#the way i write. phrases and figures of speech i keep using...

[fayesemblemring]

Lately because of my job I have to reluctantly use Gemini for the sake of testing it (for context I work as a mobile QA tester. Not gonna say any more than that because I'm a big fan of not doxxing myself) and after having to repeatedly try it for days I started noticing a couple of things.

First things first: When critics say genAI is basically just a fancy autocomplete, that is a huge understatement.

Since my tests consist of giving it various prompts and making sure the answers are correct, I had to look closely at the answers. And aside from bugs like it randomly coughing up words in Russian which I mean, that's what I'm there to help fix, I started noticing quickly that a lot of the responses are basically identical.

Sure, the context may vary depending on what exactly I ask it, but the phrases? The ways of speech? They're basically the same. Hell, sometimes it reuses entire paragraphs.

And to be clear, it's not like tendencies or patterns of an actual human writer. Rather it's like it takes a preexisting module of the response and just adds the appropriate words to make it make sense.

And sure, bugs aside it's technically correct, but at the same time it's eerily uncanny because no human genuinely writes like this all the time. Again, it's a fancy autocomplete, nothing more. It's like writing an essay by picking the suggested words from the phone and have it just happen to make sense somehow.

When you realize what genAI actually is and recognize the patterns... well, that's a hell of a lot less impressive than what all the techbros make it out to be, right?

Which leads to my second point- Ironically, now that I've been forced to use it repeatedly, I'm not afraid of genAI replacing writers and artists. Not anymore.

I've heard a few people say that there is no genuine threat of genAI replacing authors and essays or students passing by submitted works generated with it because genAI... can't actually write.

I was skeptical of this at first- after all, capitalism loves prioritizing cutting costs over quality (nevermind the sheer amount of electricity this thing wastes but I digress), so why would companies care as long as it's passable?

But honestly, I think I get it now.

Remember, I noticed entire paragraphs and sections being practically copypasted, and this is only after a few short responses. And I haven't study a thing about academic writing or linguistics, most I've done is write fanfiction whenever the planets happen to align.

Can you imagine having Gemini, ChatGPT or whatever write a book or heck, even an entire novel and trying to get it published into mainstream? It'd immediately get clocked out and laughed at like it rightfully deserves.

Now, I'm not naive. Again, capitalism. Companies will keep shoving genAI down our throats as long as they can get away with it (especially since they now have employees "correct" the generated works which is more work than having them make it from scratch. Best possible system amirite?)... but at the same time the fact they keep pushing it this aggressively says a lot, doesn't it?

genAI is already starting to cannibalizing itself. Ironically, by now plagiarizing those works it already made by plagiarizing actual artists and writers and now pollute the Internet. And considering how much electricity it costs to keep these things running...

Well. I'm no financial expert, but all these aggressive tactics sure sound like sunken cost fallacy, don't they?

Just saying. If this was a thing people actually wanted or used, every tech company under the sun wouldn't practically force us to use it (always opt-out of course, never opt-in) with increasingly hidden buttons to turn it off. Microsoft wouldn't passive-aggressively announce Edge now having genAI features with "Resistance is futile". Musk wouldn't feel the need to slap a button under every art post on Twitter to plagiarize it with its genAI and then pretend those original works were also generated with it.

It'd be a feature like any other, with no need to push it so aggressively. This reads more like "please, please you HAVE to use our genAI, we wasted millions on this", because just like NFTs, they've always been a pyramid scheme. This one was just better at hiding it and appeal to the average person. Ironically, I think they of all people know they can't push this for long the most.

I still despise genAI for everything it represents- the wastefulness and disregard for the environment, the confusing buzzwords of the techbros who are in love with it and most of all, the utter contempt and lack of respect society has for artists, writers and anyone who has done any kind of creative work- and I truly think it can't die soon enough.

But having to use it so much for work ironically gave me confidence it will die someday. It's not even a hope, more like the logical conclusion.

Because genAI is not the future, is not an exciting new technology, is not revolutionary and most importantly is not a replacement for artists and writers.

It's just a fancy autocomplete.

[unboundprompts]

Hello! I’ve never really used this ask thing before— so I’m sorry if I do this wrong. I love your prompts and other works and was wondering if you could help me figure out how to write and describe accents? My characters have very specific accents (Australian accents, British accents, etc.) and I’m having trouble figuring out how to show that. This is a fantasy setting so I couldn’t just describe their accents as an Australian accent and such y’know? I’m so sorry if this doesn’t make sense. Would you be able to help?

How to Write a Character with an Accent

-> How to Write Character Accents

-> How to Convey Accents in Fiction Writing

Make sure your character’s speech isn’t distracting

When writing dialect or a particular accent, it can be tempting to write a character’s dialogue using phonetic spellings. However, this use of dialect can distract your reader. If your character is French and is constantly saying “ze” instead of “the,” the reader will be focusing more on decoding the line of dialogue than they will on plot or character development. When writing fiction, your reader’s attention should always be on the story, and anything that distracts from that probably isn’t worth including.

Slang and Colloquialisms

Incorporate regional slang, colloquialisms, or idioms that reflect the accent. Each accent has its own unique phrases that can suggest the character's background.

Include Snippets of their Native Language

 If you’re writing a character who speaks a foreign language, one way to communicate their accent is to simply include snippets of their native tongue in their lines of dialogue. This will demonstrate the character’s native language and implied accent without resorting to the distracting eyesore of phonetic spelling.

Don't Stereotype

Writing different dialects indelicately can make you appear condescending towards non-native English speakers or people who use the English language differently than you do. One of the most common offenders is the use of “eye dialect,” which refers to using misspellings or nonstandard spellings in order to depict a character’s accent (for instance, writing “fixin’” with an apostrophe instead of “fixing” in order to demonstrate Appalachian or Southern accents). By focusing on the “otherness” of regional dialects and non-native speakers, a writer may give the impression that they are making fun of the way people speak. When writing different accents, keep eye dialect to a minimum.

Rhythm and Intonation

Accents often have distinctive rhythms and intonations. Pay attention to how the accent changes the flow of speech. For instance, British accents might have a more clipped and precise quality, while Australian accents can sound more relaxed and drawn out.

You might describe this in your narrative, saying something like, "Her words rolled out with a casual lilt, the vowels stretching like lazy waves."

Character Reactions and Context

Show how other characters react to the accent. If a character speaks in a heavy accent, others might lean in to listen, nod in confusion, or make a comment. This helps highlight the uniqueness of the speech.

Physical Description

Consider linking the accent to physical traits or background details. Describe the character’s upbringing or location, giving hints about their accent through their surroundings or lifestyle.

Example: “Raised in the bustling markets of Evermere, his accent was a musical blend of the old tongue, softening the hard edges of his words.”

Subtlety in Dialogue Tags

Instead of writing out the accent in every piece of dialogue, you can subtly hint at it through the dialogue tags. For example, “he said, his voice dripping with the easy lilt of the southern coast” can convey the accent without explicit phonetic spelling.

[noxiatoxia]

heyyy.. I’ve been learning Japanese because I’m very interested, I’ve only been using Duolingo so far and I’m not satisfied with it for a number of reasons

anyway do you have any resources you’d recommend for a beginner level in Japanese? I know the entire hiragana alphabet, including sounds like “pu” and “gi” (I can’t figure out the Japanese keyboard yet lmao)

Hi! I'm very flattered you'd come to me! Please keep in mind I do not have a degree in Japanese nor English or any Language Teaching, so this is just advice from a normal guy.

Firstly, it was a good idea to ditch Duolingo. Duolingo is good for learning the JP alphabet, or - and if you don't care/don't want to become fluent - if you just need to learn a handful of phrases to make your Summer trip to Japan survivable. If you wish to become fluent though, it's a really awful tool. For one big reason:

There are no 1:1s in language.

Put simply...there is no "English translation" to any given Japanese word. This is true of any language, I think - not just ENG <--> JP. Sure, some simple nouns can be reliably translated with accuracy - りんご ringo means "apple", or 犬 いぬ inu means "dog". But even then, context matters. There's idioms, sayings - and when you get to verbs, more complex nouns, adjectives...there simply is no 1:1 anymore.

This is why we get translations like Danganronpa which read (70% of the time) like they looked up the word in a JP to ENG dictionary and figured that must be it.

For example... "zetsubou" , "despair", doesn't actually mean despair, really. The way it's used in Japanese is much more common/versatile than how it is used in English. Really think about it. How often in day to day normal conversation do you hear the word despair?

In Japanese, 絶望 ぜつぼう zetsubou is sort of like...misery, negativity, the absence of any feeling of things will be good or okay. This makes it far more common in Japanese natural dialogue.

So please keep that in mind with every word you learn! Learn the feeling, write down as many example sentences you need to help you with it.

This may feel daunting, and it's okay to rely on basic definitions as a beginner if you need to. Everyone starts somewhere. But it's something to keep in mind.

Elsewise, I think toddler cartoons are actually good. Cartoons made for babies and toddlers are designed to help them learn basic things, such as colors, shapes, being nice...etc. Because of the simplistic nature, small words are used, speech is usually slower, and words are repeated consistently. Even just sitting down every hour once a week to watch a toddler show in Japanese is helpful.

