espoparker

[espoparker]

what? oh sweetheart no, you're not weirding me out at all. you're weirding me in. keep talking, freak

[espoparker]

There's people who have a religion, and there's Religious People. The first type is just normal people who happen to have a foundational structure they like to have their world built upon. The latter type are the kind that make me want to lean in and say "look, I would not even want to get into the kind of Heaven that would let you in."

[espoparker]

The main difference between the weather being uncomfortably cold, and the weather being uncomfortably hot, is that the things you can do in the cold to warm yourself up (hot food/beverage, blankets, cuddles, nice clothes like sweaters, thick scarves and snazzy jackets, getting exercise) are very pleasant and very effective, and the things you can do in the heat to cool yourself down don't do shit.

[espoparker]

It's incredible to me how we, as writers, can wear so many skins.

We write as genders, not our own, in worlds that don't exist.

We slip into the bodies of the powerful, the ruthless, the fearless, while sitting in a one-bedroom apartment, praying for stable WiFi.

Writers are shapeshifters. Necromancers. Magicians. We build universes out of coffee and anxiety.

Writers are incredible, and I will die on that hill.

[espoparker]

When you've been a writer for long enough, commas become more of a spiritual practice than a grammatical one.

Could I explain the actual rules of how they’re used? Absolutely not.

Do I rely on sensing a tremor in the force to tell me where to use them? Yes and this has never failed me even once.

[espoparker]

Prev HATES Star Wars with a passion. They’ve had full on hate rants about it on main.

New REBLOG Game

Just fucking lie about the previous poster

[espoparker]

One of my biggest pieces of advice for writing--or, really, for anything--is to learn to love the mechanics of it.

This is not to say that you need to love every second of every part of writing to be a good writer, but I find people who dislike the actual act of writing don't usually make good writers.

I think that this is, in part, where the AI stuff comes from--people who like the idea of writing but don't like (or know how to do) the mechanics of writing choose to rely on AI because they see it as handling the mechanics, which they see as the less important part.

But the mechanics are a huge part of it. The plot, the characters, the world, the idea--all of that is important. But writing is also about the paragraphs and the sentences and the words. It's about playing around with wording or sentence structure or phrasing to see what works best. It's about literally writing the sentences--all of the sentences. It's about choosing where the paragraph breaks are, where scenes end, where chapters end.

And if you hate doing the mechanics of it--if you hate putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or however it is you draft--you will hate writing, and you will come to hate your writing. Because you will resent the actions required to do it. You will hate having to sit down and do the writing, because you hate actually writing.

There's nothing wrong with not enjoying actually writing. You can tell stories in other ways. Record a podcast. Sing. Tell stories to your friends.

Or teach yourself how to enjoy writing. Figure out what parts of it you do like and make those a bigger part of your process. Is text to speech easier? Do that to start. Do you not want chapter breaks for your first draft? That's fine.

Anyway, tl;dr: you will be a better writer and have a better time at it if you enjoy the mechanics of writing.

[espoparker]

[espoparker]

A while back I realised that there's one specific fictional thing that is catnip to me, and that is vulnerability. People accuse me of liking dire things in stories, but it's not so much that I love it when fictional people are suffering. It's that I kind of crave vulnerability in my protagonists.

I would define vulnerability as the opposite of agency. At its core, it involves a denial or a willing sacrifice of agency, and while writers talk about agency a lot, I don't think we spend anywhere near enough time discussing vulnerability.

Vulnerability is incredibly powerful in building empathy with a character, but it also forces the character into dire choices that reveal their true nature, and it makes the antagonistic forces seem a lot more powerful and scary. Vulnerability is why whump is appealing. It's one of the reasons we all care so much about out good fried Jonathan Harker, utterly at Dracula's mercy. It's why the myth of the voluntarily dying god is so powerful, even if you aren't a Christian.

