#but that was just my worldbuilding brain looking to some real world examples

[sunshineneedsaplacetokeephernsfw]

Once upon a time I found vampires as a boring option as a monster fucker/lover. Mainly because I just saw them as pale humans who drink blood and had yet to see a piece of media take full advantage of the differences between humans and vampires and all the interesting things a vampire/human relationship could offer.

Mainly because I hadn't seen a lot and only exposure was a few posts in the teratophilia tag that didn’t sell me. But having recently consumed a piece of media that sold me on just how interesting a vampire/human relationship could be and all of the fun things that could be done with it. (If you've seen my blog at all recently, you know exactly what I'm talking about)

So since my adhd brain won't shut up about all the things that could be done with it, I will ran about the things that can be done with it here.

Sorry that it's probably disorganized and certain words might be repeated a lot. This is just me writing down all of my thoughts.

First of all there's all of the different features of vampires that different tellings of them offer. There's the obvious stuff like fangs and drinking blood to survive, sunlight being harmful to them, being able to turn into a bat, them being immortal. And there's also some things someone might forget at first like not being able to see them in mirrors, or even garlic being harmful to them. Maybe these things wouldn't be that useful to consider when writing a smut oneshot, but they are small details that would effect their life and interactions they might have with a human.

Like, maybe the human is inspecting themselves in the mirror and the vampire sneaks up behind them and whispers "Boo". The human jumps before laughing and playfully shoving the vampire away but leans into their touch after they snake their arms around the human's waist. Or maybe vampires can't be seen in pictures, much to the human's dismay because they want to remember what the vampire looks like, so they teach themselves to draw so they can draw what the vampire looks like and can always look back at that picture.

Or them trying to figure out what to do when they realize the vampire will outlive the human by a lot.

Or since vampires are stereotyped to live in gothic mansions (at least from what I can tell), lean into that gothic aesthetic. Or have them live somewhere else and lean into the aspects or aesthetic that would come with that.

But my favorite thing of all about vampire/human relationships is the dynamic and potential power dynamic or imbalance that could present.

Of course, if someone wants to write a healthy romance, they might not want to lean into that. But it could still be done in an interesting way of the characters doing their best to figure out how to have a healthy relationship and communicate with each other if they see something that could potentially become an issue and come up with a solution.

The fact that they rely on blood to survive and are much stronger and faster than humans immediately introduces a predator aspect to them which could create an interesting dynamic between the vampire and what they would usually consider food.

And even then, the abilities that make vampires so much more stronger and dangerous to humans could lead to a feeling of superiority over humans in vampire society and make it even more difficult for a vampire to interact with a human without treating them as food or a pet, or simple amusement. But humans and vampires still have the same mental capacity and ability to make connections, and potentially long for someone to be with. And how those two sides could mix or collide or be at war with each other.

It would be interesting to see how the relationship starts off like with the vampire only seeing them as a future snack or amusement, and how it slowly changes as they interact and then the journey of how it blossoms into a legitimate romance. Or it could be an exploration of the toxic elements and power imbalance in the relationship and how it effects the characters (like in Castlevania how Lenore legitimately cares about and is attracted to Hector, but still treats him like a pet in some cases).

Of course, you don't have to write vampires like this. Your world building and the ways vampires see or interact with humans could be completely different and that's okay, just make sure to explore it.

And obviously not all vampires will act the same, each will have their own personalities, ways they decide to feed, and how they decide to interact with humans. You could have a world where most vampires despise humans, but have a vampire that's never interact with much other vampires and tries to live in hiding amongst humans instead and does their best to gain their blood through methods that won't hurt others. Or maybe if there's a vampire that doesn’t realize they’re treating their human friend like a pet. Or a vampire that plans on keeping the human around until their bored or hungry, but end up developing actual feelings along the way and can't imagine a life without them (which could either develop into a sweet love confession or them becoming even more possessive).

Overall, I just really like it when vampire/human stories really explore aspects like these. And stories when it would be impossible to switch out the vampire with a human without the story not making sense.

And while the main dynamic I talked about is very good for dark romances, it's also really sweet if it's about a love so strong that it overcomes all of these obstacles any vampire/human interaction would come across

[jesncin]

Lil' musing about Public Domain, AI theft and Transformative creativity

Old essay originally written on Cohost in February 2024. With additions.

I'm putting my thoughts here because I don't want to risk going viral for subtweeting discourse again, here we go! So with the Steamboat Willie Variant of Mickey Mouse going to public domain I've seen the usual cynical pushback over transformative art. Particularly in response to overplayed EDGY DARK WINNIE THE POOH and EDGY DARK STEAMBOAT MICKEY and YOUR CHILDHOOD THING DARK NOW that inevitably happens around this time.

But to group all transformative art as derivative, soul-less, profit-driven, lazy and "reliant on past successes" is frankly just...really silly? I saw a notable concept artist making this over-simplified talking point, and I find it odd that someone can look at the most visible (by being formulaic, provocative and made by rich people) examples of public domain adaptations and just generalize all art ever inspired by a thing as uninventive and compare artists who do that to being "ai-like". It feels like the false dichotomy constantly set between "real books" and fanfiction.

We've seen marginalized people reclaim cosmic horror from Lovecraftian fiction. I've seen queer people reckon with and reclaim the queer history of Peter Pan. There's something special about taking a familiar thing and informing it with a perspective that wasn't present in its original iteration. It takes a whole other part of your creative brain muscles to adapt and reimagine something that already exists. And it can be just as creatively fulfilling as making original stuff.

While it's important to recognize and remember the origin of archetypes in stories or movements in art, I think there's sometimes a misplaced reverence put towards the original version of something. Whenever I talk about how Asian writers like Gene Yang and Sarah Kuhn have more thoroughly integrated Superman's immigrant themes in their re-imaginings of his mythos than their white peers have, I get hit with the constant "hey remember Superman's creators were the sons of Jewish immigrants (who made racist jokes about Chinese people)" and "hey remember, Gene Yang and Gurihiru's Superman Smashes the Klan was based on a radio show arc made by WHITE people first (who made the story about a binary of Good white people vs Bad white people, along with centering how white people feel about racism)".

Especially if it's a means of centering white creatives, people love to dismiss the transformative contributions of marginalized people, but especially that of people of color. It took until 2016 for the World Fantasy Award to change their statuette to not be based after the face of renown racist H.P Lovecraft, after all.

Last year I gave myself the goal to do something "unnecessarily ambitious" with no plan of pitching/printing/selling it. Just "art for art's sake", something really not-algorithm-friendly. And yeah, that ended up being a fully rendered, 40-page martian manhunter fan comic. I did it for no other reason than being a huge fan of a severely unpopular character and feeling like there was a new story I really wanted to tell about the character that would never happen in canon with how little there's been written about him. I don't think it's fair to call writing 40 pages of a new origin story, drawing fully colored pages with unique re-designs, reading hours of martian manhunter comics to tie different aspects of his lore into coherent worldbuilding, putting that comic up for free for the few other Green Justice League Guy fans to read, as lazy, profit-driven, and soul-less.

There's tons of artists who do stuff like this all the time. It just comes off as being very out of touch to view true creativity as only existing one way. That transformative media must inherently be "less". One time a white guy pitched to me some ideas he had for Superman if he ever had a chance to write him, and I said "that sounds cool, you should write a fanfic about it" and another white guy (who felt the need to come to the first one's defense), viewed what I said as an insult. There's something about doing fanart because you enjoy it and don't need to profit out of everything you make that's seen as lesser than having the seal of canonicity from a company.

My motto with making needlessly ambitious fancomics is "You don't need to work for DC Comics to make DC comics". Because canonicity has nothing to do with what makes art special.

To bring this back to edgy Mickey Mouse spin offs, even if you do just want to make cliche mascot-horrified stuff because you enjoy it, then by all means go ahead! I always go back to this video Sagan Hawkes did about petscop-inspired video series. There's a running theme about grappling with the concept of Originality in Art in relation to youtube horror projects (the thesis comes around at 2:04:10), and some valuable words are shared in the collected interviews with web series creatives (2:18:47) in the end. SeireaSong (creator behind Diminish) talks about how misguided conversations surrounding "originality" can be (2:29:43). It's so worth it to watch when you have the time.

Anyway happy 2024! Be good to each other.

[coffeebeanwriting]

What Bores a Reader The Most?

I asked my followers to answer the question “what bores you the most when reading a book?” 

Please keep in mind that these are all opinions and you’ll find yourself agreeing and disagreeing with some. Personally, I think this is amazing insight into the minds of unique readers all around the globe! I decided to keep reoccurring answers instead of merging them, just so people could see the repeating themes.

“Predictable conflicts or character actions. I want to be surprised.”

“When there’s no clear plot. When it looks like the book is leading nowhere.”

“Endless description. Nothing makes me more prone to skipping ahead.”

“When it feels like what you’re reading lacks purpose and there is no meaningful contribution to the plot.”

“Characters with less personality than a wet paper towel. Main characters with zero personality.”

“When I can’t picture anything in my head or what I understood changes randomly.”

“When a conversation is happening and I can’t follow which character is saying what.”

“Daily routines in a story. Like, I do not care.”

“When the world doesn’t move if the main character doesn’t interact with it. This applies to t.v shows, too.”

“Something that does not have a build up like a sudden relationship out of the blue.”

“When I’m so confused it doesn’t make sense anymore.”

“When there’s a 3 page description of some random object.”

“Wayyyy too much detail.”

“When the big plot twist is revealed and I guessed it ages ago.”

“Too slow or too long.”

“When the author unnecessarily drags the story and takes ages to advance to the climax.”

“Fan service that doesn’t contribute to the plot.”

“Useless descriptions and/or actions.”

“Over description of a landscape (cough old literature cough).”

“No action, no violence. I don’t like when characters talk for too long.”

“Long descriptions.”

“Too much descriptions when you are in a exciting moment. It breaks immersion.”

“Lack of imagery.”

“Constant usage of archaic vocabulary.”

“When the main character is extremely passive and doesn’t act or react.”

“Excessive description that doesn’t further the plot or meaningfully add to characterization.”

“Overly predictable plot, overly crude language for the sake of it, cringe/pompous scenes.”

“Long and boring exposition dumps.”

“Characters that never loose 😴.”

“When the world building starts out great and is really immersive until later on when things don’t add up.”

“When a character has too much internal dialogue.”

“Explaining “the science” behind magic systems in unnecessary detail.”

