an artist is a director of audience reaction, not its dictator. if you know your craft well, you can make most of your cues hit, but in the end, interpretation of art is up to the viewer. you cannot guarantee that everyone viewing your work will react as you are trying to make them react. a good artist knows that this is what allows works to breathe. by definition, you cannot have art where the viewer brings nothing to the table. you do have to respect both the generative and interpretive ends of the process if you want your art to mean anything.
this is why you have to let go of the urge to plainly state in-text exactly how you think the work should be interpreted. that desire for control conveys disrespect for audience. if you have developed your storytelling skills well enough, the audience will understand what you are trying to communicate without needing you to intercede as authorial voice. sure, some won't get it, but it's better to be misinterpreted sometimes than to talk down to your audience. you won't even gain any control that way; people will still develop their opinions no matter what you do. just find a way to communicate your ideas and hope that it comes across well to your audience at some point
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I feel like many people have a fundamental misconception of what unreliable narrator means. It's simply a narrative vehicle not a character flaw or a sign that the character is a bad person. There are also many different types of unreliable narrators in fiction. Being an unreliable narrator doesn't necessarily mean that the character is 'wrong', it definitely doesn't mean that they're wrong about everything even if some aspects in their story are inaccurate, and only some unreliable narrators actively and consciously lie. Stories that have unreliable narrators also tend to deal with perception and memory and they often don't even have one objective truth, just different versions. It reflects real life where we know human memory is highly unreliable and vague and people can interpret same events very differently
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could i ask if you'd do a version of sapient undead sorcerer that isnt evil?
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i'm finally reading moby dick and there's a lot i didn't know about it such as that the first several dozen chapters are very funny! to me ol Call Me Ishmael has a kind of "what if bertie wooster were 1. american 2. competent" narrative vibe, although admittedly i am what one professor once called an "idiosyncratic" reader, meaning u should not trust anything i say. anyway the book i THOUGHT "moby dick" was going to be doesn't start until captain ahab finally stumps upstairs in chapter 36 and then boy does it ever, because he has I Am In A Tragedy disease and it is contagious and now everyone who was normal two pages ago is monologuing ominously in the dead of night. did you guys know herman melville is a very good writer? have you heard about this? he really knows that if you encounter someone who has you doing soliloquies you should Leave. if you encounter that person while you are on a boat in the middle of the 19th century ocean you are fucked for sure. poor starbuck is out here like "i really would prefer to be in a story about doing my Fucking Job"
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hehe ghost-turbo haunting felix au
turbo is connected to the last piece of his code in the whole arcade - a trophy he gifted to felix in mid 80s as a symbol of him genuinely caring about their relationships on par with being the best racer. felix also gave him one of his medals and both kept their gifts next to other rewards, but when roadblasters and turbotime were unplugged, the medal was gone with everything else
now, after burning in cola-lava turbo is basically dead, but scraps of his code still were intertwined with the trophy (after all, it was his first winner's cup, but felix never knew about it), giving turbo an opportunity to exist as a shadow incapable of interacting with anything and anyone besides felix, who kept the trophy even after the roadblasters incident
also I went crazy in tags, feel free to check them out
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