#escalating conflict

[fukiana]

BALDUR'S GATE 3 (2023) dev. Larian Studios

[theworldinclines]

[hiding-under-the-willow]

“Careless with power you couldn’t have understood, too cowardly to take the blame for what it brought,”

There is a version of him living rent free in my head and by 'living rent free in my head' I mean living rent free in a fic I've been writing and anyways he's really fucking angry

[harbingersecho]

you will accept chaos, by choice or by force!

[sydneyscarm]

s3 renewal which means there’s more hope that sydney will slap carmen across the face <33 and that she’ll tear him apart in a big argument <33 and that he’ll spend all of s3 proving himself to her <33 that he can be better that he wants to be better not just for her, not just for the restaurant, but for himself too <33

[alex-the-nonsensologist]

Magnifico stans: He was right, in the end! The ungrateful people of Rosas DID end up revolting against him! Asha: *Magnifico cruelly destroys her mother’s wish in front of her, AND has her face plastered on Wanted posters, AND has false accusations made against her* Asha’s friends: *other than Dahlia, have literally been useless and done nothing of significance, but still get outed as aiding the “traitorous” Asha* Queen Amaya: *literally gets threatened just for telling her husband to calm down* The people of Rosas: *literally get bound and restrained, while Magnifico laughs in their face about it* Everyone: *gets fed up and does not put up with this bullcrap* King Magnifico: How could this happen to meeeeee?

[shay-does-art-things]

C'mon girls, we're killing Kagha

[sadlynotthevoid]

So, you know how when an author is writing og!Cale and they want to give him a power, sometimes they give him fantasy spirit stuff? Well, I want elementals to have the usual 'spirit king per attribute' that you usually find in fantasy mangas, but make the water spirit king an axolotl and let og!Cale befriend them.

And when I say Axolotl Water Spirit King I mean 'non-parlant little flying axolotl' that can turn into a 'giantic, water-looking-like, could swallow a pirate ship, still non-parlant axolotl' a la Ponyo.

Just, Imagine og!Cale who was just minding his business and finds a little dorky amphibian that got trapped in a net. And the little dorky one smiles at him. He has no choice but to help it.

The little one likes him. They become friends :D!!

So, turns out his animal friend can fly. Cool.

His new friend decided to follow him— Wait, where is he going?

...Oh.

So, his little friend is not so little anymore.

Ey, don't— spit it out! Spit the bad woman out!

And he doesn't like his relatives.

[shannonsketches]

so we're all making contributions

[zvaigzdelasas]

Do you think it’s the beginning of the end for Israel or will they recover from what’s happening?

I think at this point this largely depends on the reaction from other regional actors (particularly Iran, Hezbu'llah, Syria, Houthis/Ansarallah, and PMUs & other Iraqi militants). I would be rather surprised if they came out of this with a comparable form of statehood as currently exists, and with comparable international legitimacy

[61below]

I really gd love how Cang Lan Jue digs into the way enmity just perpetuates enmity (unchecked) like, not only does Yunzhong immediately go ‘if she isn’t a fairy and she isn’t human, then she MUST be Yuezu’ but like the whole thing just escalated (so quickly) from what was just a genuine question that should have had an easy answer: what is XLH? And the thing is, we know that her true form can be read, that was like, the third thing DFQC did after meeting her. Including his instinctive reaction to kill all fairies on sight

So why couldn’t the high immortal, Sansheng, do it?

I think that the protection DFQC conferred upon her also protected her from any kind of magical intrusion or interference, too. Not just physical attacks, but magical ones. But like an anaphylaxis response to allergens, it’s not that good at telling the difference between an actual attack and just someone trying to … what, scan her meridians? Idfk how it works, but I’mna run with the idea that to sample something you gotta take a piece of it, so to ‘read’ her form, one has to dip into her qi. But the bone orchid registers that as HEY YOU DON’T BELONG HERE!!! and does the meridian-level equivalent of throwing up a wall of hellfire around her. Which is why what Sansheng projects ends up looking like flames. She can’t read XLH’s true form bc all she ‘sees’ is the firewall.

(… and ok now I’m actually interested in whether or not the Yuezu doctors were able to do any magical diagnostics on her. Like, did it not register as an ‘attack’ to the bone orchid bc it’s Yuezu cultivation? Did she refuse to let these nosy strangers even do a check? I am CURIOUS.)

But my POINT is that it’s really interesting that the story takes ‘here is someone just trying to defend what’s theirs, but the State of Hostilities is so Hot that even the very act of defense is seen as a Threat’ and gives ‘the INSTANT response to any Perceived Threat is with Aggression. Up to DEATH.’

… and where do you even begin to start conflict resolution from there? It’s no wonder things escalated as far as they did.

