Yet Another Sideblog @fantasyscifibookshelf - Tumblr Blog

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die.

Every so often I come across yet another post hah hah only serious talking about the fey (by whatever name) in the modern world that totally fails to understand that your stainless steel cutlery has more and purer iron in it than anything available to a tenth century peasant, and certainly more than their nails or horseshoes.

Every stainless steel screw, nail, push tack, playground frame (yes most of those “plastic” playgrounds are built on a steel frame or if a titanium frame the bolts and screws are still steel), rebar), the zipper on your jeans -

Like look: Iron is actually so ubiquitous in modern life it’s INVISIBLE while being EVERYWHERE. If you WANTED to meet a creature sensitive to iron you would have to work to make sure you didn’t either invite them somewhere surrounded by it, or end up wearing it by accident.

Just a minor pet peeve.

usuallyherdragon

Huh.

Whenever I see that kind of stuff I explain it away with “the carbon present in the steel renders the iron useless for that purpose”. It’s not perfect, of course, but I find it helps me.

findingfeather

Yeah so funny story: there is more carbon in most of the stuff we call “iron” (wrought iron, cast iron, pig iron, essentially anything less smelted and purified than steel) than there is in steel.

Carbon dissoves into iron very very easily in its liquid form. You don’t actually get steel by adding carbon to the ore; you get steel by removing all but a small and very specifically handled amount of carbon from the steel.

Like sure: carbon is part of what gives steel its particular qualities. But that carbon is already there in the ore, and inherent in the smelting process to get the ore to actually be iron, and to get good steel you actually remove most of the carbon and avoid adding much more, down to a few tenths of a percent.

[nb: sometimes the actual process of this, especially back when we literally only knew how to do things by trial-and-error and did not actually understand the atomic metallurgy involved, is a weird back-and-forth of adding carbon via charcoal and then burning it away, etc, and it gets complex; the result is still “get rid of most of the carbon” and making steel always involves removing carbon from the iron smelted from ore.]

(You might be able to argue that the chromium usually added for stainless interferes, but since the premise is usually that rust - ie oxidization - destroys the effects of iron and the chromium is added to prevent that …enh. And that still does nothing to non-stainless.)

So like sure: you can imagine that nothing but “pure” iron actually works, and any adulturation makes it useless. In which case just about nothing we have ever called “iron” or used as “iron” for most of human existence - absolutely including all of those “iron” bells, horseshoes, nails, and so on, that the legends are built around - counts as iron, because steel is quite literally the purest form of iron that has much functional use for us, and the iron we call “steel” has quite genuinely become purer and purer iron over the centuries, with all of the processes involved in making steel (especially not-stainless-steel) being based on removing the carbon already present (or avoiding the stuff that gets in naturally via the air in the process of smelting) and creating basically the purest that iron can get before it becomes soft and useless for anything except chemistry and magnetism.

So if an old iron nail, or an iron churchbell, or an iron crowbar, or any of the hundreds of things we call “iron” that have a higher amount of carbon in them than steel does count as “iron”, steel sure does. I know: late C20 urban fantasy lied to you. But still.

onyxbird

🤣 Maybe there has to be enough carbon in the iron for it to affect the fae. The stories about fae being affected by “iron” were presumably using the terminology of the time, so if “iron” practically meant the element iron in combination with large quantities of carbon, then that detail wouldn’t make it into the story unless 1) the person telling it knew there was a distinction to be made and 2) thought it was relevant for the listeners. Maybe all this refining to separate the carbon from the iron is making things more fae-friendly. 😉

Maybe it’s something else keeping the fae away in the modern day, and someday in the future someone will be picking apart stories about how you can kill the fae with, e.g., “pencil lead” (without specifying “(technically graphite)”) and wondering why the fae aren’t back since no one uses pencils anymore and there are laws to keep lead out of consumer products.

(Protagonist meets a fae a questions how steel doesn’t affect them. Fae: “Oh, yeah. You guys finally started getting the excess carbon out of this stuff. It used to be horrible but now it just makes me itch a little with too much exposure. Sometimes if it’s really poor-quality steel, I get a little bit of a rash.)

findingfeather

Oh I mean: it’s also worth noting that at the time most of the stories we actually get with some reliability these days (so around the turn of the last millennium and later - usually much later) were being put about, iron was specifically associated with a few things, and the fact that it was church bells was often, in the stories, really relevant - as was, often, the fact that it was horseshoes or iron nails, both of which were made by village blacksmiths, who were always acknowledged to be tricky magic folk and very possibly possessing power against things that wanted to hurt you.

