#problem-solving framework

[awesomengers]

First Principles Thinking: The Key to Creative Problem-Solving

Have you ever wondered how some people seem to see the world differently? They don’t just accept things as they are; they question, they explore, and they innovate. One powerful tool that fuels this ability is called “first principles thinking.” But what exactly is it, and how can you use it to unlock your creativity and solve problems? Let’s dive in and find out. What is First Principles…

[lgbtlunaverse]

Everytime I see that "fandom is worse now because all the POPULAR KIDS got into it" post or any of the bajillion similar ones I die a little on the inside. You all sound like a 34 year old white cishet self identified gamer scoffing about how "all these girls pretend to like anime when IN MY TIME they would have bullied me for being a nerd" before he goes on to watch 4 more videos from a youtuber who participated in gamergate.

[exopelagic]

my players don’t know it yet but the adventure we’re doing rn is me being silly goofy bc they hadn’t made their characters in time for me to plan around them. now that I Know Things the game can really start

[borngeniusworld]

🧠 Ready to Think Smarter? Master These 7 Critical Thinking Exercises!

Saarthi For Success 🔍 A Step-by-Step Guide to Sharpen Your Critical Thinking SkillsCritical thinking is like a muscle—the more you use it, the sharper it gets! 🧠 Here’s a practical roadmap to boost your ability to evaluate arguments, spot logical flaws, and make better decisions.🛠️ Step 1: What is Critical Thinking?Ever tried defining it yourself?Exercise: Write your own definition.Identify…

[malcolmschmitz]

The Insider and Outsider Detectives

So there's a lot of discourse about detectives floating around, ever since 2020 shifted a lot of people's Views on the police. Everyone likes a good mystery story, but no one seems to know what to make of a detective protagonist- especially if they're a cop. And everyone who cares about this kind of thing likes to argue over whether detective stories hold up the existing order or subvert it. Are they inherently copaganda? Are they subversive commentary on the uselessness of the police?

I think they can be both. And I think there's a framework we can use to look at individual detectives, and their stories, that illuminates the space between "a show like LAPD straight-up exists to make the cops look good" and "Boy Detective is a gender to me, actually".

So. You can sort most detectives in fiction into two boxes, based on their role in society: the Insider Detective and the Outsider Detective.

The Insider Detective is a part of the society they're investigating in, and has access to at least some of the levers of power in that society. They can throw money at their problems, or call in reinforcements, and if they contact the authorities, those authorities will take them seriously. Even the people they're investigating usually treat them with respect. They're a nice normal person in a nice normal world, thank you very much; they're not particularly eccentric. You could describe them as "sensible". And crime is a threat to that normal world. It's an intrusion that they have to fight off. An Insider Detective solving a crime is restoring the way things ought to be.

Some clear-cut examples of Insider Detectives are the Hardy Boys (and their father Fenton), Soichiro "Light's Dad" Yagami, or Father Brown. Many police procedural detectives are Insider Detectives, though not all.

The Outsider Detective, in contrast, is not a part of the society they're investigating in. They're often a marginalized person- they're neurodivergent, or elderly, or foreign, or a woman in a historical setting, or a child. They don't have access to any of the levers of power in their world- the authorities may not believe them (and might harass them), the people they're investigating think they're a joke (and can often wave them off), and they're unlikely to have access to things like "a forensics lab". The Outsider Detective is not respectable, and not welcome here- and yet they persist and solve the crime anyway. A lot of the time, when an Outsider Detective solves a crime, it's less "restoring the world to its rightful state" and more "exposing the rot in the normal world, and forcing it to change."

Some clear-cut examples of Outsider Detectives are Dirk Gently, Philip Marlowe, Sammy Keyes, or Mello from Death Note.

Now, here's the catch: these aren't immutable categories, and they are almost never clear-cut. The same detective can be an Insider Detective in one setting and an Outsider Detective in another. A good writer will know this, and will balance the two to say something about power and society.

Tumblr's second-favourite detective Benoit Blanc is a great example of this. Theoretically, Mr. Blanc should be an Insider Detective- he's a world-famous detective, he collaborates with the police, he's odd but respectable. But because of the circumstances he's in- investigating the ultra-rich, who live in their own horrid little bubbles- he comes off as the Outsider Detective, exposing the rot and helping everyone get what they deserve. And that's deliberate. There is no world where a nice, slightly eccentric, mildly fruity, fairly privileged guy like Benoit Blanc should be an outsider. But the turbo-rich live in such an insular world, full of so much contempt for anyone who isn't Them, that even Benoit Blanc gets left out in the cold. It's a scathing political statement, if you think about it.