“Over description. I will skim and skip a lot of it.”

“Too much background info at the beginning.”

“When there’s small talk about a topic I don’t understand. It get’s sooo boring.”

“Too much inner monologue.”

“Slow plot.”

“When it’s just dragging on and on with the backstory.”

“Having to reread a sentence/paragraph a billion times because my brain got distracted.”

“When there’s no action, suspense or something similar for the whole chapter.”

“Things that aren’t relevant to the story.”

“Too much dialogue.”

“A lil too much fantasies.”

“Over drawn setting descriptions.”

“Overly long chapters, repetitive scenes, lots of complicated worldbuilding.”

“When it’s too simple or too detailed.”

“Long, long expositions.”

“Repeating phrases, plots ,etc.”

“Infodumps, especially in the beginning.”

“Too much history.”

“Overly descriptive settings.”

“Slow plot. I need drama!”

“Long chapters.”

“Slow pacing.”

“No major plot twist.”

“Miscommunication trope.”

“Massively long descriptive paragraphs.”

“Too much exposition in the beginning.”

“Long and confusing story building.”

“Repeating plot points. For example: the hero learning to trust his friends a million times without any real progression.”

“Training scenes that show nothing special. Especially sword fighting or head to hand combat.”

“Generic plot developments unless it’s written well.”

“Overuse of complicated words and sentences.”

“Long paragraphs.”

“I’m so over the bubble sunshine and extra grumpy trope.”

“When a character is overthinking.”

“Romanic subplots bore me. Having too many love interests.”

“When it switches between characters/subplots and one of them is awfully boring.”

“When too much information on a character is given one at a time.”

“Clichés.”

“When it takes a long time before the story gets interesting.”

“Long, long, long descriptions particularly of places that aren’t all that important.”

“Descriptions of unnecessary things.”

“Too much side character’s story. They’re a side for a reason.”

“I love beautiful writing so there must be some lovely descriptions... but don’t drone on.”

“Flat characters.”

“Scenes in which my favorite characters do not appear.”

“When the characters have no clear goal or the goal is too weak.”

“If most or all of the characters are unlikable. Then I don’t care what happens to them in the story. Being an evil/mean character is different from being unlikable.”

“When the plot does not move forward.”

“Writing unnecessary, irrelevant things that don’t have an effect on the story.”

“No real plot. The protagonist has no fire to them.”

“When the protagonist needs to figure out a love triangle and which person they like the most.”

“When the interesting parts happen right at the end.”

“When there’s too much info dumping with no easy transitions.”

“No progression after chapters and chapters. Characters not having development.”

“Too much description and a slow start to the story.”

“When characters are too oblivious to something.”

“Oblivious main characters, lazy plots, stereotypical encounters, main character is a god trope.”

“Unnecessarily long amounts of monologue or dialogue.”

“The second chance trope bores me.”

“Slow beginnings... like, get to the action in 3 chapters of less please.”

“Chapters being too long with small writing.”

“If the characters go through the same conflict over and over again.”

“Classic books... I don’t understand a thing, haha.”

“Being bombarded with unnecessary detail.”

“Bad boy meets good girl trope bores me.”

“Too much landscape descriptions like Tolkien or Stephen King.”

“Bad dialogue, too much excessive background details and too many character tags.”

“When the book moves too slowly.”

“Over described scenes or characters.”

“Descriptions without inputs of what a characters is thinking about. I need a lens of character POV to make descriptions interesting to read.”

“A badly written romance subplot where the characters involved don’t have any chemistry whatsoever.”

“I get a bit lost when there’s too much details about an environment.”

“When the story doesn’t go anywhere for a really long time.”

Instagram: coffeebeanwriting  

[lets-try-some-writing]

Do you have any tips on how to write good world building? You’re so good at it and I must know your secrets!!!

I've been doing this for a handful of years now, but I am no master so take all that I say with a grain of salt. What I do is generally calibrated toward my particular habits and tendencies. But with that said, I do indeed have some tips and tricks for you lot!

Find the Theme

Even if you know exactly what you want to do, my suggestion is still to find your theme. Are you trying to do some worldbuilding for something Sci-fi? Fantasy? Grimdark? Dystopian? or Modern?

Find what you are working toward, and then keep it close to yourself as you work. It helps keep me on track and sift through a lot of ideas that otherwise would break up the flow of the world I am working with. With that in mind, the example I will use going forward will of course be Transformers, which is technically part of the Sci-fi genre.

Locate the Subject

Now with your theme in mind, this is when you start trying to trim down things to find what exactly you want to focus on. This is arguably the most difficult part of worldbuilding. It's hard to not try and add lore for everything and anything, but seriously, calm down. Take time to find one particular subject to work with. It does not have to be as focused as a small law for a city somewhere, but you should choose a field in a sense.

An example of this would perhaps be, "Titans and their Origins on Cybertron". This is a subject wide enough to be played with but also not so specific as to end up being impossible to work with. You can get into the fine details later, for now, find your subject. If you start worldbuilding with a subject like "Laws of Praxus Bounty Hunting Crews" you could theoretically still keep working with it, but that can be a tad overwhelming considering how niche it is in concept and how little information there is on the surrounding subject matters.You need to start big and work inward bit by bit.

If need be, imagine it as making a pot. You need to start with a pile of clay and mold the shape. Then once you have it, you can begin decorating and going more in depth with adjustments and adornments. After that you can work outwards and make more things to go alongside it, but you always have to start simple, or at least specific. You could choose to talk about a city, place, time period, ritual, or anything of the sort. But try to keep your subject wide enough to be worked with but specific enough to have a frame to work within.

Find Inspiration

Once you know what you are aiming to work with, my suggestion is to find inspiration. Now for everyone this can come in different forms. What I tend to do is consume some media related to my subject matter and find appropriate music to get the brain cells working. With the Titan example I listed above, I would look at some artwork, maybe read up some other ideas people have had, or even just take a look at Sci-fi art. You never know what will get you inspired and ready to get creative. For music it’s the same deal. Find something that gets you thinking about your Theme. 

Now you may not even need to worry about this section if you already feel ready to roll, but if you ever hit a roadblock or can’t find your motivation, doing this may help. Sometimes all you need to do is take a look at what others have done and listen to some good music. 

Begin Conceptualizing 

Now this is the fun part. This is when you start going nuts brainstorming and coming up with IDEAS. There is no real method here, just thoughts. What I end up doing is coming up with a general idea, and then going down a rabbit hole regarding it. Ask questions, play with concepts, go crazy with ideas and imagination. This is the part where you essentially chuck law and order to the wind and play. Using my prior example, my thought process would go something like this:

Where do the Titans come from? 

The Well of Allsparks? No, they are too large. Metroplex was the size of a city, there would be no way for him to get out of there, meaning that Titans would need to start small.

Are they not native? In that case, how do they have sparks? They wouldn’t fit in properly and that’s a whole other rabbit hole.

Do they start out small and get large? If that is true, do they have a life cycle? Are they forged as normal Cybertronians and then just get bigger?

Are they part of the environment and grow like plants? Do they gain sentience later or are they essentially like the bots forged from hotspots? 

As you can see, I’ve played with ideas and messed with one part of the whole concept of  Titans. I picked a beginning, and at this point I would recommend not going too much further if your thoughts work like mine. Too many ideas will leave you overwhelmed, so try to keep them somewhat organized and neat, or at least categorized. Don’t dive TOO deep down the rabbit hole until you go through the nex part of the process, which I call the “World Reliability Test”. 

World Reliability

Now this is only relevant if you are not building your world from scratch. Or rather this applies if you have a world already set up with known laws and customs. So if you are building an original world, you should take into account what you have already established in this part of the process. And if you are like me and write fanfiction primarily, you should take into account already established lore to look over and either mess with, alter, or apply. REMEMBER: You do not need to stick to lore super closely if you don’t actually want to. It all depends on what you are writing.

Too much retconning and adjustment will leave your world feeling off, regardless of if it's original or not. So this is when you take your ideas, and you run them through the filter of “DOES IT MAKE SENSE” unless you intend for your lore to deviate from already established ideas. Using my prior thought process as listed above, I would consider the established lore and pick what I am going to agree with.

How are Titans formed?

Canon states that bots emerge from the Well of Allsparks, come from hotspots, can be cold forged, come from ‘budding’, or be built through the assistance of Vector Sigma. 

The Quintessons were known to create all sorts of monstrosities and lifeforms that could theoretically result in Titans being a thing. 

Fanon states that bots can be made biologically or through alternate means.

What continuity/rules will I abide by?

Aligned continuity (canon particular). 

In the Aligned continuity, Titans are known to have existed prior to Quintessons arrival.

Quintesson creation no longer applies.

Budding and Vector Sigma construction no longer apply.

Fanon biological creation no longer applies.

How closely am I going to follow canon?

Relatively closely but with a bit of creative liberty on my end. 

What are my options now?

Cold construction.

Emergence from the Well of Allsparks.

Hotspot forging. 

The thought process can go on forever, but essentially just make sure you don’t have an overpowered or absolutely insane mess of a concept that makes no sense whatsoever. You can get away with all sorts of crap if you play it right, but there MUST be a reason. At least if you are trying to make something that is not designed to be comedic. 

Get into the Worldbuilding

Once you have everything established, this is when you begin adding to your creation. Work through what you are making logically. The process differs widely from person to person, so these are just my tips and tricks to make your worldbuilding seem far deeper and richer than it may actually be. 

Add tidbits and lore. You want your worldbuilding to feel real and alive, but you also can’t be everywhere at once all at the same time, especially within the confines of a story. So make the people of the place you are working with interact with the thing you are worldbuilding. If you are discussing a city, describe the citizens and their behavior. Is the city colorful? Does the city have any unique oddities either in itself, its environment, or its population? Are there any little rituals that set it apart? Just dig into these smaller things when you can in order to bring everything together. It makes your work feel more realistic, or at least more acceptable to the human mind. 

Discuss how your subject affects the wider world. Those who look at your worldbuilding are going to want to know how your subject affects that which it interacts with. So if you are discussing a living forest, you might want to think about how it affects the locals. Are there locals? Do they have any stories about the forest? Has the forest left a mark? Does it have a reputation? Does it have any strange abilities that affect the land around it? Try to consider your subject and its influence. It need not be world shattering, but using my example, I would run down the thought process like this:

Titans start small and grow into their full size over time.

What do they consume? Does it affect those around them during their growth?

Do they shed their armor and is that used elsewhere? Or do they instead grow like organics in that their plating grows with them?

