#you have NO excuse except for your thinly veiled complex that only allows you to include white boys in your fanworks.

[scattered-winter]

unrelated to anything I've been posting today but every time someone makes a post about the batboys that excludes duke thomas another angel loses his wings

[thegeminisage]

hey liz i've been thinking a lot about story structure lately and i wanted your take on how you decide what structure your stories will have? i know there's that "you have to do what your story needs and tells you to do" thing but these bitches dont ever tell me anything they just multiply so. thoughts? - bma

(as an aside, i don't know whether involving medium would change many things but it may be worth considering. mainly i think medium is just a matter of arrangement and that the story would be for most intents and purposes the same no matter how you choose to tell it. i guess you could argue that structure is arrangement in itself and intrinsically tied to medium but i sort of feel like it is secondary arrangement, if at all? like if you consider time as an element to outline -- the time IN the story (how things happen to your characters) is not necessarily the time you’re telling the story IN (how you are telling your reader that things are happening) aka internal chronology doesnt equal your work’s pacing? or should it??? does this make sense? i dont think so. i am sorry.) - bma :|

NOOO dont be sorry ur making total sense

i think there’s 3 thots to unpack here (medium, structure, & chronology) & i’m gonna start with medium bc it’s easier. im also putting it behind a cut bc it’s gonna get just stupidly long and rambly. i’m sorry in advance if it’s not helpful to you, i have a lot to say for someone who has never taken even one single class on writing and as a result doesn’t know jack shit (there’s a tl;dr at the end dont worry)

about MEDIUM: 

so like ok i’m just some goof-off with a HS degree who writes fanfiction but In My Very Super Qualified Personal Opinion, i don’t think that most of the time medium is intrinsically tied to STRUCTURE of the main storytelling arc...i think the art of storytelling itself is distinct from the medium you choose to tell the story IN. this post puts it better than i ever could but basically for me, i feel like the story itself is sort of the raw, malleable concept, and the medium you choose to tell it in is how you convey the information??

like in a book, you can say “she forgot her keys” and in a film you have to show her smacking her forehead, heading back into the house, and swiping her keeps off the counter. you can’t TELL in film, you have to show. similarly i regret every day i cannot perfectly describe a facial expression with words when i see it so clearly in my head. for audio-only podcasts that are dialogue heavy out of necessity you have different limitations than you would for, say, animated music videos with no dialogue at all. games allow for more interactivity and exploration while sacrificing accessibility, tv shows allow for more length while sacrificing, uh, a big hollywood budget...medium affects the kind of story you can reasonably tell which is why some stories are better suited to one medium than another. i think trying things in other mediums is a good way to stretch your storytelling muscles but with enough skill nearly any story could be told in any medium. i think when trying to decide on a medium you just gotta weigh the pros & cons and what you feel comfortable with/what you think would be most effective/what would evoke the strongest reaction

re: structure:

firstly “do what the story tells u to do” is a little silly like...the story isn’t sentient. come on. that’s like “i can only write when the writing gods inspire me” there are no writing gods! inspire yourself! it’s all in our weird messed up brains! ok anyway.

this is, again, just how i do things, and i am 700% self-taught so take it with a grain of salt, but when i sit down and start blocking out a story from scratch i don’t...actually consider the big structure at all! sorry if that’s not helpful to you. i like to make a list of everything i want to happen, and then put it together in a few different orders to see what looks best. and when i’m finished, whatever i have just like...IS the structure i go with, with perhaps minor tinkering to make it flow more smoothly. (i think this might be in the same spirit as “do what the story tells you” with less bullshit and more Agency Of The Writer.)

for long and more complex projects, i actually usually have several lists - one list of stuff that is, for example, the Action Plot (the kingdom has been cursed, i’m tracking down my serial killer sister to bring her to justice, i’m running from djinn who wanna kill my dad, i’m trying to bring my dead not-boyfriend back to life). then i have another list for Character A & Character B’s romance or whatever. and maybe a even another one for solo character development (magicphobic prince learns to love magic, former werewolf hunter figures out his family is a cult, half-demon learns to embrace his own nature). and as many lists as we need for however many Main Characters and or Plots/Sideplots

how i order the lists: individually first. don’t mix them together to start with. when deciding the order of an individual list i like to, for example in a romance arc, use escalating intimacy. “A and B have dinner together” is naturally gonna go way sooner than “A and B kiss” or “A and B talk about A’s angsty backstory” because that’s more satisfying. draw it out, good/important stuff last, dangle that carrot so we have a reason to keep reading! for singular character development, it’s basically a straightforward point A to point B...if i want my guy to start hating magic with everything he is and end up being very comfortable with it, i have to put “reluctantly uses magic to save his own life” WAYYY before “casually using magic to light torches and reheat his cold stew.” 

