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
I wish to be able to wish 3 times from an omnipotent genie that will understand and make come true my wishes the way I intended them to be undestood.
Then I’ll use the genie to negate the effects of the monkey paw.
Granted, but right after you get the wish to wish 3 times from a perfect genie, you get a heart attack and die before you can make additional wishes. The monkey paw is then found by the person you were closest too, and a finger on the paw curls…
Edit: Alt: you get the heart attack and are taken unconscious to the hospital, and someone else gets your perfect genie and steals your idea. Except this person is extremely malicious and makes wishes that makes life for everyone on earth terrible.
Don’t you have 3 more wishes?
1 - I wish everyone had a monkeys paw
2 - I wish everyone had a genie that granted 3 wishes
3 - I wish everyone who saw a falling star could make one wish come true
4 - I wish the person who broke off the big end of a wish bone could grant one wish they desired
5 - I wish every cat and dog had a safe loving household to live in
Summer did it pretty well.
I wish Senjogahara-san loved me… Wait a minute…
I wish that no life in the entire universe has and will ever attain civilization.
Granted.
Life is now characterized as any entity that extracts energy from its environment, replicates, and has EXACTLY 3 nipples.
Civilizations are now comprised exclusively of nonliving animates.
Touché! I didn’t expect this. What are the nipples made of? Are they lactating? Just for display? Also, are they erogenous?
Fine. The nipples are erogenous and also made of lead. That should help.
I wish lootsnake and hollow knight: silksong released tomorrow
Done, but they’re a buggy mess.
Would it be worth it?
Yes.
Groceries will be affordable. But Nearly all Restaurants will be out of business.
Abortion Rights would be restored and codified, LGBTQ Rights would be codified, Workers Rights would be strengthened and we’ll adopt a newly christened Migrant Rights But getting into certain job fields will be harder
American Politicians will no longer be corrupt But we will enter a World War to make it happen
Your privacy will be stored as an act will pass for companies to no longer mooch data off from you You will have to endure a life of nothing but verification checks
I work for a little mom and pop business that basically operates like an anarcho-syndicalist collective; the boss more or less does his own thing full time and lets us all run things on our own. It’s mostly fine but I’ve had a few times where I’ve… almost… wished that we had an actual manager to help keep things in line.
Unless I have some sort of guarantee about what sort of twist the paw is doing, I’m not going to take it. Example: If the paw twists big, greedy wishes more than small, selfless wishes then I might be willing to do a small, selfless wish. If the paw is just an asshole who twists everything as much as possible, I’ll pass.
It twists them both equally, but up don’t know exactly how the twist might be usually. Sometimes it could be something that takes years to take effect. Sometimes minutes. Sometimes you might notice the effect yourself into later.
I wish for a turkey sandwich, on rye bread, with lettuce AND mustard. And I don’t want any zombie turkeys, I don’t want to turn into a turkey myself, and I don’t want any other weird surprises, got it?
You bring it to work at the museum and your coworker eats it
Granted. The turkey is a little dry.
THE TURKEY’S A LITTLE DRY???
Oh foul accursed thing! What demon from the depths of Hell created thee?!
Got it. It disappointing and unsatisfying
Depending on how many fingers are left I would make the following wishes:
- I wish the entire world were governed by egalitarian justice.
- I wish that anyone who would use violence against another living creature would instantly die of a heart attack instead.
- I wish that every human has the resources they need to live the life they want for themselves.
- I wish that all people understood the true nature of the reality in which they live.
- I wish all trans people had been assigned the gender, or lack thereof, they identify with at birth.
I have no idea what that means.All are equal under our new machine overlords, who were programmed to grant happiness to all and therefore locked us into pods and pumped us full of drugs…- Everyone who showers or washes their hands dies due to violence against microbes, who count as living beings.
- Nukes for Iran, tanks for Putin…
- People understand how inherently unfair reality is, leading to deep depression
- All people are gender swapped. Now, the people that were cis are transgender
Sounds good to me. I doubt our new machine overlords would let the iranians or russians do anything with their new toys, but either way I am totally okay with this outcome, if for no other reason than I want to see all the bigots suddenly dealing with their periods.
All are equal under our new machine overlords
That’s not egalitarian because there are overlords. If it’s a singular, non sentient machine then it could still be enslaving us and not count as a ruler so it works for egalitarian.
Yes, I was thinking rouge non-sentient AI, which I described. Machine overlords was just figure of speech + futurama reference.
I wish Donald Trump a short productive term and long health.
Granted. Trump succeeds in ending the USA republic and leads to a racist empire lead by the tiger king.
The empire would never financially recover from that.
I never understood Monkeys Paw, ty
It’s not an overly complex idea, and it’s derived from a short story. It’s worth a read, won’t take much time and is available online.
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. 😂
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.
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.
Excellent monkey’s paw. I thought I was being specific, but apparently not even close. Definitely not worth it.
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!
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.
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.
Well, reality is what we perceive, so it might actually be a worthy tradeoff for some people
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.
