#individual ability

[ahb-writes]

Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions (Magical Abilities)

Magical Abilities Worldbuilding Questions:

What magical or supernatural abilities exist in this world?

What does using magical or supernatural (or cyborg) abilities cost, and what are the risks and dangers involved?

Who has exceptional ability, and why?

Who understands individual and magical abilities? Does anyone hold mistaken beliefs about them?

Where did any paranormal or magical abilities in the world come from?

Where do people learn to use or work with their abilities?

When characters use their abilities, is this use governed by codes and rules? What are they?

When do abilities typically first manifest or awaken?

Why do this world’s inhabitants fear, revere or covet special abilities?

Why do people with abilities choose to use their abilities for benevolent or malevolent purposes?

❯ ❯ ❯ Read other writing masterposts in this series: Worldbuilding Questions for Deeper Settings

[post-it-notes7]

I'm learning so much

[let-roman-bite-someone]

see, both logan and janus wants to be listened to and respected by thomas. but while janus’s reasoning is just “you’re gonna end up unhealthy and unhappy and lonely if you don’t listen to what i say, you fool”, logan’s is more “the only purpose i have ever known is to serve thomas and keep him healthy and alive. if thomas doesn’t acknowledge me, that’s a failure on my part. if something happens to thomas because he didn’t listen to me, i will never forgive myself for the rest of my life.”

[botanyshitposts]

the city I live in had to take down a big old tree on public property down the street from where I live but before they did it they stapled a sign to it giving the reason (tree was dead and rotting and was a threat to the road and power lines) and then included contact info for objections to removing it to be brought before the city and idk I know it’s not much but I just think that’s….nice. like a nice acknowledgment that people have connections to plants and particularly big old trees around where they live and should at least be able to be like Please Do Not Cut Down This Big Old Tree For A Parking Lot Or Something. their reasoning for this one was super valid and they did indeed remove the tree earlier this week but quite frankly I was just like. surprised to (at least in theory) be able to have a say in it at all lmao

[sarcastic-clapping]

already seeing people who clearly don’t understand that a lot of us who are upset about what happened to marwa in this episode aren’t upset about the characters’ in-universe morality but the real life misogyny and racism in the way that this plot was handled lol

[precious-little-bhaalbabe]

Lae’zels love language would be acts of service but the only act of service she knows how to perform is murder

[endless-season]

Gather around kids, tonight we’re having a grilled squid party.

[ID: Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint fanart. Han Suyeong has a deadpan expression as she sits on the ground creating a black and purple bonfire. Yu Junghyeok has a deadpan expression as he stands on the other side of the bonfire with his sword held up. Kim Dokja is wide eyed and smiling nervously with an ellipsis and question mark written next to him while being dangled by his collar off the end of the sword, above the flames. End ID]

[klonoadoortophantomile]

uhhh drawing from today =] love these two sm

[blinkpen]

waking up in a cabin deep in a remote pine forest as the sun is going down. or coming up? you can't tell yet. suppose that's less important when you remember this world has no pine forests, or a sun to rise and set.

instead, this world has no sky at all. instead, this world has stale air and monsters. instead, this world has a man you've only heard rumors of. suppose the rumors are true, and that man has a cabin. and that cabin doesn't smell quite right.

but when has anything ever smelled right down here

[onebizarrekai]

I'm trudging through the dsasks tag and I'm sorry it stands for WHAT???? AFTERMATH HANDS????

[rebellum]

I feel like... Perhaps... Arguing that transphobia is defined by murder and that anything other than murder doesn't even matter... May NOT be conducive to fighting for trans rights.

Like... people want the right to exist as they are. They want to have access to hrt and surgeries and prosthetics. People want access to clothes that fit them and reflect how they want to be seen. People want access to medical care (eg. Getting screened and treated for sex-based forms of cancer can be impossible if you have the "wrong" sex listed to receive those tests). People want to be respected and treated well. People want to not be sexually assaulted and beaten and abused. People want to have access to housing and jobs, and the protection to not lose those things for being trans. People want access to shelters for homeless people or survivors of domestic abuse. People want name changes.

Acting like all of those things don't matter because at least they weren't murderered by an individual (and instead die of suicide or state violence, or survive and suffer) isn't okay.

[communistkenobi]

conversations about representation have always felt so navel-gazing to me, in part because those conversations tend to remain at the level of individual characters. the focus is on representing individuals as meaningful examples of the groups they belong to - to have “good” representation is to see some component(s) of your social identity reflected back at you by a character without those being the only traits of those characters. To measure representation you first look to see if there are visual or descriptive markers of identity - skin colour, gender, sexual attraction, ability - and then, once that evidence is established, one looks at how characters interact with and contribute to the narrative. does this gay character have a romantic partner? does this black character have interiority not related to their relationship to white characters? is this woman character motivated by something other than a desire to impress men? The goal is to avoid stereotypes, to be an anti-stereotype.