But even a writer who isn't trying to Say Something About The World will still often veer between making their detective an Insider Detective and an Outsider Detective, because you can tell different kinds of stories within those frameworks. Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote is a really good example of this-- she's a respectable older lady, whose runaway success as a mystery novelist gives her access to some social cachet. Key word: some.

Within her hometown of Cabot Cove, Fletcher is an Insider Detective. She's good friends with the local sheriff, she's incredibly familiar with the town's social dynamics, she can call in a favour from basically anyone... but she's still a little old lady. The second she leaves town, she might run into someone who likes her books... but she's just as likely to run into a police officer who thinks she's crazy or a perp who thinks she's an easy target. She has the incredibly tenuous social power that belongs to a little old lady that everyone likes- and when that's gone, she's incredibly vulnerable.

This is also why a lot of Sherlock Holmes adaptations tend to be so... divisive. Holmes is all things to all people, and depending on which stories you choose to focus on, you can get a very different detective. If you focus on the stories where Holmes collaborates with the police, on the stories with that very special kind of Victorian racism, or the stories where Holmes is fighting Moriarty, you've got an Insider Detective. If you focus on the stories where Holmes is consulting for a Nice Young Lady, on the stories where Holmes' neurodivergence is most prominent, or on his addictions, you've got an Outsider Detective.

Finally, a lot of buddy detective stories have an Insider Detective and an Outsider Detective sharing the spotlight. Think Scully and Mulder, or Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde. This lets the writer play with both pieces of the thematic puzzle at the same time, without sacrificing the consistency of their detective's character.

Back to my original point: if you like detective fiction, you probably like one kind of story better than the other. I know I personally really prefer Outsider Detective Stories to Insider Detective Stories- and while I can enjoy a good Insider Detective (I'd argue that Brother Cadfael, my beloved, is one most of the time), I seek out detectives who don't quite fit into the world they live in more often than not.

And if that's the vibe you're looking for... you're not going to run into a lot of police stories. It's absolutely possible to make a story where a cop (or, even better, an FBI agent) is an Outsider Detective-- Nick Angel from Hot Fuzz was originally going to be one of my 'clear-cut examples' until I remembered that he is, in fact, legally a cop! But a cop who's an Outsider Detective is going to be spending a lot of time butting heads with local law enforcement, to the point where he doesn't particularly feel like one. He's probably going to get fired at some point, and even if his badge gets reinstated, he's going to struggle with his place in the world. And a lot of Outsider Detective stories where the detective is a cop or an FBI agent are intensely political, and not in a conservative way- they have Things To Say about small towns, clannishness, and the injustice that can happen when a Pillar Of The Community does something wrong and everyone looks the other way. (Think Twin Peaks or The Wicker Man.)

Does this mean Insider Detective Stories are Bad Copaganda and Outsider Detective Stories are Good Revolutionary Stories? No. If you take one thing away from this post, please make it that these categories are morally neutral. There are Outsider Detective stories about cops who are Outsiders because they really, really want an excuse to shoot people. There are Insider Detective stories about little old people who are trying to keep misapplied justice from hurting the kids in their community. Neither of these types of stories are good or bad on their own. They're different kinds of storytelling framework and they serve different purposes.

But, if you find yourself really gravitating to certain kinds of mysteries and really put off by other kinds, and you're trying to express why, this might be a framework that's useful for you. If your gender is Boy Detective, but you absolutely loathe cop stories? This might be why.

(PS: @anim-ttrpgs was posting about their game Eureka again, and that got me to make this post- thank them if you're happy to finally see it. Eureka is designed as an Outsider Detective simulator, and so the rules actively forbid you from playing as a cop- they're trying to make it so that you have limited resources and have to rely on your own competence. It's a fantastic looking game and I can't recommend it enough.)

(PPS: I'm probably going to come back to this once I finish Psycho-Pass with my partner, because they said I'd probably have Thoughts.)

(PPPS: Encyclopedia Brown is an Insider Detective, and that's why no one likes him. This is my most controversial detective take.)

[river-taxbird]

There is no such thing as AI.

How to help the non technical and less online people in your life navigate the latest techbro grift.

I've seen other people say stuff to this effect but it's worth reiterating. Today in class, my professor was talking about a news article where a celebrity's likeness was used in an ai image without their permission. Then she mentioned a guest lecture about how AI is going to help finance professionals. Then I pointed out, those two things aren't really related.