More recently, I've been thinking a whole lot about how important vulnerability is in constructing a believable romance. In a believable romance, the characters will be emotionally vulnerable to, and on behalf of, one another. The "if you dare touch her" trope where the love interest comes unhinged at the sight of a loved one's suffering is vulnerability. Enemies to lovers is delicious because it asks what might happen if the person to whom you're most vulnerable was also the one with the greatest interest in exploiting that vulnerability. As I've written before, romance is about trust; and the corollary is that no romance can live without that heartstopping moment when one character takes the risk of putting themselves helplessly into the power of the other.

But I think that a lot of storytellers these days are prioritising agency at the cost of vulnerability. Disney's attempts at feminism are a great example of this. While the animated MULAN is outed as a woman in a moment of vulnerability that was the most powerful thing in the movie for me, in the live action Mulan's unmasking becomes a expression of agency that in my opinion guts the story of feeling. On the other hand, in the cdrama I'm currently watching (GOODBYE, MY PRINCESS) the male lead is SO averse to letting himself be vulnerable in any way at all that I simply can't find any romance in his interactions with the heroine. I love to see stories that foreground marginalised people, but too often those stories focus on giving the protagonist agency at the cost of letting the antagonist land any hits at all. The result, imo, is a perfectly soulless story.

Of course, agency is a sine qua non of a good protagonist. But so is vulnerability, and there are so many amazing stories you can write about a vulnerable protagonist. W R Gingell's CITY BETWEEN series, for instance, is the story of a desperately vulnerable protagonist fighting to claim some agency in her own life and it's GLORIOUS. And beyond that, I would say that moments of vulnerability are indispensable even to very strong protagonists. One of the reasons FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST worked so gorgeously as a story for me, for instance, was the gutpunch moments of vulnerability that happened both at the very start and then with increasing tempo toward the end.

Vulnerability can be something a protagonist constantly struggles with, or something that unexpectedly blindsides someone who seemed to be invincible, or something a character does willingly for the sake of the people they love. It can be romantic, or not at all. But either way it's the interplay of agency and vulnerability that really MAKES a story for me. You HAVE to have both.

[espoparker]

Lateral vs Vertical Magic Systems

I… think I’m the only one to use these terms? What I mean by this is different than hard and soft magic, slightly.

Quick recap:

Hard magic systems have rules and strict definition for what can and can’t be done

Soft magic systems go more off vibes, magic exists but the exact mechanics are not important or don’t exist

—

I think you can have a lateral or vertical magic system that’s either hard or soft, and what I mean by this is:

Vertical magic is where everyone has magic of wildly different flavors but hones them all for the same specific purpose.

Lateral magic is where everyone has magic of the same flavor but uses it for wildly different purposes.

Here’s some vertical magic examples:

Percy Jackson: Nobody uses their demigod powers for anything other than staying alive, by and large, and there’s a huge variety of demigod power possibilities and very little overlap. Whether it’s physical combat or mental, these kids’ powers exist so they can fight gods and monsters.

Naruto: I have not seen most of this show so correct me if I’m wrong but, this is a world where ninjitsu is almost exclusively for combat. While there’s core principles, the heaviest hitters in the show all have wild and exclusive powers or special moves that only they can use that go far beyond skill in martial arts (except for Rock Lee).

X-Men: By nature of it being a comic book, the premise of the world is built in heroes versus villains and how they use their powers to beat the snot out of each other. In X-men specifically, mutants are persecuted and can’t use their powers legally, and have little choice beyond using their mutation to stay alive and “do good”.

Lateral magic systems might be something like:

Tinker Bell: You’re a nature fairy, by and large, and everyone gets their power from the same source, pixie dust, each using their flavor of magic to suit their niche purpose in the environment

Danny Phantom: Yes, he’s a superhero and must have fights, but all of Danny’s super-powered rogues are ghosts, with no exceptions, and everyone is limited to how creatively and uniquely they use the same basic ghost principles of possession, telekinesis, invisibility, and intangibility, + their special trait, but all also suffer the same issue that unites them more than once: They are dead, and good or bad, the living fear them.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Alchemy isn’t limitless, and its practitioners typically focus on one very specific kind of alchemy of their choice with the hard rule that everyone must follow of construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct, and get really, really good at honing it mostly for combat, but also in fields of science, engineering, etc. There is alchemy and only alchemy, and it has rules.

