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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: belial.1980 on March 14, 2009, 03:50:14 AM
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Quick and dirty: I'm writing a story where a character lives in various incarnations throughout history. He's been reincarnated 6-7 times between the time of Christ and modern times. Each incarnation is a anti-hero/misunderstood hero that history and folklore have penned as a villain. I could really use some suggestions for building an ecclectic gathering of legendary villains from different time periods and places that he's been in past lives. The only two I've got so far:
Simon Magus (Quick synopsis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Magus)
Koschei the Deathless (Quick synopsis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koschei)
If somebody can offer suggestions something along these lines I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
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Is there a particular real villain that his will be facing off with? or other common elements to keep throughout the lifetimes?
*edit*
Off hand i can think of:
Jack the Ripper
Grigori Rasputin
Genghis Khan
Lü Bu
Brutus
Eurymachus
Lee Harvey Oswald
Judas
Asmodeus (from the stories of Solomon, make him a foreign devil instead of an literal devil, whose people Solomon enslaved to build his temple, as he was falling from God)
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Richard III
Gilles de Rais
Benedict Arnold
King John
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Oh, and if your protagonist can change his gender, there's:
Erzebet Bathory
Lucrezia Borgia
Lizzie Borden
None of whom may have committed the crimes history attributes to them.
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Heh...if you could work J. Edgar Hoover in there, that would be a feat.
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Nixon!!
and if you can change genders: Yoko Ono!!
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The Yoko Oni's of ancient Japanese myth could come to life...oh, wait. It's been done....
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Quick and dirty: I'm writing a story where a character lives in various incarnations throughout history. He's been reincarnated 6-7 times between the time of Christ and modern times. Each incarnation is a anti-hero/misunderstood hero that history and folklore have penned as a villain. I could really use some suggestions for building an ecclectic gathering of legendary villains from different time periods and places that he's been in past lives. The only two I've got so far:
Simon Magus (Quick synopsis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Magus)
Koschei the Deathless (Quick synopsis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koschei)
If somebody can offer suggestions something along these lines I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
Oliver Cromwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell) Might not be quite what you're looking for, since a lot of people considered him a hero, but the fact that he was exhumed 7 years after his death and his body was decapitated...
Do you have any particular time-periods in which the previous incarnations lived? That might help narrow your search.
I've noticed that a lot of stories in this vein tend to jump straight from Rome to England. What would you say to having your character fighting on the Saracen side of Charlemagne's Iberian campaign? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne#Roncesvalles_campaign (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne#Roncesvalles_campaign) Your challenge would be to describe the actions in such a way that it makes your character's nature and participation clear without being too hard for victims of the American educational system like my humble self to understand. Meaning, you won't have to give a chapter-length summation of the precursors to the event and the ramifications thereafter; establishing that the armed group was taken by surprise should be a good start.
Any others?
Good luck!
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Sir Mordred, or his brother Aggravain.
Talleyrand
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Yoshitsune no Minamoto
Gengis Khan
Caligula
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_occultists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_occultists)
I don't know how great this list is. Some of them, like Vergil, I would never put under the legendary magician category. A lot of them are European characters, too, and it looks like you haven't chosen European characters for your other two identities, so I don't know how much good it'll be. But Simon Magus is there, and he's one of your examples. It may help.
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Cool. Thanks for the input!
Right now I've worked out that Simon Magus is the first in the bloodline. I've got a pretty detailed bit of background for him that I think fits pretty nicely into his legend.
The 7th and latest incarnation will be an average 17 year old living in modern times.
That leaves five in between them, spaced out about 300 some odd years. Since the modern incarnation is caucasian, I'd like to not use anybody else who is. I've got two other incarnations that I definitely plan to use:
Koschei the Deathless. In my version, he's a Ket shaman with a suit of armor that looks like its made of fused human bones. (One of Koschei's nicknames was "Old Bones" because legends characterize him with a gaunt or skeletal appearance.) In the legends, Koschei got a bad rap for terrorizing virgins and maidens. In my version, they're actually demons in human form. Another possibility is that a scourge of incorporeal demons possessed young women throughout the countryside, as a means to prey on human males, and the only way he could save these girls' souls was to kill them, thereby exorcising the demons within. Obviously this didn't win him any popularity contests, but he decided it was better to save their souls and mourn their deaths.