Do they have parents and loved ones who will miss them when they begin to grow? How does their growth affect others? Is it well received?

Titans find a location to settle before their growth completes.

Does this interfere with trade routes?

Are there those who wish to stop a Titan from settling?

How does the local ecosystem respond?

Titans eventually turn into living cities, even forming hotspots over time.

How do they gain citizens? Do their citizens come from their hotspots?

Do they raise the young that come from their hotspots alone? Or do they lure others in to help?

Why do they become cities at all? Is it biological? If so, why?

Are there different kinds of Titans? Are there only cities or are there other living structures?

You run down the list asking questions. As you answer those questions, your worldbuilding comes into play. Then all you need to do is pretty it up and make it into something readable. 

Final Note

From here you should take the ideas, questions, and answers you have created and put it into a format of your choosing. You can make it into a story or something more informational. It's all about preference. Worldbuilding is meant to be fun, so nothing I have stated above is set in stone. Some folks do it differently, but this is my general method. Consider the factors, take them into account, ask questions, create answers, and then put it all together. 

Oh and as a bonus, here is a little tip from my writing buddy @spreadwardiard:

“MAKE SCRAP UP.”

[markantonys]

I’ve never watched wheel of time but I will say that I think something to be said for the debate about costuming is that the game of thrones costumes were INSANE when it came to quality and detail. At least in the first few seasons they were hand-sewn, hand-embroidered, etc. There was a big coffee table type book about them that broke down a lot of the choices the costume designers and department made and the quality of that department still blows me away!!! They were gorgeous and complex and took so much of the worldbuilding and politics into account!

And from what I’ve seen, it seems like the Wheel of Time costumes do the same, it’s just that they draw from very different references and eras!! Maybe there will be some kind of bts/special feature breakdown of what they referenced and the different ideas they drew from for the costuming for WOT. That seems like it would be a good time. It’s really annoying and really unfortunate that a lot of people refuse to see past their own preconceptions of what fantasy means. I’m sorry that so many people are making assumptions about fantasy costuming in your notes, especially. It’s a genre that spans much wider than lotr and game of thrones! Perhaps more people should. Idk. Engage with it more and find that out. Maybe that would fix them.

yeah!! haha it really was just 2 complaints in my notes on a gifset that otherwise had universal gushing about how much people loved the costumes, so thankfully most people are enjoying the WOT costumes (and not being annoying in my notes) and i was definitely being dramatic in my complaints about the complaints! still, there's something to be said about how ingrained ideas of "this is what fantasy costumes are Supposed to look like" are in us, when fantasy as a genre MEANS there's no set definition of what ANYTHING is "supposed" to be.

i didn't watch GOT but i've seen plenty of gifs etc over the years, of course, and the costumes are absolutely beautiful and very detailed! and from what i understand, the books were going for a medieval europe type of vibe for the main kingdoms and so in that respect the show's costumes definitely understood the assignment (tho ofc with their own added Fantasy Flavor). the downside is that they were so influential that it's made a lot of people subconsciously think that that is THE fantasy aesthetic (along with LOTR), and thus anything too different looks out of place to them.

there have been a couple WOT costume bts features that i've seen, and the designers did indeed do similar things where they showed how much stuff was handmade and how detailed everything is, and they talked about taking inspiration from many different real-world cultures & time periods as well! a lot of which is based on the way the author described clothes in the books and the real-world fashion influences he was using. i remember in a season 1 bts the costume designer had a map of WOT's world color-coded according to which real-world cultures are the primary inspirations for the dress of each region of WOTworld (although i think it's a different costume designer for season 2 so i don't know if they adhered 100% to the s1 designer's notes).

to conclude, here are some caps from a scene in s1 that features a large international gathering (same color=same wizard faction, but within each faction are women of many different cultures, so you can see for example that our 4 blue ladies are wearing 4 very different styles). i wouldn't say these are the best costumes in the show because season 2 really took it up a notch (hello, higher budget!), but this particular scene is a great quick illustration of the wide variety of styles going on in the vast continent of WOTworld and of how much detail goes into costumes even for nameless background characters. and most of them do feature the sort of clean lines/angularity that makes our brains go "modern", and most of them do look quite different from the GOT & LOTR aesthetics!

[cloud-somersault]

Your fic "The constellations within us" was so perfect, and exactly what I wanted and needed for since I joined the fandom. I wish I had eloquent words but english is not my native language, and I'm struggling with the translator now, but this fic is probably one of the most high quality ones I’ve ever read so i've finally worked up the energy to leave a solid comment.

I love your prose, the descriptions and internal monologues are so immersive and emotional that I need to reread over and over again. The worldbuilding scratches my brain real nice, all contribute to make a really cohesive image that canon still doesn't quite achieve in my opinion. And you did a good job capturing the mood and humor of the show with every little detail but at the same time you’ve added a whole new dimension to the plot and characters. Keep cooking, I beg you but also have mercy on me. I imagine you saying something like: I am going to create an situation that is so emotionally fucked up before writing any chapter.

I really love the way shadowpeach interact in this story. From trying to kill each other to sharing the food. It's kinda crazy that people genuinely thought shadowpeach was a one sided crush until s4.

To be honest, I'm not a fan how the fandom treats shadowpeach but you have successfully kept the characterization of mystical monkeys to perfection while setting up a realistic shadowpeach plotline. I read this quote in another fic but it applies very well to them: "They really embody the pain/comfort thing, except that comfort is understanding and trust."

Sun Wukong is canonically a latent danger that not even the most powerful entities in celestial realm or underworld could subdue him, but he has no self preservation skills whatsoever. He's a bleeding heart. He's the one who sacrifices everything possible to protect the few he loves because, god, he has lost so much. The immortality he achieved with peaches, wine, pills, among many other things, may have made him indestructible on the outside, but inside they made him emotionally vulnerable, lonely and afraid of attachment. This monkey can fit so much trauma and he's holding a lot close to his chest even from the audience. The fandom villainizes him unfairly, but sometimes they also put him on some kind of pedestal, which is also incorrect.

The same happens with Macaque. He's the walking mystery who may or may not realize how much of a prickly capricious hypocrite he is in some things. For example, he feels an apparent resentment at being relegated to being a mere shadow of someone much brighter, but at the same time he seems unwilling to step out of that role. In s1 and s3, he clings so much to the past that he pushes Wukong, the only constant of him in a modern world after his resurrection, to be the version he remembered. Where Wukong advanced, Macaque retreated.

Nonetheless, the motives behind every action of his are more nuanced than him just being evil. He did once he was free from LBD's control was immediately start helping everyone even until s4, as if it were a tacit way of apologizing because he was just trapped under incredibly shitty circumstances, let's remember the part where LBD said she'd kill him if he didn't do what she wanted. Although I don't think he didn’t have fun knocking everyone around a bit (to his ex-husband especially).

It's little funny because I consider that before the perigranation trip, Wukong is a self-proclaimed hero with destructive or villainous tendencies (depending on which side you look at, celestial Realm definitely sees it that way still) while in the current timeline, Macaque is a self-proclaimed villain with heroic tendencies.

I wont keep rambling, but thank you again for pouring your time and talent into this beautifully painful read. I can't wait to chew on the next chapter like a hungry dog ​​with a good steak and also I'll be keeping an eye out for your future works, in case you continue writing about queer monkeys with emotional constipation, but if not, it's such a treat to read what you've already gifted us. Have a good week! and sorry for any translation errors again.

AAAAAH i'm sorry i've taken so long to respond to this. this ask is SO SWEET and i loved just rereading it over and over to suck all the serotonin out of it. Filled me with gleee!!

Thank you so much for taking the time to translate and write out this message! There weren't any errors, it's okay! I'm so glad you liked my story sm and read it and ENJOYED IT YAAAAAY!!!

honestly, I only cackle evilly before posting chapters sometimes. Only sometimes, when I remember. I usually cackle while writing, but then, by the time I've posted it, I've read it so much, it doesn't have that emotional impact on me anymore LOL

I think that's a great way to sum up shadowpeach! It's about understanding and trust. No matter what, that trust has to be rebuilt, and that process is so painful and hard and time-consuming that...it takes such a great amount of effort on both their parts. It's the choice to persevere in spite of that amount of hardship that makes them beautiful, even if what they create together isn't inherently beautiful. What's beautiful is that, in spite of tragedy, these two monkeys want to be together in whatever way they can.

I think with any fandom, people are going to misinterpret characters. I've kind of gotten used to it, but there's definitely a lot of missed nuance and character depth that the fandom chooses to not see or doesn't except. Maybe they like to keep it surface level, but i think critically thinking about the plot and characters is where you can find depth or make depth of your own that's not present in the show.

Wukong is either a trickster villain or a precious soul who has done no wrong and needs to be protected. Macaque is usually a mustache-twirling villain or a sweet, bashful monkey who was just pretending all that time! and has never done anything bad.

A lot of the fandom sees things in a clear black and white way, which is dangerous for several reasons, but it means that their interpretations lack that depth or understanding that people crave. Because no one is black and white. The world doesn't work that way, so it's kind of worrying that they think that's...normal. It's not normal. I see it as a lack of life experience and maturity, but I also don't know these people. Maybe they like their fictional worlds to be black and white, I dunno.

Aaaanyway, you're not the first person to speak about this topic with shadowpeach and how, through constellations, they found some understanding or were pleased with how shadowpeach interacted. and to that I say, thanks! I just like some realism and three dimensional...ness to my characters, please and thanks. Don't even get me started on MK.

But wow! Yes! I'm so honored you'll keep reading whatever I write next. I have no fucking clue what I'm doing, and I'm just smashing my dolls together, but I'm happy to have you here in Constellations AU land! Welcome! Enjoy your stay 💕

[fulgrimsrefuse]

On Marazhai's brand

I'm new-ish to 40k (my family was into it, so it was the background radiation for my entire life) so imagine my surprise when I learned that it's been around for this long and there is no functional eldar alphabet because the direction of the worldbuilding just hasn't gone in much on linguistics.

A couple of admirable supernerds have compiled various resources on what we DO have. This for grammar, terminology, and just how context heavy the language is:

This for runes. Some people who got a specific Nocturne of Oblivion ending slide might see something familiar:

Something interesting in the comments:

"I emailed Gav Thorpe 10 years about the eldar runes, and he forwarded my email to Jes Goodwin - here's the reply I got from him: There are three systems of Runic Markings

The Runes used for the aspects and other troop types/concepts. These are the geometric runes that are generally based around the triangle. They are simplified versions of the actual runes that a Warlock/farseer uses to divine the potential futures in a given situation. The are based on the use of the Norse Futhark for divination, although their forms are not nordic.

