This video was sponsored by
Campfire! Guaranteed not to fuse itself to your hand and/or whisper
dark forbidding secrets in your ear. A while back I did a trope talk on Macguffins,
and part of my thesis in that video was that the term "macguffin" gets bandied about a little
more than it should and applied to stuff it doesn't actually describe. Sometimes it almost
gets treated as a synonym for "plot device", a category of objects that exist to drive the
plot in specific directions, but technically macguffins are just a subcategory of plot device
- specifically, macguffins are plot devices that only drive the plot by being wanted with no other
factors playing into their role in the story. But macguffins have something of an evil twin -
a plot device that resembles them superficially, but drives the plot through some internal
malevolence that corrupts the story around them. Instead of being a passive player
in the narrative, these plot devices are active and antagonistic. I am, of course,
referring to the trope of The Cursed Artifact. Cursed artifacts are a very common and extremely
old plot device. They show up sporadically in greek mythology and much more frequently in
norse mythology, where you can't go ten feet without tripping over a cursed ring or sword or
necklace or something, so suffice to say this trope has some staying power. The base concept is
very simple: a cursed artifact is an object that has some kind of negative effect on the people
around it. The exact effect and the radius can vary - some cursed artifacts only affect the
person who owns them, while others radiate a highly rancid vibe that makes everything around
them progressively worse. Cursed artifacts often function by tempting or encouraging the
wielder's darker impulses, but sometimes they're a little more brute-force and just make
bad stuff happen around them, like they radiate bad luck. Cursed artifacts are frequently acquired
by protagonists, at which point they become a problem. The plot is often driven, at least in
part, by the protagonist's need or desire to get rid of the cursed artifact, often in opposition to
a usually curse-driven need or desire to keep it. Now the nature of the "curse" can vary a lot.
Some cursed artifacts are explicitly magically cursed by some kind of supernatural effect, but
some are more like… radioactive, or infectious, or otherwise dangerous in a much more
mundane and physical way. And the nature of the artifact and the curse determines a
lot about the role it can play in the story. For instance, some cursed artifacts are sentient
- either haunted by some malevolent entity or being a malevolent entity in their own right. It's
most common for sentient artifacts to be actively malicious, although it's technically not necessary
- in rare cases the artifact's personality might be totally chill, but the effect it has on the
people around it is still generally negative, which is often what happens when the cursed
artifact is actually a person - consider how writers often frame Helen of Troy, a woman whose
beauty was so ridiculously over-the-top that her abduction triggered a ten-year war that she was
constantly blamed for despite having no active part in the proceedings - her beauty is literally
treated like a curse. Anyway, that aside, sentient malevolent artifacts are pretty dangerous. They
frequently whisper dark, corruptive truths into the ear of the wielder to try and push them
into More Evil. They also often act on their own - cursed swords are especially bad about
this, and will frequently jerk around and try to stab people on their own with minimal input from
the wielder. In extreme cases sentient artifacts might try to take over the user and function as a
Superpowered Evil Side. These things are extremely common in settings like D&D and are also fairly
common in the broader space of fantasy literature, where they are almost always specifically swords.
Depending on the moral standing of the wielder, dealing with these things can be pretty tricky.
More morally upstanding wielders generally don't like using them at all, but they might be
magically bound to the artifact and unable to get rid of it. In other cases the wielder might
not approve of the artifact's attitude but needs their power for whatever reason. In more morally
dubious cases the wielder and the artifact might get along fine - most common with villains for
obvious reasons. An excellent example of this kind of cursed artifact is the demon sword Stormbringer
from the Elric Saga, a series of classic fantasy novels written by the excellently named Michael
Moorcock. Stormbringer is a fun case because it is an extremely evil weapon - it's literally an
actual demon that drains people's souls through a single cut and uses them to fortify its wielder.
The wielder in question is the protagonist, Elric, a chronically ill and ultimately good-hearted
guy who unfortunately has to use Stormbringer as basically a mobility aid, since the evil
powerup is significantly more accessible than the medicine he'd have to take otherwise.
