#idle apocalypse gunslinger

[the-head-of-canons]

I'd love to hear any sexuality headcanons u have for characters in idle apocalypse!

Oh man, I thought I was alone in this fandom!! Coming right up!

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Sid

- Pansexual

- Had a crush on Mitsy from grade IV, but she ended up playing with a rotten boy with better stickers than him!

- Around the time he began attending the academy, he started to realize he was into guys as well

- *cough*MonsterHunter*cough**cough*

- Had a crush on a girl from the chess club, who sadly turned out to be another bully, as did the rest of the club

- He and the Monster Hunter dated for about a school year, until exams came around and Hunter ended things

Monster Hunter

- Bisexual

- He fancies himself a hit with the ladies, though ladies don’t exactly flock to him all that much

- Back at the academy, he was in a relationship with Sid. Though he’d never admit it (much to Sid’s disgust)

- He dumped Sid for a chance to get popular and succeed during exams, but hasn’t stopped thinking about him since

- Has a crush on the Gunslinger as well, but doesn’t want to chose between her and Sid

Gunslinger

- Lesbian

- She has a lovely wife back in town who bakes pies and kicks ass

- Despite not being interested in the slightest, she does enjoy light flirty banter with the Monster Hunter

- “Oh, you actually had a crush on me? Wow, uh, this is my wife by the way...”

Priest

- Ace/Aro

- The Lesley he keeps mentioning is actually his magical dog that loves to bake casseroles, and he’s happy

[thesswrites]

Medieval Apocalypses

I got an interesting question via Facebook today; more an idle musing, but something I thought it would be interesting to address. The question: “Would post-apocalypse tropes work in a straight up fantasy setting?”

There was a bit of a cognitive dissonance moment right out of the gate at the term ‘straight up fantasy’. What precisely do we mean by ‘straight up fantasy’? For the purposes of the essay, it would be considered to be the pseudo-medieval setting of Dungeons and Dragons, but even then there are issues. Consider Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, which originates in a pseudo-medieval world and deals with that world’s apocalypse and its aftermath, but crosses so many other different worlds and timelines that it becomes impossible to pigeonhole as medieval swords-and-sorcerers fantasy. After all, their Knights of the Round Table are not sword-wielding men in armour but Gunslingers. Also consider Final Fantasy, each world having dealt with so many apocalypses that it would nearly have to qualify as post-apocalyptic fantasy ... except that post-apocalyptic feel comes entirely from the scarcity of technology in the form of occultech.

Therefore, this essay will focus on the more familiar medieval settings of things like Dungeons and Dragons, and leave anything specifically dealing with technology, occult or otherwise, alone for the time being. This elimination, however, immediately tilts the answer to the question to “mostly no”.

In a true apocalypse - a genuine end of the world scenario - the key theme is the collapse of society as we know it, generally in a short span of time as such things are measured. The modern tropes provide many variations on the theme of ‘population reduction plus massive dangers destroying society’, from zombie plagues to nuclear fallout and all manner of things in between. This tends to result in small enclaves trying to scratch out survival in a hostile world, the occasional tinpot dictator, and bands of roving scavengers trying to pick something worthwhile out of the wreckage.

Consider the standard medieval swords-and-sorcerers fantasy setting. Unless dealing with a heavily advanced communication network of some description, most fantasy settings involve loosely or entirely unconnected provinces and countries, on even more unconnected continents. News spreads slowly, generally by gossip or bardic tale. Options for government are either feudal or imperial (surviving enclaves in the wilderness or tinpot dictators, in short), and while a loss of trade with neighbouring countries might cause some financial problems, they would not interfere with survival enough for people to be unable to find another way to survive, if not in the comfort to which they became accustomed prior to whatever cataclysm brought the situation about. Even then, without reliance on technology, life for the common folk would go on more or less as normal.

