#anyway the characters will almost definitely swear in the completely original comic i still wanna make
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
synthaphone · 5 years ago
Text
pros and cons of letting characters swear in thing im writing
pros:
easier to get certain deliveries and tones across
remember that adventure time storyboard where the board artist was like “hate having to edit out ‘what the fuck’. nothing works as well as ‘what the fuck’.” well i feel that
those are both the same reason basically. another restatement of the same reason is that sometimes specific jokes are funnier with the cursing in them
an actual different reason: i’d have to rewrite some scenes im currently happy with specifically to edit out the swearing because i just kind of put it in there
cons
maybe the challenge of having to not rely on swear words would ultimately push me to come up with more clever jokes and dialogue
this is neopets fanfic essentially and maybe its weird to have swearing in it. im not planning on putting the... comic? (story? however i end up delivering it) on neo itself anyway but like... i dunno. if they’d let people’s neopets be gay it might be fun to try and edit it so it could be published in the neopian times, but they don’t. i guess maybe after i wrote it, i could try to pull a thing where i make a version for the site where its as obvious as possible while being stealth enough to pass through security. but i’d have to finish writing it first
virtually all swearing, even ‘mild’ swearing, opens up worldbuilding issues. am i ready to just casually imply the concept of hell on neopia? or the concept of god? (this one is difficult because i tend to over rely on ‘oh my god’ as an exclaimation and its really hard to substitute something that has the same tone to it. ‘oh my gosh’ doesnt feel like it quite does it) also i tend to hate cutesy in universe versions of real world swearing, like pokemon fanfic using “oh my arceus” for instance. it doesnt bother me nearly as much when there’s no 1:1 counterpart- stuff like spongebob yelling ‘barnacles’ as a mild curse doesnt trip the annoyance alarm for me. so i guess i’d just have to put a LOT of thought into it if i wanted to come up with my own for neopets that wouldnt bother me
my characters arent far away enough from the cartoony site style for it to not seem potentially weird?? im not deliberately going for a joke about the dissonance of cute cartoon animals cursing, i just have a character swear if it feels like it would make sense for them to? hmm
in conclusion: i dunno, i guess i can wait to decide when i actually have a script ready instead of scattered scenes. my writing strategy so far alternates between ‘lets try to improv some characters shooting the shit and see what they’d talk about’ and ‘heres a specific scene i know i want/need but i dont know what anyone actually says in it yet, just that theres like, for instance, an argument that happens here. time to start writing that and see if i come up with something decent that fulfills that purpose’
maybe i’ll try to rewrite the scenes with swearing in them as practice, and then i can figure out if theres better jokes or dialogue that i might have overlooked, or if the swearing really does add something valuable enough to need to be left in
14 notes · View notes