The Japanese dub of Bluey and Peppa Pig are very good. Also available (and my personal favorite) is Paboo and Mojies. If you want some material for kids but not toddlers, NHK for School is good.

Watching the Japanese Dub of a show you know like the back of your hand (preferably a kids' show for easier to understand dialogue) is great too, as you can hear how the sentence gets translated into Japanese. The MLP 5 movie is great in Japanese, and I don't know much about Miraculous Ladybug in English, but I caught it on JP Disney Junior a few times and thought it was fun, and I think if you are able to understand some of the toddler shows with relative ease, these would be good places to move to.

Toddler shows are also careful to generally keep the words spoken normal since kids will likely emulate them. It helps keep you from talking like an anime character.

When it comes to reading, little kid books with Hiragana are good, but manga is actually helpful! Manga uses Kanji, but includes Furigana by the Kanji so you can see how to say it. The Yotsubato Manga in Japanese is a good one to start with. You can look up the words you find in a dictionary.

If you need discipline and can't learn without deadlines and such, a language school may be good. While Japanese textbooks can often be misleading for English learners, it's not necessarily incorrect info, and if you need the school environment, then I'd say the pros outweighs the cons.

Also, don't be afraid to use MTL for help, to look up words, and to google in Japanese.

Also for Hiragana and Katakana, this is a good site. I know you already know Hiragana, but just in case.

Watching Japanese vlogs and YT videos are a good way to hear natural Japanese as well. Finding people who know Japanese to talk to is important for practicing your speaking skills as well.

I hope this helps at all!

[cripplecharacters]

oh yeah another question abt intellectual disability: what do people with moderate id speak like? i assume they wouldnt be perfectly articulate but i know making them talk like cavemen would be bad too. i do want it to be clear that they have language difficulties, but im not sure how to do that realistically. so what kinds of grammar errors are actually common? would it make sense to have them mix up words with similar pronunciation, or have difficulty discerning the differences in implications between words with similar meanings (like "pretty" vs "attractive")? do people with id ever 'imagine context' the way people(well, me) do when half-asleep where the brain mishears a statement as something completely unrelated? would spatial and situational awareness be impaired? also this is kind of a different question but if you can give advice on what to do with game mechanics for an id character in an rpg, that would be nice! i already have the stats figured out for every character and theres no stat that i think would be strongly affected by id but in terms of depicted fighting style and other mechanics maybe thered be some stuff informed by it (i cant do anything too complex though, im using rpg maker vx ace). idk! im spitballing here. main thing i need to know is how to write dialogue for a character with id ^_^

Hey, we have a post somewhat about this that you might find useful, I'll try to go over the other questions below.

Keep in mind my ID is mild (and on the milder side of that) so my answer will be all second-hand knowledge from talking to people with moderate ID in my SPED years.

A lot of it will depend on what condition causes they have. People with Williams syndrome have very “normal” verbal skills majority of the time, and you can't really tell in my experience. On the other hand if they're autistic you can potentially guess from the tone of the voice e.g. they speak in a very loud and monotone way. People with Down syndrome are very likely to have a speech disorder, someone with cerebral palsy might slur their words, etc.

A lot of people with ID might be less talkative than your average person (there's definitely exceptions). So your character could use shorter sentences, simple sentences (in the grammar sense), prefer to use other forms of communication for things that don't require speech (e.g., nodding instead of saying “Yes, I agree”, or doing a thumbs up, etc.), or have to be prompted to actually answer/take part in the conversation.

I personally don't recall ever hearing the “mixing words with similar pronunciation” in someone's actual speech, maybe unless they learned the language from reading rather than hearing it. If that's the case, then ID could affect their speech more than if they didn't have it, otherwise I'd assume that the character might have brain damage or is maybe hard of hearing and simply mixes them up because they can't recognize/hear the difference between them.

Mixing words based on specific meaning makes much more sense in my opinion (probably because I do that myself). Synonyms or words that might make sense in one context but not the other are the worst. Your example here is great. When someone has ID they might take away the wrong meaning out of a word and use it incorrectly because of that. E.g., their parents used to take them camping to a forest with lots of bugs, they don't like bugs, they can later call something “foresty” to mean “with lots of bugs” even if it doesn't have much to do with an actual forest. This might make more sense for a character with more severe ID (or if they're just young) but using “attractive” when you'd normally say “pretty” makes sense for someone with moderate ID in my opinion.

Something that can also affect speech of someone with ID is word repetition. Not really in the echolalia sense (though it can be that too) but just using stock phrases that get repetitive over time. I try to edit it out from my posts, but you can still kinda see it. For some people it will be ending most sentences with the same word, for someone else it will be starting two paragraphs with the same three words without realizing even though they're right next to each other or overusing “maybe” and “if” to start sentences.

As for the “imagining context” while mishearing something, I'm not sure if I know what you mean by it, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I don't do it.

Situational awareness is definitely impacted for all people with ID but to different degrees. I don't know if it's part of the diagnostic criteria, but it might as well be. When the person's ID is mild it might look like someone who's just kinda unaware of what goes around them, maybe don't recognize that they're doing something that could end up badly. The more severe the intellectual disability the more obvious it is, the person might elope (wander off) and not be able to find their way back, not be able to use cooking utensils safely because they don't recognize the risks in real time (not really in the “not realizing that the knife is sharp” way if they have moderate ID, more like “not realizing that you need to be careful when putting things on hot oil, or you can get burned”), assuming that people are automatically safe to be around, things like that.

Spatial awareness doesn't affect everyone, but one of the biggest comorbidities of ID is dyspraxia, which does affect it a lot. There are people with mild ID with severe dyspraxia, and severely ID people with no dyspraxia. It varies.

Unfortunately I have never played any RPGS, and I'm not really familiar with the mechanics. Here's an old ask about intellectually disabled characters engaged in combat, hopefully it's useful?

If you want some real-life resources for hearing how intellectually disabled people talk, I really recommend this playlist. It's a bunch of interviews with people with Down syndrome and you can see that they're all very different from each other despite having the same disability.

I hope this helps,

mod Sasza

[twothpaste]

there's a bunch of little guidelines, unique to each character, that i use when writing dialogue. helps to give em unique voices, and keep them distinct from one another. it's also a list of headcanons in & of itself. figured it'd be fun to write 'em out and share 'em here........

lucas speaks as plainly as possible. tends not to use big words - or many words at all - if he can help it. only says what's necessary to get his thoughts across (or often much less…). his internal monologue is long-winded & rich & dripping with metaphors, but when he opens his mouth, what comes out is plain, simple, and always accommodating. though he uses informal language & comes off real casual-like, he's actually very careful with his word choice. if he's gonna speak up, he's gonna be deliberate about it. rarely imposes upon others, even if he's answering a question or making a judgment. while lucas does often talk quietly, and is prone to hesitant pauses, he almost never stutters. southern accent realness.

claus speaks boldly, usually without thinking first. may use an excessive amount of words. he meanders through sentences sometimes, cuz he's just blurting bullshit as it comes to him. has a cartoonishly brazen manner of speaking, like he's hyping himself up as the smartest funniest guy in the room, but you can kinda tell it's just a playful performance. uses mostly casual language, even when discussing serious or complicated topics. sometimes he tosses in big words to keep you on your toes and remind you he's smarter than he seems. will often try to sound calm and unfazed even when he's definitely Fazed. when he's for real emotionally compromised though, he completely flips, lapsing into the masked man's unnervingly brief, blunt, stagnant speech. southern accent realness as well.

kumatora speaks extremely casually. lots of slang. slathers the most basic statements in irony, pop culture references, and naughty language. whereas lucas won't impose upon others, kuma does exactly that, fully intending to make a big impression with everything she says. even when she's being rude as hell, she usually means it all in good fun, she's just got an abrasive edge to her manner of speaking. sometimes others are put off by it - therefore, she deems those folks unworthy of her company anyways. when she's genuinely angry or sad, she tends to cut the theatrics (though not the swearing). might occasionally lapse into metaphorical language to describe complicated feelings, especially when emotionally strained. shortens words and uses contractions as much as possible.

duster speaks really gently, with a lot of uncertain mannerisms. whenever he has to use more than a few words, he tends to hesitate and meander, like he's not quite sure he's got the right words to make himself clear. prone to hesitation, "um"s and "er"s, and occasional stutters. the way he phrases things is kinda soft & malleable, rarely stating his opinion definitively, cautiously leaving room for others to disagree or add their input. never swears - instead he opts for "gosh" and "heck" and so on. very informal, with a profound southern drawl.

boney's animal telepathy "dialogue" is simple to a goofy degree. little guy will directly state whatever is presently on his mind, oblivious to any social etiquette. sometimes his lack of filter makes for funnily rude or ill-timed interjections. he uses only plain words (though kumatora's unfortunately introduced a few swears to his vocabulary).

flint speaks a lot like lucas, plain and simple and quiet. though he doesn't have the same delicate consideration for the words he's choosing. he says what he means as bluntly as possible, in as few words as possible, and leaves it at that. (secretly he's very aware of how awkward and imposing he comes off, but he hasn't the faintest clue how to remedy it.) prone to hesitant pauses, but only when emotionally compromised. heavy southern drawl (where do y'think the twins got it from).

