Real-Life Horrors

When I include those horrors in fiction or gaming, I USUALLY have a supernatural agent behind it because ... it's TOO frightening to know that we can do this crap to ourselves, sometimes even eagerly...

All I do is just describe my actual anxiety into words. Just think about how you would feel if some criminal was targeting you, or a family member was deathly ill. Its a pretty awful feeling that readers can instantly relate to.

Hasako said:

Alternate world battles can be brutal once you write and do enough research, even inspiration flows.
While if we're talking, irl, just being mortal and the common issues from reports of battles, etc., are horrific once you are in there.

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I don’t know why, but I just can’t imagine horror in a magic/fantasy genre. Horror in our real world — yes, absolutely. Horror in a cyberpunk world — sure, that works. Horror in space — it’s a bit trickier, but still possible. But horror in a magic world? No way, I can’t picture it at all.

BearlyAlive said:

You forgot the worst horror of them all: Needing to wake up early on a Monday...

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Poleg said:

The slowly encroaching entropy that will consume all things.

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Are you talking about that myth that all the stars will eventually go out and heat will disappear from the universe? Even if that’s true, have you thought about the fact that we only see the part of the universe that our telescopes are capable of showing us?

Dawnathon said:

Some of the scariest real life horrors are the ones that make sense why they happen, while also being things the victim had no control over. One that's always stood out to me was the use of non-functioning anesthesia but fully-functioning paralytics during intensive surgeries. You see, anesthesia alone wouldn't be enough to keep patients still even while unconscious, so paralyzing drugs are also used so that they won't twitch or spasm during the operation.

The problem is that since the patient can't move at all, they can't do anything at all. Not even being able to signal that they're still conscious because the anesthesia didn't work. But it's the sedation of anesthesia that lets them not experience the pain of the procedure. The paralytic only locks them in place while they feel every second of the operation. Just temporarily experiencing locked-in syndrome by itself can lead to lifelong trauma. Experiencing that on top of feeling their bodies being sliced apart and having things shoved in or ripped out? It can directly lead to suicide for the patient. There are few things that can make you feel that helpless, and it's all because of an oversight from one of the professionals, nothing you have control over.

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I thought about this for a long time before replying here. I've been studying this topic for quite a while.
Tell me, is it allowed by the rules here to write about medications and their effects on the brain?
In reality, very few people know this, but an anesthesiologist is one of the most important doctors.
Moreover, anesthesiologists and psychiatrists are the kinds of doctors you basically can't accuse of anything. In court, no one accepts testimony from people who were under brain-affecting drugs.
This is a huge black hole without any laws — a perfect playground for the mafia. You get what I'm saying, right?
Medicine and the mafia look almost like an ideal symbiosis. Have you ever thought about that?
I'm not trying to scare you or anything!
In normal medicine, a good anesthesiologist does everything correctly — though it's complicated — but if you don't have any serious or complex diseases, there's almost a 100% chance you'll be fine during and after the surgery.
I've studied a huge number of protections against errors and unexpected events in anesthesiology.
The case you described — waking up during surgery and being unable to move — sounds really terrifying, but it's addressed by a whole range of devices.
In the past, monitors could always tell if the heart rate spiked dramatically, meaning the person was waking up, so they'd just add more drugs.
Then came brain activity monitors that accurately show whether the person is asleep or awake.
But even if someone wakes up briefly, they usually won't remember the horror because almost all full anesthesia drugs cause amnesia starting from the moment they take effect.
And here again — unfortunately — this is a very convenient thing for the mafia.
But you have to understand: the memory wipe only happens after the drugs are administered, not before, and that's actually a really good safeguard.
Overall, I'd love to make a computer game about anesthesiology so that more people learn just how much work these doctors do — the ones most people know almost nothing about.

AliceMoonvale said:

Insomnia, chronic anxiety and sleep paralysis are pretty spooky.
I would know.

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I know that, and it wasn’t scary — it was just weird. The thing is, in that moment the world doesn’t feel completely real. Yeah, not being able to move sounds terrifying, but for some reason you don’t think about it much at the time. I was thinking “this is strange”, but I guess it’s just part of the dream/sleep state. And then I just got up.


Has something like that ever happened to you?

HungrySheep said:

Bills.

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Yes, it can be just sad.

GearMagical said:

I thought about this for a long time before replying here. I've been studying this topic for quite a while.
Tell me, is it allowed by the rules here to write about medications and their effects on the brain?
In reality, very few people know this, but an anesthesiologist is one of the most important doctors.
Moreover, anesthesiologists and psychiatrists are the kinds of doctors you basically can't accuse of anything. In court, no one accepts testimony from people who were under brain-affecting drugs.
This is a huge black hole without any laws — a perfect playground for the mafia. You get what I'm saying, right?
Medicine and the mafia look almost like an ideal symbiosis. Have you ever thought about that?

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Ironically, if they worked together, they would both LOSE money, at least in America. Both organized crime and the pharma industry are profitable because of the laws on the books here

ConansWitchBaby said:

How the universe can fall apart because a single electron chose to do a little wiggle at the wrong time.