Eldar script. This is the stuff behind the eldar headers. These have no ascribed meanings, I.e there is no 'alphabet' of them. These are generally cursive and we use them in various places to give flavour, they sometimes include elements from the runes [Which would give them a kanji-like relationship to the runes] and are sometimes more blocky/simplified as on the warning markings on vehicles.

Eldar Seals. These are the complex symbols found on Titan Banners and on the back of the Wraithlord. They are used to represent the seals of Noble Houses or the Bonesinger schools of design. They are based on the idea of the Turkish 'Tugrah' , complex signature seals associated with the Ottoman Empire, meant to stop forgeries. To summarise, the forms of all the symbols don't have a single real world source, but their functions are influenced by real world sources"

I was just curious and wanted to know if we could build Marazhai's name out of what we do have from these sources. A lot of words beginning in "Mar-" seem to refer to death or death related ideas, and "Zai" is a known name meaning "morning". But there's nothing that I found in a written form for those sounds.

They do have a rune for Ynnead, their god of the dead, which looks like this:

Eldar runes can stand for an idea and not just one letter per sound. If this is their rune for a god of death, I'm making the wild assumption that somewhere in that rune is something that could be read as "Mar-". Since we have no idea how to properly "read" that rune, I just tried looking at their lettering runes for shapes in common with this, ssssort of like how kanji multiradicals work since that was the given example.

(Sort of. Kind of. If you squint at it and look at it sideways, maybe.)

It's a doomed prospect, because once you go looking at the runes, it becomes increasingly clear none of this follows any logic, or maybe it's just logic my simple mon-keigh brain lacks.

So, possibilities for "Mar-":

(Not quite, but close. Chalk up the difference to calligraphy styles, maybe)

(again, only close, but radicals in kanji can look subtly different depending on where in a given character they appear, so I just shrugged and said fine, elf logic.)

(Also only close, also operating off of elf logic.)

As for "Zai", the sun does appear as a pretty recognizable shape in some runes, like these:

(Craftworld Lugganath)

Without a linguistics person at GW telling us how to read this stuff, I say we have pretty free rein to figure out what the heck Marazhai burns into our necks. Like, we don't even know if it's read left to right, up or down. So I just made something up as an example, using what I posted above:

Trying for a balance of "relatively easy to burn into a person before they pass out from shock" and "cute", though it is missing the jaggy quality of Drukhari lettering. This is just an idea though, y'all go wild and have fun!

If you are a 40k lorehound and you think I'm W R O N G that's fine, I only got into this hobby a couple months ago. I'm curious if you know more about eldar writing, actually!

Edit: lmao how did I miss the literal “zhai��� entry. I’ll try that later.

Edit 2: I tried it later. https://www.tumblr.com/fulgrimsrefuse/741450381287096320/on-marazhais-brand-2?source=share

[wuxiaphoenix]

Worldbuilding: Scents and Sensibility

What regular, ordinary smells immediately put your character on alert? Because we’ve all got one. Chemoreception is one of the most basic senses an organism can have; we share it with everything down to bacteria, and even some viruses.

(No, seriously, some viruses have been spotted clambering across a cell membrane until they find one specific protein to get in. Eep.)

In humans smell in particular is linked to the most basic parts of the brain, chemicals making the most direct physical contact with brain matter the body generally allows. Smell triggers memory like nothing else, and so forms one of the key warning systems that activate your body for fight or flight at a literal moment’s notice. It reacts so fast, your adrenaline’s pumping and your heart’s racing before your conscious mind has a chance to sort out what you smelled. Meaning your character might snap at someone, or take more drastic measures, without even knowing why. Until it’s too late.

And the brain being the mad evolutionary jury-rig it is, that smell could be something completely innocuous. It just happened to be in the air when you suffered pain - mentally, physically, or otherwise. So your brain has stamped “Let’s not do that again” to stick this smell into the Bad Things Category.

One of mine is chlorine. Specifically pool chlorine. Long story short, some slips end up very painful and you never forget holes eaten in the soles of your feet.

So I can be minding my own business having a decent day, and then smack. All nerves on alert, There Is A Threat. It can take minutes to pick out what the “threat” is, especially if it was just a faint wisp on the wind. The primitive brain doesn’t care. That is Bad Hurty Scent. Get ready to make it go away. Good thing I’m not in the pool-cleaning business.

In writing, you’ve got to pay attention to conservation of details. You only have so many words on a page. The reader’s entitled to think they’re all important. Scents that set off character flinches should also set the scene, give insight into your characters and worldbuilding, or advance the plot. Preferably all three.

For example, if Ripley from the Aliens franchise smelled acid, she’d be reaching for the nearest weapon before she could register that it was an innocent vinegar spill in the kitchen. A writer could use this to bring up any of a swarm of bad memories, from the acid damage done when they tried to remove the first facehugger to the misty halls of the alien hive to staring down a muzzle of translucent teeth. You could evoke pain, guilt, rage, and grief; the sheer frustration of working for a company that saw deadly infectious aliens and only thought of profit. And from there spiral out into the kind of interstellar world and society where companies like that can exist.

Note, if I wanted a real-world example to base Wayland-Yutani on, I’d look less at modern corporations and more at past ones like the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Long travel times, isolation of crews and marines from most other contact, interaction with a hostile environment more suited to aggressive exploitation than peaceful settlement - it has a lot in common with the VOC mindset.

(Seriously, the Predator movie where the company founder gets himself killed in Antarctica is so fitting with some of those guys. High risk for the hope of high rewards - and if you can make someone else take those risks, even better.) One scent can spiral your character into all of that information. Use it wisely!

[maitarussa]

Ok I got one: what specifically is speculative biology?

& to make the question Silmy... Who in Arda might pursue this study, and what do they make of it?

(I know this likely isn't the kind of question you're looking for, I'm sorry. Feel free to ignore, of course, but I'm genuinely curious)

Okay this got a little bit long because I am a nerd and this stuff is so cool to me.

So, speculative biology is basically the study of biology that doesn’t really exist and/or we don’t know whether or not it exists, such as the evolution of creatures on other planets, or in fantasy worlds, or if some event were to happen that changed the way that living things would need to function. It can be to speculate about the future, alternate timelines, fiction, etc.

It’s usually a science fiction concept, where you figure out how exactly your alien creature works and why it works that way. Getting into the nitty gritty details about character/creature design, so that instead of “this looks cool,” it becomes “this is here for this and that reason, and it evolved this way, and has these variations.”

Ultimately you end up creating a sort of guidebook, so the readers can learn about a sci-fi/fantasy creatures as if they’re real, and it adds a level of depth to the world.

I really like doing it in terms of Arda. One of my spec bio projects is my current longform worldbuilding series “Elven Traits and Heredity,” which is about the physical features of Elves and how they are inherited. Another is series on one of my old blogs called “The Nature of the Ainur,” which is just sort of about how the Ainur work in a physical and spiritual sense.

One thing that makes it really neat is to take into account the ways that Arda works— incorporating things like the Song, and the material essence of souls. Basically I like to really latch onto one or two lines from the Histories and other books and go wild with them and what the implications might be for the physical nature of the beings and creatures of Arda. Grounding fantasy into something that— while still fantastical— makes sense in the context of the world.

In terms of your second question, it would probably just end up being similar to how we do it, but with the fictional stories that people create in Middle Earth, or in a more practical sense, to prepare for events or new locations (for example, if Sam were to try to figure out what effect Valinor’s climate and environmental traits would have on Shire-grown plants if he were to bring them over the sea).

But on another note, a lot of my writings like these are framed, like Tolkien’s works, as though they are in-universe texts. The Elven Heredity series might have been written by, say, a Man of Númenor who had met the Elves before, or one of the Dúnedain who lived in Rivendell, and the Nature of the Ainur might have been written by an Elven scholar in Aman. So while this isn’t exactly in-universe speculative biology, it’s more speculative biology about in-universe biology, which for some reason makes my brain hum like a very happy computer.

[hyperbolicreverie]

All right, exorcising some of the One Piece brain worms I’ve accumulated over the month-long break before 1054 comes out in the next couple of days and gives me, I am sure, a whole new set of brain worms to ruminate over.

Spoilers through the end of Chapter 1053, but not any farther, because I am an aggressive spoiler-dodger.

Bounties, and how they are utilized, are one of my favorite little bits of worldbuilding in One Piece, and that’s because of how complicated they are and how much we see circumstances affect how they’re issued. It’s an incredibly realistic thing, to have personal and political reasons affect something like that, and contributes to the world feeling that much more grounded.

The World Government, the Marines, and the press all have their roles in the issuing of bounties: the Marines set the actual number, based on whatever unknown criteria they have, the World Government gets input in how those bounties might need to be modified—like removing someone’s middle initial, or acquiescing to the request from Judge that Sanji be brought in ‘Only Alive’—and the press is responsible for the images and disbursal. So there’s a lot of moving parts, and as one might expect with all this bureaucracy, things get messy and other factors start sneaking in.

For example, while you can definitely-kinda-sorta use bounty numbers as a general scale of threat level, you definitely can’t use them as any sort of empirical strength ranking. There’s no real pattern you can follow beyond “this person has caused X units of Havoc, so we have increased their bounty a requisite number of times.” This does result in the more terrifying pirates out there having the higher bounties, as they have, quite demonstrably, engaged in said Havoc, but it’s less cut and dry than it seems.

And politics certainly comes into it, as well as perception. There are so many weird choices regarding bounties. For example, maybe Robin’s original bounty was on point, but why did no one raise it once she was an adult and exponentially more dangerous? Sure, she was probably protected during her time with Baroque Works, because Warlords get amnesty for their subordinates, but before and after that? She represents such a huge danger to the World Government in particular, you’d think they’d want to entice more people to go after her.

But…they likely do not want to draw too much attention to her, because their initial excuse for setting a bounty was that she destroyed several battleships, not anything to do with her knowledge. And if people started asking too many questions about why she had such a high bounty, they might learn the real reasons. So low the bounty stays.

Or what about Chopper and Bepo? Their criminally low bounties are obviously a gag, but Bepo sure did beat up a whole bunch of marines without breaking a sweat on Sabaody, and there have to be people in the Marines or World Government that know what Minks are and what they can do. And enough people have seen Chopper in action that they should be able to deduce he’s not just a pet. It’s just such an odd choice, because there’s no logic behind keeping them low.

