Pirates Of The Caribbean 1 curse. Steal a coin, have a terrible time til it’s all returned. Solid curse. Real nobody-to-blame-but-yourself curse. Easy to lift unless you’ve really gone nuts with your spending, else potentially impossible. Good curse.
You know what’s a lousy curse? Pirates 2 curse. Cursed with a spot on your hand that attracts a Kraken who Kraks on behalf of Davy Jones, himself subject to, and issuer of, a variety of convoluted curses which are weirdly transactional/contractual in nature.
Though the series doesn’t fall over entirely til the third one, a massive Lore Burden is put upon it in the second one on account of its not understanding that Adventure Where Curses Are Real is not the same genre as Fantasy. You can and should write something set in the real world where it turns out that A Curse Was Surprisingly Real. It’s the best genre!
X-Files, though a mess, is a fun example of staying in this genre. It’s never fantasy, it’s just that in the real world, that we all live in, which is huge, billions of people, there is occasionally, gosh dangit, a vampire. In Pirates 3, the world is suddenly flat and you can sail off the edge of it. Cursed.
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