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Stupid Heroine Tricks
Mar. 5th, 2015 09:57 amWhy do characters do insanely stupid things? The kind of things where you occasionally say the dastardly villain deserves to win by right of having a few brain cells to rub together.
So Medieval-lite story that isn't Game of Thrones. Stupid heroine (and hero tricks)
1) when capturing enemy combatants who just tried to kidnap your daughters, do not beg your husband to let them go. They are going to go right back to their army and keep fighting for your enemy. Duh. (And sure one of the ones you spared let you help your 2nd husband escape later but that only means the guy was also an idiot because after he did that, you got his castle overrun by combatant soldiers and what would you guess would have happened then?)
2) So you are chatelaine of a strategic castle in a multi combatant war. Your castle is under siege. You hate you first husbands gross family, whose castle it is -- except that your children are now its heirs. You send multiple messages to your family asking for aid to end the siege and receive no response. For weeks. Passed the point of where your children are starving. You eventually surrender. The opposing force then does nothing to you or your children except feed you. You discover your family hung you out to dry and were never coming to your aid because they had political problems of their own. Eventually you form an alliance with the conquering knight and a tenuous trust established. Yes, for strategic purposes he betroths your prepubescent daughters to his younger brothers to secure the alliance (the 6 year old to the 10 year old boy. The 12 year old to the 14 year old boy) but, he's in no rush to wed them and has also given you charge of the boys to raise, and they're nice boys. You and your daughters have been treated well, theres no threat of a wedding in the near future, and you are faring better than the way you were treated by the middle aged leacher YOUR family sold you to when you were only 13. So the first time the knight leaves a castle, a totally unknown monk shows up telling you the uncle-- who hung you out to dry during the siege--says your daughters are in danger (unlike when they were starving during the siege and then had the castle overrun by the enemy?) and for you to secretly slip out of the castle with your two daughters to go to the abbey where your gross old lecherous late husband's brother is bishop... and you go with no guards, no plan, and in secret. You are an idiot! It's a trap. Go grab a gif of the fish dude in Star Wars it's so transparently a trap! I can't even feel anything but smugness when you arrive and discover that it's a trap and that your family has decided to marry you off to your dead husband's equally gross, equally leacherous, twice as murderous brother. Or that he wants to kill your daughters for being heirs to 'his' castle-- because you are an idiot! You left what had proved to be a safe situation for a transparently dangerous one on the say so of politically meddlesome family who had already proved that they only see women as chatel for barter. You. are. an. idiot.
3). When you stab the villain and he falls down, slit his throat, dumbass. He's not dead dead. He's Glen Close in Fatal Attraction waiting to improbably come back up and attack you again. Never simply assume he's dead. He isn't. Sheesh.
😏
So Medieval-lite story that isn't Game of Thrones. Stupid heroine (and hero tricks)
1) when capturing enemy combatants who just tried to kidnap your daughters, do not beg your husband to let them go. They are going to go right back to their army and keep fighting for your enemy. Duh. (And sure one of the ones you spared let you help your 2nd husband escape later but that only means the guy was also an idiot because after he did that, you got his castle overrun by combatant soldiers and what would you guess would have happened then?)
2) So you are chatelaine of a strategic castle in a multi combatant war. Your castle is under siege. You hate you first husbands gross family, whose castle it is -- except that your children are now its heirs. You send multiple messages to your family asking for aid to end the siege and receive no response. For weeks. Passed the point of where your children are starving. You eventually surrender. The opposing force then does nothing to you or your children except feed you. You discover your family hung you out to dry and were never coming to your aid because they had political problems of their own. Eventually you form an alliance with the conquering knight and a tenuous trust established. Yes, for strategic purposes he betroths your prepubescent daughters to his younger brothers to secure the alliance (the 6 year old to the 10 year old boy. The 12 year old to the 14 year old boy) but, he's in no rush to wed them and has also given you charge of the boys to raise, and they're nice boys. You and your daughters have been treated well, theres no threat of a wedding in the near future, and you are faring better than the way you were treated by the middle aged leacher YOUR family sold you to when you were only 13. So the first time the knight leaves a castle, a totally unknown monk shows up telling you the uncle-- who hung you out to dry during the siege--says your daughters are in danger (unlike when they were starving during the siege and then had the castle overrun by the enemy?) and for you to secretly slip out of the castle with your two daughters to go to the abbey where your gross old lecherous late husband's brother is bishop... and you go with no guards, no plan, and in secret. You are an idiot! It's a trap. Go grab a gif of the fish dude in Star Wars it's so transparently a trap! I can't even feel anything but smugness when you arrive and discover that it's a trap and that your family has decided to marry you off to your dead husband's equally gross, equally leacherous, twice as murderous brother. Or that he wants to kill your daughters for being heirs to 'his' castle-- because you are an idiot! You left what had proved to be a safe situation for a transparently dangerous one on the say so of politically meddlesome family who had already proved that they only see women as chatel for barter. You. are. an. idiot.
3). When you stab the villain and he falls down, slit his throat, dumbass. He's not dead dead. He's Glen Close in Fatal Attraction waiting to improbably come back up and attack you again. Never simply assume he's dead. He isn't. Sheesh.
😏
