So. There is no safe place (in the body) to be shot. There are places that are slightly safer than others to be stabbed (i.e. being stabbed in the meat of your calf is less likely to be lethal than your torso). For the purposes of an arrow wound, which feels like a combination of shot+stab for a swords n sorcery world, is there a “less lethal” place to take an arrow? My character is traveling with companions and gets into a fun little goblin skirmish. I need her to catch an arrow somewhere that will be concerning, but not immediately fatal. Magic Bullshit™️ will keep the wound from healing properly for a few days, but I’ve accounted for field wound care (cleaning and bandaging and such) as she’s being taken on horseback to get proper treatment.
Not deeply.
So, the problem with all of these is tissue disruption. If the injury gets deep enough, the chances that it will hit something vital (especially on the torso) increase dramatically. So, getting stabbed and having the blade catch bone, instead of getting in deeper is “relatively” safe. Similarly, getting stabbed (or shot) in the hand or foot is unlikely to kill you (though, those injuries are likely to result in permanent damage impairing the use of injured appendage.)
Arrows are a little different, in a couple of ways. First, if you get shot, you do not want to pull that off (nor break it off and push it through.) That will increase the risk of bleeding out. Arrows make fairly large holes in people, but if the arrow sticks in the wound (which, it should) it will actually limit the amount of bleeding. Effectively the wound has a partial plug in it. Pulling out the arrow means that plug is no longer there, and they can happily bleed to death on the spot.
The second thing about arrows is that they actually pin muscle together. Think of it a bit like holding two pieces of meat together with a toothpick. If the toothpick isn't there, the pieces can slide across each other without issue, but that's not possible when there's a wooden shaft running through them. Your muscles are a complex web of meat, that slide over each other as you move. Pinning those together means that part of your body will actually lock up. For example, if you're shot in the shoulder, you won't be able to adjust the position of your arm. It's been toothpicked, and it's not going anywhere.
Arrowheads can get wedged in bone. If it's a broad head, or hunting tip, that will be obnoxious to get out.
At the risk of reading too much into your setting, goblins often means poisons, or other nastiness. Though, really, even just getting a tetanus infection (it used to be called “lock jaw”) from their blades is a pretty horrific potential fate. Even if the wounds themselves were relatively minor (cuts and scrapes, maybe a graze or two), a couple days might still result in some pretty horrific harm after the fact.
Also, remember, it's unlikely that bacteria will be understood by the medical science of your setting. So, first aid would still run a real risk of secondary infections.
Depending on their skill in first aid, anything outside of a severed artery or catastrophic organ damage should be (technically) survivable, though the wounds could easily result in permanent impairments, depending on exactly what was hit. A punctured lung might not kill her, but it could result in permanent respiratory issues, such as a cough, and chronic pain while breathing heavily from then on. It could also result in pneumonia and death, which is also, usually, pretty permanent.
Some of this depends more on where you want to land on a spectrum between dark fantasy and swords & sorcery. The genres are similar (and potentially overlapping), but can scatter out into dramatically different works. But, you do have some options on how you want to proceed.
-Starke
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One tiny little very annoying thing about blogspot is that when I'm doing stuff with multiple tabs open I like to switch between them using the command & number keys, and I have to remember to not do that if I'm on the blogger tab because hitting those keys there will change the size of the font.
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okay so i don’t mind reg bc w/e this is fandom innit ppl can do what they want, but i think you’re so right that remus and lyall are fundamentally much more interesting characters and so is their relationship. reg by himself is somewhat compelling but no one in the fandom seems to care abt what makes him compelling i.e. stuff that actually happened in canon not just fanfictions that he’s been featured in. for instance, i see it being stated as though it’s fact that his parents abused him which we don’t know iirc? we know that sirius was mistreated and i do think being raised by political radicals would likely cause a turbulent home life, so i doubt regulus came out of his childhood unscathed, but we have no actual proof he was treated similarly to sirius at all. he was still a supremacist, just not to the extent that his parents were. as far as i’m concerned he died a fascist, but he had a “for thee but not for me” tory level attitude about certain things.
oh absolutely! with regards to my position on regulus, im in no way trying to say that people can’t/shouldn’t like him—as you say, people can do as they like, but im just personally not at all interested in him or with what general fandom consensus has chosen to do with him. the things that would make regulus compelling in canon do not necessarily compel me anyway, but more than that i agree that a lot of people have chosen to virtually wipe those things out out in favour of creating a morally pure conceptualisation of him that they don’t feel the need to defend (not that i think anyone should have to defend having an interest in regulus anyway).
i suppose i am just not personally predisposed to having an interest in canon regulus, so his popularity is not something i fully understand, but particularly the version of him that has been created by fanon...honestly i find him irritating, and generally i find even less to be interested in in a conceptualization of regulus that strips him of agency, flaws and responsibility. i said in that other post that i dont think regulus is as complex as he's given credit for (which applies even more once fanon is through with him), and i honestly stand by it--i reckon he was fully willing, albeit having been influenced by his upbringing, to become a death eater, and i don't buy the narrative that he had no choice and was forced into it and had no personal sympathy with the politics of it all. i find it ridiculously convenient. and then, i think he started having doubts when the impact of all it all became a little too close for comfort (for thee but not for me is quite a perfect summary lol), and he turned traitor. that is really all there is to it for me. i do not think that he would have rejected his parents' ideology if given the chance, the way sirius did. but i recognise really, since i don't think a character's morality or lack thereof should dictate whether you're allowed to enjoy them, the discussion of regulus' morality is sort of besides the point lol, other than the fact that i find his complete and unrealistic redemption via fanon rather boring and admittedly a little lazy.
my comparison between his relationship with sirius and lyalls relationship with remus in the earlier post was mainly just me. making a joke of sorts and being a little unserious, but i do genuinely think lyall and remus are a lot more interesting and complex--though i 100% recognize that this is largely personal preference and im not trying to dress my opinion as an objective fact. mainly, i guess where i am with it all is that i already dont really have an interest in regulus from canon, and despite his huge surge in popularity i have never seen anything in fanon that really changes my mind about that (apart from. maybe one fic). which is fine! nobody is obligated to sit here and try and tailor their own takes on, or fondness for, this guy to attract my interest, or win me over. that is not their job. my opinion holds no more weight than the next guy's, and my lack of interest in regulus is not anyone else's problem, just like i am not ever going to exert energy trying to win someone over to liking remus or liking r/s. i am never going to go to someone's blog or fic and have a go at them for liking regulus/demand they justify themselves. BUT, in the safety of my own blog, i figure im safe to say these things xx and as far as im concerned, my favourite thing regulus ever did was piss off and die xx
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