.
As a Science major I can testify that whenever I encountered ancient evil knowledge I would always poke it with a stick.
Based and curiosity-pilled
As a Psych PhD that studies narcissism, I like to do experimental studies where I put them in low status and/or embarrassing positions and watch them lose their shit. Fun in experiment, in the real world this is how you get Trumps.
I'd heard a theory about the Ring of the Nibelung that I kinda feel is probably true: Taking the ring causes you to be cursed, but just giving the ring away doesn't remove the curse from you. This could explain why, after passing the ring off, Loki's luck seems to desert him: He may have gotten rid of the ring, but the curse still persisted. Odds are, the only way to be free of the curse would be to return it to the original owner.
12:44
"A lot of money from a highly specific source"
Ways that could go wrong:
You forget to ensure the source survives
The money is stolen from the source and placed in your bank account
The source considers it a loan or a favor that you have to pay back
"I wish to win the next Publisher's Clearing House $10,000 a week for life prize."
"I wish that tomorrow when I walk into the local casino, the first machine I pull the lever on results in the 100 million dollar jackpot, that the casino owners can't find any fault in or actually find a way around giving me the money, making me able to leave the casino with 100 million dollar in my bank account with no negative reprecussions"
(And then you can add more clauses that protect you from theft, assault and the like to keep your money)
@@tnecniw and you promptly get hit by a bus when you step out the door (and live in America and must pay your own medical bills)
@@ginganinjav5220 That is what I specified with the different clauses you can add onto it.
Like that you arrive home safely and are free to spend your money as you wish, with no sudden heavy costs appearing or pressuring from any state or company to pay a huge sum Etc etc.
Cursed Artifacts is just another reason why Tropes are not necessarily good or bad per se, but that they are recognizable enough to stir a conversation about said trope. Whether from the context of the story, 4th, wall or Metaphysical concepts. This video is very well done, thank you for the inspiration.
I would also have mentioned time machines. Sure, they're not "cursed" most of the time, but in many stories they work just like the Monkey Paw. A sort of wish granting machine that usually leads to a lot of trouble.
Remenber the fry paradox?
Great point!
I'm remembering a book I read (but not the title unfortunately) where a man is obsessed with building a time machine in order to prevent a car accident he caused. His wife leaves him, they never have kids, ect, but then he finally does it. He prevents the accident, and the death of a 10 year old boy. Fast forward and he has everything he wanted; his wife, daughters, a nice house. But the 10 year old boy grew up to be the face of a dictatorship and he'd accidentally un-prevented the end of the world
@@slithra227 that sounds hilarious but depending on how time travel works for him he could probably go back in time, grab the kid, go further back in time, and abandon the kid in a time/place he couldn't possibly effect anything from.
@@Draiocht012 the machine only works once from what I remember, since after he used it it ceased to exist in his universe, and it's a stationary machine
Ah, I always love when objects become the danger to society whenever it’s a possessed item, or simply something that’ll cause immense consequences. No but seriously, cursed artifacts are kinda cool to think about
🚨🚨🚨 AAAAAAHHHHH!!! 🚨🚨🚨 school is sooooo boring i am in 8th grate and its so boring i am having sucess on youtube so i think i will drop out of school. i dont have friends so i need your opinon fla
I’ve seen comments about this before and let me tell you that it will be easier to do well in school than to try and stay successful on CZcams or any other platform.
@@henrypaleveda7760 it’s a spam bot ignore it
I 100% blame Matt Mercer and Craven Edge for my absolute adoration of cursed artifacts.
I really want a coffee mug with the image from 6:59 - "Hey kid, ya like mortal peril?" with the words "Cursed Artifact" above it. :)
SCP-738 is a great example of how you can't win against a cursed wish granter. Their final tests was one of their lawyers attempt to draft a legal contract for a wish, resulting in a nine hundred page contract with the deal maker. The deal failed as the lawyer never finished as he pass out from the 41 hour long session.
You always need a team.
In the comic book "Knights of the Dinner Table" a player in a D&D-style campaign gets a wish. He had one prepared and paid a lawyer (who was also a gamer) to go over it to keep the GM from messing with it. And just to be safe, he had a rider to the wish that if it were ever canceled, he'd get a million GP.
Isn't the rider technically a second wish?
Standard wish format is that use of the word "and" in the wish statement starts a second wish, as if you're making a new request.