And then, of course, we have The Boys’ bounty reveal in 1053, which ran hard in the opposite direction. We’ve never seen such huge bounty jumps before, with the exception of Blackbeard who went straight from zero to over two billion. And I want to zero in on this particular choice a little bit more closely, because I think it’s going to backfire on the Marines and World Government spectacularly.

It’s clear that despite the giant jump in numbers this is probably an attempt to obfuscate the several things about Luffy that are currently giving the World Government a nice old panic attack, what with splitting the rough amount of Kaido and Big Mom’s bounties between the three captains, but it’s also bound to raise some eyebrows.

Because Luffy also got officially named an Emperor, but it looks real weird when you give the same numeric value to people without that title. And yes, Luffy’s got a bunch more going for him that contributed to that, and was previously an ‘unofficial’ one, but we’ve never seen numbers that high for someone who wasn’t one. (Maybe Dragon, if that’s ever revealed). If Blackbeard’s hasn’t increased, they’re all actually above him now. So now we have “the Emperors, plus these two other suspiciously expensive rookies.” Like sure, they helped take down two Emperors and that’s a feat and a half, but Luffy was at least a billion ahead of them each already. Why bring them to match? People are going to start asking questions.

(I should note, because I’ve seen a lot of talk about this subject in particular, that I actually love this choice. It feels like this is either the gauntlet being thrown, that the World Government is declaring a real open season on anyone—what with their talk of a ‘Great Cleansing’—and everyone who’s liable to be against them and the careful balance of powers they had cultivated, or that they’re panicking and not thinking things all the way through, which will contribute to their eventual fall. That’s also leaving aside the fact that they do have a vested interest in Law’s devil fruit as well as Luffy’s, and there have been theories about Kid’s being behind the magnetic disposition of how the Grand Line is navigated, but that’s neither here nor there).

As a side note, I think it’s entirely possible that the Marines are also worried about having to deal with all of these Worst Generation kids for a long time coming, because excluding Blackbeard—who is doing very well for himself—the arguably most successful members of the group are also all the youngest. (Excluding Bonney, who may or may not actually be 24, who knows, but whom is very very wanted by the World Government anyway, so maybe not!) So that means they potentially have to deal with these kids who are doing stupidly impressive stuff on the grand scale of things for decades. And most of them at bare minimum respect each other, and have either worked together explicitly or by necessity, which means you kind of can't put too much hope into them wiping each other out. If Kid or Law get the equivalent of even a fraction of the established support Luffy already has? Then they’re probably not going anywhere any time soon.

And again, this is likely to backfire. Because with numbers in the billions like that, I think two things happen: one, a whole bunch of people go “hey, these guys are real successful, I want in on that” and try to join them, or two, anyone besides the marines who might be interested in collecting those bounties looks at them and decides it’s not worth the risk, because if the authorities think they’re worth that much, and they did what the papers say they did, then what’s the point?

I’m interested in seeing more updated bounties going forward, because if the pattern holds we might get some more dramatic ones, and seeing the reactions to those is going to be excellent.

Anyway, if you made it to the end of this, please help yourself to an internet cookie for listening to my rambles.

…Bounties are weird, y’all.

[ganymedesclock]

These are questions I've had for some while and it's hard to find someone who'll answer with grace. This mostly relates to disabilities (mental or physical) in fiction.

1) What makes a portrayal of a disability that's harming the character in question ableist?

2) Is there a way to write a disabled villain in a way that isn't ableist?

In the circles I've been in, the common conceptions are you can't use a character's disability as a plot point or showcase it being a hindrance in some manner. heaven forbid you make your villain disabled in some capacity, that's a freaking death sentence to a creative's image. I understand historically villains were the only characters given disabilities, but (and this is my personal experience) I've not seen as many disabled villains nowadays, heck, I see more disabled heroes in media nowadays.

Sorry if this comes off as abrasive, I'd really like to be informed for future media consumption and my own creative endeavors.

Okay so the first thing I'm going to say is that while it IS a good idea to talk to disabled people and get their feedback, disabled people are not a monolith and they aren't going to all have the same take on how this goes.

My personal take is biased in favor that I'm a neurodivergent person (ADHD and autism) who has no real experience with physical disabilities, so I won't speak for physically disabled people- heck, I won't even speak for every neurotype. Like I say, people aren't a monolith.

For myself and my own writing of disabled characters, here's a couple of concepts I stick by:

Research is your friend

Think about broad conventions of ableism

Be mindful of cast composition

1. Research is your friend

Yeah this is the thing everybody says, so here's the main bases I try to cover:

What's the story on this character's disability?

Less in terms of 'tragic angst' and more, what kind of condition this is- because a congenital amputee (that is to say, someone who was born without a limb) will have a different relationship to said limb absence than someone who lost their limb years ago to someone who lost their limb yesterday. How did people in their life respond to it, and how did they respond to it? These responses are not "natural" and will not be the same to every person with every worldview. This can also be a great environment to do worldbuilding in! Think about the movie (and the tv series) How To Train Your Dragon. The vikings in that setting don't have access to modern medicine, and they're, well, literally fighting dragons and other vikings. The instance of disability is high, and the medical terminology to talk about said disabilities is fairly lackluster- but in a context where you need every man you possibly can to avoid the winter, the mindset is going to be not necessarily very correct, but egalitarian. You live in a village of twenty people and know a guy who took a nasty blow to the head and hasn't quite been the same ever since? "Traumatic Brain Injury" is probably not going to be on your lips, but you're also probably going to just make whatever peace you need to and figure out how to accommodate Old Byron for his occasional inability to find the right word, stammers and trembles. In this example, there are several relevant pieces of information- what the character's disability is (aphasia), how they got it (brain injury), and the culture and climate around it (every man has to work, and we can't make more men or throw them away very easily, so, how can we make sure this person can work even if we don't know what's wrong with them)

And that dovetails into:

What's the real history, and modern understandings, of this?

This is where "knowing the story" helps a lot. To keep positing our hypothetical viking with a brain injury, I can look into brain injuries, what affects their extent and prognosis, and maybe even beliefs about this from the time period and setting I'm thinking of (because people have had brains, and brain injuries, the entire time!) Sure, if the setting is fantastical, I have wiggle room, but looking at inspirations might give me a guide post.

Having a name for your disorder also lets you look for posts made by specific people who live with the condition talking about their lives. This is super, super important for conditions stereotyped as really scary, like schizophrenia or narcissistic personality disorder. Even if you already know "schizophrenic people are real and normal" it's still a good thing to wake yourself up and connect with others.

2. Think about broad conventions of ableism

It CAN seem very daunting or intimidating to stay ahead of every single possible condition that could affect someone's body and mind and the specific stereotypes to avoid- there's a lot under the vast umbrella of human experience and we're learning more all the time! A good hallmark is, ableism has a few broad tendencies, and when you see those tendencies rear their head, in your own thinking or in accounts you read by others, it's good to put your skeptical glasses on and look closer. Here's a few that I tend to watch out for:

Failing the “heartwarming dog” test

This was a piece of sage wisdom that passed my eyeballs, became accepted as sage wisdom, and my brain magnificently failed to recall where I saw it. Basically, if you could replace your disabled character with a lovable pet who might need a procedure to save them, and it wouldn’t change the plot, that’s something to look into.

Disability activists speak often about infantilization, and this is a big thing of what they mean- a lot of casual ableism considers disabled people as basically belonging to, or being a burden onto, the able-bodied and neurotypical. This doesn’t necessarily even need to have an able neurotypical in the picture- a personal experience I had that was extremely hurtful was at a point in high school, I decided to do some research on autism for a school project. As an autistic teenager looking up resources online, I was very upset to realize that every single resource I accessed at the time presumed it was talking to a neurotypical parent about their helpless autistic child. I was looking for resources to myself, yet made to feel like I was the subject in a conversation.

Likewise, many wheelchair users have relayed the experience of, when they, in their chair, are in an environment accompanied by someone else who isn’t using a chair, strangers would speak to the standing person exclusively, avoiding addressing the chair user. 

It’s important to always remind yourself that at no point do disabled people stop being people. Yes, even people who have facial deformities; yes, even people who need help using the bathroom; yes, even people who drool; yes, even people whose conditions impact their ability to communicate, yes, even people with cognitive disabilities. They are people, they deserve dignity, and they are not “a child trapped in a 27-year-old body”- a disabled adult is still an adult. All of the “trying to learn the right rules” in the world won’t save you if you keep an underlying fear of non-normative bodies and minds.

This also has a modest overlap between disability and sexuality in particular. I am an autistic grayromantic ace. Absolutely none of my choices or inclinations about sex are because I’m too naive or innocent or childlike to comprehend the notion- disabled people have as diverse a relationship with sexuality as any other. That underlying fear- as mentioned before- can prevent many people from imagining that, say, a wheelchair user might enjoy sex and have experience with it. Make sure all of your disabled characters have full internal worlds.

Poor sickly little Tiffany and the Red Right Hand

A big part of fictional ableism is that it separates the disabled into two categories. Anybody who’s used TVTropes would recognize the latter term I used here. But to keep it brief:

Poor, sickly little Tiffany is cute. Vulnerable. How her disability affects her life is that it constantly creates a pall of suffering that she lives beneath. After all, having a non-normative mind or body must be an endless cavalcade of suffering and tragedy, right? People who are disabled clearly spend their every waking moment affected by, and upset, that they aren’t normal!

The answer is... No, actually. Cut the sad violin; even people who have chronic pain who are literally experiencing pain a lot more than the rest of us are still fully capable of living complex lives and being happy. If nothing else, it would be literally boring to feel nothing but awful, and people with major depression or other problems still, also, have complicated experiences. And yes, some of it’s not great. You don’t have to present every disability as disingenuously a joy to have. But make a point that they own these things. It is a very different feeling to have a concerned father looking through the window at his angel-faced daughter rocking sadly in her wheelchair while she stares longingly out the window, compared to a character waking up at midnight because they have to go do something and frustratedly hauling their body out of their bed into their chair to get going.