And so you ‘solve’ representation through the adequate presence of these characters. But I think this is an inherently individualistic and anti-liberatory way to approach representation, because it views minorities as individuals who can be cut from the social fabric of real life and transported into different fictional universes while leaving their identities fully intact. The presence of a disabled character does not also require the inclusion of structural ableism in the narrative, their individual presence is enough to represent disability. And so their presence in the narrative seems to emerge from nowhere - you don’t judge representation by looking at how the narrative represents and thinks about historical structures of race, gender, ability, you judge it by the amount of characters who contain those social markers. It means social identity exists primarily within the individual. There is no historical perspective given to characters, no acknowledgement of the fact that identity is dialectic and socially mediated. to paraphrase Gramsci, history impresses upon you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory, and I think when discussing representation, people judge the quality of representation by those traces - race, gender, ability, sexuality, religion, etc - but ignores the inventory, the origins of those things, the social processes that produce race, produce gender, constantly and everyday. And so you get these characters that feel dislocated, alien to themselves and other people, because they express an identity that appears to have no origin point in the fictional world, no social backing. They are essentialised to what they “are” deep down inside. Characters are not made racial, not made gendered, not made disabled by the universe they exist in, they simply “are” those things.

And if narratives do tackle those histories, they tend to represent them primarily through misery. You know a character is gay because they get called slurs. You see a black character experience racism. You recognise a character is a woman by the fact that she is sexually assaulted. The history of their identities is represented as individual acts of violence or trauma, as if misogyny or racism are narrative objects themselves that occasionally collide with the characters to remind the audience that the authors take history very seriously. If an author is especially serious, they will get individual sensitivity readers to confirm or deny the authenticity of the social identity being expressed on the page; much less often you will hear of authors who rigorously consult, for example, books like Orientalism to ensure the structure of their work is not reproducing Western (and ultimately racist) conclusions about the world they are creating. Representational politics begins (and frequently ends) at the level of the individual. And so you get queer characters who endure homophobia or transphobia, but whose ultimate wish is to enter into a monogamous marriage and reproduce the social unit of the nuclear family, or the black character who finally finds community in a group of all white people that aren’t racist to their face. That’s not tackling history, that’s just allowing these character to be momentarily exempt from it. the historical norms and hegemonies present in the narrative are disconnected from the characters themselves. this is why you can have “good representation” in stories that are fundamentally racist or misogynistic or heteronormative (see: ofmd). If representation is only housed in your characters, if you view representation as a discrete trait that you can add more or less of, you are not thinking about the social identities that you are representing in a systemic way - you are, in effect, producing tokens.

And I think that sense of dislocation is part of what motivates people to cringe away from stories primarily billed as having “a diverse cast” or filled with “queer characters” or whatever, even when they are otherwise desperate for those things (excluding from this discussion the people who dislike the mere appearance of characters who are not strong white men, a perspective that is not worth entertaining). I do not want to watch stories that smash characters and identities together like barbie dolls, that treat race or gender as something to “tackle” in a B plot or a “police brutality episode” like you get in a show like Brooklyn 99. I do not want a character creation screen. Identity should, ideally, be part of the structure of the narrative, not a thing you merely choose to “include.” Which is much more difficult, of course - it requires a robust political imagination, but it’s a problem that is possible to solve.

[fiapple]

i'm getting towards the end of the skypeia arc, & i'd like to say just how much i adore the way the female strawhats have been treated.

just... every aspect of how the way their characters have been previously contextualized influences the story-line is treated with a masterful amount of consideration. we're given so many layers to both of them that enrich not only their characters specifically, but the arc, and the one piece world as a whole. without nami & robin having their specific skills, and their specific values, without those being built upon, the story would have come to a halt.

you could not have skypeia without nami & robin being who they are as individuals. not just because they never would've gotten there without nami, but also because the way these women think is itself foundational to the machinations of the arc as a whole.

to be totally upfront, if you think any other strawhats were more central to the skypeia arc than nami & robin were you are full-on fucking lying to yourself.

[darkwood-sleddog]

Can the balanced dog trainers please stop fucking talking about positive reinforcement as if those dogs are not “obedience trained”? A majority of competition obedience dogs I know were trained with R+. Letting your dog wander on the end of a line because you want to do so does not = untrained. It is simply…a choice.

[himejoshiangels]

I remember a few episodes ago there were posts along the lines of kristen should just go back to helio right before she pulled the whole "gifted cleric" thing. I hope yall feel stupid as fuck btw

[ivyithink]

behold the fools!

separately: some of the smartest (if not actually THE smartest) people in the room

together: share one rusty dusty braincell that they stubbornly refuse to actually use