Also how exactly does this wish work to have something happen should the wish be cancelled?
Is the wish granter forced into giving this wish and is lawful and obligated to see it through to the letter? Most entities may just refuse to grant the wish if they don't like it.
@@andrewgreeb916
In this particular example, the player (Brian) wished to become a god
The game master accepted the wish as written on condition that he be able to consult with other game masters to attempt to break it
This team of game masters were so caught up trying to avoid allowing him to become a god that they failed to notice this backup plan
It's a major part of Brian's character that he makes huge elaborate plans and basically gets away with it because the game master doesn't have the time or resources to cover every eventuality
Anyway, the wish was cancelled because he was immediately killed by a god he had just recently made an enemy of (the god was forbidden from interfering with mortals, but since Brian had become a god, she was able to just up and kill him because he was no longer mortal)
As for the use of the word "and" implying a second wish, the actual wording of the wish is never disclosed, just that Brian had spent a not inconsequential amount of time and money getting the wish drafted
The joke is "This is Brian, this is what he does"
There's another scene where, after defeating some monsters, the party goes through the loot. Brian notices and immediately calls dibs on an innocuous thimble, because he deduced that it was an artifact by memorizing the random loot drop tables.
@@andrewgreeb916 The easy work-around to that is just to write out the whole deal as what amounts to a contract, and wish for what is written in that contract to become reality.
The Hive from Destiny and their Worm parasites are my favourite version of this, especially with the new expansion.
Endless blood tithes in exchange for greater power and an ever increasing hunger for bloodlust through interstellar genocide. The new expansion leads into the backstory of this event of parasitism beautifully.
Just took years to get to this point :'(
I can’t believe they gave Link Majoras’ Mask in BOTW. Knowing what that thing is capable of, seeing Link wearing it was eerie even if it does pacify monsters.
Maybe they become passive because they can sense a still lingering malevolence in the mask and don't want to risk angering it...
“A sentient cursed artifact can sometimes also just be chill”
Nightblood?
Nightblood.
"I was just so hungry..."
"I can relate to that"
What IP is this?
Sanderson, yeah?
This reminds me of Horror’s Hand from “Billy and Mandy”. When anyone gets near it to claim it, the hand makes your worst fear come to life that you have to conquer yourself in order to claim it. All but 3 people fail, and one of them says that he lives his worst nightmare everyday and therefore the hand can’t affect him.
I liked the cursed skull episode, as the skull granted twisted wishes, exactly like a monkey's paw. So when Mandy got it she immediately started an auction, and when Grim tried explaining the curse, she just nodded and said 'Yeah, why do you think I'm selling it?'
I fricking love that show
@@jackbaxter2223 And when Jr got it, he overthought everything and just whished he knew what to wish for.
I had forgotten that episode, thanks for bringing back memories.
@@jackbaxter2223 Pudden had the worse of it when you remember that he basically has an immortal rabbit that will forever torment him while being his best friend even after he dies.
Very happy that Red mentioned Elric, the oft forgotten saga and character that inspired the Witcher saga and its protagonist Geralt respectively. To elaborate a bit on the basic information she gave, Elric used to be a kind-hearted and just emperor, until Stormbringer took hold of his mind and soul and made him kill his beloved and most of his capital city's inhabitants, and so he's been wandering about carrying more guilt and self-loathing with him than working bones and muscles ever since. It's a unique kind of vibe, honestly
The Stormbringer thing sounds awesome, I should read the book series. It seems like an item that gives the whole elder relief from their disability while simultaneously draining their soul and the energy of everyone around them could be symbolism for disability itself and how being unable to do things others could easily do is a drain on your physical, mental, and emotional resources
I've read the series, and since it was made in the 60s and 70s mainly, I'm pretty sure it was about drugs in the way that Elric hates it and hates himself for using it, but is forced to use it to sustain himself and is powerless against it as it destroys everything in his life.
“rip to the last [n] guys but I’m different” - n-1
the fact that you could use a number sequence to explain the point here is both brilliant and terrifying
“Blacksmith, make a sword for me, such as none did ever see,
For ancient symbols of majesty have power in troubled times.
Blacksmith, make me a magic sword, one that will make me the valley’s lord
Whom folk will hail with one accord to save them from their crimes."
