#AND Stories

[wanderersofeorzea]

LF More FFXIV RP Blogs Hey there, it's one of those posts again asking to like, reblog, comment, or whatever it is peeps ask for(I seriously don't remember) to find more rp blogs to follow, because as much as I love seeing the same four people on my dash, they need a hand!

Looking to follow... - Peeps talking about their character(s). - Sharing solo character(s) writings. - Sharing roleplays. - Prompts & asks. - Screenshots & art.

[bucking-mustangs-with-wings]

buckxbucky au idea #2:

Lone-wolf John Egan travels into a small town looking for a place to stay temporarily, the full moon only a few days away. Unbeknownst to him, the town is the territory of an established but discreet pack, led by a powerful alpha, the last of a rare bloodline of white wolves, Gale Cleven.

[wormworker]

some of y'all forget way too often that fictional characters are like... open to interpretation

[ellenofteamcealverse]

I drew this a while back of Star of Team Cealverse's character named Winter for a solo project they're making.

[teitomonogatari]

when people say "enough stories about the human condition" like.

all stories are about the human condition!!!!!!! all art is about the human condition!!!! everything we create is about the human condition because we are so so so desperately human

ancient paintings in caves are about the human condition. the epic of gilgamesh is about the human condition. stories made a million years from now will be about the human condition

we are humans making art and all the art made by humans bleeds of humanity. do you get it? do you fucking get it?????

[justp34chy]

considering writing a Briar fic perhaps

[etfrin]

idk where I got the courage to write an aftg fanfic because Neil and Andrew are both such unique and complex characters and every time I make them talk or make them do something I am like WOULD THEY DO IT!? WOULD THEY? i am so afraid of writing them fr, and I feel so scared whenever I make them interact with my oc because what if it's not like them to do that??? All I can do is suck it up because I am trying my best and idk what else to do— because I want to keep writing my story and I went them in it and I want them to be themselves and it's scary because what if I am changing them to my will?? But characters are up to interpretations because even tho an author writes them, a reader will see what they want to see, so my writing of Neil and Andrew will never be truly accurate so that's scary af because I love them as they're

[alovelyburn]

This became ranting halfway through so feel free to delete/ignore.

Related to recent discussion but not necessarily confined to Berserk. Lately I've just disliked calling antagonists or characters I write 'evil' at all. I tried introducing a new OC of mine to an acquaintance once and their immediate question was 'are they good or evil'?

What does it matter! Are you banned from liking them if they're evil? What if their morality and actions are too complex to sum up in a good-or-evil dichotomy? What if they begin as a hero and undergo a corruption arc? What if they begin as a villain and undergo an atonement arc? What if I just made them for a cutesy slice-of-life comic where the stakes are so low there don't need to be heroes and villains? What if they're super ambiguous and there are no right answers about their morality? And again, even if they were evil, does that somehow prevent you from liking them?

I just feel like labelling my characters as 'evil' makes them more boring, or misleads certain audiences into thinking the story will go a certain direction when it won't. I like putting my villains through redemption arcs and my heroes through corruption arcs. Not to mention how... I am a weird writer who has to understand my villain and what they desire and why they do what they do completely before I can make them do anything. I can't just have them kicking puppies for funsies, that just causes my brain to stutter to a halt and go 'but... what's the point of this????? to what end???'

I dunno. Maybe I'm too idealistic?

But overall I just. Find evil-for-the-sake-of-evil villains so unbelievably boring. They feel more plot device than character, and the longer they spend on-screen, the more I start to get bored by them. They can catalyze fun situations but they just... don't feel interesting. Griffith, and other villains and ambiguous characters who fandom tends to flatten, is more fun and interesting as a deeply flawed person than as Secretly Satan Incarnate All Along.

So one of the conversations I used to get into a lot during my days with the DC Fandom was this idea of Evil Villains, right like... people complaining that all the villains these days have tragic pasts and aren't just evil for the sake of being evil anymore.

This is also a complaint a friend of mine had when Aizen's motivations came out in Bleach back in the day - she was disappointed that he wasn't just a power hungry bastard. And then Gin's motivations came out and she was even more unhappy about that.

And this is one of those things that I'm never going to understand, I think. In part just because I think in most cases, characters who can be easily labeled as "evil" are kind of, you know, boring just like you said. They're flat. This isn't definitely all the time absolutely true, but it is I think true as a general rule, at least to me. It's also not realistic. Even the most evil people in history weren't sitting around like, yes today I will grease and twist my mustache and go out there and be Evil.

Fiction being fiction sometimes you can sometimes get away with it, I think, but that's the other thing: IMO when you do have a character who can be described as evil by nature, just evil - a Joker, or a Darkseid, that kind of thing - their absolute pointless malevolence pops more when they are a rarity. If you consider every character being plotted somewhere on a hypothetical graph where their point is placed at the intersection of the reasonableness of their goal and the tactics they use to get those things done, I feel like very few characters should be like... at the all-for-nothing extremes right like, if you have a character that's at 0 on reasonableness and 100 on extremity of tactics you've created an Absolute Monster, which may or may not be what you're going for but something that extreme should really stand out in my personal opinion. It shouldn't be just like one heartless monster in a crowd of thousands, that makes them less memorable and honestly it makes the story less memorable because one absolute monster can be chilling but a crowd is so over the top as to be unbelievable.

All of which is a long long winded way of getting around to, yeah I agree with you. I don't really think it's too idealistic - I mean I think the same thing and I'm a cynical realist so. Rather, I think the tendency to imagine that people who do awful things do those things because it's just fun to cause pain or even "because they're evil" is a little reductive. Everyone has motivations - some are better than others, but everyone has them.

On the subject of whether a character being evil means you can't like them, though, I think to some people the answer to that is "Yes..." but the thing is, I'm not really sure if I believe them. Is that actually a thing? Because in my experience when I actually talked to them a lot of the time I ended up feeling like that's not true, they just frame "liking" the character differently because Morals.

It's like all the people who are like, "I don't understand how anyone could like Griffith, I mean sure maybe if you like him as an interesting character and a well-constructed villain but how do you LIKE HIM?" Because I'm not sure what they think Griffith fans actually mean when they say they like Griffith, but it's usually something like "what a well-constructed and fascinating character." Speaking for myself, anyway, I just don't feel obligated to put up "BUT ONLY AS A VILLAIN YOU GUYS" disclaimer up when I say it.

[rudamaruda520]

me as a writer

[chunkysoup22]

[trekscribbles]

This week, I read a fic that was around 20 years old, which had originally been posted on the author's personal website and which she added to AO3 a few years ago. She listed her email address with the fic, so after I finished reading, I sent her an email saying how much I enjoyed the story, how much I appreciated the work and effort she obviously put into it, and thanked her for uploading it to AO3. She responded the next day and thanked me for my message, then said she had a few more stories in the same series that she hadn't gotten around to uploading. I checked this morning--she added a 35,000 word novella and thanked me in the summary.

👏 comment 👏 on 👏 old 👏 fics 👏

[write-on-world]

[yeepof]

I understand that tall men are our POV characters, but surely being like a foot taller than everyone around them would have some occasional consequences

[blu-engineer]

funniest shit is going down on discord rn

[puppppppppy]

filipina miku!! my mom helped me with her outfit ^_^