hinawa speaks kinda like claus, tossing out a lotta thoughts and words in a merry stream of consciousness. hugely exuberant. singsongy, even. she's a bit teasy, and very whimsical, but never offensive or impolite. fond of nicknames. her word choice tends to be informal, though she probably does have a more vibrant vocabulary than she lets on. heavy southern drawl of course, peppered with homely little hillbilly-isms.

fuel is funny to write, cuz he has a loose jokey less-than-sincere manner of speaking, which comes off lackadaisical & carefree. but you can sorta tell he's actually mopey & nervous under the surface. if not by his frequent hesitations and dodgy replies, then at least by his body language. very informal and hickish, and prone to swearin', like the workin' class guy he is.

nana's one of my favs to write, cuz she is a fountain of run-on sentences, always babbling some tangential story off the top of her head, winding this way and that, and by the time she's done talking you've learned like 5 mildly intriguing and hilariously irrelevant new things about her. remarkably formal diction, paired with a flat tone that does not quite match her long-winded rambles. rarely if ever uses exclamation points. doesn't swear. no accent.

ness' speech is probably the most basic out of anybody's. ordinary and casual, with no particular accent or flair to it. big & fancy words are completely out of his wheelhouse. he peppers his dialogue with a few dorky dad-isms every now and then (like callin' folks "sport" or "pal," or dropping a wholly unironic "see ya later, alligator"). though he's not a nervous guy, he does get a little mopey or unsure of himself sometimes, which causes him to pause and mumble a lot.

paula speaks pretty formally most of the time. she says shit like "furthermore," and "precisely," making her stand out distinctively from her fellow dorks & dweebs. is she playfully talking clever in a tounge-in-cheek kinda way, or is she Actually Just Being A Smartass? depends who you ask! paula likes to flex her robust vocabulary, and lace her dialogue with snark & sarcasm. her delivery's comedically dry. when she's reaching out to someone in earnest sympathy, though, her speech gets a lot softer, with thoughtful pauses and gentler language. when she's upset, she gets really flustered, swapping her calm & cool veneer for frantic exclamations & italics!! she does have a southern accent, but she takes care to enunciate each letter in the words she uses, so it's subtle compared to characters like lucas or duster.

jeff speaks as flatly as possible, and keeps his word count to an absolute minimum. his standbys are answering questions with a blunt one-word reply, and asking questions with a period instead of a question mark (cuz he delivers them with virtually no affect). though he knows a lot of academic language, he tends not to use it in casual conversation, afraid of alienating others or coming off like a smartass. his speech is generally bone-dry and very constrained. which makes it all the more special when someone manages to choke a sappy blabber or a furious snap out of him. oh. and he comes with a british accent, of course.

poo's another surprise favorite of mine. my take on him is really charismatic, and genuinely quite funny. he's able to swap between casual and formal mannerisms on the fly. sorta in reference to his mimic ability, he tends to match the energy of whoever he's talking to. so he can turn on a dime from talking real candidly plain & chill with ness, to snarking it up shakespearean style with paula. sharply attentive, he's both clever and empathetic, wily and kind, often sassy but never hurtful. chooses his words very thoughtfully. he has a lot of big feelings bottled up, and fancies himself a poet, so he sometimes goes on sappy wistful metaphorical tangents. he knows full well they sound indulgent, perhaps even dorky, but you'll cut him some slack, won't you? a guy's gotta breathe a little.

porky is the fucking worst and i love him so much ❤️. he treats every conversation like a war, and will deploy snide ruthless underhanded tactics to emerge victorious. he's sardonic, haughty, vitriolic. if he thinks he has the upper hand, he'll cooly sit back and try to pick you apart with biting insults & blows below the belt, trying to find your weak points. if he feels cornered, he'll start furiously barking whatever he thinks will hurt you most. he speaks with an uncanny blend of boyish casual language, pretentious big-brained scrabble words, and swearing (which thinks make him sound Very Mature). will wax poetic about human nature like he thinks he's on par with socrates, then whirl around and call you a snot-nosed dweeb for daring to question his wisdom. my very favorite thing about writing porky's dialogue (and his internal monologue) is that almost everything he says is Wrong. like. as a rule, if he claims something, he's probably got it backwards. and while he is certainly trying to convince others of his bullshit, he is even moreso trying desperately to convince himself. maybe if he repeats his miserable lies & false convictions enough, louder this time, they'll finally stick.

picky peter is practically his brother's antithesis. if every conversation is a war, he chooses to lay down his weapons and avoid the fight entirely. he white flags his way through dialogue, keeping his statements simple and brief and unobtrusive. harshness or accusations make him retreat, essentially playing dead or gray rocking 'til the threat dissipates. kindness catches him off guard, making him "er…" and "um…" and scramble sheepishly to find his words. he does have a lot of barely-repressed bitterness in his guts, and might take on a subtle hint of snark or spite under pressure. his vocabulary is not very broad. he's got a dry fake little laugh he does when he's trying to be friendly ("haha") - but when he's genuinely cracking up, he'll snort instead.

tracy is fun cuz she shares ness' plain & casual "just some guy" manner of speaking, but she's like?? kinda fuckin' mean?? she thinks she's too cool for most folks, adopted a tough exterior to one-up her childhood bullies - and especially admires paula. but she hasn't quite mastered the art of being snarky without coming off rude or edgy. so she speaks sarcastically, teases others, seems bluntly disinterested all the time, and it just makes her sound like a careless teenager (which is exactly what she is). thankfully ness sees through her attitude and knows she's full of love deep down. and paula knows she'll probably grow out of it. peter weirdly enough feels very at ease with tracy snarking at him, cuz he's used to that sorta abrasive talk, but he finds solace in the knowledge that it's harmless here, he knows she doesn't actually mean it. tracy reveals her soft side when she's nervous or troubled, prompting gentler language and lots of unsteady pauses, sounding a lot more like her brother in moments of uncertainty.

[ceilidho]

Do you have any advice on doing a character study for a character before writing them? Stuff like how they’d act/respond 👁👄👁

haha it's quite tricky, I won't lie! it's definitely one of the things I struggle with the most (writing really well-rounded and defined characters). Here are a couple things that I do, but keep in mind that I'm reeaaalllyyyy not an expert on this. I'm still learning so much about characterization every day.

If you're writing fanfiction, watch or read the source material as much as possible, until you can almost hear the way the character sounds in your head. Take time to understand things like their accent and how they speak (do they talk a lot or very little? do they use slang or enunciate everything? do they speak quickly or slowly?). Here, you just want to concentrate on the cadence of their speech / their speech patterns. If they speak plainly or use lots of proverbs or turns of phrases, that sort of thing. If you have that down, you've honestly done half the work. Even I often reread my work and go "fuck, all of these people SOUND the same even though they're saying different things".

This is harder if you're not writing fanfiction and have to create your own universe, but regardless of whether you're writing for an existing IP or your own 'verse, I think understanding your character's cultural and religious background is so crucial to developing them. It's a big part of the lens through which they see the world, whether consciously (if they're a very religious character for example, or raised in a specific country) or subconsciously (for example, I grew up catholic so I relate to the world through that lens, even though I'm not a religious person - it just heavily informed me in my childhood years). For this Bear story, I had to do a bit of research around Baptist theology because I knew Bear would be a religious character (whether or not he's struggling with that religion) and it would heavily inform how he sees the world around him. I listened to some sermons, talked to someone with a Baptist background, and also thought about how that background with tie into his desire to have a family).

Pick like 3-5 words that you think best describe your character and just write them down somewhere. I've never been very successful when I make huge character sheets for my characters or try to write a super detailed background for them, so I try to give myself a bit of grace and be brief about it. You can always expand on it going forward. Like for someone like Bear, I might pick: family-oriented, religious (Christian), gruff, and scrupulous. You can also do this in the reverse way and try to think of what they're not (same example with Bear, I might go: conniving, hedonistic, flighty, and optimistic LMAO). This is a nice way to put like, boundaries around your character.

In the framework of your story, try to pick a trajectory for your character, or a goal. At least have one, but you could have a couple. If they're directionless, that works too! But they should want something or aspire to be something. This counts even if they think that thing they want is beyond them or unattainable - it's still a want/goal pushing them forward. This can also be an unconscious goal by the way -> like a very hedonistic character that likes to party who's slowly getting worn down from that life and doesn't even realize they want to settle down, or vice versa! Someone who feels trapped in their mundane life but thinks that's what's expected of them. The character doesn't have to know they want this goal.

Fatal flaws. This is a big one. What is something that might get in the way of them achieving their goal or might influence how they get it? Easiest way to think of this is just looking at the 7 deadly sins (soooo corny, but it's a good place to start). Characters are never perfect, so give them a reason to struggle.

And honestly lastly? Trial and error, baby. Take your vaguely defined character and figure out what you want them to achieve (whether or not they get it is beside the point), and then work out how they might go about achieving that. If they'd run full throttle towards it because they think they deserve it or whether they'd fight it every step of the way because they either don't think they want it or don't think they deserve it.

I'm sorry if this is very messy!! It also totally depends on you as a writer. When I try to make "character background sheets", it gives me anxiety and I end up not following through with my writing versus when I try to keep it brief and just dive into the writing and slowly change things and edit as I write. But maybe a sheet works best for you!