The term AI is being used to obfuscate details about multiple semi-related technologies.

Traditionally in sci-fi, AI means artificial general intelligence like Data from star trek, or the terminator. This, I shouldn't need to say, doesn't exist. Techbros use the term AI to trick investors into funding their projects. It's largely a grift.

What is the term AI being used to obfuscate?

If you want to help the less online and less tech literate people in your life navigate the hype around AI, the best way to do it is to encourage them to change their language around AI topics.

By calling these technologies what they really are, and encouraging the people around us to know the real names, we can help lift the veil, kill the hype, and keep people safe from scams. Here are some starting points, which I am just pulling from Wikipedia. I'd highly encourage you to do your own research.

Machine learning (ML): is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines "discover" their "own" algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. (This is the basis of most technologically people call AI)

Language model: (LM or LLM) is a probabilistic model of a natural language that can generate probabilities of a series of words, based on text corpora in one or multiple languages it was trained on. (This would be your ChatGPT.)

Generative adversarial network (GAN): is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. (This is the source of some AI images and deepfakes.)

Diffusion Models: Models that generate the probability distribution of a given dataset. In image generation, a neural network is trained to denoise images with added gaussian noise by learning to remove the noise. After the training is complete, it can then be used for image generation by starting with a random noise image and denoise that. (This is the more common technology behind AI images, including Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. I added this one to the post after as it was brought to my attention it is now more common than GANs.)

I know these terms are more technical, but they are also more accurate, and they can easily be explained in a way non-technical people can understand. The grifters are using language to give this technology its power, so we can use language to take it's power away and let people see it for what it really is.

[lostconsultants]

Navigating Complexity: Introducing the Cynefin Framework for Effective Decision-Making

🔍 Unlocking the Power of Decision-Making: Introducing the #CynefinFramework! 🚀 In today's fast-paced world, navigating complexity is a must for every organization. 🌐 Discover how the Cynefin Framework can help you make informed decisions.

In a rapidly changing world, businesses and organizations often face complex challenges that defy traditional problem-solving approaches. In such dynamic environments, leaders and teams need a reliable framework to make sense of complexity and devise effective strategies. This is where the Cynefin Framework comes into play. Coined by Dave Snowden, the Cynefin Framework is a powerful sense-making…

[high-priestess-house]

𝕾𝖎𝖒𝖕𝖑𝖊 𝕸𝖔𝖔𝖓 𝕻𝖍𝖆𝖘𝖊 𝕮𝖍𝖆𝖗𝖙

New Moon

Appearance: The moon is not visible in the sky.

Duration: Lasts about 1-3 days.

Energy: New beginnings, fresh starts, setting intentions.

Activities

Intention Setting: Write down or meditate on your goals and desires for the coming month.

New Projects: Initiate new projects or start new habits.

Cleansing: Perform a cleansing ritual to clear away old energies and make space for the new.

Waxing Crescent

Appearance: A small sliver of the moon begins to appear.

Duration: About 7 days.

Energy: Growth, expansion, gathering energy.

Activities

Manifestation Work: Focus on the growth of your intentions and desires.

Affirmations: Use positive affirmations to strengthen your goals.

Action Steps: Take practical steps towards achieving your intentions.

First Quarter

Appearance: Half of the moon is visible.

Duration: About 1-3 days.

Energy: Decisions, challenges, taking action.

Activities

Problem-Solving: Address any obstacles that have arisen since the new moon.

Courage Spells: Perform spells to boost confidence and courage.

Reevaluation: Adjust your plans if necessary to stay on track.

Waxing Gibbous

Appearance: More than half but not fully illuminated.

Duration: About 7 days.

Energy: Refinement, patience, and persistence.

Activities

Refinement: Fine-tune your goals and work out the details.

Patience Rituals: Practice patience and stay focused on your long-term goals.

Energy Work: Perform rituals to boost your energy and motivation.

Full Moon

Appearance: The moon is fully illuminated.

Duration: About 3 days.

Energy: Completion, celebration, illumination.

Activities

Manifestation Rituals: Perform powerful rituals to manifest your intentions.

Gratitude Practices: Celebrate your achievements and express gratitude.

Divination: Use tools like tarot cards or pendulums to gain insight and clarity.

Waning Gibbous

Appearance: More than half but decreasing in illumination.

Duration: About 7 days.

Energy: Reflection, gratitude, sharing knowledge.

Activities

Reflection: Reflect on what has been accomplished and learned.

