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What Monkey Paw Wish would you be willing to take?
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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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I meet a beautiful intelligent woman, we are the perfect match for each other, we fall in love, get married and live happily ever after.
Missing specifier. You each fall in love with other people.
Missing specifier. You each marry neither your perfect matches nor the other people you each fell in love with.
Mental illness can provide happiness. This seems almost good, and yet...
Insufficiently specific. You both die in the same mass road accident, travelling in separate vehicles with your respective spouses, not long after you're each married.
Excellent monkey's paw. I thought I was being specific, but apparently not even close. Definitely not worth it.
I'd argue this is more in line with the literal genie trope.
Fun lore. Literal genies come mostly from players and DMs quibbling over the wish spell, but they do have roots in Arabian lore like A Thousand Nights and a Night: Most genies in bottles were trapped by Solomon and are in different states of bondage, so those who you beg for assistance might provide an untoward solution. An ifreet commanded Deliver me from this sandstorm might take you to antarctica.
The monkey paw version is to allow them to fall in love with each other and then, like Eurydice wedding to Orpheus, suffer an unfortunate accident and perish right after the ceremony.
Ok take two, the wish is actually granted:
Your beautiful wife is incredibly intelligent and is perfect for you... as a result of profound psychopathy. She has chosen you specifically as the next in a chain of husbands with whom she has meticulously crafted idyllic relationships for the purpose of complete psychological and emotional control. Once sufficiently in her intoxicatingly romantic grasp, she convinces you of the simple joys of homicide. You eliminate her previous husband together, then your own family as a gesture of pure devotion. You fall into a pattern of orphanage arson, elderly abuse, and kitten stomping before she ultimately gets you both positions as mid level managers at united healthcare.
You couldn't be happier.
If this was just some minor crime, sounds great honestly. I definitely draw the line at the murder of innocents though. Not worth it.
Yes, all kitten-stomping and the other stuff, but United Healthcare?
No way. I'm not a monster!
It is all the result of paranoid schizophrenia. She doesn't exist, you estrange your family, and you ultimately die from a slow descent into indigence and squalor because you are unable to escape the prison of your own mind.
Realistic. Doesn't the monkey's paw have to actually grant the wish though?
I was gonna say it would be to easy if every wish is just a mental problem skewing reality. it should do the thing in reality and fuck you in reality.
Hmmm... yeah maybe. I'll take another crack in a minute.
Well, reality is what we perceive, so it might actually be a worthy tradeoff for some people
As you celebrate your 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th anniversary and witness the heat death of the universe, you realize that all matter and energy has dispersed, is no longer observable, and that you and your beloved will be floating in a void of nothingness forever.
I kinda don't hate this, if it's an eternal youth / total invincibility sort of thing, and existing in the vacuum of space isn't uncomfortable.
Actually, with future technology it might be possible to modify our brains to make a sort of shared virtual dream world, with an avatar-style neural connection. Not a bad way to spend eternity.
Also even without brain/body modification, we might be able to train ourselves to hibernate and just wait for a big quantum fluctuation. Assuming the universe doesn't have an end, we would eventually meet intelligent life, even humans, again.
I'm honestly undecided. As a mortal human, I don't really know if I want true immortality or not.