Poor Sickly Little Tiffany (PSLT, if you will) virtually always are young, and they virtually always are bound to the problems listed under ‘failing the heartwarming dog’ test. Yes, disabled kids exist, but the point I’m making here is that in the duality of the most widely accepted disabled characters, PSLT embodies the nadir of the Victim, who is so pure, so saintly, so gracious, that it can only be a cruel quirk of fate that she’s suffering. After all, it’s not as if disabled people have the same dignity that any neurotypical and able-bodied person has, where they can be an asshole and still expect other people to not seriously attack their quality of life- it’s a “service” for the neurotypical and able-bodied to “humor” them.

(this is a bad way to think. Either human lives matter or they don’t. There is no “wretched half-experience” here- if you wouldn’t bodily grab and yank around a person standing on their own feet, you have no business grabbing another person’s wheelchair)

On the opposite end- and relevant to your question- is the Red Right Hand. The Red Right Hand does not have PSLT’s innocence or “purity”- is the opposite extreme. The Red Right Hand is virtually always visually deformed, and framed as threatening for their visual deformity. To pick on a movie I like a fair amount, think about how in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the title character is described- “Strong. Fast. Had a metal arm.” That’s a subtle example, but, think about how that metal arm is menacing. Sure, it’s a high tech weapon in a superhero genre- but who has the metal arm? The Winter Soldier, who is, while a tormented figure that ultimately becomes more heroic- scary. Aggressive. Out for blood.

The man who walks at midnight with a Red Right Hand is a signal to us that his character is foul because of the twisting of his body. A good person, we are led to believe, would not be so- or a good person would be ashamed of their deformity and work to hide it. The Red Right Hand is not merely “an evil disabled person”- they are a disabled person whose disability is depicted as symptomatic of their evil, twisted nature, and when you pair this trope with PSLT, it sends a message: “stay in your place, disabled people. Be sad, be consumable, and let us push you around and decide what to do with you. If you get uppity, if you have ideas, if you stand up to us, then the thing that made you a helpless little victim will suddenly make you a horrible monster, and justify us handling you with inhumanity.”

As someone who is a BIG fan of eldritch horror and many forms of unsettling “wrongness” it is extremely important to watch out for the Red Right Hand. Be careful how you talk about Villainous Disability- there is no connection between disability and morality. People will be good, bad, or simply just people entirely separate from their status of ability or disability. It’s just as ableist to depict every disabled person as an innocent good soul as it is to exclusively deal in grim and ghastly monsters.

Don’t justify disabilities and don’t destroy them.

Superpowers are cool. Characters can and IMO should have superpowers, as long as you’re writing a genre when they’re there.

BUT.

It’s important to remember that there is no justification for disabilities, because they don’t need one. Disability is simply a feature characters have. You do not need to go “they’re blind, BUT they can see the future”

This is admittedly shaky, and people can argue either way; the Blind Seer is a very pronounced mythological figure and an interesting philosophical point about what truly matters in the world. There’s a reason it exists as a conceit. But if every blind character is blind in a way that completely negates that disability or makes it meaningless- this sucks. People have been blind since the dawn of time. And people will always accommodate their disabilities in different ways. Even if the technology exists to fix some forms of blindness, there are people who will have “fixable” blindness and refuse to treat it. There will be individuals born blind who have no meaningful desire to modify this. And there are some people whose condition will be inoperable even if it “shouldn’t” be.

You don’t need to make your disabled characters excessively cool, or give them a means by which the audience can totally forget they’re disabled. Again, this is a place where strong worldbuilding is your buddy- a handwave of “x technology fixed all disabilities”, in my opinion, will never come off good. If, instead, however, you throw out a careless detail that the cool girl the main character is chatting up in a cyberpunk bar has an obvious spinal modification, and feature other characters with prosthetics and without- I will like your work a lot, actually. Even if you’re handing out a fictional “cure”- show the seams. Make it have drawbacks and pros and cons. A great example of this is in the series Full Metal Alchemist- the main character has two prosthetic limbs, and not only do these limbs come with problems, some mundane (he has phantom limb pains, and has to deal with outgrowing his prostheses or damaging them in combat) some more fantastical (these artificial limbs are connected to his nerves to function fluidly- which means that they get surgically installed with no anesthesia and hurt like fuck plugging in- and they require master engineering to stay in shape). We explicitly see a scene of the experts responsible for said limbs talking to a man who uses an ordinary prosthetic leg, despite the advantages of an automail limb, because these drawbacks are daunting to him and he is happier with a simple prosthetic leg.

Even in mundane accommodations you didn’t make up- no two wheelchair users use their chair the exact same way, and there’s a huge diversity of chairs. Someone might be legally blind but still navigate confidently on their own; they might use a guide dog, or they might use a cane. They might even change their needs from situation to situation!

Disability accommodations are part of life

This ties in heavily to the previous point, but seriously! Don’t just look up one model of cane and superimpose it with no modifications onto your character- think about what their lifestyle is, and what kind of person they are!

Also medication is not the devil. Yes, medical abuse is real and tragic and the medication is not magic fairy dust that solves all problems either. But also, it’s straight ableism to act like anybody needing pills for any reason is a scary edgy plot twist. 

(and addiction is a disease. Please be careful, and moreover be compassionate, if you’re writing a character who’s an addict)

3. Be mindful of cast composition

This, to me, is a big tip about disability writing and it’s also super easy to implement!

Just make sure your cast has a lot of meaningful disabled characters in it!

Have you done all the work you can to try and dodge the Red Right Hand but you’re still worried your disabled villain is a bad look? They sure won’t look like a commentary on disability if three other people in the cast are disabled and don’t have the same outlook or role! Worried that you’re PSLT-ing your main character’s disabled child? Maybe the disability is hereditary and they got it from the main character!

The more disabled characters you have, the more it will challenge you to think about what their individual relationship is with the world and the less you’ll rely on hackneyed tropes. At least, ideally.

-

Ultimately, there’s no perfect silver bullet of diversity writing that will prevent a work from EVER being ableist, but I hope this helped, at least!

[niseamstories]

10 Lessons on Realistic Worldbuilding and Mapmaking I Learned Working With a Professional Cartographer and Geodesist

Hi, fellow writers and worldbuilders,

It’s been over a year since my post on realistic swordfighting, and I figured it’s time for another one. I’m guessing the topic is a little less “sexy”, but I’d find this useful as a writer, so here goes: 10 things I learned about realistic worldbuilding and mapmaking while writing my novel.

I’ve always been a sucker for pretty maps, so when I started on my novel, I hired an artist quite early to create a map for me. It was beautiful, but a few things always bothered me, even though I couldn’t put a finger on it. A year later, I met an old friend of mine, who currently does his Ph.D. in cartography and geodesy, the science of measuring the earth. When the conversation shifted to the novel, I showed him the map and asked for his opinion, and he (respectfully) pointed out that it has an awful lot of issues from a realism perspective.

First off, I’m aware that fiction is fiction, and it’s not always about realism; there are plenty of beautiful maps out there (and my old one was one of them) that are a bit fantastical and unrealistic, and that’s all right. Still, considering the lengths I went to ensure realism for other aspects of my worldbuilding, it felt weird to me to simply ignore these discrepancies. With a heavy heart, I scrapped the old map and started over, this time working in tandem with a professional artist, my cartographer friend, and a linguist. Six months later, I’m not only very happy with the new map, but I also learned a lot of things about geography and coherent worldbuilding, which made my universe a lot more realistic.

1)  Realism Has an Effect: While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with creating an unrealistic world, realism does affect the plausibility of a world. Even if the vast majority of us probably know little about geography, our brains subconsciously notice discrepancies; we simply get this sense that something isn’t quite right, even if we don’t notice or can’t put our finger on it. In other words, if, for some miraculous reason, an evergreen forest borders on a desert in your novel, it will probably help immersion if you at least explain why this is, no matter how simple.

2)  Climate Zones: According to my friend, a cardinal sin in fantasy maps are nonsensical climate zones. A single continent contains hot deserts, forests, and glaciers, and you can get through it all in a single day. This is particularly noticeable in video games, where this is often done to offer visual variety (Enderal, the game I wrote, is very guilty of this). If you aim for realism, run your worldbuilding by someone with a basic grasp of geography and geology, or at least try to match it to real-life examples.

3)  Avoid Island Continent Worlds: Another issue that is quite common in fictional worlds is what I would call the “island continents”: a world that is made up of island-like continents surrounded by vast bodies of water. As lovely and romantic as the idea of those distant and secluded worlds may be, it’s deeply unrealistic. Unless your world was shaped by geological forces that differ substantially from Earth’s, it was probably at one point a single landmass that split up into fragmented landmasses separated by waters. Take a look at a proper map of our world: the vast majority of continents could theoretically be reached by foot and relatively manageable sea passages. If it weren’t so, countries such as Australia could have never been colonized – you can’t cross an entire ocean on a raft.

4)  Logical City Placement: My novel is set in a Polynesian-inspired tropical archipelago; in the early drafts of the book and on my first map, Uunili, the nation’s capital, stretched along the entire western coast of the main island. This is absurd. Not only because this city would have been laughably big, but also because building a settlement along an unprotected coastline is the dumbest thing you could do considering it directly exposes it to storms, floods, and, in my case, monsoons. Unless there’s a logical reason to do otherwise, always place your coastal settlements in bays or fjords.

 Naturally, this extends to city placement in general. If you want realism and coherence, don’t place a city in the middle of a godforsaken wasteland or a swamp just because it’s cool. There needs to be a reason. For example, the wasteland city could have started out as a mining town around a vast mineral deposit, and the swamp town might have a trading post along a vital trade route connecting two nations.

 5)  Realistic Settlement Sizes: As I’ve mentioned before, my capital Uunili originally extended across the entire western coast. Considering Uunili is roughly two thirds the size of Hawaii  the old visuals would have made it twice the size of Mexico City. An easy way to avoid this is to draw the map using a scale and stick to it religiously. For my map, we decided to represent cities and townships with symbols alone.

 6)  Realistic Megacities: Uunili has a population of about 450,000 people. For a city in a Middle Ages-inspired era, this is humongous. While this isn’t an issue, per se (at its height, ancient Alexandria had a population of about 300,000), a city of that size creates its own set of challenges: you’ll need a complex sewage system (to minimize disease spreading like wildfire) and strong agriculture in the surrounding areas to keep the population fed. Also, only a small part of such a megacity would be enclosed within fantasy’s ever-so-present colossal city walls; the majority of citizens would probably concentrate in an enormous urban sprawl in the surrounding areas. To give you a pointer, with a population of about 50,000, Cologne was Germany’s biggest metropolis for most of the Middle Ages. I’ll say it again: it’s fine to disregard realism for coolness in this case, but at least taking these things into consideration will not only give your world more texture but might even provide you with some interesting plot points.