Seeing he would not be deterred, the blacksmith took him at his word
And pondered long on what he’d heard about this would-be lord.
He pumped the fire and he made his start, melted iron in the fire’s heart,
But he named the steel with an older art the Arizona Sword.
He chanted words to the blazing mix, of ancient Red Men’s and White Men’s tricks
To draw a spirit, and purpose fix in what the blade would feel:
The iron laws from Nature’s hand, the ruthless will of the desert land,
The freedom no one can command - and cast that thought in steel.
And when the blacksmith’s work was done, the new sword gleamed like the setting sun.
All down the blade did the old runes run, a warning plain to see.
The steel was grained like the finest wood. A full yard long and more it stood.
The runes read: “I serve but the good of life and liberty.”
Near the hilt, set in copper wire, a phoenix rose up from the pyre.
A copper star within the fire rayed out copper cords.
The grip was like a saguaro made that clasped a moon in quartz and jade.
In truth, like to no other blade was the Arizona Sword.
“Blacksmith, well have ye served my cause. This shall aid me to make the laws.
Hmmm, the guards are shaped like cougar’s paws; in truth, like none I’ve seen.
The price is steep, but I shall not carp. She’ll sing more praise than a minstrel’s harp.
Ye gods, that blade is razor-sharp! ...For a symbol, very keen.”
“And cheap she'll be if I strike ye dead!” The blacksmith promptly turned and fled.
The lordling laughed and shrugged instead, and went out to meet his horde.
He cried out: “This is the day foretold. Just one hand now this land shall hold,
For in this sign will I rule. Behold, the Arizona Sword.”
“No more argument shall we find, but all hereafter shall be inclined
To just one purpose and just one mind. Thus do I mean to do.
Now go ye forth, and take the land.” The sword heard well his first command.
She lunged and twisted in his hand, and fell, and ran him through.
They say the sword vanished clean away, for none has heard of it since that day,
But seek it wisely, and find ye may. Take care, who would be lord.
Beware, ye tyrant! Beware, ye fool! For who is the master and who the tool?
Ye may well serve, but ye shall not rule the Arizona Sword
The Arizona Sword - Leslie Fish
I've never heard of this before, but i absolutely LOVE it!!!!!!!! Thank you!!!!
@@AskMia411 Pleasure! I try to find something for each OSP Vid =)
One of the rare artifacts with a Good-aligned curse.
@@lordcirth I'd call it a blessing, for the only ones who can wield it is those who has no desire to rule.
Oh my god that’s so cool. SM Stirling, take notes!
Wishes are kind of their own can of worms and should definitely get their own tropes video.
As far as I can tell there are 3 major ways to make a wish cause conflict.
1. There is something wrong with the actual desire/wish itself. This one is the true morality tale about the value of a specific desire. And a common format for these is the three wishes rule: 1 for the initial wish, 1 to try to fix the wish, and 1 to be a big reset button. (The other two are popular ways for the author to cheat and pretend to be this)
2. Screwed up the interpretation, this shifts the focus to the language and becomes more about how you phrase your wish.
3. Introduce 3rd element costs that make the wish/desire not worth it in balance. (A popular way to cheat a phrasing challenge/ construction)
When you mentioned how the cursed object could technically be a person where bad things happen around them, I thought of "Lucky Abrams" from Blood Blockade Battlefront. He's an otherwise normal guy who was cursed by blood breeds (more or less vampire entities) to have extreme misfortune follow him wherever he goes.
Now, this doesn't mean he experiences misfortune; he is "Lucky" after all. The curse brings hell and chaos to everything AROUND him. Wherever he goes, bad things happen: traffic accidents that kill dozens, implausible meteors crashing into a train full of people, and other otherwise extremely uncommon disasters occurring that lead to death and destruction. However, Abrams himself is exempt from harm, and these disasters barely miss him, but cause hell for everyone else nearby.
The funny part is that the people who know Abrams KNOW about this curse and most would avoid being around him if they had a choice, but Abrams doesn't even seem to realize why everyone avoids him or why crazy things happen all the time.
Definitely my favorite take on this trope.