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Are you talking about the so-called quantum vacuum bomb?
I heard about it when I was reading up on the cobalt bomb.
A lot of people — myself included — think that both of these bombs are impossible, and I agree, although for my book I’m going to write that a radiation bomb is possible.
In the hardcore scenario of my apocalypse, first the Earth would be cracked open using fissures in the tectonic plates, then everyone would be infected with diseases, and finally cobalt bombs would be detonated.
But let me say right away: we’re lucky because in reality none of this is possible.

GearMagical said:

Are you talking about that myth that all the stars will eventually go out and heat will disappear from the universe?

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stars *definitely* have a lifespan. It depends upon how much hydrogen coalesced in their formation. But every star will eventually run out of fuel. Long before that though, our own star... the sun. It will swell so big it fries us. nothing is forever. Not the earth, not the sun... nor even the stars.

Real life horror: beans on toast

TinaMigarlo said:

had sleep paralysis *once*, one time only thing. I was young, and never slept on my back... since.
wow, was that a weird experience. didn't find out what it was, until years later.

I was awake for surgery once.
I was having my face rebuilt, after getting hurt bad.
They gave me a shot in my room, wheeled me down to the cutting room.
i was woozy. They told me to count down from 20 to 1.
i was told, you can't make "one'. Naturally, I fought like hell to make one, cause you know, a challenge.

never made one.

I did however, watch with open eyes, unable to move.
as my *face* got worked on and rebuilt.
I saw everything. I heard everything. I felt everything. later described the procedures to a capital T.
even ID'd the guy that worked on my face. They tried to trick me, too.
said pick him out of a "line up" of three dudes. none of them. you? over there, in the back? it was you.
I can tell you what grinding a facial bone sounds and *smells* like.

when they finally started stitching me up, it didn't really hurt to have skin snipped and stitched.
it was pleasure, as compared to the rest. knew I was almost done.

it was a fun time.

what else. guy standing right next to me, got shot in the face. that was a fun time.
that involves talking to the state police investigators, prolly like 20 straight hours. fun times.

the awake for face rebuilding, i put that in one novel. too good not to use, and I *know* that's written realistically, lol.
same for the guy getting shot in the face scene. Changed the names, but the scene is molecule for molecule how it went down.
they're both in different books.
oh yeah, PTSD. Seeing the images or little movies? That's a feature in more than one book.
not a subject I know nothing about.

when i read violence in print, sometimes i get a clear sense the author is just trying to write about something they have zero experience with.
same goes for dealing with the violence, how they act afterwards, all that.
I call that "cartoon violence", when I read that.
something as simple as a hunting scene, people that do it regularly can tell when the author is just winging it.
gun-fu shootouts... hand to hand fights... using a knife on a human, most military scenes... these are the worst offenders, it stands out the most.

accident scenes are another one few people do well. or should I say like real life.

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I've already replied a bit about anesthesia and sleep paralysis earlier, so start reading there so I don't repeat myself. I'll get more to the point now:
I'm really sorry you had to go through that! I'll try to explain possible reasons for what happened:

1 You were in a weakened state because of severe trauma? They decided to do the surgery with not a very large amount of medication. This is because when a person is weakened from trauma, they don't give too many drugs. With a larger amount of medication, the person doesn't actually fall asleep forever but could stop breathing — though whether they'd feel like they're suffocating or not is unknown. By the way, during full general anesthesia, they always insert a breathing tube into the mouth for artificial ventilation of the lungs — do you remember that? Also, incidentally, if the surgery takes a long time, they tape the patient's eyes shut because, surprisingly, under full anesthesia the eyes stay open. But if the operation isn't very long, they might just apply gel to the eyes. In modern trendy medicine, sometimes instead of tape they use transparent stickers — just so as not to scare relatives and friends if they happen to observe.
2 It's very rare but possible: you have a high innate resistance to medications. This is both good and bad. On one hand, no one can secretly poison you, but on the other hand, surgeries are more complicated for you.
3 The option that might offend you. I'm not trying to accuse you of anything — this is just a theory! People who use a lot of illegal substances develop high resistance to drugs in anesthesiology. Anesthesiologists really dislike these cases because they have to dramatically increase the doses, which raises the risks. But I think this isn't your case. Although if it is true, now you secretly know there's yet another downside to that.

As for your story about the shooting — I have many friends from former USSR countries, and they told me about the shootings in the 90s that they saw even in childhood, sometimes right in the middle of the day on the street. Why do people who actually know about this usually not write about it? When they told me, you could see they didn't really want to talk about it. I think it's clearly not something to brag about. I believe when a person really sees something like that, they don't want to think about it afterward. It doesn't necessarily mean they have some kind of trauma. It just means they witnessed something that, in other circumstances, could have killed them. Although I like the quote from that one comedian who laughs at everything. That's why I want to write femdom in the horror genre, where I'll tackle the scariest topics with full honesty and humor.

Money

CharlesEBrown said:

Ironically, if they worked together, they would both LOSE money, at least in America. Both organized crime and the pharma industry are profitable because of the laws on the books here

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What do you think about Theranos?

GearMagical said:

What do you think about Theranos?

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Had to look them up. Frauds on that level appear in every industry. Some actually wind up with a real (though not exactly what they claimed) product, others are pure fraudsters.
Kind of impressive that they pulled their nonsense off for 12 years before the lawsuits started coming in and it took three more to bring them down.