 7)  World Origin: This point can be summed up in a single question: why is your world the way it is? If your novel is set in an archipelago like mine is, are the islands of volcanic origin? Did they use to be a single landmass that got flooded with the years? Do the inhabitants of your country know about this? Were there any natural disasters to speak of? Yes, not all of this may be relevant to the story, and the story should take priority over lore, but just like with my previous point, it will make your world more immersive.

 8)  Maps: Think Purpose! Every map in history had a purpose. Before you start on your map, think about what yours might have been. Was it a map people actually used for navigation? If so, clarity should be paramount. This means little to no distracting ornamentation, a legible font, and a strict focus on relevant information. For example, a map used chiefly for military purposes would naturally highlight different information than a trade map. For my novel, we ultimately decided on a “show-off map” drawn for the Blue Island Coalition, a powerful political entity in the archipelago (depending on your world’s technology level, maps were actually scarce and valuable). Also, think about which technique your in-universe cartographer used to draw your in-universe map. Has copperplate engraving already been invented in your fictional universe? If not, your map shouldn’t use that aesthetic.

9)  Maps: Less Is More. If a spot or an area on a map contains no relevant information, it can (and should) stay blank so that the reader’s attention naturally shifts to the critical information. Think of it this way: if your nav system tells you to follow a highway for 500 miles, that’s the information you’ll get, and not “in 100 meters, you’ll drive past a little petrol station on the left, and, oh, did I tell you about that accident that took place here ten years ago?” Traditional maps follow the same principle: if there’s a road leading a two day’s march through a desolate desert, a black line over a blank white ground is entirely sufficient to convey that information.

10) Settlement and Landmark Names: This point will be a bit of a tangent, but it’s still relevant. I worked with a linguist to create a fully functional language for my novel, and one of the things he criticized about my early drafts were the names of my cities. It’s embarrassing when I think about it now, but I really didn’t pay that much attention to how I named my cities; I wanted it to sound good, and that was it. Again: if realism is your goal, that’s a big mistake. Like Point 5, we went back to the drawing board and dove into the archipelago’s history and established naming conventions. In my novel, for example, the islands were inhabited by indigenes called the Makehu before the colonization four hundred years before the events of the story; as it’s usually the case, all settlements and islands had purely descriptive names back then. For example, the main island was called Uni e Li, which translates as “Mighty Hill,” a reference to the vast mountain ranges in the south and north; townships followed the same example (e.g., Tamakaha meaning “Coarse Sands”). When the colonizers arrived, they adopted the Makehu names and adapted them into their own language, changing the accented, long vowels to double vowels: Uni e Li became “Uunili,” Lehō e Āhe became “Lehowai.” Makehu townships kept their names; colonial cities got “English” monikers named after their geographical location, economic significance, or some other original story. Examples of this are Southport, a—you guessed it—port on the southernmost tip of Uunili, or Cale’s Hope, a settlement named after a businessman’s mining venture. It’s all details, and chances are that most readers won’t even pay attention, but I personally found that this added a lot of plausibility and immersion.

I could cover a lot more, but this post is already way too long, so I’ll leave it at that—if there’s enough interest, I’d be happy to make a part two. If not, well, maybe at least a couple of you got something useful out of this. If you’re looking for inspiration/references to show to your illustrator/cartographer, the David Rumsey archive is a treasure trove. Finally, for anyone who doesn’t know and might be interested, my novel is called Dreams of the Dying, and is a blends fantasy, mystery, and psychological horror set in the universe of Enderal, an indie RPG for which I wrote the story. It’s set in a Polynesian-inspired medieval world and has been described as Inception in a fantasy setting by reviewers.

Credit for the map belongs to Dominik Derow, who did the ornamentation, and my friend Fabian Müller, who created the map in QGIS and answered all my questions with divine patience. The linguist’s name is David Müller (no, they’re not related, and, yes, we Germans all have the same last names.)

[warsofasoiaf]

Writing Characters With Believable Military PTSD

I typically write these writing and worldbuilding essays from a dispassionate perspective, offering advice and context to prospective writers from as neutral a point of view as I can manage, with the goal being to present specific pieces of information and broader concepts that can hopefully improve writing and build creators’ confidence to bring their projects to fruition, whether that be writing, tabletop gaming, video game programming, or anything that suits their fancy. While writing this essay though, I struggled to maintain that perspective. Certainly, the importance of the topic to me was a factor, but ultimately, I saw impersonality just as a suboptimal presentation method for something so intensely personal. I do maintain some impartiality particularly in places where historical or academic context is called for, but in other respects I’ve opted for a different approach. Ultimately, this essay is a labor of love for me, love for those who suffer from military PTSD, love for those who love those who suffer from it, and love for writers who want to, in the way that they so choose, help those two other groups out. Thus, this is a different type of essay in certain segments than my usual fare; I hope the essay isn’t an unreadable chimera because of it.

This essay focuses on military-related PTSD. While there are some concepts that translate well into PTSD in the civilian sphere, there are unique elements that do not necessarily fit the mold in both directions, so for someone hoping to write a different form of PTSD, I would recommend finding other resources that could better suit your purposes. I also recommend using more than one source just in general, trauma is personal and so multiple sources can help provide a wide range of experiences to draw upon, which should hopefully improve any creative work.

And as a final introductory note, traumatic experiences are deeply personal. If you are using someone you know as a model for your writing, you owe it to that person to communicate exactly what you are doing and to ask their permission every step of the way. I consider it a request out of politeness to implore any author who uses someone else’s experiences to inform their writing in any capacity, but when it comes to the truly negative experiences in someone’s life, this rises higher from request to demand. You will ask someone before taking a negative experience from their own life and placing it into your creative works, and you will not hide anything about it from them. Receiving it is a great sign of trust. The opposite is a travesty, robbing someone of a piece of themselves and placing it upon display as a grotesque exhibit. And if that sounds ghoulish and macabre, it’s because it is, without hyperbole. Don’t do it.

Why Write PTSD?

What is the purpose of including PTSD in a creative work? There have been plenty of art therapy actions taken by those who suffer PTSD to create something from their condition, which can be as profound for those who do not have it as it is therapeutic for those that do, but why would someone include it in their creative works, and why is some no-name guy on the internet writing an essay offering tips as to how to do it better?

Certainly, one key element is that it’s real, and it happens. If art is to reflect upon reality, PTSD suffered by soldiers is one element of that, so art can reflect it, but what specifically about PTSD, as opposed to any other facet of existence? Author preference certainly plays a factor, but why would someone try to include something that is difficult to understand and difficult to portray? While everyone comes to their own reason, I think that a significant number of people are curious about what exactly goes on in the minds of someone suffering through PTSD, and creative works allow them a way to explore it, much the way fiction can explore scenarios and emotions that are either unlikely or unsafe to explore in reality. If that’s the case, then the purpose of this essay is rather simple, to make the PTSD examination more grounded in reality and thus a better reflection of it. But experiences are unique even if discernable patterns emerge, so in that sense, no essay created by an amateur writer with no psychological experience could be an authoritative take on reality, the nature of which would is far beyond the scope of this essay.

For my own part, I think that well-done creative works involving PTSD is meant to break down the isolation that it can cause in its wake. Veterans suffering may feel that they are alone, that their loved ones cannot understand them and the burden of trying to create that would simply push them away; better instead to have the imperfect bonds that they currently have than risk losing them entirely. For those who are on the outside looking in, isolation lurks there as well, a gulf that seems impossible to breach and possibly intrusive to even try. Creative works that depict PTSD can help create a sense that victims aren’t alone, that there are people that understand and can help without demeaning the sense of self-worth. Of course, another element would be to reduce the amount of poorly-done depictions of PTSD. Some creative works use PTSD as a backstory element, relegating a defining and important element of an individual’s life as an aside, or a minor problem that can be resolved with a good hug and a cry or a few nights with the right person. If a well-done creative work can help create a bridge and break down isolation, a poorly-done one can turn victims off, reinforcing the idea that no one understands and worse, no one cares. For others, it gives a completely altered sense of what PTSD is and what they could do to help, keeping them out, confusing them, or other counter-productive actions. In that sense, all the essay is to help build up those who are doing the heavy lifting. I’m not full of so much hubris as to think this is a profound piece of writing that will help others, but if creators are willing to try and do the hard work of building a bridge, I could at least try to help out and provide a wheelbarrow.

An Abbreviated Look At The Many Faces and Names of PTSD Throughout History

PTSD has been observed repeatedly throughout human history, even when it was poorly understood. This means that explorations of PTSD can be written in settings even if they did not have a distinctly modern understanding of neurology, trauma, or related matters. These historical contexts are also useful for worldbuilding a believable response in fictional settings and scenarios that don’t necessarily have a strict analogue in our own history. By providing this historical context, hopefully I can craft a broad-based sense of believable responses to characters with PTSD at a larger level.

In the time of Rome, it was understood by legionnaires that combat was a difficult endeavor, and so troops were typically on the front lines engaged in combat for short periods of time, to be rotated back for rest while others took their place. It was considered ideal, in these situations, to rotate troops that fought together back so that they could rest together. The immediate lesson is obvious, the Romans believed that it was vital for troops to take time to process what they had done and that was best served with quiet periods of rest not just to allow the adrenaline to dissipate (the "combat high"), but a chance for the mind to wrap itself around what the legionnaire had done. The Romans also recognized that camaraderie between fellow soldiers helped soldiers to cope, and this would be a running theme throughout history (and remains as such today). Soldiers were able to empathize with each other, and help each other through times of difficulty. This was not all sanguine, however, Roman legions depended on their strong formations, and a soldier that did not perform their duty could endanger the unit, and so shame in not fulfilling their duty was another means to keep soldiers in line. The idea of not letting down your fellow soldiers is a persistent refrain in coping with the traumas of war, and throughout history this idea has been used for both pleasant and unpleasant means of keeping soldiers in the fight.

In the Middle Ages, Geoffroi de Charny wrote extensively on the difficulties that knights could experience on the campaign trail in his Book of Chivalry. The book highlights the deprivation that knights suffered, from the bad food and poor sleep to the traumatic experience of combat to being away from family and friends to the loss of valued comrades to combat and infection; each of these is understood as a significant stressor that puts great strain on the mental health of soldiers up to today. De Charny recommended focusing on the knightly oaths of service, the needs of the mission of their liege, and the duty of the knight to serve as methods to help bolster the resolve of struggling knights. The book also mentions seeking counseling and guidance from priests or other confidants to help improve their mental health to see their mission through. This wasn’t universal, however. Some severely traumatized individuals were seen as simple cowards, and punished harshly for their perceived cowardice as antithetical to good virtue and to serve as an example.