[flamingfoxninja]

Well this reminds me of some kids I met up the block, a kid named Alfie and his friends, Well we were chatting and all and I gave them some change I got for some sodas since it was pretty hot outside. And you know what they said? They said that I'm a goat. Or well The Goat was the exact phrase here. And I'm sitting there just trying to figure out what they meant by it. Cause you know I may be old but I'm not that mean. And they wereso genuine about it I knew they weren't being mean either. So I asked them. And you what they said? It's an acronym: Greatest Of All Time. Well isn't that something. I mean I try to be a decent guy, but the greatest? They're really sweet those kids.

But now I'm thinking, well listen to this....

<plays tape>: "ya Ohio mogger. You think you're sigma riz? No you were always skibidi sus with looksmaxxing and you're delulu if you think I'm going to let you yeet the bussin goat. Bet."

Now I listen to that and I don't know half the things that's being said. Its probably my age catching up to me. Everything seems to go in one ear and out the other. Even my own thoughts. I'll tell yeah i have to write everything down on my notepad otherwise my wife would be mad if I forget to buy her coffee. In fact I got all the words written down here, at least how I think they are supposed to be written. And the dictionary can't help me, everything is online nowadays so I can't just go grab the dictionary off the shelf to make sure I spelled it right.

Well so I was thinking, the best way of getting anywhere was by going to the source. So I went to little Alfie, a wonderful kid by the way, and he was nice enough to help me with the spelling of these. Even told me what those words mean, like Ohio being "bad". Now I've never been to Ohio myself so they might be exaggerating, but well, kids will be kids.

My point? Oh, I do beg your parden, I don't mean to keep bothering you on this. But you see, Alfie said no one uses "yeet" anymore. No one in Gen Alpha uses it. It's too old school for them, too out of touch with the current generation. I mean, seven years isn't that long of a time for us older folks, but for kids it's like ancient history.

So it struck me as a little funny. What with the tape that we found. If the murderer from Generation Alpha, they wouldn’t have used yeet. It wouldn't be part of their normal speech. But all the other words make sense, too. They weren't misused or incorrectly placed. It was like the murderer knew the definition of the words enough to properly use them but didn't know enough about the current trends to know what words are un fashion. Don't you find that a little odd, Mr. Webster?

[gyokutoll]

i absolutely love the way you write and i enjoy reading your writings! i was hoping if i can get some writing tips from you! on how you write and portray a character or a muse! thank you!!!

ANONYMOUSLY TELL ME YOUR HONEST OPINION ABOUT ME. I CAN’T REPLY/COMMENT, JUST PUBLISH. ; accepting !

oOOOOH I'LL SCREAM. I'LL SCREAM WH AT THE HELL ??? okay I'll try. I'm shaking. First of all tysm I'm shaking but okay let me. Let me lock in I'm JHKSDFJHG. It's one thing to be told you're good at writing but another to be asked for advice what an HONOR. Ok. Anyways.

This depends on if you're working with a canon or an OC. Canons, in my experience, I would study extensively. I use Kafka from H.SR as an example, but every time I'd gear up to do her replies for the day, I'd listen to a video of her voicelines + cutscenes to habitually reacquaint myself with how she talked. You can tell a lot about a person from how they talk and that will help so much from characterization.

This also applies to OCs though! It's good to have an idea of how they talk + why. Hotaru doesn't speak in regular English. I've got a VERY fast and loose background in Japanese + have read an untold amount of manga that I've become really acquainted with the kinds of phrases they use in Japanese to English translations. A big one is "that sort of person", "that kind of feeling". The way translations structure sentences and refer to them can clue you into the conventions of another language, so I tend to write Hotaru's speech as if he's been translated rather than necessarily how I'd talk. This is a weird one but the more deliberate your choices as a writer, the more they shine through even if they seem intangible, initially.

ON A LESS WEIRD NOTE. I've changed my OC-writing + creating into "what's wrong with them?" The more I've written, the more that I've noticed people tend to be more engaged when there are more overt flaws. What's wrong with them can also be SO helpful into informing you more about that person. It's good to interrogate yourself as you create and to put yourself on the spot so you expand. For example: Hotaru has intimacy issues. Okay, where does that stem from? His line of work and his past relationships. Okay, how does this affect how he interacts with people? Etc, etc. The more things wrong you give your character, the more you can flesh out about them because humans have more than one flaw and oftentimes they work in tandem. Like that intimacy issue flaw, in general, can lead to cynicism, loneliness, bitterness, and now you can try and figure out if those traits coincide with anything else. People want other characters they can relate to, and people are flawed, your work will inherently be more engaging for it.

It also helps when portraying a character when I'm figuring out what I'm trying to do. I'm not. From these neck of the RP woods, but I've seen this thing on pinneds that are like. "A study in... / a study of" and I don't necessarily disagree with that approach. I keep using Hotaru as an example but fuck it, this is his blog! But for Hotaru, I knew I wanted to explore this concept of "what if a man is like a woman", "what if the man were The Final Girl trope", and "what does it say about a society that there's a hosting industry in the context of a larger, loneliness crisis?" These are kind of bigger questions because I love sociology, but it helps a lot to understand why you're writing. Even if it's just for love, that's a wonderful guiding principle too! Like, okay I love this concept or character, what do I love about them that I'm trying to show? It could be you love how they represent mental illness so you want to portray that, or you love that they're a biologist and you might know a lot about that and want to bring, and spread that knowledge in your communal hobby. Having an idea of what it is you're even there for helps a lot in portrayal because you'll always mentally have a compass guiding you to the direction of where you need to go.

I'm trying to think of if there is anything else I want to say in regards to characterization.... people are very complex and if you're trying to write a character who is a person and not a metaphor nor an allegory, my personal advice is to understand that people are intentional and complicated and react very differently to different stimuli. I wish I could... necessarily explain this in a way that isn't funky and doesn't require a solidified backstory, but I will say, if you've solidified one, really work with it! Try and imagine your character as someone affected by their experiences. That sounds so fucking stupid but please just bear with me. There is always a through line from how people behave in the present day + their past experiences. Maybe you don't have it in you to do a full backstory yet, but maybe choose three major events, or create three, which have shaped them into who they are today. Those events will inherently create a more dynamic character because they will be responding in a complex way informed by their experiences, which is how people are. Hotaru, out of all my creations, benefits from this EXTENSIVELY. He was written with this dynamic reaction principle in mind and it's one of my favorite things about him. Oh did your hand move too quickly? Well, that reminds him of Sadao and he is naturally going to tense up due to his past experiences. Oh, did Hotaru watch you get bullied and is now sympathetic? Past experiences at play again there babey! Oh, do you own a pet rat? Hotaru's liable to be kinder now since he has a chinchilla. From the large things to the mundane, establishing at least three key events in their lives will fill in a LOT of blanks for you. I think... reading my own advice over, it's really just turning into: make decisions and let those decisions inform your other decisions. And you know what? Yeah! Because it builds continuity and people build on themselves like that all the time!

THIS GOT REALLY LONG and there is just SO much that goes into character writing but before I wrap up, I will say that the most important thing for character writing is trial and error and accepting that things aren't going to work. There's the phrase "kill your darlings" which is a CLICHE and I KNOW every writer uses it I know I know I know but sometimes you'll slap some things on a character only to realize it doesn't suit what you're going for. And these trial and errors aren't failure. They build really valuable skills of looking at your work and seeing what isn't working and responding + improving accordingly. Part of what makes strong character writing work isn't knocking it out of the park the first time. For Hotaru again, I gave him some things which were WAY too dark that I looked at like. Holy hell man, this isn't anywhere near the kind of story I want to tell. Tsugumi and Hotaru are as fleshed out as they are because they underwent multiple iterations. The Gumi you all see is Gumi 4.0 and the Hotaru you all see now is like Hotaru 2.5 (he was a simpler character, Gumi was VERY experimental). But anyways! Just keep that in mind. Especially on a site like tumblr where I've spoken to people and they've had their OCs for YEARS. A character you've been writing for 6 months is not going to have the same clarity of vision and refining as one written for three years, and that is OKAY! Give yourself the grace to experiment and grow!

Anyways this is so long. I'm sorry. But I hope. You get something out of this!!

