For those who don’t know, a Monkey Paw Wish is when you get your wish granted, but in an unexpected usually negative way.
Example:
- I wish human caused global warming would stop.
- It does, but because WW3 leads to Nuclear Winter.
The question here though, is what wish would you be willing to take even though it’ll get monkey paw’d?
So basically you don’t care if the consequences, or would be willing to take the sacrifice for it.
Others can come up with the negative scenarios if they want and the original wisher can decide if it’s still worth it
Donald Trump bumps his head and wakes up as an objective and rational person willing and capable of acting for the good of his country and the world instead of his own unintelligent, narcissistic ways.
His followers believe some kind of twisted conspiracy theory about him being replaced by reptiloids and want to overthrow the woke communist impersonator, war ensures.
The down side is his rational arguments and rational way of thinking is always opposite of what you want. He also convinces the state and federal legislators to repeal the twenty second amendment and he stays in office for several terms.
He leaves office to use his fortune to set up a charitable foundation leaving a JD Vance presidency
I think it was Leeja Miller who said Vance is a dark horse in that he can rationalize and communicate significantly better than Trump - making the insane sound reasonable.
One of my fears is that while I disagree with Trump on practically everything, a JD Vance replacement of him would lead to greater competence to execute and justify the same agenda.
Granted. Trump is now fully capable of stripping the people of their rights to enrich the state and turn America into an effective fascist engine of war. He then turns his machine on the rest of the world to spread the goodness of America.
How is this different from what’s already going to happen under POTUS Musk & VP Trump?
I wish it was the year of Linux, and they get 90%+ market share overnight when Gabe Newell announces you can play Half Life 3 exclusively on Steam OS, which includes in-game copies of The Winds of Winter, Doors of Stone, an English translation of Mother 3, and footage of 10 seasons of Firefly that had secretly been produced in private for Gabe.
The downside is they start the enshittification process immediately. The DRMs get worse, then the ads come, and finally the lawsuits and psyops on distros that treat us well and give us options.
Hey here’s part of that wish granted with hopefully no downsides. https://mother3.fobby.net/
A solar storm wipes out almost all computers and all tech to build chips.
In a bizarre twist of fate, a couple of houndreds linux pcs, a handfull of steam decks and a windows millennium survived the blast.
I would make the money’s paw consequences similar, but slightly different.
A bad microsoft update somehow manages to permanently brick every windows computer on the planet overnight. Linux is now the dominant operating system, but mass societal chaos results from 90% of computers being permanently bricked.
I wish housing prices were actually reasonable and my generation (tail end of millennials) could afford to buy a house in the cities we have to work in.
The housing prices crash no one builds decent homes and all you can buy is a trailer house.
You just described
- The situation for many Americans
- A situation that’s still an improvement for the country’s 650,000 homeless
- A situation that’s really still not worse for the ultra-rich, who can afford to hire peasants to custom-build their homes to whatever quality they want
- It doesn’t harm the wisher, who doesn’t own a home and so wouldn’t lose an investment from a market collapse.
It’s a nice try, but it’s going to have to be a far worse consequence to really make them want to take the wish back.
Hey trailer homes aren’t anything to sneeze at! Too bad they’re so fucking expensive now though.
They cover your head when it rains.
They have no resale value. They don’t have a very long life span compared to an actual house. They have crap for insulation. You do not want to be in one during a tornado or most other serious weather event. Their ability to block out outside noise sucks.
If it’s a choice between homeless or trailer house, fine I’ll take one.
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.
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?
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.
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.
we fall in love
Missing specifier. You each fall in love with other people.
get married
Missing specifier. You each marry neither your perfect matches nor the other people you each fell in love with.
live happily
Mental illness can provide happiness. This seems almost good, and yet…
ever after
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.
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.
I actually just had this happen to me irl. My old office was colloquially referred to as “The Dungeon” bc it was in the basement of an old dark campus building and to get there you had to take a somewhat circuitous path. I pleaded with my boss to move us to a new space with windows.
A few years later, we were able to move into a new suite in a different building with the rest of my department. Our new office even has windows! Except they’re interior windows that face out into other surrounding rooms, instead of exterior windows bringing in natural light which unfortunately I didn’t specifically mention in my wish. 😂