The idea of "swords that are actually demons" is actually pretty popular in non-Tolkien classic
fantasy - the concept also shows up in Larry Niven's short story, "Not Long Before The End",
where the demon sword actively vampirizes the life force of the wielder, who can't put it
down because the demon is biting their hand. Now some cursed artifacts aren't technically
sentient on their own, but are still corruptive in a passive way, encouraging bad impulses and
negativity in the wielder. They don't abruptly flip a morality switch or anything, but they
usually push the character emotionally - it's fairly common for wielders to feel more tired and
angry to encourage them to lash out at the people around them, for instance. Now it might be more
accurate to say these cursed artifacts aren't obviously sentient - they frequently display some
kind of agenda, often in service of a large-scale villain they belong to, but they tend to be fairly
passive in the story itself and don't display the kind of agency we expect from a sentient cursed
artifact. These artifacts won't unexpectedly swing around and decapitate anyone, but they'll slowly
and insidiously encourage the darker impulses of the wielder and turn them into a worse version of
themself. They won't take over the character, but they'll try and wear them down. This is arguably
the category The One Ring falls into - sure, it serves a dark master with a powerful will of
his own, but the ring itself can't do much beyond bounce in inconvenient directions. The
insidious nature of the One Ring is that, even if it doesn't manage to corrupt the
wielder within the first minute of contact like it did with smeagol, it wears down the
willpower of everyone around it and is just frankly exhausting to deal with. The effect it
has on people can be over or subtle depending on the individual, and the subtle effects
are often significantly more dangerous. And lastly, some cursed artifacts aren't
sentient or insidiously corruptive - they're just really bad to be around. They don't tend to have
an explicit impact on anyone's moral character, but they do have a tendency to drive them mad
or kill them dead. Unexpectedly deadly weapons, barely-contained plagues, tomes of forbidden
knowledge and garden-variety radioactives all fall into this category. Depending on how unhealthy
they are to be around, they might create cursed locations around them - deadly environments
warped by the sheer malignance infused into the object itself. Or for, you know, set design.
Technically speaking this category includes almost all mythological cursed artifacts, which didn't
tend to be particularly malevolent but would do things like cause death and misfortune to anyone
around them through the power of bad vibes. These cursed artifacts are more karmically
unpleasant and cause bad luck or tragedy to follow them around. The most famous of these is
probably Andvari's Ring, also known as the Ring of the Nibelung, which was stolen from the dwarf
Andvari by Loki, causing Andvari to curse it to bring misfortune and death to its owner. Loki
handed it off and it proceeded to do just that, producing the plot of the Ring cycle and by
extension the one opera everyone knows about. The ring doesn't really do anything, but bad things
happen to the people around it. It basically just serves to justify the tragedy happening.
Now it's pretty clear by now that cursed artifacts come in all shapes and sizes, and
it makes sense that they can correspondingly play a lot of different narrative roles. At its
core a cursed artifact is nothing more than a source of narrative conflict, and conflict can
fit into a story in a lot of different ways. For instance, in some stories, the cursed artifact
is in the macguffin slot. Everybody wants it, everybody's after it. The curse might even
be that everybody wants it, and will go to increasingly immoral lengths to get it. In some
stories the fact that the thing is cursed isn't obvious or known, and is only revealed when they
actually find it, producing some complications for the third act. While these cursed artifacts
technically still aren't macguffins due to their unique properties, in some stories those
properties don't actually factor into the story too much, making it kinda functionally
a macguffin. A pseudo-macguffin, if you will. Now in other stories, the cursed artifact is
in the inciting incident slot. These stories tend to rely a little more strongly on the actual
unique properties of the artifact - most commonly, the cursed artifact gives a character access to
some sort of ability they didn't have before, and the story will dedicate some or all of the
plot to exploring the consequences of that. Many of these stories will focus on the protagonist's
downward spiral as the cursed artifact corrupts them with power and/or evil magic - in some
cases they might even highlight that the artifact doesn't directly affect the character's morality
at all, they just let the power go to their head and make them a worse person the regular way. But
in some other cases, instead of getting a starting powerup from the artifact, the characters will
have to go on some sort of adventure to destroy, contain or otherwise un-curse the artifact
and render it harmless. While some of these stories focus predominantly on the burden of