—

Last Airbender is both! Its bending rules are strictly limited to the four elements and how creative you can get with your element… but it is also a show that heavily features martial arts and how that bending can be used in combat, but it also built a world where bending factors into other jobs, arts, and the very fabric of society.

Why does lateral vs vertical magic matter?

When you’re designing your magic system, you have to think about how this magic would integrate into a world as if its always existed there. Is it hidden magic, like in most urban fantasy? Or is it baked into the fabric of society, like with bending? Does everyone start with the same basic tools and go wild, or does everyone start wild, and all chase the same aspirations?

Whichever you pick does depend on the story you’re telling. A lot of the media I mentioned is action-adventure, which means that all magic, lateral, vertical, soft, or hard, leans toward one thing in the end: Combat.

But beyond combat, how can your magic be used? Are people allowed to practice it without regulations or is it heavily structured by their fantasy society? If it has always existed, how would their would be fundamentally different than ours?

[espoparker]

[espoparker]

Whoa, this film opens up with the main character saying she rejects the idea that you need to fall in love/get married to have happiness and she isn’t interested in finding a partner, surely THIS time she won’t fall in love by the end of the movie

[espoparker]

New Challenge!! Is the man on my dashboard

a) Jesus Christ

b) Odysseus

c) Jayce Talis

d) Jonathan Sims

[espoparker]

are you five nights at fucking kidding me

[espoparker]

happy disability pride month and once again, FUCK lazy subtitles. fuck the [speaks foreign language] instead of actually transcribing the words, fuck shortening sentences and changing whats been said for no reason, fuck censoring swearing in captions but not in audio and fuck anyone who says youre being 'too sensitive' for being upset about a lack of accessibility

[espoparker]

I think people who consider aromanticism as "basically straight" underestimate how noticeable absence can be to those around you.

Whether you're a kid in school with classmates who won't take "no one" as an answer to who you have a crush on or an adult whose coworkers have picked up on the fact that you've never mentioned a romantic partner; after enough time, a lack or insufficient amount of romantic interest will raise the antennae of friends, family, coworkers, etc... They will notice and they will speculate and they will ask.

It is impossible to meet the societal bar for straightness through inaction.

[espoparker]

Sometimes it feels like you've lived your whole life in a house that's always a little bit on fire. Like it's usually just in one room and you make sure to wet the walls around it so it doesn't spread and that usually works. You were expected to take more responsibility over fire containment when you were like seven because it's not like you can expect your parents to always be 100% on guard about making sure the whole house doesn't catch fire, and you figure that's just how things are like.

And sometimes as a kid you visit your friends' homes and some of then whisper to you - grimacing with embarrassment - about how they're not supposed to tell anyone this, but there's a whole room in their house that's currently on fire. And you're like yeah it's ok I'm not supposed to tell people about the way our house is a little bit on fire all the time, too. And then you visit some other friend's house and there's no trace of fire anywhere, and you think "wow, these people are really good at hiding their house fire."

And one day you show up to work like "hey sorry I'm late, I forgot to wet the walls before going to bed last night and my whole house burned down", and you're startled by the way people react, acting like that must be the worst thing that has ever happened to you. And you're just like "chill, it's been years since the last time this happened, and it wasn't even that bad this time", and that just makes people more shocked, acting like that's the weirdest and most concerning thing they've ever heard anyone say, which only confuses you more.

And then someone tries to explain to you that people aren't supposed to have an ongoing house fire. Most people actually never experience a house fire in their lives. Like not even once. Not even a little bit. The normal amount of having your house be currently on fire is zero.