The other incarnation I had in mind was Fafnir, the dragon. This Norse legend probably has an oral tradition dating back for many centuries, but since it wasn't published till around 700 AD, I have a little leeway to "fudge" and make the actual occurance take place sometime a few centuries before that.
In breif, Fafnir was a revered dwarf who changed himself into a dragon, collected a massive horde of stolen, cursed gold and was slain by the hero Sigurd.
In my version, the "dragon" is actually Fafnir's demon familiar, and she's not a dragon per se, but something big and awful, and able to control fire, so what else would they call her but a dragon? I'm toying with the idea of making Fafnir a human being of different ethnicity than the Norse folk, who has somehow ended up far, far from home. (Orphaned son of an Arab explorer who predated Ahmad ibn Fadlān by a few hundred years?) His dark skin and shorter stature elicit some xenophobic prejudices. This, coupled with some elaboration on the part of story tellers all work to make him the dwarf of legend.
Sigurd won't slay Fafnir or his familiar, but rather they'll work together to face some common foe. However, Sigurd ends up being a braggart who takes all the credit, and adds the bit about slaying Fafnir to boost his own reputation.
Details are still sparse, as this is very early in the developmental stage, but that's the sort of thing I'm leaning towards.
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There was a decent indy flick called the The Ring Of The Nibelungs about that legend. Benno Fürmann plays Sigfried (another name for Sigurd) while Kristanna Loken plays Brunnhild. It was quite entertaining, much more so than Beowulf
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Julian the Apostate
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Pretty much any traitor whose treachery galvanized/motivated people to fix something (cf. Benedict Arnold). There's even religious theory that holds Judas' act was a holy one because it eventually created the martyr reborn for expiation, etc.
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Cool. Thanks for the input!
Right now I've worked out that Simon Magus is the first in the bloodline. I've got a pretty detailed bit of background for him that I think fits pretty nicely into his legend.
The 7th and latest incarnation will be an average 17 year old living in modern times.
That leaves five in between them, spaced out about 300 some odd years. Since the modern incarnation is caucasian, I'd like to not use anybody else who is. I've got two other incarnations that I definitely plan to use:
Koschei the Deathless. In my version, he's a Ket shaman with a suit of armor that looks like its made of fused human bones. (One of Koschei's nicknames was "Old Bones" because legends characterize him with a gaunt or skeletal appearance.) In the legends, Koschei got a bad rap for terrorizing virgins and maidens. In my version, they're actually demons in human form. Another possibility is that a scourge of incorporeal demons possessed young women throughout the countryside, as a means to prey on human males, and the only way he could save these girls' souls was to kill them, thereby exorcising the demons within. Obviously this didn't win him any popularity contests, but he decided it was better to save their souls and mourn their deaths.
The other incarnation I had in mind was Fafnir, the dragon. This Norse legend probably has an oral tradition dating back for many centuries, but since it wasn't published till around 700 AD, I have a little leeway to "fudge" and make the actual occurance take place sometime a few centuries before that.
In breif, Fafnir was a revered dwarf who changed himself into a dragon, collected a massive horde of stolen, cursed gold and was slain by the hero Sigurd.
In my version, the "dragon" is actually Fafnir's demon familiar, and she's not a dragon per se, but something big and awful, and able to control fire, so what else would they call her but a dragon? I'm toying with the idea of making Fafnir a human being of different ethnicity than the Norse folk, who has somehow ended up far, far from home. (Orphaned son of an Arab explorer who predated Ahmad ibn Fadlān by a few hundred years?) His dark skin and shorter stature elicit some xenophobic prejudices. This, coupled with some elaboration on the part of story tellers all work to make him the dwarf of legend.
Sigurd won't slay Fafnir or his familiar, but rather they'll work together to face some common foe. However, Sigurd ends up being a braggart who takes all the credit, and adds the bit about slaying Fafnir to boost his own reputation.
Details are still sparse, as this is very early in the developmental stage, but that's the sort of thing I'm leaning towards.
Make her a Sirrush.
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Make her a Sirrush.
Well the demon's actually a shape shifter. But I could easily say that Sirrush was one of her chosen forms.