Even the monsters - sentient or otherwise - that invariably accompany the apocalypse would fit fairly seamlessly into the medieval fantasy status quo. It may be hard to worry too much about a few extra zombies when there may or may not be a bulette bursting through the vegetable patch one day. Bandits are commonplace in medieval fantasy too, filling both the ‘men are the real monsters’ trope and the ‘wandering band of scavengers’ trope. Of course, one other very commonplace medieval fantasy staple also fits the ‘wandering band of scavengers’ trope - adventuring parties. These deal with both the bandits and the less sentient monsters, maintaining an ecological balance in the matter of murderous things continuing a population decline.

On the subject of population decline, consider one of the most common post-apocalypse scenarios - plague. Whether it’s an inadvertently unleashed bioweapon like Captain Trips, two man-made cures combining in lethal ways like Kellis-Amberlee, or a mutant Cordyceps fungus, plagues are a good way of reducing the population to horrific levels, under the right societal and technological circumstances. However, while modern society allows for long-distance travel at significant speed, and whose credulousness tends to shift from individual to individual, medieval settings tend to have a different view of their personal health and, more importantly, a very different rate of travel.

The main issue is travel time. However the plague is contracted initially, it still needs to spread, and in most cases, diseases survive best in a living body. The Killer Flu, for instance Captain Trips in The Stand, took some time to even manifest as something more than an annoying set of sniffles, much less kill people. All the same, becoming ill to the point of ‘too ill to travel’ took days for large segments of the population. In most medieval fantasy settings, the vast majority of people do not leave their small towns or villages, and a merchant or peddler selling his wares in a town would probably be unable to get out of town before deciding to stay a few days to ‘get over this illness’. Unless there were multiple Patient Zeroes across multiple continents, a Killer Flu would self-quarantine and burn out before it took out more than a few villages.

Much the same for the Zombie Plague scenario, with the added advantage that they live in a world where undead already exist. While most people in the modern world, who have seen or at least heard of George Romero’s movies, would take a shuffling corpse as someone in really good makeup joking around, the resident of an average fantasy village would run screaming, and probably not get bitten. Fewer bites means less spread of the plague, and those who did get bitten would have probably heard enough stories to take steps to ensure they stay dead. More to the point, they would believe those stories before any irreparable damage was done to their community, because if you live in a world where it’s entirely possible to have a ‘statue’ of a local mapmaker in the centre of town because the poor stupid idiot got himself caught by basilisks and some adventurers you hired to bring him back figured they ought to show you something, you’re hardly going to doubt that thing you heard from that bard last week about the next town over being overrun by undead.

There is the argument that apocalypse can be something other than the standard zombies or killer flu. For instance, if Vecna or Tiamat rose and basically smashed holy hell out of the entire world all at once, you could argue that that’s a pretty standard apocalyse scenario. However, with an evil, vengeful god ruling over the ashes, there is still a societal structure of a sort, albeit the dictatorial kind. In fact, in the case of a god destroying existing social structures in a takeover, one could argue that this is actually averting the apocalypse trope, as a god can centralise society however they want. And there needs to be a centralised structure in order to rule with an iron fist.

In summary, it’s difficult to say that a ‘straight up’ fantasy setting can truly be affected by an apocalypse. An apocalypse requires more than the destruction of society; it requires that nothing take the place of that destroyed society, or at least that what little society can be scavenged from the ruins be less centralised and organised than the one that came before, at least in the outset. In the case of swords-and-sorcerers fantasy, it would be difficult to destroy an entire decentralised pseudo-medieval sociopolitical structure without the power of a god, who would then create a sociopolitical structure more centralised and thus more organised, if only by divine fiat. A plague would be unable to destroy more than a village or two - a country at most, depending on incubation period, before self-quarantining. Most of all, there is no technology, the loss of which is what generally cripples societies in modern post-apocalypse settings.

Of course, in a fantasy setting, anything is possible, so one cannot say that you could not play with the themes of a post-apocalyse setting in pseudo-medieval fantasy, if you can find a believable way of destroying all societal structure and leaving nothing but chaos in its wake. And, considering that the person who asked me this question is also in the D&D game I run, I will only say this: “Well, if you guys don’t manage the things you set out to do over the course of this campaign, you may very well find out, my dude”.

This one, by the way, is for @fauxfire76.