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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 job to convince the audience of anything,
even the moral of their own story - they just gotta tell it.
So… yeah!
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