[e8luhs]

17 10 8 vlad 😋🔫

17. Has your OC ever found other people struggle to understand them because of their accent? How did this make them feel? Did they resent the listeners? Or feel bad about themselves? Or both?

not really accent per se since vlads just a guy from the midwest. more like the way he actually structures his speech and expresses himself. he has a weird sense of pride in the fact that hes difficult to understand (aquarius moon / mercury in 12th combo). it fuels a lot of his complexes. he only really puts effort into people who "get it" and "can keep up with him" (like trinity did or like lea does in a sense). will also say that this trait really influences the decisions i make about his particular style of speech when im writing him. he is really particular about the way that he words things and talks in circles a lot. usually he expresses something first and then explains it in laymans terms after to let the person hes talking to catch up a little bit. like as if you are always kind of being forced to chase after him in conversation to figure out the point hes making. its supposed to create an automatic weird power gap in that interaction and assert "i am smarter than you". otherwise though like i think some turns of phrase ("jesus christ" and other earth phrases) dont translate very well when hes in vitium obviously but that doesnt really stop him from using them VS the way that mavis tries to "vitium-ify" what she says sometimes to be better understood or gives up on certain phrases because nobody knows wtf shes talking about

10. Does your OC often punctuate their speech with filler sounds, such as "um" or "er"? Or words such as "like" or "you know"?

he does make thoughtful noises a lot but very consciously does not use filler words. he thinks they make you sound stupid or too unsure

8. Did your OC's parents or other caregivers use any specific terms of endearment for them as a child? Do (or would) they use similar terms for their own children?

i was just talking about this with cecil the other day ... i think his mom used to call him some diminutive offshoot of his name but i dont really know what specifically. i also CANNOT even fucking imagine vlad having children or wanting children. i do think on the topic of nicknames or whatnot that once he got swapped over to public school when he was younger some people picked on him by calling him vlad the impaler or etc. considering he is a guy named vladimir with long black hair.

[musical-chick-13]

How do you write so well?

So, I kept this in my inbox for...way too long, don't worry about it. Partially just to keep it--to look at and feel incredibly grateful to whoever sent this to me, and partially because...I'm not really sure this has a good answer.

I am (obviously) THRILLED beyond belief that you think my writing is good. Seriously. I literally think about this message all the time. But I don't feel like I can...elaborate on this? Really? I don't think I'm the best person to give advice on writing because I really am just kind of floundering around until I stumble on something that works.

All I can do is kind of...talk about my process a little bit. I shall put this under a cut for courtesy's sake.

There are a few things I find particularly helpful when I'm writing. The first--a more formulaic tip--is, if you find yourself overusing a certain word or phrase to the point where you think it's genuinely distracting, to keep a list in a separate document of various synonyms or other ways of wording it. (<-for me, this is, for some reason, "realize" and "dangerous," among a few others). That way, you have options to choose from at the ready, and it prevents you from agonizing over how to avoid repeats every time they come up.

A more...amorphous, I guess, tip is to consider how your characters talk, both in dialogue and in their internal monologues. How willing are they to communicate? Are there things they will readily admit to themselves, just not to other people? Do they tend to like metaphors and/or figurative language, or is everything blunt and straightforward? Are they wordy, with longer sentences or a tendency to ramble? Or are they direct, with few tangents and less elaboration? Do they use filler words? High-level vocab words? What is their sense of humor like--wacky, pun-based, abstract, dry, sarcastic, mocking? And, most usefully to me, what unique qualities does this character have that might impact the way they use or think about language (for instance, given River's background as being raised as a weapon and constantly labelling and presenting herself as A Dangerous Person, a lot of descriptors she uses when I'm writing her are similarly weapons-based, or reminiscent of war terminology)?

I've found that figuring out a character's relationship to language and speech helps me not only get a better idea of who they are, but also to write them more in-line with what I want my story to be. We have to be in the characters' heads and read them interact with other people. That's where most of the emotional momentum and development happens. Having a clear idea of what those things look like makes it a lot easier to hit the character progression (or regression!) beats you want to hit.

There are other things I could say, tips I've heard from other people that I make use of myself: vary your sentence length, don't start to many sentences the same way with the same structure, use the word that fits the best not the one that sounds the most impressive or that you think the readers will like the most. But ultimately, in writing, I truly do believe the most important thing is to commit to treating your characters as people. Don't be afraid to dig into their flaws, to make them silly or annoying or oblivious or unlikable sometimes. Be willing to give them several different personality facets that inform their worldview, and have a sense of where the emotions they feel and display are coming from (and, again, don't be afraid to get uncomfortable with those emotions if that's what is needed to carry the story to its next point). And...honestly? Pay attention to your own feelings. If you can figure out how to articulate what you're feeling/experiencing/remembering/etc., then you will be much more effective at successfully describing what your characters are feeling/experiencing/remembering/etc. This might sound...odd, but having to learn how to explain my particular emotional state in therapy has done wonders in helping me discover how to explain what's going on with the characters I write. (Not that you need to go to therapy to do this, nor should your priority during a rough time be "how can I translate this to my art." This is...literally just my own personal experience, lmao.)

I am...not a career writer. I'm doing this for fun without any kind of formal training. (My formal artistic background, as everyone who follows me knows, is in music.) So it's quite possible all of this will be useless to anyone else. But I did appreciate the opportunity to break down my process a little bit, and, once again: thank you.

[brigitoshaughnessy]

Fanfic characterization & voice:

Okay, so I was going to find a reputable source for this information, but everything I found related to writing unique voices for original characters. So, unfortunately, you're stuck with my lame advice. If you want it. If not, keep scrolling.

First, what is voice? Voice is a character's unique way of speaking. Everyone has a dialect that includes things like word choice, regional phrases, accents, syntax, etc. Some of this is driven by a character's personality (think of choosing the word "think" instead of "feel" for a logically driven character). Which brings me to my second point.

Personality, if you know a character well, you can find their personality type or get close by reading through the 16 personalities and finding the one that most closely resembles your character. From that, you can find out how they will act in a number of different scenarios, relationships, etc.

Catchphrases. This has to be one of the most common sins of fanfic writers. Since most of you around here know this one, I'll just say, "For cryin' out loud!" You immediately know who I'm talking about, but it almost feels like I tried a little too hard, right? Because it's a crutch. Instead, use a character's catchphrases extremely sparingly, but find the less catchy catchphrases. Something like "Likewise" is a good one for this character. It's not flashy or memorable, but it is something we hear him say repeatedly in various situations. It will invoke a sense of familiarity in your reader without being overbearing. In other words, readers won't necessarily know why, but they'll know that it sounds like Jack O'Neill.

Grammar. Some characters are sticklers for proper grammar, others throw caution to the wind. For some writers, it's difficult mentally to write in broken sentences that are grammatically incorrect. It's the perfectionist, but it's important to note, that in fanfic, you aren't getting paid to write the perfect sentence. You're also not getting paid to write the perfect characterization. Okay, so you're not getting paid at all, but you still want to be good.

Accent and/or dialect. This can quickly go off the rails and become a caricature instead of a characterization. Moderation is the key here. Do enough that the heavily accented words are clearly heard when your reader hears the dialogue, but you don't have to chop up every word with apostrophes and wonky vowels. It's distracting. All the reader needs is to hear the dialogue correctly. They don't need to read a phonetically correct spelling of every word. Remember that in fanfic, your reader knows your characters accents already.

And finally, a bonus category because it's really specific to Jack O'Neill: cliches and figures of speech. An easy way to infuse that feeling of "this is actually Jack O'Neill" is just a little mix of some phrases that shouldn't go together or a slight alteration. i.e. "We'll jump off that bridge when we come to it," or "One man's ceiling is another man's floor."

I don't know what all that was, but if you're still reading, hopefully you found something helpful.

[echotunes]

Hey!

First of all, you're a godsend for the 'MCYT writing cheat sheet' - I use it all the time, especially because I struggle with characterization, so thank you a ton!

Second, would you have any tips for someone wanting to create their own version?

I was looking for characterization posts about a certain character but found nothing so i'm taking it into my own hands :D I just don't know where to start lol

Thank you!

npnp!! as for tips hmm. well the way my doc has amassed has just been via me offhandedly noticing things while watching videos/streams and going "oh yeah that's a phrase this person uses often I'll add it to the doc" and if they don't have a section yet I'll add a new one specifically to write down that phrase. and then it just keeps growing as I notice more things. same goes for the little info bullet points, or when I notice something that's noteworthy to how someone acts that I can add as a clip. like I don't really actively sit down and think "okay what advice do I have for how this person talks specifically" it just kind of accumulates whenever I think of single little points. hence why the doc looks so unfinished in places because for some people it just never moves past that stage of "noticing one little thing and starting a new section" yk.

if I was specifically trying to start a new section from scratch I think I'd start with speech patterns by trying to think of words or phrases that I can Hear in their voice. Rendog is of course an extreme example but there's certain words phrases like "diggity dog" and "my dudes" that just IMMEDIATELY pop into my head when I think of him, and there's a couple of those for nearly everyone if you think about it. so I'd say start off that and then figure out more!

if you're lost for where to start on what phrases there could be, think of different "categories" of words/phrases there are! like these:

adjectives/adverbs they use to describe things ("cool", "beautiful", "lovely", "awesome")

common swears or exclamations ("oh my goodness", "holy shit", "oh god")

ways they address people ("my dude(s)", "man", whether they say the name of the person they're talking to a lot, common nicknames they have for people)

whether or not/how often they swear and if so which swear words they tend to use

filler words ("like", "okay okay okay", "alright")

other generally common phrases (these examples are more cc-specific but "if I'm gonna be honest", "oh snappers", "at this point in time" and so on)

you can also pay attention to grammar:

do they speak in lots of short sentences or longer elaborate ones?

do they repeat themselves a lot?

do they use filler words such as "like"?

are there other more specific quirks or technically-incorrect grammar usages (like how Tango will go "sadness is happening" or Bdubs will say things like "I'm very proud of me" )?

especially for the grammar part of things, transcribing sentences they say whlie I'm watching stuff helps a lot. because 1) that makes it easier to understand what I meant with what I wrote and 2) I can compare to the sentences I already have written down which helps me try to hear the sentences I've written in that person's voice and trying to figure out Whether They Would Fucking Say That yk

this got a bit longer than intended but I hope that helps a bit!!! :D

[basuralindo]

You'll Have Me Rise ch.16 is up!

