mechanics of faith in urban fantasy: a notion for a project

[belial.1980]

It's an interesting proposition. I always applaud somebody who's eager to think outside the box and try something new.

As has been mentioned, I think the issue lies with rationality serving as the trump card. I'm reminded of the movie Boogeyman starring Barry Watson, where the protagonist keeps reminding himself, "Don't be scared...don't be scared..." because if he can face the fear, the boogeyman can't get him.

One thing that I thought might be interesting is to really play up the psychological aspect. You could use some layered versions of reality, akin to the way that Richard Kelly does in his movie Donnie Darko or the way that Ken Kesey did in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is another example of how two separate levels of reality can coexist.

I think a device like you're suggesting would be more effective if the reader can't always guess which layer of reality the characters are encountering.

I think you could also play up on the fear/paranoia aspect.

Example: Poor Jake beleives in magic and the occult and whatnot. This leads to his being drained by a vampire. The police, rational guardians of rational people living in a ::rational:: society find a human corpse drained of blood. Word leaks out to the press. People begin to talk. They jump at shadows or hang garlic cloves over their doors. This paranoia leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy of somebody else dying, and the paranoia of vampires grows even more...

I dunno if either of those ideas tickle your fancy at all. However you decide to run with it, good luck.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

It seems this would create a base of ever increasing rationalist society, immune.  The base premise that I'm having difficulty is the assumption that a rationalist not able to recognize science in a situation would somehow be vulnerable?  Wouldn't a rationalist just stay firmly in rationality and acknowledge that all science is not known and be invulnerable to the effect?  Sort of a Sherlock Holmes type resistance to magic?

I was thinking that seeing something inexplicable and acknowledging that it is inexplicable in the terms you have is what makes you vulnerable to it.  Whether you think of it as being magic that is science-like and works rationally or inexplicable miraculous magic being of secondary import there.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

It seems this would create a base of ever increasing rationalist society, immune.

Yep.  This seems to me to fit rather well with a "secret history" that exists alongside our real history; one of the problems I often have with urban fantasy is that it seems implausible for all these supernatural powers to have existed alongside our own for centuries and never had any real impact, and in this case, the premise gives me that for free.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

It's an interesting proposition. I always applaud somebody who's eager to think outside the box and try something new.

Thank you.

As has been mentioned, I think the issue lies with rationality serving as the trump card. I'm reminded of the movie Boogeyman starring Barry Watson, where the protagonist keeps reminding himself, "Don't be scared...don't be scared..." because if he can face the fear, the boogeyman can't get him.

I'm thinking that if you've got so far as having to remind yourself, you're already lost.  It's about underlying fundamental axioms rather than things you can easily consciously choose at that level.

One thing that I thought might be interesting is to really play up the psychological aspect.
I think a device like you're suggesting would be more effective if the reader can't always guess which layer of reality the characters are encountering.

Depends a lot on whose viewpoint I'm using; I think it might well want more than one, a rationalist and someone who is steeped in the magic.

Example: Poor Jake beleives in magic and the occult and whatnot. This leads to his being drained by a vampire. The police, rational guardians of rational people living in a ::rational:: society find a human corpse drained of blood. Word leaks out to the press. People begin to talk. They jump at shadows or hang garlic cloves over their doors. This paranoia leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy of somebody else dying, and the paranoia of vampires grows even more...

That is a direction in which things could go, yes. I think the balance needs to be slightly different, though; if this fictional universe remains on the surface indistinguishable from our reality, it can't be that easy for vampire panics to enable vampires. The counterbalance there is... well, I'm sure I've seen horror movies where the rationalist authority figure looks at a corpse and is sure it's just a corpse and it later becomes a vampire/zombie/whatever and starts killing, whereas in this world if a vampire is imitiating a corpse and a doctor confrims it's a corpse, there's a high likelihood that that would in and of itself transform the vampire into a corpse, perhaps.

[Agravaine]

Your premise is actually pretty close to a movie called Skeleton Key starring Kate Hudson.  The evil plot only succeeds in Skeleton Key because Kate Hudson's character has been slowly brought around into believing in Voodoo.  If she remained an unbeliever (as she had been in the beginning), it couldn't have worked on her.

[comprex]

Not a tree, no.  Which means that people wanting to stay safe from magic want to stay in heavily urban areas where everything around them is tech heavy and hard to affect.

Coolness, I hadn't thought of the statistical possibilities of this.    You get to think of both the average density of believers, their mean free path between interactions, and the, ahem, 'energy' of their belief.     Heck, you might even devise a Cooper-pair analogy, where believers pair up to travel through the lattice of unbelief.

<edit: gigglesnorts at the thought of explaining Gaussian and power curves in SF>

[The Corvidian]

There is a novel by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens where a good guy vampire holds off a bad guy vampire with a cross. The bad guy believed that the cross could hurt him.

[Dandalf the Grey]

Also, read I Am Legend - a good deal better than the movie, in my opinion.  The vampires there were repelled by crosses only when they were Christians in life; whereas Jewish vampires were repelled by Stars of David, and if they had no faith you were stuck with staking them to death and other such violent things.  Kind of an interesting 50's-era rendition of vampires, and the author got into some science-type reasons for vampire behavior and traits.  Short but sweet.

[Dandalf the Grey]

Also, "The Vampire Lestat" includes Armand and his group of flunkies being held at bay when Lestat enters a church.  Armand knows that he can enter with no ill effects, but the others don't come inside for fear of their (un)lives.  Not quite the same as magic affecting them, but still a similar concept.