But the details also adds to the magical element. It's not just being reckless, but being reckless with a horrible, excruciating, protracted, torture curse.
A story of using a screwdriver to fiddle with a loaded gun while the muzzle is pointed at you wouldn't have the same appeal, because the consequence is so much more direct and mundane.
Rabies is actually a great comparison. It has similar magical/horrifying feel to it. Like with the screwdriver slip-up, catching rabies can look like a total non-event; here, it doesn't kill you yet, merely starts the timer on a bomb. The countdown can be anything between days and years, and when it runs out - when the first symptoms start showing - you're already dead. Then the dying happens, which... relative to radiation sickness, I'm really not sure which is better.
To add an insult to injury, rabies is very much curable before the symptoms show - but you have to realize you may have been exposed in the first place.
They are found, rushed to the hospital, they wake up and feel better, everybody can meet them and see them alive and know of their attempt -- but they're walking dead, their liver is incurably damaged and they die in a few days.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/1hy7fu/never_look...
I didn’t think of it this way before, but yeah, the demon core memes are absolutely cousins of this type of loaded weapon humor.
Someone playing with a screwdriver and a few pieces of various metals is funny because its danger is unintuitive. It's so strange that someone can mishandle such seemingly innocuous objects and then die a few days later because of it, that it's comical. It's a non sequitur.
It's unlike many deaths. But there are plenty more that share that quality.
> Wetterhahn would recall that she had spilled several drops of dimethylmercury from the tip of a pipette onto her latex-gloved hand.
> Approximately three months after the initial accident Wetterhahn began experiencing brief episodes of abdominal discomfort and noticed significant weight loss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn
That onset reminds me of a children's book about postwar Japan, in which a little girl is running around on the playground and falls down. This extremely ordinary event is treated as an emergency, and it turns out to be one.
