Despite what the man wants you to believe, video games are fairly true to life. For example, people do drop money when you kill them, and while you have no literal meter filling up with points, you do gain experience that makes killing the next person easier. And, if Catharism is to be believed, and I can see no reason it shouldn’t, dying in real life simply results in respawning, much like in a game. This realism makes games a great tool for educating our children but there is the hidden danger that they learn unfactual things, or unlearn factual things from them. One of the widest spread misconceptions from video games, movies, and lithographs is the lie that skeletons can smile. (Technically, skulls smile in media and not skeletons but if you smiled at me wearing all of your muscles and skin I would say something normal like “Your body has a nice smile,” and not something weird like, “Your face has a nice smile.”)
You may be shocked to learn this skele-fact after being misled for so many years, so let me tell you something about a thing you’ve likely never heard of called muscles. Even the puniest allow me to type up this explanation of how bones would be mere cream filled sticks without them and their cronies ligaments and tendons. Skeletons have a hard time getting things like housework done primarily because they are missing all these soft, meaty parts. Laying flat, your bones spread out and unconnected, and like, a little mouse or something has your finger bones in their mouth makes vacuuming difficult, though you can still manage the cleaning process or a team of web developers effectively without any muscles.
Now I can hear all the contrarians coming along to claim that skeletons can smile, frown, and give sexy winks because of forbidden, possibly Satanic necromantic magics granting them ethereal muscles, tendons, ligaments, and so on. Do you think I am too stupid to have considered this? Like I just make stuff up without thinking it through? That I am not constantly arguing with my wife about what skeletons, ghosts, and mummies can and cannot do? I accept that potent magic, or even magicks could potentially allow a skeleton to hit you with a cursed sword, or jump out at you in the dark wearing a Richard Nixon mask. But I have another skele-fact for you that will lay this idea of skeletons emoting to rest – bones are rigid.
That’s right, even a magically reanimated corpse would have to face the hard reality that their core structure is an unbending, rigid material. (As of this post, I have no information on the viability of a rubbery baby skeleton being able to smile or not but they are rare enough in games (but not on earth) that the discussion is outside the scope of this article, though will be explored in depth before this write up is submitted to the Journal of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science.) No one has ever heard of a flexible bone spell, and I have skimmed through the D&D player’s manual looking for drawings of sexy elves more than once. It is time to abandon your dream of meeting a smug skeleton in real life; even the richest skeleton cannot make a face to indicate his superiority. He will have to rely on the time tested monocle.
This Christmas I would like you to consider all of the lying media that tells you bones can somehow make faces. Yes, the Nightmare Before Christmas is somehow even worse than you thought. But as the holiday is a time for family, giving, and especially having, thank your skeleton for allowing you to have skin and all the other required bits of body that allow you to smile. Unless you are missing that stuff from a comedic mishap at your job at the laboratory, then you probably want to frown but are unable to.