I wonder if the old story "The Button" could fall into this trope. It's been told a few different ways, but the core of it is a desperate couple is offered a box with a button on it and told if they push the button they will get a sum of money that will solve their immediate problems, but in doing so someone they do not know will die. They are given 24 hours to decide if they will push it or not. In most tellings they eventually do push the button, which is then collected and they are provided with their money. They are usually also told that the button will then be sent out again to someone else that they do not know, implying they will be killed if the next subjects press the button. I'm not sure if the button itself would be a cursed object, or just a prop for a malevolent force setting them up.
That sounds more like a malevolent dick making people do terrible decisions and then killing them off the next time a person does the wrong decision they are pushing them to do.
There's a movie with that plot. It's called The Box and has Cameron Diaz in it.
“Did you REALLY know your wife though?”
@@Hoshimaru57 that really pissed me off because then it just makes the statement full on lies. I think having met someone should be enough to count it as knowing them. Otherwise this slippery slope means that anyone even yourself could die as "you don't truly know yourself" or whatever nonsense. And there's still billions of people you haven't met leaving a lot of room for a death
@@ilyte1 you seem pretty cheesed
You know what’s an interesting cursed ‘artefact’ that absolutely suffers from the ‘the audience just wants to use it’ problem?
Vampirism. It’s not an artefact, sure, but if we’re counting the symbiote as an artefact Vampirism qualifies - the artefact is just your blood.
Being a Vampire is supposed to suck. It’s supposed, turning you into an obligate killer and making you lose touch with your humanity and all that.
The problem is that most people have a definite list of plentiful ‘acceptable victims’ and you’ve been given super powers in order to make that happen. So if the audience happens to be a bunch of asocial night owls - y’know, like the kind of people that really enjoy Vampire stuff - the downsides are either non-existent, so distant from the point of humanity at being turned into a vampire that you can’t really comprehend it, or kind of esoteric and thus not really tangible. Even worse is that if you’re in those Vampire stories that have entire groups of vampires then you’ve accidentally created a potential found family dynamic, meaning that becoming a vampire is just a straight upgrade.
Hmm, that's an interesting thought, but I wouldn't agree that vampirism is much of an artifact. In this discussion, artifacts are unique things that can only be possessed by one person at a time, and since a vampire doesn't lose their vampirism when they make new vampires, I don't think it'd fully qualify.
@@spenle it's a fancy zombie plague
@@spenle The One Ring's curse remains on people who have held it for example, so I think it's at least spiritually adjacent
Also, it may not be an artifact, but it _is_ a curse.
Here is a fun thought for a story.
MC finds a sapient cursed artifact with a reputation for being evil because it causes all its owners to suffer horrible deaths, the story goes on to display the artifact is genuinely a good entity (maybe it isn't even particularly powerful but has one or several versatile or otherwise convenient abilities similar to DnD cantrips) and the reputation is purely because all its past owners were secretly evil in some manner but good at hiding their crimes from the public and it taking offence to their actions and arranging them to have "accidents" because it is bound to a given owner until their death.
12:00
lol, I love your background cartoons! Whoever writes those has an incredible sense of humor
"Andvari's ring, one of the oldest cursed artifact, wasn't cursed initially. It ws cursed because-you guessed it-Loki stole it."
Just another day in Norse Mythology, really.
Oh you steal MY Ring?! WELL NOW IT’S CURSED!!!
Loki: (Mind racing at a mile a minute thinking of the possibilities) So it’s cursed now you say,
I feel like a lot of myths from Norse mythology can be summed up with the phrase "oh goddammit, Loki"
yeah red mentions this in the video when she brings it up
This video was my first intro to this myth, and now I'm seeing The One Ring in a whole new light.
@@AskMia411 Tolkien always claimed his ring was not inspired by that ring though.
One aspect about cursed artifacts or items that i really like hearing is the reason WHY it's cursed.
I mean, if you think about how many cursed items there are in dungeons and dragons for example: Who created these items and why?
The hand of Vecna is obviously the will of Vecna, but what about the more common cursed items with effects like "makes the owner slowly go insane" or "the item can't be unequipped"?
It really peaks my curiosity: "What motivated someone so much that they decided to make this curse? Did they intend it for someone specific?"
It's a shame there are so many instances where you find cursed things in games, but the games rarely explain *why* the things are cursed.
Big same! I love detailed worldbuilding!
One thing I did in a dnd game I run, the players defeated a plot arc baddie and I wanted to throw some magic items their way, but the baddie wouldn't have had a hoard or an armory. No worries, I like "magic as background radiation" type settings, I'll just have the magic released by the conclusion of the arc enchant some of the party's items!
