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Redefining Established Paranomal Beings

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Son of an Ogre:
I was wanting to get some opinions on a matter that's been bothering me. What happens if you take a traditional paranormal entity, one that a lot of people are familiar with, like say ghouls, and redefine them? Like what they are; how they work. Should it be then that the name of said creature should be changed? I don't want to get into too many details, of course, but for a story I'm working on, I've basically redefined what a ghoul is...but have kept to basic ideas about the mythology. I know...that doesn't make any sense probably. I've looked at certain aspects of the origin Persian mythology and have developed ideas from that. A friend of mine said it'd probably be better to just rename my creatures since people have preconceived notions of what a ghoul is and how they operate. That they come from graveyards and eat flesh. Mine don't come from graveyards nor do they eat flesh...

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: Son of an Ogre on October 26, 2009, 03:35:34 PM ---I was wanting to get some opinions on a matter that's been bothering me. What happens if you take a traditional paranormal entity, one that a lot of people are familiar with, like say ghouls, and redefine them? Like what they are; how they work. Should it be then that the name of said creature should be changed? I don't want to get into too many details, of course, but for a story I'm working on, I've basically redefined what a ghoul is...but have kept to basic ideas about the mythology. I know...that doesn't make any sense probably. I've looked at certain aspects of the origin Persian mythology and have developed ideas from that. A friend of mine said it'd probably be better to just rename my creatures since people have preconceived notions of what a ghoul is and how they operate. That they come from graveyards and eat flesh. Mine don't come from graveyards nor do they eat flesh...

--- End quote ---

I wouldn't see any need to rename them, so long as you are good enough to make things work. I mean, an awful lot of the current cultural notions of how vampires work was defined by Bram Stoker and a goodly subset defined by Anne Rice, so you can redefine them as well as anyone else.

Starbeam:
I wouldn't really say that most people have as much of a preconceived notion of ghouls as they do for werewolves and vampires.  Ghouls aren't used very often.  And like neuro said, there's really no need to rename them.  SMeyer didn't rename her vampires as something else, though about the only thing they have in common with mythological vampires is the need to drink blood.

comprex:

There's a joke here somewhere about reboots and 'Troll sat alone on his seat of stone' that is just out of my reach at the moment.

polarglen:
Perhaps they are mutated ghouls.

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