the artifact on the protagonists, in others the main characters might be on the quest because
they're uniquely qualified to not be affected by the artifact's curse, and for whatever reason
are basically totally cool with it. An extremely pure of heart protagonist is common in these
stories, and they tend not to focus too hard on the burden of the cursed artifact - this is
common in more action-adventure-heavy stories. And in contrast, possibly most obviously, in some
stories the cursed artifact is in the antagonist slot. Whether the villain of the story is using
a cursed artifact or whether it's arguably the other way round, these stories complicate
matters for the heroes by giving the bad guy access to the power of the cursed artifact
without the downsides of the "cursed" part of it. Villains don't tend to worry about being
morally corrupted by the stuff they use for evil, so this is a pretty clean way to give the bad
guys access to a powerup the good guys can't use. In fact, some stories will double down and let
the villain use the artifact for ludicrously powerful effects because they're on the same page
as the cursed artifact rather than fighting it. This is pretty much exclusive to sentient and
malevolent cursed artifacts, which are basically just villains in their own right. In some stories
they might be being wielded by another villain, but in other stories it might turn out that the
artifact was actually the one calling the shots the whole time, and the person who's been swingin'
it around is just another victim who became fully controlled by it. This doesn't tend to happen
with non-sentient cursed artifacts, but you do sometimes get stories where the villain's villainy
is in large part motivated by an obsession with a nonsentient cursed artifact that may or may not
be passively corrupting them over time - this is actually pretty common with mad scientist
types, who see something leaking cursed knowledge and just can't resist pokin' it with a stick.
Now there's a lot of flexibility to this trope, but the nature of the cursed artifact does to
an extent determine some key details about the story around it. A cursed sword is probably gonna
see more combat than a cursed ring, and a cursed artifact whispering dark secrets to the holder
is probably gonna factor into a plotline about that character either resisting corruption or
falling to it, while a passive cursed artifact might be more at home in a plotline about
the human corruption of greed. Big, dramatic cursed artifacts might be central to a hero's
journey type adventure story with an epic quest and a grand finale, but smaller, simpler cursed
artifacts might be central to small-scale human tragedies where things fall apart due to human
nature rather than massive armies of darkness. The most generic kind of cursed artifact is a
thing that causes misfortune. This is a pretty basic concept, and is very popular in mythology
and folklore. It's a fairly all-purpose curse since basically all it does is cause narrative
conflict. In some cases it might not even be explicit that the artifact is at fault in any
meaningful way - the bad stuff that happens around it might look like it has more to do with people
being greedy jerks than with the artifact in question, which is pretty common in stories where
the "cursed artifact" is just a seemingly mundane treasure, like a stash of gold or a valuable
gem that has a reputation for being "cursed" because people keep murdering each other about
it. These artifacts are basically just generic conflict-drivers, and in some cases might even
be functionally interchangeable pseudo-macguffins with no overt "cursed" properties. But
in most stories the artifact has at least one other property that makes things a little
more interesting. For instance, the Monkey's Paw is a cursed artifact that causes misfortune by
granting wishes in the most needlessly unpleasant way possible - it causes misfortune, sure, but
the real focus is on the "be careful what you wish for" message and how getting what you think
you want isn't always a good thing. Of course, for a lot of people, the actual takeaway from
that story is that you could totally outsmart the asshole wish-granter and get everything you want
just by being really specific with your wishes. And this is actually a surprisingly common
audience response to "cursed artifact" stories! People love speculating about how they'd handle
a cursed artifact - outsmart it, use it for good, lean into the evil, handle it through sheer heroic
gumption - and I honestly can't decide if this is a flaw or a feature. It feels like a flaw in the
writing, because if the point of the story is to highlight that the cursed thingy is bad and never
goes well it seems like, if the story does its job right, the audience shouldn't conclude that
the cursed thingy could go well if they were the one who got to it. But on the flipside, I feel
like that's actually a testament to the allure of the cursed thingy in question - that even
an audience with an omniscient perspective on the damage it does can feel tempted to give it
their best shot. Is it better to write a cursed artifact so alluring that the audience feels drawn
to imagine how it'd work in their hands, or is it better to write a downfall so devastatingly
thorough that the audience feels fear and disgust at the cursed thing that caused it?