Sharing: Share your knowledge and experiences with others.

Gratitude Rituals: Focus on giving thanks for what you have received.

Last Quarter

Appearance: Half of the moon is visible again, but decreasing.

Duration: About 1-3 days.

Energy: Release, letting go, forgiveness.

Activities

Release Rituals: Let go of anything that no longer serves you.

Forgiveness Practices: Practice forgiveness for yourself and others.

Decluttering: Clear out physical and emotional clutter.

Waning Crescent

Appearance: A small sliver of the moon is visible before disappearing.

Duration: About 7 days.

Energy: Rest, recuperation, introspection.

Activities

Rest and Recuperation: Take time to rest and recharge.

Introspection: Reflect on your inner self and spiritual journey.

Dream Work: Pay attention to your dreams and subconscious messages.

Additional Tips for Baby Witches:

Moon Journaling: Keep a journal to track your activities and feelings during each moon phase.

Crystal Charging: Use the full moon to charge your crystals by placing them under moonlight.

Moon Water: Create moon water by leaving a container of water under the moonlight to absorb its energy, especially during the full moon.

This chart provides a basic framework for how you can align their practices with the moon phases. As you grow in your practice, you may find additional or alternative activities that resonate more with your personal path.

[maliro-t]

the thing i love about running dnd is that the campaign kinda writes itself sometimes u know. like i go ok i have these threads. and i need to hit these beats. then obviously that means x is true. holy shit x is true!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

prepping for dnd rereading notes from the last time we played to remind myself of stuff that the party didn't get to like damn ok. i really had my shit together when i wrote all this in january

[nothorses]

Hi, I'm new on Tumblr. I've been doing a ton of research on TERFs and TIRFs and white feminism, and a lot of people say that the problems with all of these movements at least partially stem from the fact that they all are based off the framework of radical feminism. I'm having trouble understanding the connection, and you seem pretty knowledgeable about this sort of stuff. Could you explain the flaws in radical feminism that cause the problems in these movements?

Sorry this has sat for so long!

"Radical feminism" originates in the second wave of feminism: the first-wave/liberal feminist belief was that patriarchy is a legal issue that can be solved through changes in law. The second wave/radical feminist belief is that patriarchy stems from individually-held biases and large-scale cultural misogyny, and requires a fundamental cultural shift in order to solve. Which is an important step forward in feminist thought! Subsequent waves of feminism included and built on those ideas.

The core of the issue with radical feminism is that it is still very much holds that the oppression of women is the first or most fundamental form of oppression, and everything else is built on top of that. Even when radical feminists do pay lipservice to other forms of oppression, ultimately those things just can't be as important; and even when this belief isn't explicit or conscious for a particular individual, the implication is present in all of the other radical feminist beliefs that have come from that core idea.

So, if women's oppression is the root of all oppression, why focus on other kinds of oppression? Why focus on racism, ableism, classism, religious persecution, or any other form of oppression? Surely, those problems will be resolved when we dismantle patriarchy.

If misogyny lies at the center of it all, well, it follows that other forms of oppression also stem directly from misogyny- or are, literally, just misogyny. For example, they tend to believe that lesbophobia exists entirely because lesbians aren't available to men, and homophobia exists entirely because men are acting like women; biphobia is just a combination of those two things, and therefore doesn't actually exist as a unique phenomenon.

It also follows that the greatest privilege that one can hold is being a man. Black men cannot be uniquely oppressed, because male privilege is the ultimate and most fundamental privilege there is- and the same goes for other men of color, disabled men, gay men, etc. Radical feminists are generally uncomfortable with the idea that white women can oppress men of color at all, or they dismiss that possibility outright.

Bioessentialism and gender essential are foundationally important to radical feminism for this reason: they need to know how to categorize you. Are you a man (oppressor), or a woman (oppressed)? Or, if you don't like that language: Are you woman-aligned or man-aligned? Are you feminine or masculine? Woman and/or femme, or other? Man or non-man? AMAB or AFAB? Are you TME or TMA?

Whether they define "woman" and "man" by some oversimplified version of "biological sex" (think TERFs); by a more lenient, but still oversimplified version of gender identity; or whether they redraw the lines slightly to create a new gender binary, the core idea is the same: women are one way, men are another, and men always oppress women.