And I finally got to properly include Cater! (he's kind of a crossover from @terrible-eel's Trey/Cater fic!)

This time it's also featuring editing by @kamikazequail, so, if you notice an overall improvement in the polish, you know who to thank!

Also, thank you to everyone for being so supportive and patient this past week. It's been hellish, but you've all been great, and I'm glad to be able to pull back and put some time into something nice for a bit.

Now, I know I'm missing a few chapter notes that I wanted to mention on this, but I've been trying and failing to remember them since last night so I'm giving up for now (just leave a comment if you wanna hear my thoughts on something specific). Anyway the rest, as always, is under the cut

-Soooo about my "Kalim grew up around brutal assassination attempts and his only friend was a trained killer and overall he's just completely desensitized to graphic or spooky shit" theory? Slasher films must be more chill than his last family reunion,

-Hey so did I mention I love Cater and Lilia? This was my first time trying to write them, and I feel like it was clumsy, but I really wanted to show an outside view of Kalim and Jamil's dynamic through someone who's more familiar with modern human society. I feel like anyone observing these guys interact is eventually gonna experience that skincrawling dread of "something is not okay at home"

-Also yeah I imagine Jamil having the most deeply uncomfortable vibes once he's in his own environment. Like, the housewarden chambers is where he doesn't usually have to perform and mask for other people the same way, so once he drops the act a bit there's gotta be some sinister, angry detached shit under it all. Not to mention all the hostile magic woven into the area to protect Kalim. Kalim, of course, is desensitized to all this because that's just what his lifelong friend feels like. It's probably cozy

-Oh? The scarabia duo starting to develop wildly different english dialects as they spend more time with people of their choosing instead of assigned company? Big time side agenda to show an immediately perceivable metric of them growing into themselves separate of each other as time goes on? Couldn't be

-Speaking of language: I think I've mentioned before that Jamil allows himself to admit ignorance and ask questions to Azul more, because Azul always takes him seriously and doesn't try to embarrass him for not knowing a word or phrase. There's trust and respect there. With Cater he's also asking more questions because he knows Cater has been helping to tutor Kalim with some decent success, and is willing to test the waters a bit. Partially because he can barely keep up with Cater's lingo and is treating it like learning a new dialect, which he knows he'll need some help figuring out.

-Notes on their speech: Jamil focuses a little obsessively on impeccable grammar, vocab, and pronunciation in the hopes of not giving anyone more material to criticize him. He struggles more with casual lingo and slangs because of this (and not socializing much in general), and is afraid to fuck up at contractions so he tends to drop them when stressed/flustered or over text (some are easier than others, like I'm and it's vs don't and won't). Since he mostly learns from Azul lately, his speech skews even more towards formal and anachronistic. Kalim isn't that concerned with accuracy. He likes to socialize and starts up casual conversation easily, so he picks up a lot more slangs and dialectical quirks but doesn't apply himself to learning "proper" english much. He's able to navigate casual conversation well, but often fucks up at unfamiliar vocab and grammar rules, and doesn't sweat correct use of things like conjunctions so long as he can get the general point across. Cater helps him out a lot, so he picks up a lot of Cater's terminology and cadence and ends up sounding much more modern than Jamil. So, their differences in speech aren't a matter of intellect, just a difference in learning style and social values.

-So, Cater's supposed to be from the shaftlands, and his Halloween vignette mentioned moving a lot and never really fitting in, so I'm choosing to believe that he moved to the queendom of roses as a kid and had to transfer around there a bunch growing up.

-Headcanon that, because there weren't a lot of mages around the palace, and even less who would spare time to teach a servant, Jamil is mostly self taught. The result of that being a lot of kinda juryrigged practical spells that, once mastered, ended up being modified in various ways for whatever needs they could apply to. The things that weren't so self taught were mostly curses and assassin techniques passed down through his family, which also got modified over time for practicality and protecting Kalim. So a lot of his magic just feels immensely uncomfortable, like protection wards that are actually modified curses and shit like that. The rest is just very noticeably different from standard teaching, and of course Jamil doesn't want anyone to know he's invented so many of his own spells, so he downplays and straight up lies about it if asked

-Writing from Cater's perspective was a lot harder than I expected, but I really like him and wanted more of him in the story. And again, an outside perspective on this whole situation is much needed imo. Just, let someone actually look at Jamil and see that he hasn't gotten to be young yet

-The whispers movie is a reference to the Suspiria remake. The way dance is used for spells in that partially inspired Jamil's sandstorm dance in the first chapter, and it seemed like something he'd like

-Anyone: "Don't worry about it." Jamil: *Worry intensifies*

-Cater is out here holding the emotional intelligence and basic social skills of the entire school together. There wasn't a lot to go around, but he's making it work.

-I love the idea of like, between the preferential treatment and Jamil's own warped standards, his description of the octatrio and their merits being completely unrecognizable to the rest of the school. I don't think Cater would have been so encouraging if he knew who he was encouraging Jamil to give the benefit of a doubt to.

-Headcanon slightly supported by actual canon: I think Floyd has a relatively photographic memory, and he shows affection by taking note of the things that make people light up, and supporting those hobbies/interests with little relevant gifts, or just encouraging them to explore and talk about it and listening to them infodump. If it's particularly important to them he'll learn up on it enough to hold a real conversation. Since Azul and especially Jade are the type to get really deeply invested in every little detail of an interest, and he sees that Jamil seems to happily talk to both of them about that kind of thing, he figures there's a good chance Jamil would enjoy being bombarded with informative material and the like too.

-Since I'm bringing up Floyd's love language, I might as well add that I think Azul would deeply investigate to determine what someone might want from him, then try to provide it at a level above and beyond all expectations (partially driven by an obsession with proving his worth. potentially disastrous results when he misjudges what was actually wanted). Jade would give little gifts of things that a) he thinks they'd like, b) he wants to see how they'll react to, and/or c) he wants them to have because he likes the idea or aesthetic of it for them. These almost never include things they actually ask for, because it's more fun to experiment than just do something with guaranteed results. And he'd gift an overwhelming amount of these little things constantly, half because he gets a thrill out of seeing the reactions, and half because he wants the recipient to always feel the presence of his affection.

-Jamil, meanwhile, would probably show care through acts of service because it's all he knows so far (this may change over time as he heals). His hate language would be malicious compliance.

-Okay so I think Cater is absolute drunk aunt friend? I think he compulsively adopts people and drags everyone else into it and makes a whole project of helping them, and then ditches out for several weeks to have his own secret crisis. Then he pulls himself together and comes back chipper and doubles down on the project to keep his mind off of his issues because if everyone else is happy then he can fake it till he makes it. …I also think Riddle's overblot was a little traumatic and the idea of another one happening is freaking him out.

[thesorcerersapprentice]

4 and 5 for the Tolkien ask game?

- @kingkendrick7

Hi @kingkendrick7! Thanks for the asks. I'm really looking forward to answering these! If you aren't following Kendrick yet, go check out his Writeblr Intro and About Me post! He's got demons and vampires and a writing club, oh my! P.S. If you want to participate in this ask game, take a look at the full list of questions here: Tolkien Ask Game

I had a hard time distinguishing between these two questions, so I answered No. 4 for the research/expertise that went into creating characters for The Sorcerer's Apprentice and No. 5 for the research/expertise that went into worldbuilding. I hope this division keeps with the spirit of the original asks! Also, I apologize in advance for the enormous info dump you are about to receive lol You have summoned my inner nerd. Sorry, not sorry ;)

4. What are your elves and dwarves? As in: something you studied or know a lot about, something you can geek out about, etc.

✦ Cucufate: (pronounced: Coo-coo-fah-teh)This is a secondary character I haven't spoken about much because I keep going back and forth on some of the minor details. Generally speaking, he's a monkey (a Colombian Night Monkey or Aotus Lemurinus) who lives in Valeriano's mansion and befriends Altaluna. His character is based on two figures: the ancient philosopher Socrates and Bartleby from the short story Bartleby, The Scrivener by Herman Melville. What I wanted to do with Cucufate is find a way to have an animal speak without necessarily resorting to a 'human' voice (a voice that furthers our aims, mimics and thus elevates our culture, clarifies and informs etc.). This is where Socrates and Bartleby enter the picture. They both provide a language model that subverts standard communication. For instance, despite being the primary character in Plato's Dialogues and one of the most famous philosophers of all time, Socrates makes no positive or prescriptive claims (thou shalt not blah, this is that etc.). Instead, he talks in (flattery &) questions, undermining any certainty his interlocutors might feel by prodding and probing their knowledge of x, y & z until they are forced to reveal their ignorance (this is known as Socratic irony). Socrates' speech is thus a kind of anti-speech. If it spotlights a topic, it does so only to reveal the immensity of the darkness that sustains it, its lack of substance. Indeed, whenever Socrates opens his mouth, he widens the abyss that will eventually swallow his interlocutor's thoughts and beliefs whole, and terminate the discussion (silence). Hence, Socratic dialogue successfully humiliates and confuses us. It strips us of that very human arrogance, our intellectual bravado, so that we too can become wise: so that we too can share in the wisdom of knowing that we don't know. Doesn't the natural world do the same? Isn't that precisely the horror of climate change? The root of the unease we feel before our uncanny valley primate cousins? Bartleby, on the other hand, taps into the ambiguity of certain language formulas. His signature phrase "I would prefer not to," which he repeats whenever he's asked to do his job, expresses a hypothetical that... never seems to go anywhere? It's the Schrodinger's Cat of phrases, simultaneously dead and alive; he'd prefer not to, but... will he or won't he? Yes. The ambiguity, the inaction of it, dumfounds and incapacitates his employer. Bartleby's speech thus provides an example of a language that resists, confounds rather than clarifies, and complicates rather than simplifies. Like Socratic irony, Bartleby's masterful use of the conditional and modal auxiliary verb "would," disrupts the status quo. Because Cucufate's speech pattern draws from both of them, he becomes an effective helper to Altaluna; by engaging with her, he counteracts the temptation to think along the lines of a simplistic, "heroic" fascism (good vs. evil, light vs. darkness, us vs. them), and forces her instead to adopt a more nuanced stance, capable of aptly handing contradiction and ambiguity.