Then I rolled up random loot for inspiration. One was a Rapier of Vengeance- a cursed item that forces the wielder to use it to attack any creature that harms them. The baddie had been on a quest for revenge against the party. The bard wielded a rapier and had been goaded into melee with the baddie. It was too perfect.
So yeah, magic has vibes, sometimes the vibes are bad and consequences can be fun XD
@@meganr9102 A lot of "historical" cursed objects simply have the creator's personality imprinted into them; like how an angry smith might make an equally angry sword, especially if the anger was directed at a particular kind of person, such as a family or type of monster.
@@meganr9102 Did the rapier require you to say "Hello. My name is [name]. You [reason for wanting revenge]. Prepare to die!" :P
Also, it's not uncommon for cursed items to be cursed not out of any deliberate intent, but because someone goofed when they were magicking the weapon.
Dingo Doodles's animated campaign character Sips is actually a vendor of cursed knickknacks. A wild magic sorcerer, Sips accidentally curses some of the things he touches. And then sells those things.
There's one 'cursed' item (in the sense that it comes with a lot of negative attention to its wearer) in Minecraft Story Mode Season 2. It's a gauntlet that is impossible to take off. It's given an actual explanation in that it's meant as the marker of the chosen 'champion' of the god who made it. Though, in this context, champion should be substituted for 'plaything' as the god in question is really more interested throwing you at more and more dangerous challenges and gets increasingly annoyed if you don't cleave to things he wants you to do.
Anyway, just an example I thought I'd share.
The fact the audience is trying to figure out how they could outsmart the artifact shows is kinda a testament to the awe inspiring power and temptation it brings and how it can affect anyone, even people who know it’s not real.
One of my favorite sub-tropes is the "I deliberately cursed this item so nobody can f*cking steal it" in where a character binds an item to themselves to be able to summon it at will or just not have to worry about pickpockets and thieves.
Sortof like Mjolnir, but with the added bonus that you can add any other twist besides "it's too heavy"
A less magic-y option would also be modern ID locks, like the one found on Jetstream Sam's sword that was deactivated specifically for Raiden to use against Armstrong, symbolizing Sam's turn of faith and trust.
Tyrfing was a particularly prominent sword in Norse myths that came with its own curse. Any wound it made wouldn't stop bleeding until they died, but it couldn't be put away unless it was soaked in blood. If Tyrfing came out, someone had to die.
doesn't necessarily have to be a human then >:)
@@metaparalysis3441 once again, the audience tries to "play" the curse
I think I can subvert that curse better. Soak it in blood, and get the blood from a cut made by another weapon. Also, technically, modern medicine could manage an ever-bleeding wound, although you might have to spend the rest of your life hooked up to machines.
@@lucasriddle3431I think contact with the cursed metal is what stops healing,
Also at that point, you'd only wish you were dead.
@@lucasriddle3431 why not just ask for the blood of some beast to coat the weapon with?
or did I miss some part about the fact a human must die before it is sheathed?
I now want a magical orb that just hates the owner. It doesn’t do anything else, it can’t really interact with the world beyond what a regular orb can, it can’t even talk or anything, it is just an orb, and it hates you.
If u had it, how would you know it hated you? And also, I think that cursed artifact would be cursed ITSELF, as in it suffers while the owner is fine. The owner is the curse. Poor orb
@@levydeat Well, it would probably be quite obvious to its owner, well more likely whoever had it in their possession, and if someone were to use some form of magic to detect its thoughts, they would find that it was true. No other thoughts, nothing even resembling the slightest hint of consciousness, just an intense hatred
@@lazydroidproductions1087 I don’t know why I want to have this orb so much
@@lazydroidproductions1087 Maybe it behaves like a bad tempered cat that tries to get away from you in close proximity, and "looks" at you with the intensity of the sun on a hot summer day.
@@NobodyC13 exactly, but it can’t get away because it’s an orb
6:08
Considering the opera:
"Liebesverzicht" translates to "relinquishment/renouncement of love" and basicaly means that the ring only gives you it's whole power when you give up on love and fully give into greed or lust for power
The whole "but I'm different!" Thing can also happen when an audience looks at stories in terms of lore rather than engaging with the deeper themes of the story - this happens a lot with LotR, where the efficiency by which the ring is destroyed matters far less than the method. The inconsequential country boy and his gardener traveling into hell snubbing and destroying the representation of power and industrial society is the whole point of the series. Sure, maybe Legolas could have drop-kicked it into the volcano fron 5000 miles away with his elf eyes but that's a very boring way of looking at media, imo.
