Profanity in Fantasy

[talyesin]

So lately I've had an epic (in the classic sense of huge, not the internet sense of awesome, though I have no doubt that it will be awesome also) fantasy trilogy, and I keep getting hung up on the issue of language. Not the write-it-in-English sort of language, but rather, the manner in which I will phrase sentences and in particular, dialogue

Comments

[fearsclave]

FWIW, there is very little that blows my suspension of disbelief/immersion in a story more jarringly than modern figures of speech in fiction set in other eras. I'm still near-homicidally pissed off at that "YES!" uttered by the Interchangeable Backup Hobbit in The Two Towers.

And don't get me started on First Knight. It caused me to abjure Sean Connery forever.

Go period. Go period hard.

[talyesin]

But what if the period is, say, early 1900s steampunkian fantasy? Or even dieselpunk, the newfangled way of saying pulp adventure? I'm fairly sure all the modern idioms of profanity existed in the 1930s.

I agree with you that modern slang in a fantastical setting does jar, though I would counter that Deadwood used modern swears to extremely effective ends.

[ai731]

For me, it depends entirely on the setting. Future-on-earth, or NotEarth, or Settled By Humans Other Planet, I prefer current/modern swears to anything made up, precisely because "(though many so-called modern swears date back hundreds of years)" - more than hundreds in the case of the old standards like "shit" and "fuck". "Frack" was a way of getting around stupid censorship, and very annoying as such.

If your setting is Other, then IMHO, your swears should come out of the culture you are depicting. Is there a strong religion? (Damn) Does the culture have a foe or underclass? (Faggot)? Are there (either companion of farm) animals around? (Son of a bitch) Any of these can form the basis of that culture's swears. OTOH, do you really need your characters to swear? Very few readers will notice a complete lack of swearing. "He grimaced in frustration" can easily replace "Bugger it!" he said...

[talyesin]

Yeah, the setting that's congealing in my head is pretty much turn-of-the-century steampunkian other style fantasy, not your classic swords-and-sorcery stereotypical genre stuff.

> "He grimaced in frustration" can easily replace "Bugger it!" he said...

But isn't that a case of telling, not showing? As I continue to write, I've determined that my strength (and preference) really lies in dialogue. I'm more inclined toward writing dialogue, and frankly every time I've done something similar to what you suggest in my Truthseekers novels, it's felt a little like a cop-out.

[lindaabdavis]

I like it when the swears are almost modern but their own. I always liked "gorram" because its source is obvious but changed to meet the characters' own future culture. For fantasy, I particularly like "by the stars above," something to indicate that they do hold reverance, but maybe not to a god.

[talyesin]

So you'd rather read (for example) "Blood and bloody ashes!" than "oh shit!"?

I don't dispute that an entire swear system that holds the reader firmly in the headspace of my universe has its attractions, but does a modern audience need that?

[pasley]

I find the invented swears very distracting and annoying. If a writer has to try that hard to create a feeling of otherness, then it seems to me there's problem with the fantasy world itself, or with the writing of it. (But then, it's taken me long time to get used to the pagan utterance "Oh my gods!", and I still find it a little too forced-sounding to use it myself.) "Shit!", "Piss!", "Fuck!" "Bugger!" "Bastard!" "Bitch!" --- All good.

[talyesin]

Interesting. There were moments, when watching BSG, when "frak" seemed completely natural to me (though I always remained aware of it), and other moments when it snapped me out of the moment. These moments, pro and con, never once occured to me while watching Deadwood, with its completely anachronistic language.

That said, I never had a problem reading made-up swears in fantasy novels, while modern-sounding profanity almost always feels strange. And yet, my instinct is to go with the latter in this case, rather than the former.

[kolvin]

I'd say follow your gut on this one. Swearing has been a part of language as long as language has been around. Words like "fuck" and "bugger" and all that lovely stuff have also been around for quite a while.

The problem most people have with profanity is entirely born out of their own conception that people did not speak that way in olden times when the people actually living in these times most assuredly did.

For good use of such profanities I'd like to point to cinematic source like Rome and Deadwood which made extensive use of profanities. Game of Thrones is a good written example, Guy Gavriel Kay also uses "foul language". It's not new and to me it sounds right.

Word substitution to me most often sounds wrong. Firefly did it well with Chinese swear words but "Frak" or "Frell" never felt natural to me. If you're gonna swear, do it with conviction.

[miseri]

Thinking about it, I'm pretty certain I've heard people say "what the frell" as far back as the early 1990s. Of course, that was in Singapore, half a world away from here.

[talyesin]

Frell comes from Farscape, a show from the late 90s...

[miseri]

I came to Montreal in 1996. This was definitely before Montreal, and before my military service, putting it around 1991 or 1992. It might have been an affectation adopted by a very small group of secondary schoolers; certainly, I don't remember hearing it after that.

I don't think I've ever seen Farscape.