✦ The Secret to Altaluna's Success: I can't really explain this one without explaining the magic system. Since I don't want to give anything away before the big reveal, all I'll say for now is that Altaluna's strength as an individual and as a magic-weilder (although that's the wrong word, really) can be understood in reference to "La Conciencia de la Mestiza" (Chapter 7 within Borderlands) by Gloria Anzaldúa.

✦ Valeriano's Cruelty: Partially inspired by The Imp of the Perverse by Edgar Allan Poe (and he would know, wouldn't he, what with his cousin being 13 and a literal child when he married her). If you haven't read it yet, I couldn't recommend it more highly. It's very disturbing. To summarize, it tells the tale of a man gripped by the so-called "imp of the perverse," a self-destructive tendency to do exactly what he shouldn't precisely because he knows he shouldn't do it. A large number of Poe's characters take this tendency to the extreme. Valeriano does so to a lesser degree. Like Poe's characters, he enjoys doing the wrong thing because it's wrong but, unlike them, he won't put his life or his career at risk to satisfy this urge. So, who ends up suffering from Valeriano's perversity? Easy. Only those people who have the misfortune of being beneath him on the socio-economic ladder i.e. only those incapable of defending themselves against him. In this way, I've also written Valeriano as a critique of Western philosophy's stance towards 'evil.' From Plato to Kant to Arendt, philosophers have been adamant that people do not commit heinous acts because they derive pleasure from them, but rather because they lack 'the good' (respectively: knowledge of the 'idea of good' for Plato, a correct understanding of the moral law -the categorical imperative- for Kant, and, finally, the activity of thought for Arendt). 'Evil,' in most of Western philosophy, is always an absence of 'the good'. It is not a thing-in-itself. It has no positive, independent existence (the same goes for ugliness, but that's another discussion). Like Poe with The Imp of The Perverse (and Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment), I'm using Valeriano to disagree (and to show JUST HOW MUCH I disagree lol).

✦ Valeriano's Attitude Towards Truth: Partially inspired by contemporary French philosopher Michel Foucault's account of parrhesia in his lecture series, The Courage of Truth. Basically, parrhesia is a type of ancient Greek truth-telling that implies courage because by participating in this speech act both the truth-speaker and the truth-listener risk their lives; the speaker by possibly incurring the all-powerful wrath of the listener, the listener by risking the possibility of being made profoundly vulnerable by the speaker. Valeriano's exchanges with Altaluna's father, Peregrino, are an example of a failed attempt at this form of communication since Valeriano rejects any attempt at truth-telling from him. Indeed, he exiles and punishes Peregrino and, by extension, Peregrino's family for daring to confront him with his own monstrosity, which he refuses to acknowledge. By the time The Sorcerer's Apprentice commences, Altaluna has been thoroughly warned of Valeriano's inability to be a truth listener, and so, although she offers him opportunities for parrhesia, neither he nor she fully engages in this act as Altaluna is unwilling to risk her family's well-being a second time. This has two further consequences for the narrative. First, it means that while Peregrino is 'free' because he was able to define himself within the speech-act, namely to autonomously determine himself as a subject of a certain kind in relation to the truth, his truth, and to act accordingly; Altaluna's sense of self and her field-of-possible-actions are entirely dominated by Valeriano. She is who he says she is, what he allows her to be. She exists only between the limits of what he's willing to tolerate. This gives us an idea of where the plot has to go in order for Altaluna to reach the peak of her arc, aka. a moment where she wrestles free from underneath Valeriano's power and participates in a fully successful act of parrhesia. However, since we've established that Valeriano is incapable of being a truth listener, then it's clear that in order for this moment of liberation to finally come Valeriano and Altaluna's relationship needs to be turned on its head; Valeriano needs to become the truth speaker and Altaluna the truth listener. Furthermore, that the parrhesia has to be successful implies that Altaluna is going to have to hear something very hurtful from Valeriano and not abuse the power she has over him to punish him for it (as he abused the power he had over her father, Peregrino). Finally, and this is the second point I wanted to make, this reversal between Valeriano and Altaluna provides a commentary and critique on the efficacy of parrhesia in undermining (certain degrees of) domination.

5. What are your Middle Earth languages? As in: something you have expertise in due to a career, a hobby, something you love, etc.

✦ The Magic System: I'm actually not going to say too much about the magic system because I don't want to give anything away before the big reveal. For now, just know that the mechanics are equally inspired by contemporary French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's 'Ontology of the Flesh' as contained in his article Eye And Mind and his unfinished manuscript (published posthumously), The Visible and the Invisible, which I wrote my BA dissertation on; and Philosophy as a Way of Life by Pierre Hadot, where he argues that the true product of philosophy is the philosopher themself. It is also heavily influenced by Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, which just so happens to be one of my favourite academic texts of all time (and a fantastic read if you like Greek mythology).

[owmylasagna-blog]

A (Like Me Still), B, H, P :3

Thanks for the ask!! Let’s do it B)

A: How did you come up with the title to insert fic?

It’s a play on the song Like Me from May I Have This Ed. The lyrics are disgustingly saccharine with the key phrases being:

I know that you like me

I know that you do

But honey you could love me too

…

And sweetie you could like me still.

I just felt like it was fitting for a story that is equal parts about rekindled romantic feelings as it is about trying to keep a childhood friendship afloat in your 20s.

B: Any of your stories inspired by personal experience?

Oh absolutely. Not like complete plots but details for sure. In high school I ate a joint like Ed (as described in ch 3 of LMS) and fell in torturous young gay love and had to hide it. I’ve been to a good number of the road-trip destinations or hope to visit some IRL one day. The Ed Must Go On was a commentary on my dynamic with my partner, me being Edd and she Eddy (she owns like 6 silk robes): but we are generally far less confrontational I think lol. The list goes on…

H: How would you describe your style?

I was chatting with doubledyke about this recently: I try to construct really vivid images that capture the expressions, mannerisms, places, and personalities of the characters the way that I see them in my mind. I think in some instances I could find less words to capture the same feelings (or let the readers use their imagination) but haven’t quite figured out how haha

And depending on whose POV it is I will change up the style to match their vocabulary and speech patterns. If I’m writing all three Eds at once I play with who I want to be the main POV depending on who’s perspective I think will be most interesting given the scene/events.

P: Are you what George R. R. Martin would call an "architect" or a "gardener"? (How much do you plan in advance, versus letting the story unfold as you go?

I’d say I start as an architect but I work slow and then the building gets over grown with ivy and honey suckle and all this other fluff that hadn’t meant to include but it makes it sort of pretty in the end so 🤷

[vidavalor]

Hiiiii, @kimberleyjean 😍😍😍 Very, very fun & smart post. *bounces with joy at wordplay post* Thanks for hailing me in the comments-- I was grinning reading this. 💕 I have to jump in here because I can't help it-- you're one of the first people I've seen who is also recognizing the wordplay in the figurative language and connecting it together like this and I'm twitching with the need to share what I've found, which is that you are also teaching yourself Crowley & Aziraphale's cant vocabulary in doing so.

Good Omens' is a quite literally queer-coded novel, in the sense that there's an actual code to it. It's based around the same love of etymology and wordplay that is present in Pratchett's other writing. In Discworld, Pratchett also used a love of etymology and wordplay to inform his choices of what he used for figurative language. It adds a lot of humor and additional layers of meaning to his work. When he went to write Good Omens, it was the late 1980s and so it would have had to be queer-coded more than overtly queer and, while the story reads as plenty queer on the surface, it's a whole lot more so when you look at what's going on with the words the way that you are doing.

Crowley and Aziraphale are spies from opposites sides of a conflict and they're queer, which is already lending itself to hints towards coded language, as those are two of the biggest groups, historically, to use hidden speech. They've also been on Earth since the beginning, though, so what they have in common is that they are walking, talking etymological dictionaries. They are characters who have lived through the word history the reader/viewer might uncover when and if they realize the existence of the coded speech and start to do some digging. But you don't even have to do etymological research to get the main idea of what's going on because the book is helping the reader decode the cant vocabulary of the characters by the way it uses figurative language.