And honestly I think it depends on the artifact. I don't see anywhere near as many reddit threads
about how people could totally handle the Ring of the Nibelung versus, like, the Death Note.
Some cursed artifacts are tempting from both a character and an audience perspective. A cursed
murder-sword or an evil ring might or might not draw a modern audience's eye, but a wish-granting
artifact or an instant "kill anyone" button tugs at the imagination. And if the writer gets
the audience thinking "hey, maybe it would be cool to have this thing, imagine the problems it could
solve", the writer now has an angle of audience investment they can use to explore that question
and, theoretically, demonstrate why it wouldn't actually give them what they wanted, or that at
minimum it wouldn't be worth the personal cost. Of course, the effectiveness of this depends
on the execution - and again, I can't decide if this is a bug or a feature. If a story about a
malignant cursed artifact that explicitly destroys everyone it touches ends with the audience still
feeling like they could totally handle it and get it right, that misses the point of the story - but
it also highlights the other point of the story, that the cursed artifact is a temptation that most
people can't resist, even from behind the fourth wall. The monkey's paw story is a fun little
vignette about an asshole wish-granter that interprets every wish in the most actively harmful
way possible, but we really only see it used three times. First the users wish for a little
bit of money, which they get as compensation for the horrible death of their son. Then one of
them wishes for the son to come back, but it's heavily implied that he doesn't get un-mangled
in the process, so the third wish puts him back in the grave permanently. This highlights that
the monkey's paw is a dick, but it also teases the imagination because it doesn't cover a lot of
bases. Maybe if you wished for a lot of money from a highly specific source you'd be fine, right? Or
wished someone back from the dead but completely healed from what killed them? Maybe if you got
a lawyer to go over your wishes for you first, you could make sure they were loophole-free?
The appeal of a wish-granting artifact is obvious, but this kind of thing even happens with stories
where the cursed artifact doesn't actually seem all that useful or appealing to an outside
audience. People love coming up with other, simpler ways the fellowship could've destroyed The
One Ring. Personally I'm partial to the "legolas ties it to an arrow and fires it into Mount Doom"
solution, but that's not really the point - even in a story where the cursed artifact doesn't
really tempt the audience's imagination on its own, there's still a temptation to outsmart the
story and the characters in it. Things could've been fine if the characters just did this
one thing, or made this one choice. And this phenomenon isn't limited to cursed artifact
stories, but it does crop up in them a lot, because frequently cursed artifacts lead
characters to make questionable decisions. The corruptive ones actively push characters
towards evil, while the misfortune ones just make bad stuff happen around them, often because
the characters make questionable decisions - and any time a character makes a choice the audience
knows is bad, it's natural for the audience to think about how things would've turned out if
they'd made a different choice instead. And this ties back into something I touched on in the trope
talk about tragedies - a huge factor in tragedies is that the nature of the characters makes the
tragedy inevitable. The decisions that character would make because of who they are as people
brings them into conflict and leads to disaster. In many cursed artifact stories, the artifact
is just a catalyst for that kind of conflict. It might push the character to make a bad
decision, but not an out of character decision. A cursed artifact in this kind of story is
just a crystallized bad situation that puts the characters into a context where their traits
become flaws. The cheerful, humble couple that gets the monkey's paw make a simple wish for
a small sum of money and their life crumbles around their ears. The people powerful and heroic
enough to quickly and efficiently destroy the One Ring are the same people most susceptible to its
temptations to use it for the good of the world. The person wielding the actively malevolent demon
blade Stormbringer is so frail and sick that he's only capable of doing good - or doing anything -
because of the power that evil sword provides, so he concludes his only option is to use the sword
or be useless himself. The idea that someone else might've had better luck with the cursed artifact
is a reasonable conclusion in many cases because so many cursed artifacts play to the specific
nature of the character dealing with them, and sometimes that's even explored in-story. Hell,
even in Lord of the Rings, where they go out of their way to explain that the ring can get into
anyone's head and tempt them with their greatest desires or whatever, when it tries to get Sam on
its side it literally can't figure out what he wants because the ring is very grandiose in its
temptations and Sam's not interested in a garden the size of a city, he just wants one small enough
for him to tend. It might've been able to wear him down eventually, but it was not gonna be easy.