the tricky part for me is when i’m done with these lists and then i need to mix them together To Pace My Whole Story. (this is usually why i wind up with a rainbow colored spreadsheet.) i don’t like to put too many things too close together because then the pace feels uneven. even if my Action Plot is only a thinly veiled excuse for romance and character development, i still don’t want to focus on a romance for 30,000 words and then go “and oh yeah in case you forgot Serial Killing Sister is still coming for your asses.” the more sideplots and major character arcs you’re juggling the harder it is to get an even distribution, which is my main concern always

and like, generally, whatever i have when i’m finished...is my structure. (sorry.) 

i don’t know much about the classic 3-act or anything like that, but i usually can divide them up into 3-5 big arcs based on story turning points. sometimes i take a scene out of one arc and put it in another because it fits better and i like for my shit to be organized, but usually by the time i’m finished with all that, that’s what the final story is mostly gonna look like. (there have been a few exceptions when i realized i needed extra scenes/changes while i was MID-DRAFT and let me tell you that murders me EVERY time. it happened on the merlin fic i’m currently posting and that was like my own personal hell.)

this is also where thots about chronology come in:

i think time CAN be an element of this if you WANT it to be, but it doesn’t HAVE to be. if you want it to be, i would consider it just another “list” like character development or the romance arc. 

i usually plot without considering Time very much...to me, it’s all down to the events you want to show, and however much time it takes is the byproduct. if you want to show something from a character’s chilhood but then tell the bulk of it when they’re adults, that’s one thing. if you want to show a scene from their childhood, teenhood, young adulthood, etc, that’s a different kind of pacing?? i usually do it this way so i can regard time like wordcount: it takes as long as it takes. 3 days or 3 years, a 1.5k drabble or a 100k epic...overall, my LARGEST CONCERN is that even distribution. in the same way that i don’t want one chapter to be 30,000 words when the rest are 10,000 words, i personally am not a fan of huge timeskips offscreen

(because this where i think someone’s own internal chronology DOES matter...this is just a personal preference, as a reader i have a hard time really comprehending, say, a year timeskip or a 10yr timeskip when all i did was turn one page. like, a year is such a long time. i can’t even begin to describe how different i am now to how i was a year ago. it’s the same for character development. time IS development and as a writer i’m not really comfortable having that take place offscreen - for main characters, at least. it’s just too jarring. a little prologue with something happening 10 or 20 years ago is usually fine, but for the most part, i’m not a fan. ...i can do one chapter per year a lot easier than i can do two chapters in childhood and the other 8 in adulthood. of course you can play with this a LOT with nonlinear storytelling, which is a whole other very cool thing, and someone skilled in their work can keep me sucked in no matter what, but imo if you don’t want to risk throwing your reader out of your work it’s better to keep things steady)

HOWEVER sometimes time IS an element u wanna consider outside of just making sure your shit is evenly distributed...if your heart is moved to tell a story in a specific timeframe, over a year, or from solstice to solstice (this was almost the timeline for my merlin fic and then i changed it), for the first six months of a friendship, or even a huge journey in the span of a single day (toby fox had a lot of success with this one lol).

i think it can help to choose a start and end point for your chronology the same way you do for character development (prince goes from hating magic to being ok with it, story takes place from ages 8 to 25, or from new year’s eve 2038 to 2039, whatever) - that way you can keep your distribution even, if that’s a thing you want to do...even if you have a lot of skips you can still note what happens offscreen to make it work better in your head? like, if you just make it another List, another column on your spreadsheet, when you’re in the early stages of organizing you can be conscious of it and make sure it’s playing into the story the way you want it to

anyway these r my thots im SOOOO SORRY this is so long lmao. brain machine broke today which is why i had to ramble more to explain myself. the tl;dr in case ur brain is melting out of ur ears & u didn’t sign up for an essay:

imo medium is totally distinct from storytelling tho ofc some stories are better suited to some mediums

structure? i don’t know her. i plot w/o regard to structure and then if it looks funny i mush it into a more structurally sound shape

my main concern when structuring anything, including time, is an even distribution of Events and a steady rate of escalation

structure to me is just what i have when i’m finished plotting. i’m sorry one day i’m gonna take a writing class

internal chronology matters to me personally because i have a little bit of time blindness but maybe not to everyone, i know many very successful stories where they disregarded that entirely to no ill effect

writer’s block isn’t real! everyone just needs more rainbow spreadsheets

thank u for asking I HOPE i didn’t make you regret it too badly lmao and that at least a little of it was helpful!! 