The words used there are significant in their choice and in their repetition. The types of wordplay used-- things like homophony and frequently-confused words/phrases, like you've uncovered by looking at exercised/exorcised above-- are also clues for things to listen for when you hear Crowley and Aziraphale speaking. How the show is using wordplay in its overall language-- even when Crowley and Aziraphale are nowhere to be found in the story-- are examples of how Crowley and Aziraphale use it in their hidden language.

While a bit of this toast stuff was added for the series, it was because it exists to highlight language that did already exist in the novel, as well as also exists in the series. Toast is supporting the uses of bread and alcohol in figurative language and cant vocabulary. Keep going with it and you'll see it in more places:

Toasts-- as in, clinking glasses. Rome, 1941, and...

Shax's toast/toste in 2.06, mirroring a blend of Hastur & Ligur's toast stuff you pointed out from S1 and also Hastur's ciao/chow homophonic confusion in 1.01:

When Shax misspells toast as toste, she's actually spelling a different word that does exist-- toste, which is a musical term, and also means soon, hastily and quickly. Toasting is also a term for speaking over a beat, so it relates to language as well. So, now, we've just connected bread, alcohol, an element of death/an end, and music/language through just the use of the word toast. I'm fairly sure that's why the tv series uses this word nine hundred times-- it's meant for us to notice it and go why won't this show stop talking about toast?! lol and then start playing with it. Look at where thinking about those things goes...

If you think of bread, for instance, your mind might start to do this: Mrs. Sandwich?!... And the brioche... Four *different kinds* of sourdough... Don't feed them bread, you idiots!... The Russian Cultural Attache's black bread was particularly sought after by the more discerning duck...

If you start to think about alcohol, now you're thinking about: lovely bottles of joy-- eighty percent proof... large Talisker, please, and a sherry for Lady Bracknell... I picked up a dozen cases [of Chateauneuf-de-Pape] in 1921-- for *special occasions*... An extremely alcoholic breakfast at The Ritz...

...and the most important one...

If you start to think about endings/finishing/forms of death, then you start to realize pretty quickly that one of the several things for which Armageddon-- "the end of the world"-- is analogous for in Good Omens is an orgasm. Stars crashing down and what are they putting in bananas these days?! Whole seas bubbling-- everyone turning into bouill--bouille--bouille--baby--fish stew, anyway! Kraken! Great biggggg bugger! Supposed to come up-- right up-- to the surface. When the sea boils.

That weird way that God speaks in the series that is made up of strangely-worded passages from the book? Those are those things Aziraphale references in S2-- la plume de ma tantes. They're oddly-phrased for the purpose of teaching us the cant vocabulary. One of them, in particular, is especially relevant to the fact that you are looking at the figurative language:

He probably wins prizes for his tropical fish.

At first glance, this sentence is quite the wtf??, even as it's amusing. The one thing this world doesn't exactly have is a thriving competitive scene for pet tropical fish, right? Am I sure that The Surplus Baby grew up to have some stellar tropical fish as pets because there is a literal element existing alongside the figurative here? Of course. But that's not what this sentence is doing.

In the sentences prior to it, the words fairly and contented are used to suggest that we'd be headed in the correct direction if we looked also at those tropical fish more figuratively than literally. People win prizes at fairs, right? Often, for their sweethearts? So, if The Surplus Baby grows up to be a fairly contented adult who probably wins prizes for his tropical fish? His tropical fish is his lover, not his pet. The story just used fish as figurative language to describe a person's romantic partner, in line with Crowley and Aziraphale's recurring use of fish to refer to sex.

The funny part is that, if you then take the word tropical and you come at it etymologically, as direction in the story elsewhere leads the reader/viewer to do, you'll find that tropical roots back to the word trope. While we usually use that word nowadays to mean a recurring thing in tv or film, we do so because the word trope is originally a literary term that described the use of recurring figurative language in a work of fiction.

Sushi. Bouillabaisse. Pickled herring. Carp. I hear he does remarkable things to *oysters*... No more gravlax in dill sauce... Mmhmm..

'He probably wins prizes for his tropical fish' is a sentence reinforcing the idea of using the figurative language of Good Omens to understand what it's saying. That sentence, in particular, suggests you start with the story's obsession with fish and the sea to get what's up with Crowley and Aziraphale and doing so definitely yields results but it's not the only thing being used figuratively in this way. Imho, you're following one of Pratchett's guidelines to cracking Ineffable Husbands Speak in looking at the words this way.

You're looking at the same stuff that I'm using to write word posts so thank you for making me feel very seen. 😍

Other keys I've noticed aside from toast, if you like this and want to fuck around with it some more? Nightingales; the opening words on the tv in 1.01; God's monologue is always relevant but especially Her intro to Crowley & Aziraphale at the start of the St. James' Park scene; Demon's Guide to Angelic Beings (start with the top section above Aziraphale's entry, as it's the wordplay directions); and Aziraphale's magic words, which are all the parameters of the cant in a single sentence. Once you see it, you see it everywhere, and it's not too hard to pick it up.

Good Omens S1 Parallels - 1/?

Saturday Morning Funtime is a particularly interesting episode for me, because it suggests something about the structure of parallels Season One. Also, it's easier to start with a single episode than trying to cover the whole show at once. I'm going to show you six different scenes from Saturday Morning Funtime and how they link together.

Let's start with the pun pointed out by Danny Motta in his video (link here to relevant timestamp if you haven't seen it). Danny made the link between this scene near the start of E4, where Aziraphale gets exercise:

And this scene at the end, where Aziraphale was exorcised (according to Shadwell, at least):

Cool, seems like a funny pun. But there's no way to know it was intentional right? Well, I think I can argue it was. Let's look at another scene.

We have this scene where Hastur destroys 3 Erics on the plains of Megiddo. Since each demon has a corresponding animal, I'm going to go ahead and place bets on the Eric's being rabbits, and Hastur destroys 2/3 of them.

And then later we have this scene where Hastur again destroys 2/3 rabbits, but this time they're cartoon bunnies - the first one he beheads like a costume, the second he rips out it's throat.

Ok, but again, why am I linking these two scenes? No deep character insights, or thematic elements are being displayed here... Except that's a key reason I'm pointing them out - they're seemingly pretty pointless, so why bother to make them? Well, maybe the sum is bigger than the parts. One more example and then I'll show you how this comes together.

Here's a scene which I think is pretty good foreshadowing of something that will happen later in the episode - Hastur and Ligur talking about the dripping pipes down in Hell. Hastur has a little bucket he's collecting water in, which he uses in a toast:

And later, we have this particularly gruesome scene of Ligur becoming toast at the hands of a bucket full of (holy)water:

Ok, so six scenes, three sets of parallels... now's where the magic happens... I take E4 as a whole... loop it over on itself like a piece of trick rope from Goldstein's magic shop and....

Tada! Here's the episode laid out in 2 minute increments.

Some pretty interesting places to have parallels, no? That two minute block at the start is a lead in before the opening credits, so the Exercise and Exorcism scenes are coming directly before and directly after the open and close sequence (shown above in blue).

I'd be lying if I said it didn't remind me of the overall chiastic structure that some people have worked on, such as this one by @drconstellation, just on a smaller scale.

It's also interesting to note that each of these parallel pairs relates to someone getting discorporated - Eric, Ligur and then Aziraphale.

What's the point?

So, I promised that I would share a little on why this might be important. In my opinion? It appears like there is some detailed structure to Good Omens, at least in S1.

It should also be noted that these scenes were added only for the show in order to produce this effect - Aziraphale exercising with Gabriel, Hastur and Ligur talking about the pipes, the three cartoon rabbits in the theatre - they were all newly created for the show.

Why go to the bother of creating these little parallel moments at corresponding points along a mirrored structure? Especially when these don't necessarily have ramifications for characters or plot? Is it just good story telling or is it something more? These are all questions worth asking in my opinion. I think it relates to how this show treats words and language in a very Pratchetty fashion. The whole show is a dedication to Terry, after all.

Of course, if things were so simple, I think we would have figured it all out long ago. Parallels, puns, wordplay... they're all quite slippery things. There are things I would consider to be parallels which don't line up with this same structure. For example, the scene from earlier with Gabriel and Aziraphale exercising? The "lose the gut" gut-punch foreshadows this other gut punch scene in E4 too:

Despite examples to the contrary, the presence of parallels and wordplay that do line up along a mirrored structure makes me want to explore this further. If you're also interested in this and want to collaborate, please let me know.

This will be a continuing series, as and when time allows, because parallels seem to be absolutely everywhere. Future posts will look at parallels at different levels (within scenes, across episodes, and across seasons).

Let me know if you spot any others - I'd love to hear about them. They might be hidden in the visuals, wordplay, puns and more...

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With thanks to all the detectives for keeping me clue hunting @embracing-the-ineffable, @theastrophysicistnextdoor, @noneorother, @somehow-a-human, @komorezuki, @maufungi, @lookingatacupoftea, @havemyheartaziraphale, @251-dmr, @dunkthebiscuit, and @ghstptats <3