And there are plenty of stories that actively play into this. Sometimes a cursed artifacts starts
out with a hero and has a terrible time trying to corrupt them because of their dang heroic
gumption, only to later jump ship and end up with a villain who has exactly no problem embracing
the dark side and is significantly easier to corrupt and control. Sometimes the cursed artifact
actively selects for people who are vulnerable to it and never deals with anyone who could use
it responsibly. But sometimes the story takes a slightly different angle: the cursed artifact will
corrupt anyone who uses it, but the real measure of narrative heroism is who wouldn't be willing to
use it. Maybe the monkey's paw can be outsmarted, but the gist of the story seems to be that anybody
who uses it will suffer, no matter how clever they try to be - so the only way to win is not to play.
The reason Sam doesn't get corrupted or tempted by the ring is because it has nothing he wants and
thus he has no desire to use it. In these stories, instead of any one bad decision messing up
their chance to use the artifact responsibly, the character dooms themself by choosing
to use the artifact at all. This can be… difficult to convince an audience of, since the
story can only present examples of characters who were beaten by the artifact, and the audience's
temptation to outsmart them can be bolstered by knowing where those characters went wrong. But
honestly, feature or flaw, I don't think this is a bad thing. It's just a very specific way for
the audience to critically engage with the story, and that's always fun. It's not the writer's
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A strange example, but one of my favourite "cursed artifacts" in fiction is the sword in the Soul Calibur series. It's a sword which can grant you incredible power, but turns you into a soulless monster.
As a kid, I played the first game on the PS1 and loved how all these diverse characters had their own motives for seeking out the sword - some wanting to destroy it, others wanting to use its power. And how some of their endings showed them inevitably being corrupted by its power.
Ok a bit of a tangent but can powers be considered cursed artifacts? Like for example in Worm the powers that people get are ironic twists in personal tragedies that subtlety twist people's personalities in order to seek more conflict
I played a D&D Barbarian who had an evil, sentient sword that wanted to exterminate all life in the universe and drained the souls of whoever it killed.
The barbarian in question was a simple lad, and he just figured "well the magic sword wants to kill people, which is what swords are meant to do anyway. This is fine."
So I don't know if it's cursed per se, but it seems like Sanderson was kind of playing with this trope with the magical sword Nightblood.
Nightblood is a sword from the book Warbreaker imbued with the power of 1,000 Breaths (which are more or less analogous to souls) to become sentient and given the command "Destroy Evil". However, given that it is a sword, it has literally no idea what "evil" means and just kind of does its best working with the definition of "someone who would try to take the sword and use it for evil purposes, selling it, manipulating, and extorting others, that sort of thing" to quote the author. So basically it's MO is to basically tempt people into using it, where the wielder will then immediately kill everyone nearby before committing suicide by Nightblood; at various points Nightblood just kind of "wanders off" to go kill random people it tempted into stealing it and is thrown at palace guards to get them to kill themselves/each other. However, if you're a good person who really doesn't want to murder people than Nightblood just makes you sick by looking at it which IIRC is used once or twice in the book as a test like how the MCU uses Mjolnir.
It's a sword that when outside of its sheath passively consumes souls and will eventually kill its wielder, and one of its more famous quotes is "Hello! Would you like to destroy some evil today?" which is how everyone should greet each other.
Weirdly enough, while watching, I couldn't help but think of the Dead Money DLC for Fallout: New Vegas.
The whole theme of the story is repeated throughout as a motif, and voiced in the ending:
"You've heard of the Sierra Madre Casino. We all have, the legend, the curses. [...] Finding it, though, that's not the hard part. It's letting go."
In archaeology, our term for these is “ritual.”