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

Netflix's Umbrella Academy Season 2 is just around the corner, and there are a lot of characters to keep track of

Umbrella Academy Season 1 wrapped up on a major cliffhanger--and it's one you'll probably want to have fresh in your memory as Season 2 kicks off on July 31. The new season picks up directly where the old one left off--with the entire Hargreeves family in the crosshairs of a full-on apocalypse, except this time the world isn't going to end in 2019, it's going to end in the 1960s. Talk about a tough break.

Naturally, there are plenty of moving parts to consider and keep track of in this new season, which means it's critical for you to have at least some memory of exactly what happened in Season 1. Remember Five's torrid love affair at the end of the world? The whole deal with The Handler? Leonard Peabody and Vanya's awakening? What about Klaus in Vietnam, or Ben's reveal?

Don't panic if you're scratching your head--like we said, there are a lot of moving parts here. And to save you from trying to fit a whole 10-episode binge into the week before Season 2's premiere, we've broken down the most critical things to remember about each of the key players in Umbrella Academy's wacky, violent, temporally displaced world. So, let's rewind a second and bring you back up to speed.

In case it wasn't already obvious, major spoilers from Umbrella Academy Season 1 ahead.

Luther Hargreeves (Number 1)

Luther's whole life has been defined by his unwavering (and completely misguided) loyalty to his father who, quite frankly, treats both him and his siblings like absolute garbage. Prior to Season 1, Luther was the only Hargreeves child to stay with Reginald, who sent him on a "mission" to an isolated moon base. The mission, which, unsurprisingly, wound up to be a thinly veiled excuse to get Luther out of his hair, ended in catastrophe, nearly killing Luther but allowing Reginald a chance to test an experimental medical procedure. It saved Luther's life but transformed his body into an ape-like monstrosity.

More isolated and repressed than ever before, Luther tailspun until Reginald was murdered and his siblings came crashing back into his life. He has an antagonistic relationship with Diego and a flirtatious (but typically doomed, for numerous reasons) relationship with Allison. The two of them can just never seem to make it work.

Luther spent nearly all of his time in Season 1 pining over Allison, trying to mediate his siblings' petty squabbles, and otherwise grappling with the yolk of leadership around his neck.

Diego Hargreeves (Number 2)

As the official Number 2, Diego has always had an inferiority complex aimed at Luther. While Luther always seemed to win the approval of Reginald, Diego was the family's mama's boy, fostering a close connection to the family's "mother," Grace, a robot made by Reginald himself. When the Umbrella Academy was officially dissolved, Diego became a sort of Batman-like vigilante, befriending (and later sort-of dating) a police officer named Eudora Patch to get his leads.

Diego's power allows him to telekinetically control projectiles. He's never stopped feeling desperate for his father's approval and never quite forgiven Luther for being the "favorite" of the family.

Diego spent the majority of Season 1 obsessively trying to investigate Reginald's death with the help of Detective Patch, which unfortunately lands her in the crosshairs of The Commission. Patch was killed by Cha-Cha, leaving Diego with yet another death he felt the need to avenge.

Allison Hargreeves (Number 3)

Allison had the closest approximation to a successful life following the collapse of the Umbrella Academy team--but it came with a catch. Her power, the ability to mentally manipulate anyone into doing anything by giving them commands that start with "I heard a rumor…" (i.e. "I heard a rumor that you hired me for this job," or "I heard a rumor you paid me millions of dollars," etc.) She conned her way into a life of fame and fortune by telling rumors about herself, earning celebrity status before settling down and starting a family.

Things began to collapse in her life after Reginald's murder when her husband eventually learned about her abilities and her on-again-off-again thing with Luther was reginited. She ended the season with a severe neck injury (her throat was slashed by Vanya's violin bow during an outburst) that rendered her mute, and thus, unable to use her powers at all.

Klaus Hargreeves (Number 4)

Klaus's abilities allowed (or, maybe more accurately forced) him to commune with the dead. After being traumatized repeatedly by his father's experiments in pushing him to his limits, including locking him in mausoleums for days on end surrounded by ghosts, Klaus completely went off the rails. On his own, he became a drug addicted alcoholic, caught in a seemingly endless downward spiral, all while putting on a flamboyant, narcissistic front.

