Tales · of · MU

The question that came up in response to the most recent chapters is “What causes Mackenzie to feel pain, if she’s not actually injured?”

The answer is very simple, and it’s got nothing to do with interior bruising. If her own body could injure itself as one part knocked against another, she’d probably be badly concussed, if not dead… her magical skull was not injured by the non-magical fist or the non-magical wall… but what about her brain receiving its share of the impact from the magical skull?

It’s got nothing to do with ingrained psychosomatic responses, either. Yes, the pain she feels is “in her head”, but it’s just as real as the pain you feel in your head. (Or it would be, if she weren’t fictional.)

I have, in fact, tried to explain this on the forum, the last time she had a bad non-injury… though the forum registration is still broken (sidebar sidenote: there’s a phpBB upgrade coming out on Thursday… I’m going to install the new version, see if it will let me import the old data… and if it doesn’t, we’ll just start with a clean slate. I’ll make the old version available as an archive, though.), so that’s not terribly helpful.

Therefore, I’m writing this sidebar so that anybody who wishes to know the mystery of Mackenzie’s lingering pains can read it.

However, in case some of you would rather speculate or prefer to have your own version instead of having the Definitive Author’s Authoratitive Version, or simply don’t care, I’m hiding that answer, and the subsequent elaboration, behind a “more” cut.

The cause of Mackenzie’s pain in Chapter 114 is that in Chapter 113 a half-ogre kicked the living shit out of her.

That’s really all there is to it.

It’s like a law of nature: half-ogre-inflicted-beating = pain.

Don’t follow?

I’ll explain more, but you have to meet me half-way. If the answer above doesn’t make sense to you given the point of view from which you’re examining it, you have to be willing to set that point of view aside, or else the rest of this will be pointless.

Got it?

Okay.

Now, I expect you’d agree with the following statement: “Barring any mitigating factors, being punched repeatedly in the face by a raging half-ogre will result in pain and damage.”

Everybody with me on that?

Now, Mackenzie has a mitigating factor: she is mystically immune to mundane damage.

Take that with our premise about being punched repeatedly in the face, etc., etc., and you’re left with pain.

Beating = Pain + Injury

Beating - Injury = Pain

Simple, no?

Now, some people are going, “Well, yeah, the initial pain would be caused by sudden physical displacement/pressure/shock/whatever…”

Sorry, but remember what I said about leaving aside the point of view you’re using? That’s the wrong perspective to employ here. The initial pain was caused by the same thing as the lingering pain: being punched in the face repeatedly by a raging half-ogre.

“But what actually causes it?” is the refrain, I expect. (Or at least, it was when I tried to explain this on the forum.)

I’ll say in answer, once again: being punched in the face repeatedly by a raging half-ogre. That’s just the way the world works, folks.

Counter-argument: “That’s not an answer. In real life, being punched in the face by somebody that strong would cause lingering pain, but that pain has an actual cause: the damage inflicted. It doesn’t happen just because that’s the way the world works.”

I have to disagree… there is no ultimate cause for anything in our world other than “Just because that’s the way the world works.” We can take any explanation posited for pain and at each level keep asking, “But what caused that?” until we’re down discussing the behavior of the subatomic particles involved, and nobody will be able to say why what’s happening is happening except “because that’s what happens when these things do that.”

Well, this is the same thing, only the “final cause” of “because that’s what happens when these things do that.” isn’t quite as far down the chain.

Mackenzie feels lingering pain because… barring intervention… that’s what happens when an ogre punches you. Immense pain, that does not fade away.

A cop out? Not in the least. I started with the (not terribly revolutionary) idea that Mackenzie was immune to physical damage but not to pain, and then realized a world structure that this (and more than a few other things) would actually make some sense in, because it makes no fucking sense in ours.

The pain thing is actually the least of it! You’ve already accepted that a human-sized, human-shaped person of human density can be punched in the head like that and not be injured. Why can you suspend disbelief for that but not for the pain?

All the explanations for her invulnerability to injury or her susceptibility to pain which would make a physical-scientific sense in our world ultimately fall apart. You can try to argue with that, and I won’t even argue back. Not because I can’t… but because I’m tired of that subject. After having spent decades reading and years of my life writing superhero fiction, I know that you ultimately can’t explain something like physical invulnerability in a human-sized person that’s still essentially a person.

If it’s actual invulnerability and not “tougher than normal skin”, it becomes even more of a stretch.

Certainly you can explain it away, with enough pseudoscientific babble, but if the genre is “fantasy”, why bother reaching?

Now, if this revelation of how Mackenzie’s invulnerability works with regards to pain interferes with your ability to believe that deep down, even magical fantasy worlds with dragons and pixies and giants and ants the size of horses and horses with wings and wizards who can throw fire and summon lightning are governed by the same set of physical laws as ours, well…

Words can not express how sorry that makes me feel.

Addendum
To everybody I’ve interacted with, I apologize if I’ve come across as disrespectfully abrupt… but I’ve had this conversation (or variations of it) so many times that parts of it wear thin rather easily.

If you don’t care how it works and just want to suspend disbelief… go on doing that, honestly. I read superhero comics. I’m not going to throw stones.

But if you do care how it works and you just can’t get it to add up, this is the key point you have to understand:

It’s magic.

“There has to be more than that!”

There is… but you won’t be able to make any sense of it until you accept that it’s magic. Those two words are the beginning of the explanation, not the end. Tell yourself that: it’s magic… i.e., not biology as we know it, not physics as we know it, not any science as we know it… but magic. If you can’t grasp that, then you’re probably better off with simple suspension of disbelief.