yakalskovich | Epic fantasy is epic

Entry tags:

game of thrones,
tv

Epic fantasy is epic

Slowly getting hooked on 'Game of Thrones'. I like how they take time to tell the story, give you time to start caring about all those characters. My favourites so far are Tyrion Lannister, and Littlefinger, and I must admit to a certain predilection for Danaerys despite the fact there this feeling of "one trope too many" around her which so far prevents her from developing much non-tropical personality.

I find it slightly worrying that the entire series of books isn't even completely written yet. Eventually, Wikipedia assures me, people are certain that the three story lines (only starting out at where I am) of a power struggle in King's Landing, Danaerys beyond the sea, and Jon Snow up at the Wall will come together. But how can they if they aren't written yet?

What I like is how there are really alien elements in the familiarity of High Fantasy's perpetual middle ages, starting with the odd square things the priests (or whatever, Maesters?) wear on their shoulders at Jon Arryn's funeral rites at the very beginning, mediterrenean/oriental elements both in King's Landing and beyond the sea, and the steampunk/fallen former technical civilisation elements at the Wall. Suddenly, clockwork elevators and steel t-beam constructions, whoops! That tells us that many long winters ago/before the dragons came/ whatever, civilisation was much more advanced. The Wall itself -- what in blazes might have built it?

So many delightful answers that might be so many years in the coming. I don't know that I'll want to read the books (my to-be-read-pile has reached Pluto, who tells the books on top of the stack that he's a planet, never mind what those haters say), but I guess until somebody commits bad shark-jumping the way Supernatural has, I'll be along for the ride, show-wise.-

ETA: Ahahahahahahhhh, Guppy Sandhu as a barbarian warrior! I knew I know that face!!! That made me hoot with laughter, and totally killed my Suspension of Disbelief there, as bad as Caserta in Star Wards Episode 1... Now I scared the cats away with my raucous laughter.-

ETA2: Now with pictorial proof:

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I can't imagine snail farming is very taxing...

Yes, especially as your livestock can't run very far, and you don't need a lasso to wrestle it to the ground. Foodstuff, too, is not so terribly hard to come compared to, say, raising koalas or pandas...

And snails are so appropriate for an historian...

Yes, you can research complicated issues while they just proceed at a snails pace...

ar ar ar

Hey, do you know any good sources on day-to-day treatment in US state hospitals circa 1915? For a fic. :)

Sorry, I think I saw a link some while ago somewhere on my flist, but I can't for the life of me remember when and where. It must have been an interesting and dangerous time when the old ideas of mere containment of 'lunatics' were slowly getting replaced with actual psychology.

Drat!

Well, keep me in mind if you come across anything. I am writing the

history_bigbang and this is my topic.

Trust me to pick one that is nigh near impossible to research...

*sigh*

Wikipedia has some basics, but beyond that, I don't know.

Especially as you're looking for the daily lives of these people, and not grand sweeping theoretical approaches.-

Yeah, I have the grand sweeping theoretical approach down. I need to know on a day-to-day basis how they were treated.

I did find some info on the Burghölzli when Jung was working there, but I am not certain how much we can draw from that.

Certainly there was a move away from asylums to state hospitals and shock therapy didn't commence until the end of the 20s, but with all the immigration (some 5,000 people a day into Ellis Island from Eastern Europe) and discussion of eugenics and "undesirables" in the changing society, I can't help but wonder how those deemed "insane" were treated.

Of course, my fic deals with the treatment of an affluent member of society, but I would like to know what was going on with the others.

If it was a really affluent member, would they have been at a state hospital? I'd rather guess that their family would have paid private caretakers rather than suffer the embarrassment. Keeping up appearances was terribly important back then.

Keeping up appearances was terribly important back then.

That's the catch. The son is a homosexual and rather than risk exposure (which would be a sign of failure for the mother in her capacity as well as moral failure of the family), they opt to send him to a clinic once visited by Jung and Freud (during their lectures at Clark University).

