Fantasy Fiction This or That Challenge
Dragons and Seers and Portals, Oh My!
Aka the one where Rayne chooses between some stuff, ToT style
Thank you to Jacinta Palmer for creating this fantasy ToT challenge and inviting me to participate! It was a lot of fun, though there are some tough choices in there!
1.Dystopian or Enchanted: Dystopian. I once took a course called “The Apocalyptic Consciousness” which was all about how/why basically every culture and society on earth has both predicted and been fascinated by the End Times. I am no exception. (There’s also some psychological/ evolutionary explanations for our fixation on dark stuff — i.e. paying extra attention to danger/potential danger kept our cave-dwelling ancestors alive and our brains still think it’s important to look out for impending doom).
2. Vampire or Dragon: Dragon. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like the idea of staying young and beautiful for several hundred years, but in terms of raw power, danger, and majesty… dragons win every time.
3. Sword or Bolt of Fire from your Fingers: Fire fingers. It is much more versatile. It would be great for wilderness survival as you could use it to start a fire to cook food, boil water for tea, and/or to stay warm, no matter what. AND yes, sure, it could also be used as a force of destruction if you really needed to take out some bad guys.
4. Mind Reading or Crystal Ball: Mind reading. Crystal balls look heavy and impractical. Although, all the mind reader characters I’ve read don’t like having this skill because they can’t turn it off and are constantly bombarded by other people’s thoughts. In order to keep their sanity, they are forced to live in isolation and loneliness.
So, I pick mind reading, but with a character who is a selective mind reader — i.e. they can turn it off and on at will. Or maybe it could be triggered by physical contact… Not sure yet, that’s the fun part!
5. Broomstick or Winged Creature: Winged creature. It’s always safer to ride something alive because they don’t want to get hurt any more than you do, so they will put extra care into keeping both of you safe. A broomstick would do nothing to help if you were careening towards a mountain of solid rock, for example.
6. Runes or Tarot Cards: Tarot Cards. Just because I have more familiarity with them. I would need to do more research to put runes into a story.
7. Under an Oath or Stolen Memories: Stolen memories. It seems like the more freeing option. A person with missing memories could possibly recover them or possibly leave their old life behind, become a new person and live happily ever after. Being under an oath implies obligation, which is the opposite of freedom.
8. Rainbow or Waterfall: Waterfall. I love water. I’m a water sign. Also, water, like fire (see #3), is life-giving and yet also capable of wild destruction and unimaginable devastation. Tsunamis, flooding, water-borne illness, sharks… and that’s just the real stuff, not even touching on all the potential it has in fantasy stories.
9. Enchanted Object or Cursed Object: OOOHHHHH. This one is hard. In spite of my answer for #1, I’m going to go with enchanted here because I like the idea of helper objects or objects that grant special powers.
10. Seer or Warlock: Seer. Seers don’t have the associations with demons or “dark” magic and I like the idea of having foresight and insight that other people don’t have.
11. Dungeon or Banishment: Dungeon. People mostly, though not always, escape from dungeons. Plus, humans are wired for connection — it is much easier to get through hard things when we have a network of people with us and there’s more likely to be a ready-made community of support in a dungeon.
12. Soul Sucking or Demon Torment: Soul sucking. Because I have more questions about it, and questions make interesting stories. Like — who or what is doing the soul-sucking? Why? Is it a bad thing or perhaps somehow a good thing? Is someone going to stop the soul sucking? Also, what happens after your soul has been sucked? 🤷♀️
13. Portal or Time Travel: Portal. Somehow portals seem more reliable. There are probably stories of portals taking people to the wrong place, but travel by portal still seems less risky than the mechanical upkeep and engineering feats that would probably be necessary to make time travel happen.
14. Undiscovered or Forgotten: Undiscovered. I can’t help but think of the Jurassic Park quote: “What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world”, which I don’t think is inaccurate. But forgetting history is pretty much always dangerous, whereas undiscovered things could go either way.
15. Enchanted to Sleep or Cursed to Ride: I’m going with “enchanted to sleep” because I don’t understand “cursed to ride”… Cursed to ride what?
16. Diary or Grimoire: Grimoire. The only magical diary I can think of is Tom Riddle’s diary in Harry Potter and it took A LOT of words to make that one magical. Grimoires are magical by definition. And, of course, spooky, eerie, perhaps dangerous, and very powerful. They are an easy pick for a fantasy story.
17. Kraken or Mermaid: What kind of TKL editor would I be if I didn’t choose the Kraken? Kraken are actually surprisingly versatile story characters… Maybe there should be a story with a Kraken AND a mermaid!!!!!?!?!??!?!
18. Haunted or Re-programmed: Reprogrammed. I love reading cyberpunk and sci-fi stuff. Sometimes it’s scarier to be able to recognize elements of our current world/society/way of living and have it pushed just a few steps further. For example — do you have Netflix? Do you like Netflix? What if, instead of watching on a screen in the evenings for 17$/ month, it was Netflix VR. And what if the government said it was mandatory? And what if the show simulations contained some nefarious subliminal messaging hidden in Dora the Explorer or Chicago Fire? BAM! A story. (Maybe not a great one, but you can see the possibilities).
19. Historical or Future: Future. Unless you’re re-writing the past (like in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — the zombies are definitely, probably, not historically accurate), then I think the future has more opportunities to invent and be creative.
20. This World or Another Realm: This one is hard! I think I’m going with this world. It doesn’t seem like a very “fantasy-esque” answer and if I were doing this tomorrow my answer might be different, but right now I’m really feeling the dystopian, cyberpunk, sci-fi, and urban fantasy vibes, so I’m sticking with this world.
Thank you for reading! If you would like more cool ToT challenges, check out Brett Jenae Tomlin’s pub here:
https://medium.com/bjs-this-or-that-the-gathering-table
And if you would like some cool fantasy fiction stories, check out this pub or this pub.