This gender essentialism is also why radfems tend to cling so hard to ideas that very obviously strip women of their agency. Misogyny is viewed as so fundamental to the shaping of every single person and their every decision that radfems often believe that a woman cannot truly consent to certain kinds of sex or sex-related work. If it is in service of a man in any way, it must be motivated by patriarchy and misogyny, and it therefore cannot be genuinely consensual. (Nevermind the fact that this work is also often in service of the woman in question, performed for other women, performed by men for women, or performed by men for other men... etc.)

The original shift from first- to second-wave feminism was a good one, and radical feminism contains some really solid feminist ideas. There are also a lot of other branches of feminism, most of which share the exact same good ideas & build on them in far better, more intersectional and inclusive ways. People don't see "radfem" as a red flag because they believe liberal feminism is the way to go-- they avoid it because the reasons for identifying as a radfem in the present day are generally limited to the aspects of radical feminism that virtually every other feminist movement has long since left behind.

(This is also by no means comprehensive, and while I've spent time digging around in this, I'm very much not an expert in gender theory as an academic field. This is just my understanding!)

[transmutationisms]

what DOES an ideal framework for processing, healing from, identifying etc trauma look like in an ideal future to u? ive never sought therapy for mine bc idk what talking about it with a stranger would do for me but im sure as shit not healing from it properly rn. it feels hard to think about what WOULD help me

sorry probably unhelpful but i don't really agree with the entire trauma framework at this point; i don't find it useful or clear & i don't think of shitty / painful / traumatising parts of my life as separate from the 'rest' of me, any more than i would for enjoyable or positive events. & i don't know wtf people mean when they talk about 'healing' or 'processing' or whatever else; these seem to me like very imprecise and wilfully obtuse ways of referring to the thing anybody actually cares about, which is how well a person is able to meet commonly accepted standards of functionality. i think what would help people is if they weren't being held to those external standards of proper functioning lol; i don't really see this as a problem that will ever be solved by application of a universal psychological method because it's a social problem of mismatch between what we demand of people & what we offer them. there are, hypothetically, lots of different ways to address situations where you're incapable of performing whatever functions you do actually need in your own life apart from questions of economic productivity (yknow, things like personal hygiene, forming interpersonal connections, eating enough, &c &c) and i don't think this is a matter of some global personality-level 'healing process,' i think it basically comes down to emotional triage & whether you have the material resources to accommodate your needs. i think this focus on 'recovering' and the promise there is some great happiness waiting for you on the other side is essentially a smokescreen that reframes your having problems as a personal therapeutic failure because it's the only way the ruling medical ontology can cope with the fact it simply does not exist to 'help people' in this particular way & it is structurally economically incapable of doing so.

[plaidos]

IMO, the biggest videogame opinion red flag is something being unfavourably compared to “unmodded skyrim”. i agree with the baseline assertion that Skyrim is a bad & boring videogame, but i think it’s laughable to say these problems could be solved though modding. sure, you can mitigate how uninteresting and broken Skyrim is, but the issue isn’t just the content, the entire framework & engine is the sloppiest, sludgiest, mushiest take on an open world fantasy rpg i can even imagine. the entirety of every system in Skyrim would have to be thrown out to make it worth playing

[borngeniusworld]

🧠 Ready to Think Smarter? Master These 7 Critical Thinking Exercises!

Saarthi For Success 🔍 A Step-by-Step Guide to Sharpen Your Critical Thinking SkillsCritical thinking is like a muscle—the more you use it, the sharper it gets! 🧠 Here’s a practical roadmap to boost your ability to evaluate arguments, spot logical flaws, and make better decisions.🛠️ Step 1: What is Critical Thinking?Ever tried defining it yourself?Exercise: Write your own definition.Identify…

[codingquill]

Essentials You Need to Become a Web Developer

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Mastery

Text Editor/Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Popular choices include Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text.

Version Control/Git: Platforms like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket allow you to track changes, collaborate with others, and contribute to open-source projects.

Responsive Web Design Skills: Learn CSS frameworks like Bootstrap or Flexbox and master media queries

Understanding of Web Browsers: Familiarize yourself with browser developer tools for debugging and testing your code.

Front-End Frameworks: for example : React, Angular, or Vue.js are powerful tools for building dynamic and interactive web applications.

Back-End Development Skills: Understanding server-side programming languages (e.g., Node.js, Python, Ruby , php) and databases (e.g., MySQL, MongoDB)

Web Hosting and Deployment Knowledge: Platforms like Heroku, Vercel , Netlify, or AWS can help simplify this process.