And, despite the fondness of modern SF writers and others to neatly and tidily class various fey and other European folkloric creatures as all tricksy-false-dangerous-bad, OR all good-safe-friendly, OR even to be able to neatly state which kind are which based on rules … honestly in the past they ran the whole spectrum, depending on how each region, village or even family perceived things, and when the story got written down, and where anyone was on the most recent religious or social upheavals or … anything else. And some of them didn’t care that much about iron in general, but specifically reacted to the iron horseshoe, or iron nails, or iron bells, or …

When you actually dig into the folklore, especially digging into it with the same rigour that you do other parts of history and historical anthropology and archaeology, rather than just taking the eighteenth century compendiums (who really liked to homogenize if they could) at face-value, one actually finds a huge range of underlying assumptions in the folklore about how and why the iron or iron artefacts are working, and how much of the other part (that is: the holiness of the bell, the magic of the blacksmith, the power of the cunning man or woman who’s messing around with this stuff, even literally how and where the “supernatural” creatures fit into the predominantly devoutly Xtian landscape - and no it’s not always just as evil devils!) is important; it’s a big mess, because it’s folklore, not a rigorously thought out worldbuilding norm, and not subject to rigorous falsifiable investigation.

Folklore is usually messy like that.

My peeve is simply quite literally when people make a big fuss about iron and don’t realize how absolutely inundated we are with some of the purest forms of the stuff that we’ve ever had (and that have any utility).

findingfeather

#one interesting worldbuilding idea: what counts as iron is what people collectively agree is iron#the chemical content is irrelevant it’s the belief that counts#point the second: steel-type pokemon are super effective against fairy-types check and mate

hdu hide either of these in the tags I love them both XD XD <3

whetstonefires

loving this pushback against the continued promulgation of early-modern cultural homogenization ty ty and also

fucking steel have i yelled lately about how it’s

it’s not a thing, it’s not–there’s not one thing you can point to can go ‘that’s steel’ even as much as you can say that i.e. copper and tin yield bronze, it’s just—–

you know why we can get it to do so many, wildly different things in different contexts, thin and springy or massive and rigid or–

you know why? you know???? because ‘steel’ is just a catch-all term for ‘iron we did some intense shit to.’

the intense shit varies! it necessarily involves extreme heat and control of carbon content, but the how much and how and when of these things is what you alter to get different results.

steel is iron that we have compelled to assume specific structures on the molecular level. depending on what we want from the iron those structures vary! it’s still iron, though. usually more iron than iron, as op has discussed. it’s just iron that we’ve tortured in especially exquisite ways. it’s just iron! what the hell! what the hell!

steel is a social construct.

findingfeather

I’m sorry “steel is a social construct” is officially my favourite thing said today you get the gold star except I’m on a keyboard where it’s hard to make stars.

loving this pushback against the continued promulgation of early-modern cultural homogenization ty ty and also

Like I have already spent years losing my shit about this on a mediaeval level thanks to, like, my degree but I am increasingly pushing that wayyyy forward into the earlymodern, yesss because fuck I’m literally not sure we should be calling 16th century folklore in Kent the same “English” folklore as 16th century York and it sure as shit ain’t the same as 16th century Cornwall and all of them have wildly different ideas of what’s going on with fairies (and ALAS we have such incredibly limited sources that we are not even sure what all they think was going on with them because it comes up only in very random and rare bits and pieces, often in court cases, without any other context)!

soilrocks

Would the iron in human blood also be enough to deter fae? Like I understand that they probably didn’t know our blood works by having iron in it when these things began, but still.

Also what about the iron present in most soil? Soil that doesn’t drain well usually has lots of reduced iron that is visible in the form of grey mottles. I’m from an area where the soil is bright red from clay content, so it’s not easy to see the other iron at first glance, but it’s there.

So in addition to the what society agrees as iron and considering the power blacksmiths are said to have, I would like to put forth the idea that the thing would also have to have been deliberately crafted/put there to be effective against the fae.

findingfeather

They absolutely did not know that Fe ions in our blood when the lore started, as that was demonstrated in the 1700s.

I mean from a fiction POV, you can literally do anything you want, and can also mess around with “how MUCH iron is too much?” “what does the iron actually DO?” and so on, because it’s literally garlic and vampires.

From a lore perspective, pick your poison: as noted multiple times, almost all of the folklore we have about this shit is actually derived from extremely and emphatically Christian sources so if you go back to them you’ll rapidly find that it’s as much the fact that it’s a cross, or a church bell, or been blessed by the priest, or the human using the iron thing is saying the Lord’s Prayer or the Hail Mary, or the bones of a saint are involved, or whatever. Because the actual folklore we have is from an aggressively Xtian era - or is being passed down through families (and is therefore idiosyncratic in the way these things are) with huge variation.

As I said: one of my foremothers would insist that all of the iron is worthless if you haven’t gotten it blessed. Another would insist that one was a dirty papist. Until someone can make some kind of rigorous repeatable trial and publish the results and the methodology, there’s gonna be some heavy unknowns, because there’s literally not a single authoritative source on this; just a lot of folklore and local traditions and story-lines.

purronronner

Where does cold iron come into all this?

findingfeather

I mean in the real world cold iron is just iron. It’s a figure of speech, along the lines of “the taste of cold steel”, a referent to the fact that generally speaking if you’re not LITERALLY heating it up, iron (like many other metals) is cold to the touch.