During Season 1, Klaus accidentally time traveled back to the Vietnam war, where he met and fell in love with an American soldier named Dave. Dave, tragically, was killed in battle and when Klaus was returned to the present, he kept Dave's dog tags. Now coping with post-traumatic stress, Klaus tried to get clean.

The other major reveal for Klaus in Season 1 was that Ben, his brother who had been killed on a mission during their childhood, is actually still around as a ghost that only Klaus can see and communicate with.

Five (Number 5)

Five mysteriously vanished in a time traveling experiment that left him stranded in a post apocalyptic future for decades. During that time, he lost his mind, fell in love with a mall mannequin he named Dolores, and proceeded to make a sort of life with her in his head. It was all very weird, but kind of sweet. He even brought her back to the present with him and toted her fiberglass body around, confiding in her.

It was revealed that, during his time in the future, Five joined a bureaucratic body known as The Commission, created to police time-space anomalies and preserve the passage of time. He became one of their top ranking agents, a ruthless killing machine who traveled through time snuffing out anomalies with brutal efficiency, all while grappling with the fact he was still very much not-quite-there mentally or emotionally.

When he finally managed to return to the present, he found himself trapped in his thirteen-year-old body, despite being mentally in his 50s. He attempted to rally his siblings to prevent the apocalypse he had traveled to while dodging The Commission's assassins sent to kill him for going rogue.

Ben Hargreeves (Number 6)

Ben Hargreeves died as a child before the events of the show kicked off, but was revealed to be haunting Klaus--a major change from the comics, where he was just regular, run-of-the-mill dead.

Ben was able to possess Klaus and use some of his powers to help fight The Commission--though not much is known about how Ben's abilities actually work. His code name is "The Horror" and he's able to manifest various extra dimensional monsters through his skin, but thus far, at least in his ghost form, what we've seen have been tentacles sprouting out of his chest.

The only person Ben can directly communicate with is Klaus, who, unfortunately, is less than thrilled to play mediator between him and the rest of the siblings.

Vanya Hargreeves (Number 7)

Gaslit by her father from childhood, Vanya grew up believing she was the only Hargreeves child without special powers. The truth, however, was that Reginald determined Vanya's abilities to be too dangerous and drugged her to keep them at bay. This led to a life of isolation for Vanya, who never officially got to be part of her brothers and sister's childhood superhero team.

As an adult, Vanya played and taught violin and lived a mostly quiet life before a man named Leonard Peabody slowly insinuated himself into her good graces. It seemed like an innocent enough romance at first, but eventually Leonard revealed himself to be an Umbrella Academy stalker who was bent on destroying the team. His plan involved turning Vanya against her family and causing her to lose control of her powers--and he mostly succeeded, but Vanya's mental breakdown also triggered the apocalypse (via the moon exploding), which the Hargreeves family avoided by traveling back in time.

The Other Hargreeves

The 7 Hargreeves children were raised by Reginald, their abusive adoptive father, Grace, their robotic "mother," and Pogo, a sentient chimp who functioned like something of a nanny.

Reginald adopted the Hargreeves children after they were mysteriously born--all simultaneously, around the world on October 1, 1989, to women who were not pregnant. He trained them as the Umbrella Academy, forcing them to fight crime and develop their powers, though no one, least of all the children, really knew why or to what end.

Reginald's death is what triggers the family reunion that kicked off the first season. Grace was killed, as much as a robot can be killed, by Diego (it was tragic, trust us) and Pogo was accidentally killed by Vanya when she lost control of her powers.

The Commission

The critical characters to remember in The Commission are The Handler, Hazel, and Cha-Cha. The latter two are time-traveling assassins who were sent to execute Five for abandoning his mission and trying to prevent the apocalypse. Hazel finished Season 1 by betraying The Commission after he fell in love with a civilian waitress in 2019, which prompted him to decide he'd rather lead a normal life than continue hopscotching through time murdering people.

The Handler, Five's former boss, is a sociopathic ladder-climber bent on complete Commission control. She sits at the top, or very near the top, of the Commission's bureaucratic ladder and is less concerned with actually preserving space and time than she is with garnering as much personal power as she possibly can. She ended Season 1 by taking a bullet to the head courtesy of Five--though it's difficult to say whether or not this removes her from the equation for good, given how connected with time travel she is.

from GameSpot - All Content https://ift.tt/3g59RAB