[bettsfic]

hi betts! i was wondering if you would be willing to explain a little further about the third thing in a concept you spoke about in the feb '22 issue of lkwrnl? would you describe it as an unexpected conflict? i'm just not sure i've wrapped my head around it! thanks! :]

sure! "third thing" is really not a great term for it and i wish i'd thought of a better one before writing that newsletter. sometimes i use the phrase "initial escalation." an initial escalation is something that elevates or complicates the conflict just as the audience is getting grounded in the story.

my definition of a conflict is "establishing a status quo, and something happens to interrupt the status quo." the third thing/initial escalation is, "something happens to complicate the interruption of the status quo."

here is a very simplistic/ridiculous example:

you have the protagonist, let's say a hero, driving the forward movement of the story. you then have the antagonist, a villain, pushing against that forward movement and slowing it down.

a hero getting to their destination without any obstacles is not very interesting. a villain thwarting their efforts creates a conflict. but still, that's two things, two forces, and i can kind of predict where it's headed. that's not a bad thing. it just means i'm grounded in the story.

the third thing, the initial escalation, would be to put both of them in a burning building. this complicates our understanding of their motivations. they can no longer prioritize their primary objective; they have to work together to escape the burning building. they're suddenly allied.

now i have no idea what to expect. will the protagonist and antagonist being on the same side for a time alter the trajectory of the story? will it change decisions we predict of hero vs. villain?

note that the burning building/third thing/initial escalation is not a twist. twists happen at the end of a story. this is merely an early complication that alters the anticipated plot trajectory.

most stories don't have a third thing. many don't even have a second thing. i'm looking at my bookshelf right now to find an example and noticing how few of my books have a plot at all. and that's fine. plot isn't really necessary in telling a good story.

upon looking at my letterboxd diary, i've found an example. the last movie i watched was Poor Things. the premise is that Bella (Emma Stone) is a grown woman whose brain has been transplanted with that of a newborn infant, and so she's learning how to be a person. as she grows, she feels stifled by her "father" (Willem Dafoe) and wants to see the world. she gets her chance when a sleazy lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) offers to help her escape, in exchange for being at his mercy (but she doesn't understand that).

it's your basic princess story in the format of a bildungsroman (i did really like this movie, but i'm an easy sell on bildungsromans). it's still three things:

forward movement: Bella growing and discovering how to be a person, which is a story with its own merit

opposing force: her father keeping her safe by imprisoning her, halting her growth and desire for sex meaning

initial escalation: the lawyer sweeping her away, only to trap her too, so that she has to escape his grasp as well, and in doing so her growth, the forward movement, is happening but it's more complicated now than it would have been if she'd just walked out the door

(note: this is a VERY fucky movie, and i mean that literally. there's so much sex. like so much. truly regret seeing this with my sister.)

sometimes the escalation is in the structure of a story, like an alternative point of view or another timeline. sometimes it's an added element to a trope that subverts our expectation of how the trope plays out. anything that escalates or complicates the inciting incident in act 1 of a story is a third thing.

again i want to emphasize that there are many amazing stories that only have forward movement, especially if what's driving it is exploratory. most stories have two dimensions, and those are also perfectly good stories. the third thing only exists to escalate and complicate, and not every story needs that.

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

Bibulus is so thoroughly pigeonholed into my brain as "the guy Caesar's buddies dumped poop on," that for twenty years it did not occur to me that he had a full name. He was just Bibulus of Ye Olde Poope Buckette. I got through the entire Masters of Rome series and still didn't remember his full name, although now I was vaguely aware that he had one. Wasn't until I started this blog and started tagging him alongside all the other Romans that I finally looked it up on Wikipedia.

It's rather fitting, though, for a guy who spent most of his career whining about Caesar overshadowing him, and then when he and Caesar were co-consuls refused to actually do his job.

[thewhizzyhead]

so I just finished my first run through of Stray Gods aka that visual novel musical based on Greek mythos and,,,you know how there are visual novels that don't have romance as the MAIN point but yet still have romance routes in them? Like you get the MAIN gist of the game with or without those romance routes - like, those romance routes are simply side dishes that add more to enjoy with the main course? Yea it seems to be like that with most of the romance routes here in Stray Gods and I'm not saying that as a bad thing at all BUT MY GOD FREDDIE'S ROUTE ISN'T LIKE THAT AT ALL LIKE IT ACTUALLY IS THE MOST PERSONALLY AND EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED ROUTE FOR ME BY THE THIRD ACT THAT IT KIND OF CHANGES THE MAIN COURSE ENTIRELY AND I MEAN THAT IN A VERY GOOD WAY-

[gingerswagfreckles]

It's funny how people will say that the media hasn't been reporting on the Israeli violence towards Palestinians that has lead up to this while that has quite literally been on the front page of every major news outlet in the world every day for the past few weeks. Tell me you get all your information off of tiktok without telling me you get all your information off of tiktok.

[quietwingsinthesky]

obsessed with the idea of the doctor and the master standing together in opposition to gallifrey post-end of time. less in it being the reality of the situation, and more in it being what the master perceives it to be in the immediate aftermath of being. well. told he was going to be disposed of. the combination of that rejection with the doctor choosing him, the way that sets them up with a common enemy. but where that enemy for the master becomes gallifrey in the abstract with the council as the face of it, the doctor never sees it that way, never thinks of it as the two of them against their own world. the doctor, crucially, kept count of the children. when he saves gallifrey, it isn’t about the master at all, not to anyone but the master themself. because how are they supposed to take the doctor choosing gallifrey over them as anything other than a betrayal.