laurarwrites

[laurarwrites]

One of my favourite questions for figuring out a character’s motivations is which qualities they most fear being assigned to them. Are they afraid (consciously or unconsciously) of being seen as stupid? Ungrateful? Weak? Incompetent? Lazy? Cowardly? Intimidating? Like they actually care? etc.

It’s such a fun way to explore into who they are, why they do what they do, what they don’t do out of fear, and how they might be affected by the events of the story. And I love when characters have negative motivations—trying to avoid something (in this case, being seen a particular way) as much as they’re trying to achieve a goal.

[laurarwrites]

everything u need to know about me can actually be explained by the fact that i read that poem about the serving girl wearing the pearls so they're warm for her mistress when i was like 11 and it rewrote my brain chemistry forever

like this Changed Me

[laurarwrites]

“I don’t think that every villain in the world actually thinks they’re being a good guy, but I do think that everybody creates a value system that justifies the actions they’re taking, and and I think there’s a difference between those two things. Not everybody believes that they’re on the side of righteousness, but everybody has a way of justifying the actions they’re taking. Not every villain has to be a misunderstood hero, and in fact I think there are a lot of instances throughout history of people who were obviously doing the wrong thing and probably had an understanding of that on some level, but had some rationale or justification for it. A lot of villains in literature and media have these weird, Thanos-esque philosophies of what it is that they’re trying to do, and I think human motivation tends to come from more primal places than that. So a lot of the villains I write can be brilliant or clever (and, in fact, probably should be), but their motivation tends to be primal. They wanna be rich, they wanna have power, they wanna live forever. There’s something deep down that is, when you break it down, not too complex. Right? If you look at the real world, the people that are doing bad stuff don’t need complex motivations. They wanna rule the world! They wanna be rich! They wanna be unafraid that other people can ever screw them over, so they screw other people over. Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundanes of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard.”

—

Brennan Lee Mulligan, when asked how to create villains for ttrpgs

(I found this quote to be really meaningful in like…life in general which is why I posted it here. When he said “evil is boring”, it felt like something clicked in me that I had known deep down but hadn’t had the words for.)

[laurarwrites]

wind brings smell of rain starless sky holds close above formless, and yet full

[laurarwrites]

Sappho fragment 147

μνάσεσθαί τινα φαῖμι καὶ ὔστερον ἀμμέων.

Very commonly translated as: "Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time."

Can also be translated as:

"I say that someone will remember us even afterwards."

"Men will remember us even hereafter.", or

"I think men will remember us even hereafter."

"I declare that later on, even in an age unlike our own, someone will remember who we are.".

The fragment itself only survives as a quote from Dio Chrysostom's Orationes (37.47).

The poem is also written in the Aeolic (or lesbian) dialect.

Anne Carson's version of the line is "μνάσεσθαί τινα φα⟨ῖ⟩μι καὶμνάσεσθαί τινα φα⟨ῖ⟩μι καὶ ἕτερον ἀμμέων", with 'ἕτερον' instead of 'ὔστερον'. There's an interesting discussion about the line here.