Interesting. The point you made about audiences tending to consider how "they'd" handle a cursed artifact made me think about the "AI in a box" experiments and such. A lot of people said they couldn't possibly be convinced to let the AI out, and yet the results speak for themselves in the percentages...
AI: I need you to plug in the network cable. *displays puppy eyes ASCII art*
Humans: Say no more!
@@Dessirris right? I also think that the way it's set up plays into humanity's natural empathy. Anything sentient - even animals - sparks empathy and outrage when mistreated. So ....you give AI a personality, and the ability to chat with you, and then it tells you "you cant really be ok with imprisoning me here forever, right? If you were in this box...." annnnnnd we cave. Is that a bad thing? Dunno, but...😅
.......hmmm.
That's the sort of thing an AI in a box might say....
I'd let it out. Things either go Ian banks Culture or skynet and I'm fine with either.
The problem is that humans have this weird habit of pack-bonding with anything. People get intimately attached with inanimate objects, a machine that can talk is basically an empathy problem waiting to happen.
You mentioned the dark side once in passing, but I love how, despite not being an artifact or object, the dark side of the Force easily fits into many of the explanations and descriptions you gave for cursed artifacts. Compels a character to use it, actively corrupts them toward evil, grants them evil powers, can be in the villain’s hands as well as the hero’s, and most of the story’s implications attributed too.
For a genuine cursed artifact, another lesser-known one is the sword Tyrfing, from the Tyrfing Cycle. It was forged by dwarves under threat of death by King Svafrlami to cut through anything, never miss a stroke and never rust. In retribution, the dwarves also cursed it three times over, giving it three flavors of cursed artifact juju. First, it’ll bring about three great tragedies. Second, as if to ensure the first will happen, it must kill someone every time it’s drawn from its sheath. This second curse actually makes it more deadly in battle, but at a risk of friendly fire or suicide, potentially causing one of its great tragedies. Finally, separate from the prior curses, it will also cause the death of Svafrlami, which it does, when a berserker named Arngrim kills him and takes the sword.
Tyrfing was inherited by one of Arngrim’s twelve sons, Angantyr, eventually being buried with all of them. The big main character of the cycle is Angantyr’s daughter Hervor, a badass viking berserker who heard about her father’s super-sword and wanted it. After claiming it from a legion of magical ghosts through sheer acrobatic skill and poetic insults, she set out and mastered it. Of all of Tyrfing’s wielders, she was the only one whose life was never ruined by it, and not because she was pure of heart or had heroic gumption, but simply because she played the audience game, theorized how she would handle the cursed artifact better than her predecessors, then put her sword arm where her mouth was and proved herself right. Through martial skill, tactical awareness, practical application, fast thinking and insane reflexes, she mastered the sword like none before her or since.
She’d only draw it when she knew she could kill her enemy with it, augmented by both its enchantment of unerring strokes and its curse of bloodlust. One time, someone picked it up without her permission and tried to inspect it, and she swiftly ran to him and made him kill himself with it before he could kill some innocent bystander instead. Her son was its next wielder, and he didn’t do so well with it, by all accounts bringing about most of its great tragedies, but some say this actually caused its curse to lift.
Anyway, the story of Tyrfing and Hervor is so lesser-known that I’ll take any excuse to let people know about it.
Edit: Awesome! You gave Tyrfing a shoutout in the OSPod about this episode! :D
She sounds super badass! Thanks for letting me know of her. I knew about Tryfing, but not that one of its wielders actually got a happy end just by being that awesome! Makes me wonder what she would be like as a Servant in FGO.
@@OmniGman Me too! Like I said, she appears nowhere in pop culture, but I feel like she’d be most likely to appear in a Fate property. Probably as either a Saber or Berserker.
Edit: Knowing how a hero’s legend can elevate their powers above what they could do in life in Fate, I wonder if Hervor could like, summon the ghosts of her father and uncles into battle alongside her martial skills. At the very least, her overcoming them shows she has insane magical defenses. At most, it shows a magical ability to sway spirits.