An equivalent is the whole “eat hot lead” quip. The “hot lead” isn’t some special kind of lead. It’s just lead (in bullets)… .that is hot … .because it came out of a gun.

Various fantasy authors and RPGs have attempted to codify it, and people who really are determined to homogenize and solidify folklore into One Thing speculate endlessly on what it might be down to trying to insist it means a certain level of magnetization, but the actual phrase comes out of “iron - that is metal - generally feels cold, so this is an evocative way to talk about it in English.”

#queue we go

kindof-amess

Thinking about the Hadestown proshot and Orpheus being introduced wiping down a table with his back to the audience. Hermes has to call out to him again to get him to take his opening bow, and for the show to start, Orpheus has to turn around.

#queue we go

kuttithevangu

There’s nothing quite so disappointing as a story that’s this close 🤏 to Getting It but then they do some absolute clown shoes nonsense that makes it clear they don’t get it at all

bowditch

listen, i love the LOTR movies. i do! i love them. they are cinematic masterpieces of practical effects and team effort. it's astounding they look and sound as good as they do for what movies were at the time, the budget they had, etc.

but one of the quibbles i have with them is faramir's arc. in the books, faramir refuses to take the ring. in fact, he refuses to even know what object the item of power is. he tells frodo not to tell him! "not were gondor in ruins and i alone could save it, would i use this thing!" he studied with gandalf for years and years. he KNOWS objects of dark power corrupt.

and in the commentary for the LOTR movies, the writing cast (Philipa Boyens, specifically, I think?) talks about the change to have Faramir try to take Frodo to Gondor so they can use the object of power. she says that they've built the ring up for all the prior running time, to convey to the audience how powerful it is, and that Faramir comes along and "strips the ring of all its power."

i have been haunted by the Almost Getting It for years. Frodo's encounter with Faramir is important because of that! Faramir has so many reasons to succumb and rationalize trying to use the ring, and he says no. Frodo desperately needs that hope, that it CAN be done, at that specific moment. he's also been separated from the group charged with getting him to Mordor because of betrayal, and now only has Sam and Gollum. Faramir's refusal to take him off course or take the ring also gives Frodo hope that he still has support from the world around him, and that not all men have fallen and become lost already.

i understand many other changes to the story for drama and for run time, but that's one detail that's always struck me as illustrating precisely how close they were to understanding The Point, only to miss it entirely

#queue we go

alienatedartt

i would tag the post this is based on but I lost it 😔tag the og if you know it !! here is the og by @goldensunset !!

#project hail mary

wildminti

This deleted scene killed me 😂 Imagine 4 years of this. Sleepover of all time LMAOOO

#project hail mary

for-those-who-wait

Forgetting your friend is both blind and a professional ragebaiter

#project hail mary

tomhoppusdelonge

i bet being stabbed to the hilt feels so fucking good actually

#queue we go

jellyfishforest135

Activated them like sleeper agents

grac3yn

eva stratt they could never make me hate you

gallopinggallifreyans

tony head as different flavours of dad

cloudabserk

people say rocky is lesser because “grace talks down to him” but that’s literally just how grace talks

tuesdayisfordancing

#it's a good thing he teaches middle schoolers #bc if he was teaching any younger he'd be saying shit like “okay guys say goodbye to the fighter jet!" #and half the science team would respond “goodbye fighter jet!” tags via @hylasregilla

assiraphales

frodo getting criticized for decades for not doing much / not being a hero compared to sam is fitting when you consider mental health and strength is often trivialized. frodo carried the most dangerous and insidious item in middle earth for YEARS. ancient beings (elves, gandalf, etc) were taunted and tempted by it. boromir was corrupted within weeks without even touching it. men and hobbits turned against their brethren for it. killed for it. and frodo, with a wound from a morgul knife, bore it’s weight when no one else could. had it been anyone else, middle earth would have fallen.

no, he couldn’t have done it without his samwise. but isn’t that a lesson in itself?

shrubfriend

I love you Martha Wells. I love you and your beef with privatized transit and whatever happened to you at Rainforest Cafe.

regonym

hope is a weapon, by @mumblesplash (x)

Project Hail Mary (2026) dir. Phil Lord, Chris Miller

#project hail mary

youremysunshine8

Secunit, talking to Three: ok, now if you want to pass as an augmented human you're gonna need to get surgery. Personally ART removed some length from my limbs, but it had some more extreme options available as well-

Iris: Wait rewind. ART did surgery on you?

Secunit: yes

ART: Yes

Three: it was obvious someone did surgery on it, look how off model it is

(to humans, Three and Secunit look identical in body shape)

Ratthi: I kind of assumed you'd just grown out your hair

Seth: ART doesn't have the permits to do that kind of surgery

ART: it was consensual

Secunit: don't say it like that

Iris: what were the more extreme options????

Secunit: I'm not having this conversation. ART, you handle this. Don't be a freak.