Thursday DE: the Maltese Falcon

[needsmoreresearch]

While the Yard Sale is still on, is there anything you'd like your character to find? I bet someone can hook you up!

And if not: Does your character or their canon have a quest object? MacGuffin? Some special talismanic object or device? (Or person--of course people are plot devices all the time. Maybe your character is the McGuffin?)

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Sabine: Can you say Darksaber? I have no idea what this is going to mean for plot, but I am excited.

Amelia: She actually is a mix of MacGuffin, Red-herring, and walking exposition.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

For Yamato, the digivices and Crests both serve the function of 'special talismanic object' in Adventure, and tend to be the most overt expression of the show's mythological-y themes, with older characters tending to refer to them as things like 'the holy devices' or in markedly poetic terms, and with carven representations of the digivices and Crest symbols showing up all over the place.

The Crests in particular also serve as quest objects during the Etemon and Vamdemon arcs. The individual Crests also tend to serve as emblems for the character they belong to, and as Unpredictable Magic Wish Objects for whatever deus ex machina the plot requires.

[hangingoutwithcrows]

Gredya's canon has the Special Magical Books that show you how to get to the special magical country (as well as [spoiler spoiler spoiler]). Gredya and the other Wyr are some of the only creatures that can navigate without said books, so the head villain gets them working for her; later on Gredya helps the protagonist hunt down a copy in Chicago. (She doesn't like Chicago.)

And speaking of special magic books, a Book of Thoth is a pretty popular idea--I'm not sure how much currency it had before the Ptolemaic era, but there's a story that dates at least that far back. Superduper magic book of divine knowledge, written by Thoth, not meant for humans. The idea got picked up by medieval alchemists...Aleister Crowley...lots of fantasy/science fiction novels, computer games... So I guess Djehuty is the guy that makes the MacGuffins.

Harry Monmouth and William Douglas both come from canons that scrutinize kingship and power. You have a lot of talk in the Shakespeare history plays about the English crown--the literal physical one, the one that Richard II hands over to Henry IV with so much drama, the one Henry IV keeps with him on his deathbed and Hal takes when he mistakenly thinks his father is dead. (Ask Hal how he feels about obnoxious little Irish thieves stealing English crowns.) There's less crown talk in the James plays--it's the child-kings themselves, James I and James II, who are the symbolic objects sought and controlled by power-seekers.