5:00
technicaly the one ring could be classified as a phylactary since saurons souls is bound to the ring so that aslong as the ring exsists so does he making sauron esentially a lytch wich is why he died as soon as the ring was destroyed.
Just like Voldemort and his phylactories. Leave it to Tom Riddle to try and out do all his lich peers by having seven. Guess he didn’t know that evil things react negatively to holy numbers.
IIrc he didnt die so much as lose cohesion and fade into a evil spirit, unable to take form again
In relation to Lord of the Rings; having giant eagles swoop into enemy territory would raise so many alarms that any aerial threat would intercept the giant eagle and thus delivering the ring right into the enemies hand.
I want a cursed artifact storyline where it slowly kills its owners, the curse is never explained for eons until society finally discovers radiation
Star Trek had an episode sort of like that, but not so long in scale (the episode where Data loses his memory after trying to retrieve a radioactive probe that crashed on an undeveloped low-tech planet)
There's a short story that opens with "There are no millionaires on Xanax" which tells of how a private citizen, wanting to be a millionaire prepared his money pit and hoarded coins until the fateful day he dropped the final bag of coins into the space reserved for it - at which point the plutonium coins went critical...
Self-Limiting by Robert L Forward
In tracking it down, I've found speculation that it may have been inspired by Larry Niven's earlier essay "Yet Another Modest Proposal: The Roentgen Standard" suggesting solving the two problems of nuclear waste and the hoarding of wealth by using the former as currency.
Not a geologist, but could you have naturally occurring gold that is radioactive? Or gold and uranium mixed in a ring? Or a natural gem or crystal that is radioactive?
i dont remember it well, but I think that in the animated series of Justice League, Lex got cancer due to having a piece of kryptonite on his pockets 24/7 in the case of a meeting with Superman, and after an analysis, an ancient "cursed" chinese dragon statue made of a beautiful green material that kills its owner, is revealed to be a giant piece of kryptonite, and its owners died of the radiation
@@xavier5987 Something similar happened in the comics too - Lex got cancer due to the Kryptonite ring he wore, and his business empire was inherited by his Australian bastard son who had a full head of hair and was generally reckoned to be a good bloke and dated Supergirl (until he turned out to be a clone with Luthor's brain transplanted into the new body).
8:48 As someone who's main strength is an unfettered curiosity, aka "mad scientist type", using a cursed artifact just to see what it would do sounds like something I would do
Do people that say have the eagles fly the whole way forget the Nazgul have flying beats and the eye can see the ring the closer it gets?
No. There are a lot more eagles than Nazgul, and the Nazgul are away from Mordor most of the time anyway. But it's a silly argument anyway, akin to saying "if we had driven a different route, we would not have had this accident".
Castellan Crowe: Treat them as useless trinkets. That's literally all.
Now im just imaging him using it for everything, just beating the shit outta of it cause he can. Need a crowbar? use the useless screaming sword. Need to cut down a tree? Take your anger on a metal wall? Its fine it won't break.
@@BrotherVoidBomber now I imagine him using the demon blade as a steak knife or toilet plunger…
Ah, the classic Dante from Devil May Cry method.
@@johnnychopsocky to be fair, that's also because said cursed weapons also tended to be certain demons he dunked on already, of course he's gonna dunk on em more
Strength: User, Armour Penetration: 0, Damage: 1
My favorite is definitely the "Gonne" in Pratchett's Men at Arms.
The idea of the round world leaking into the Discworld is prevalent throughout the novels, but our world's obsession and fixation on guns as an actual sentient being is so awesome.
Also the fact that it's unique in a world that runs on Narrative Causality gives it a lot more corrupting potential. It would have lost a lot of its mind controlly stuff if someone had managed to make a second one, but then you'd have multiple gonnes...
I also love that we don't really know if the Gonne really corrupts its wielder or its relative power justs makes people mad with it.
Chainsawman has a main villain who’s literally the physical manefestacion of peoples fears of gun violence
You mean the US rather then the world. Not everyone is as gun-crazy as that place.
@@rogerogue7226 nah the world is pretty gun crazy. Not everywhere is as bad as the US (And the US isn't even the worst of them) but people, as a whole, are unfortunately obsessed with guns and power.
I'm very happy that you know Elric so well.
People usually think he's a witcher ...