marycatelli: (Galahad)
marycatelli ([personal profile] marycatelli) wrote2013-07-28 11:08 pm

leaving the field

Thrashing around with the outline, and whether our hero, so loyal to his lord, has to go off and do stuff while some evil sorcery is desecrating his lord's body and exploiting his men for its own purposes. . . and pondering how long he would stay, and then remembering:  this guy was on the battlefield where the lord fell.

It's the sort of culture that would expect, "Here lies our lord, cut to pieces, out best man in the dust. If anyone thinks of leaving this battle, he can howl forever," except that our hero has the slight complication that they kicked butt -- the opposing commander fled and has a hard time even getting anyone to follow her after her cowardice -- but just lost their lord.  They could have sat on the battlefield forever without anyone coming along to kill them there.

Gotta be an exception clause for that.  More or less.  Certainly less when someone has it in for him.  Given his character, deserting his lord in the grip of dark magic would also have him thinking himself on the less side.  After all, failing his lord twice in less than a month would be a real possibility if he ran off and never managed to find him again.  Even if staying would be a guarantee of failure.

And then there's our heroine, who is not pledged to any lord.  But as soon as I started to think of her contrasting with the hero, she primly told one of the other characters -- I think the lord -- that her father had forbidden her.  Is he really expecting her to disobey her father?

[identity profile] dirigibletrance.livejournal.com 2013-07-29 11:50 am (UTC)(link)
This also totally happens whenever you're playing Skyrim and you finish some major questline and decide to go off and do all the minor quests you've picked up along the way.

Everyone will just stand around the battlefield, grieving over the fallen body of the hero/lord *forever*, or at least until you come back and trigger the next part of the story by speaking to the right NPC.

[identity profile] dirigibletrance.livejournal.com 2013-07-30 10:37 am (UTC)(link)
Indeed. One of the things I love about that game is how evident it is that real research into Norse and Anglo-Saxon history and myth went into making it. Also just how ridiculously detailed the world is. You can get lost just reading the books you find on shelves insides castles.

[identity profile] eric-hinkle.livejournal.com 2013-07-29 06:08 pm (UTC)(link)
I really like that quote from "the Battle of Maldon".

[identity profile] persephone-kore.livejournal.com 2013-07-30 01:05 pm (UTC)(link)
This probably betrays terrible historical ignorance, but if they won the battle, would it really have been considered inappropriate to take his body back to his family or something?

[identity profile] persephone-kore.livejournal.com 2013-07-30 02:15 pm (UTC)(link)
Still, it might have raised the question of how the killer got to the lord without your dying first -- in the thick of battle where he was fighting as well as you -- but still. . . .

I suppose if your lord leads from the front he does occasionally get ahead of you, but I can see how that would be awkward.