The family resides in Illinois which was notorious in its treatment of homosexuals - castrating those for consensual sex as well as first degree sodomy.

Then he'd be in a private clinic, I guess, with strict security and experimental treatment?

That's my question. Did private clinics exist/ There appears to be a grand total of one in Europe (Zurich) and while we have Long Island House and the mention of the transformation of the field of psychiatry, we don't appear to know anything about the day to day operations or what a family in this situation might do.

*head desk*

**digs around a little**

Yes, there were. There were quite early alternatives to those horrid state asylums.

Why, blessings upon your household! That is very useful.

K, I am off to work. Catch you on the flip side. :)

Have fun!

Perfect!

Actually the state hospitals were a vast improvement over the asylums -- which were essentially holding pens for anyone deemed unfit.

The danger is the state hospitals is that this was the era of eugenics and the beginning of experimentation in psychiatry. While the insulin-induced seizures were not yet tested, the idea of "shocking" the brain into fixing itself was already being discussed.

And then we enter the 1930s and the nightmare era.

Yes.-

And that is why old state hospitals are such a favourite subject for scary stories of all sorts. I don't know how much you want to make your protagonist suffer, but with a little stretch of imagination, you can have really bad things happen to him. Or not, if you go for the private clinic things.-

It's not that I want to make my protagonist suffer...

Well, there are two of them actually. One is an immigrant who has witnessed unspeakable things in the old country and then in the treatment of immigrants in America. The other -- the gay one -- is from a wealthy, sheltered existence who has never experienced anything negative in his life.

Until he meets his friend who "corrupts" him, in the minds of his parents. In the end, he is forced to sign a statement to that effect which results in the imprisonment of his friend. (The friend is an adult; the character is 17).

After a severe bout of depression and a half-hearted suicide attempt, his mother whisks him out of town to seek help from a forward-thinking group of psychiatrists, neurologists, psychologists. I chose the group in Worcester as they were exposed to Freud and Jung (Hall, the head of the group, was the one to invite Freud to give the lectures). Hall is certainly not a savory character (he was a eugenicist and a proto-Nazi), but he exemplifies a major current in the society at large.

As character #2 (our immigrant friend) is a doctor, I also felt he would be able to find a place in this environment -- working in some lowly position that enables him to observe the masters at work.

The story is a series of conversations between the young, depressed boy who is unable to accept what happened to his friend (and himself, mostly) and the older man who has witnessed so much over the course of time.

I think the suffering is crucial because it shows the young, rich boy how comparatively cushy his life is.

But perhaps I just have an axe to grind. LOL

I'd really like to read that when it's done. Sounds fascinating.-

Are you kidding? You are getting my first born for holding my hand and giving me a leg up on research!

:D

Also, I have been looking into modes of transportation outside of the big cities (Worcester isn't Egypt, but it's hardly New York). I actually assumed that the standard form of transportation would still be carriage for the streets (trains for the longer haul).

Thoughts?

Trains for longer hauls, carriages in the cities, first cars owned by the richest people in towns (in America, there were already Tin Lizzies, so not just the stinking rich but also the really well to do might have had cars at that stage), bicycles which were quite popular with young people, and lots and lots of walking. Larger cities would have had trams as well, of course. Horse trolleys were probably seriously on their way out by 1915.

I always associate horse trolleys with everything Mid-West and West and carriages with the East coast.

When I looked at the stats, even in the 1930s, only 1 family in 4 owned a car and the roads were so unreliable, it was more of a nuisance to have one.

Depending on where were, people might even have ridden horseback for transportation. Much really depended on the condition of the roads, you're right.

I think in the "older" towns -- because the East coast is old and established, it's reasonable to assume that they would have horses. Putting in horse-drawn trollies is such a major undertaking! I can see it in the newer cities, but I would think it would wreak havoc in the East (plus I know those roads and how narrow they are. Trying driving in Back Bay in Boston sometime.)

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