Basic DevOps and CI/CD Understanding

Soft Skills and Problem-Solving: Effective communication, teamwork, and problem-solving skills

Confidence in Yourself: Confidence is a powerful asset. Believe in your abilities, and don't be afraid to take on challenging projects. The more you trust yourself, the more you'll be able to tackle complex coding tasks and overcome obstacles with determination.

[sheeezu]

-The congo line straight to death-

▪︎Shifting research papers - 1▪︎

(yeah, ha. Don't freak out the title came to me in a dream. Actually you can just NOT read this, there really isn't anything interesting, im just posting this sort of like im a researcher, oh! If you were to read this, imagine me as a mad scientist or something)

Human behavior in shifting:

If someone is adopted well into an environment, coming out of that mentality could be in a matter seconds- new thoughts new mind, new reality.

But the way a human learns and interact with environment is one of the leading factors of the struggle to change reality.

Social dependence:

A person grows up watching the people in its environment, parents, fellows and learns and tries to mimic their behavior. They may already have a framework of what a successful human being is like; therefore when an individual comes to shifting, it tries to logically deal with the situation. When the individual can't find an answer, it tries to copy off of others.

Conclusion:

While any other problem can be solved with this approach; shifting is unlike it. Shifting is unlike anything, it's concept, applications, and principles are even more unheard of than a human's interpretation of magic.

A person should keep its reliance on a source material only up to the beginning stages of purging out the human mindset; taking inspiration from others, but should never become fully reliant on it;

It will only lead to a mass cycle of repetition, and melting into the human ways.

Instead with surface-level human computing, the person should prepare to reach its higher consciousness, separating it's reality, its identity from being a worldly human being.

I'm making a series, sort of, just going to organise my knowledge into single posts, and make a masterlinked post later on.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Worksheets: The Antagonist

Worksheets & Templates Antagonist; Villain; Fighting

ANTAGONIST

Treat your antagonist as a real person. Their sole reason for existing should not be to act as a foil to your protagonist.

It is the framework of your story that sets the antagonist in opposition. What happens when the antagonist becomes the protagonist?

Have you imbued your antagonist with some of your own good & bad characteristics?

Use a real-life antagonist for inspiration, and give them some love too.

My antagonist wants:

Why they want it:

They will sacrifice these to get what they want:

Others judge them too harshly because:

But they act like this because:

I can sympathise with my antagonist because:

They could change if:

They can't change because:

They are good at:

They are bad at:

Who else loves/loved your antagonist?

Why do/did they love your antagonist?

Antagonist - works against the goals.

Villain - a “bad guy” in the story, often working for evil purposes to destroy a heroic protagonist ⚜ Writing Notes: Villains

While there can be villainous protagonists, villains are antagonists when they’re not the main character of the story, but instead the main source of conflict for the main characters.

VILLAIN

Defining characteristics:

General mood/disposition/outlook:

Motivation/s:

Do they consider themselves a villain?

Do they feel mistreated?

Who or what do they blame?

What is their aim?

How do they plan to achieve it?

How does this cause conflict with the protagonist?

Why does the protagonist dislike them?

Why do they dislike the protagonist?

What advantages do they have?

Are they isolated?

Do they have henchmen?

Do they change? Do they succeed?

How do they...

Treat their subordinates?

Unnerve others?

Try to manipulate others?

Try to hurt others?

Try to antagonise others?

Pursue their victims or wait for them?

Create a contrast with the protagonist?

Change the course of the story?

Create drama and suspense?

What made them a villain? Was it...

An event?

A person?

A belief or world view?

Their environment?

Something else?

FIGHTING

Who gets involved in the fight?

Why do they start fighting? Who starts?

What is at stake for each party?

What is the aim of the fight for each party?

Do all parties fight fair?

Why couldn't the problem be solved without fighting?

Are there any onlookers or arbiters?

Is the fight pre-planned or spontaneous?

Does anyone try to flee? Why or why not?

How does the fight end? Is there a clear winner?

What do they do after the fight? How do they feel?

Does the fight end the conflict between them?

Physical Elements

Do they have weapons?

How does the method or choice of weapon influence the fight?

Is the fight part of a ritual or rite of passage?

Where do they fight?

Does the fighting ground play a role in the outcome?

Is anyone injured or killed?

Are they evenly matched in skill? In strength and stamina? In resources?

Do any other factors come into play?

How does the fight play out?

Sources: 1 2 ⚜ More: Worksheets & Templates ⚜ Writing Exercises: Antagonist Fight Scene ⚜ Hate ⚜ Word List: Fighting ⚜ Morally Grey Characters