World War I saw a sharp rise in the reported incidents of military-related PTSD and new understandings and misunderstandings. The rise in the number of soldiers caused a rise in cases of military PTSD, even though the term itself was not known at the time. Especially in the early phases of the war, many soldiers suffering from PTSD were thought to be malingering, pretending to have symptoms to avoid being sent to the front lines. The term “shell shock” was derived because it was believed that the concussive force of artillery bombardment caused brain damage as it rattled the skull or carbon monoxide fumes would damage the brain as they were inhaled, as a means to explain why soldiers could have physical responses such as slurred speech, lack of response to external stimuli, even nigh-on waking catatonia, despite not being hit by rifle rounds or shrapnel. This would later be replaced by the term “battle fatigue” when it became apparent that artillery bombardment was not a predicative indicator. Particularly as manpower shortages became more prevalent, PTSD-sufferers could be sent to firing squads as a means to cow other troops to not abandon their post. Other less fatal methods of shaming could occur, such as the designation “Lack of Moral Fibre,” an official brand of cowardice, as an attempt to shame the members into remembering their duty. As the war developed, and understanding grew, better methods of treatment were made, with rest and comfort provided to slight cases, strict troop rotations observed to rotate men to and from the front lines, and patients not being told that they were being evacuated for nervous breakdown to avoid cementing that idea in their mind. These lessons would continue into World War II, where the term “combat stress reaction” was adopted. While not always strenuously followed, regular rotations were adopted as standard policy. This was still not universal, plenty of units still relied upon bullying members into maintaining their post despite mental trauma.

The American military promotes a culture of competence and ability, particularly for the enlisted ranks, and that lends itself to the soldier viewing themselves in a starkly different fashion than a civilian. Often, a soldier sees the inability to cope with a traumatic experience as a personal failure stemming from the lack of mental fortitude. Owning up to such a lack of capability is tantamount to accepting that they are an inferior soldier, less capable than their fellows. This idea is commonly discussed, and should not be ignored, but it is far from the only reason. The military also possesses a strong culture of fraternity that obligates “Don’t be a fuckup,” is a powerful motivating force, and it leads plenty of members of the military to ignore traumatic experiences out of the perceived need not to put the burden on their squadmates. While most professional militaries stress that seeking mental health for trauma is not considered a sign of weakness, enlisted know that if they receive mental health counseling, it is entirely likely that someone will have to take their place in the meantime. That could potentially mean that another person, particularly in front-line units, are exposed to danger that they would otherwise not be exposed to, potentially exacerbating guilt if said person gets hurt or killed. This is even true in stateside units, plenty of soldiers don’t report for treatment because it would mean dumping work on their fellows, a negative aspect of unit fraternity. Plenty of veterans also simply never are screened for mental health treatment, and usually this lends to a mentality of “well, no one is asking, so I should be fine.” These taken together combine to a heartbreaking reality, oftentimes a modern veteran that seeks help for mental trauma has often coped silently for years, perhaps self-medicating with alcohol or off-label drug usage, and is typically very far along their own path comparatively. Others simply fall through the cracks, not being screened for mental disorders and so do not believe that anything is wrong; after all, if something was wrong, surely the doctors would notice it, right? The current schedule of deployments, which are duration-based and not mission-based, also make it hard for servicemembers to rationalize their experiences and equate them to the mission; there’s no sense of pairing suffering to objectives the way that de Charnay mentioned could help contextualize the deprivation and loss. These sorts of experiences make the soldier feel adrift, and their suffering pointless, which is discouraging on another level. It is one thing to suffer for a cause, it’s another not to know why, amplifying the feelings of powerlessness and furthering the isolation that they feel.

Pen to Page - The Characters and Their Responses

The presentation of PTSD within a character will depend largely on the point-of-view that the author creates. A character that suffers from PTSD depending on the presence of an internal or external point-of-view, will be vastly different experiences on page. Knowing this is essential, as this will determine how the story itself is presenting the disorder. Neither is necessarily more preferable than the other, and is largely a matter of the type of story being told and the personal preference of the author.

Internal perspectives will follow the character’s response from triggering event to immediate response. This allows the author to present a glimpse into what the character is experiencing. In these circumstances, remember that traumatic flashbacks are merely one of many experiences that an average sufferer of PTSD can endure. In a visual medium, flashbacks are time-effective methods to portray a character reliving portions of a traumatic experience, but other forms of media can have other tools. Traumatic flashbacks are not necessarily a direct reliving of an event from start to finish, individuals may instead feel sudden sharp pains of old injuries, be overwhelmed by still images of traumatic scenes or loud traumatic sounds. These can be linked to triggers that bring up the traumatic incident, such as a similar sight, sound, or smell. These moments of linkage are not necessarily experienced linearly or provide a clear sequence of events from start to finish (memory rarely is unless specifically prompted), and it may be to the author’s advantage to not portray them as such in order to communicate the difficulty in mental parsing that the character may be experiencing. Others might be more intrusive, such as violently deranged nightmares that prevent sleep. The author must try to strike a balance between portraying the experience realistically and portraying it logically that audience members can understand. The important thing about these memories is that they are intrusive, unwelcome, and quite stressful, so using techniques that jar the reader, such as the sudden intrusive image of a torn body, a burning vehicle, or another piece of the traumatic incident helps communicate the disorientation. Don't rely simply on shock therapy, it's not enough just to put viscera on the page. Once it is there, the next steps, how the character reacts, is crucial to a believable response.

When the character experiences something that triggers their PTSD, start to describe the stress response, begin rapidly shortening the sentences to simulate the synaptic activity, express the fight-flight-freeze response as the character reacts, using the tools of dramatic action to heighten tension and portraying the experience as something frightful and distinctly undesirable. The triggering incident brings back the fear, such as a pile of rubble on the side of the road being a potential IED location, or a loud firework recalling the initial moments of an enemy ambush. The trauma intrudes, and the character falls deep into the stress response, and now they react. How does this character react? By taking cover? By attacking the aggressor who so reminds them of the face of their enemy? Once the initial event starts, then the character continues to respond. Do they try to get to safety? Secure the area and eliminate the enemy? Eventually, the character likely recognizes their response is inappropriate. It wasn’t a gunshot, it was a car backfiring, the smell of copper isn’t the sight of a blown-apart comrade and the rank odor of blood, it’s just a jug of musty pennies. This fear will lead to control mechanisms where the victim realizes that their response is irrational. Frequently, the fear is still there, and it still struggles with control. This could heighten a feeling a powerlessness in the character as they try and fail to put the fear under control: "Yes, I know this isn’t real and there’s nothing to be afraid of, but I’m still shaking and I am still afraid!" It’s a horrifying logical track, a fear that the victim isn’t even in control of their thoughts - the one place that they should have control - and that they might always be this way. There’s no safety since even their thoughts aren’t safe. Despair might also follow, as the victim frantically asserts to regain control. Usually with time, the fear starts to lessen as the logical centers of the brain regain control, and the fear diminishes. Some times, the victim can't even really recall the exact crippling sense of fear when attempting to recall it, only that they were afraid and that it was deeply scary and awful, but the notion that it happened remains in their mind.

Control mechanisms are also important to developing a believable PTSD victim. Most sufferers dread the PTSD response and so actively avoid objects or situations that could potentially trigger. Someone who may have had to escape from a helicopter falling into the ocean may not like to be immersed in water. Someone who was hit by a hidden IED may swerve to avoid suspicious piles in the road. Someone buried under a collapsing ceiling may become claustrophobic. Thus, many characters with PTSD will be hypervigilant almost to the point of exhaustion, avoiding setting off the undesired response. This hypervigilance is mentally taxing; the character begins to become sluggish mentally as all their energy is squeezed out, leaving them struggling for even the simplest of rational thoughts. This mental fog can be translated onto the page in dramatic effect by adding paragraph length to even simple actions, bringing the reader along into the fog, laboriously seeing the character move to perform simple actions. Then, mix in a loss of a sense of purpose. They’re adrift, not exactly sure what they’re doing and barely aware of what’s happening, although they are thinking and functioning. In the character’s daily life, they are living their life using maximum effort to avoid triggering responses; this is another aspect of control that the character can use as an attempt to claw back some semblance of power in their own lives. Even control methods that aren’t necessarily healthy such as drinking themselves to pass out every night or abusing sleeping pills in an attempt to sleep due to their nightmares, are ways to attempt to regain a sense of normalcy and function. Don’t condescend to these characters and make them pathetic, that’s just another layer of cruelty, but showing the unhealthy coping mechanisms can demonstrate the difficulty that PTSD victims are feeling. Combined with an external perspective, the author can show the damage that these unhealthy actions are doing without casting the character as weak for not taking a different path.

External perspectives focus on the other characters and how they observe and react to the individual in question. Since the internal thought process of the character is not known, sudden reactions to an unknown trigger can be quite jarring for characters unaware, which can mirror real-life experiences that individuals can have with PTSD-sufferers. In these types of stories, the character’s reaction to the victim is paramount. PTSD in real life often evokes feelings of helplessness in loved ones when they simply cannot act to help, can evoke confusion, or anger and resentment. These reactions are powerful emotions with the ability to drive character work, and so external perspectives can be useful for telling a story about what it is like for loved ones who suffer in their own fashion. External perspectives can be used not just in describing triggering episodes, but in exploring how the character established coping mechanisms and how their loved ones react to them. Some mechanisms are distinctly unhealthy, such as alcohol or prescription drug abuse, complete withdrawal, or a refusal to drive vehicles, and these create stress and a feeling of helplessness in characters or can impel them to try and take action. Others can be healthy, and a moment of inspiration and joy for an external perspective could be sharing in that mechanism, demonstrating empathy and understanding which evokes strong pathos, and hopefully to friends of those who suffer from PTSD, a feeling that they too, are not alone.

As the character progresses, successes and failures can often be one of the most realistic and most important things to include within the work, since those consumers who have PTSD will see parts of themselves in the characters, which can build empathy and cut down on the feelings of isolation that many victims of PTSD feel. A character could, over the course of the story, begin weaning themselves off of their control mechanisms, have the feelings of panic subside as their logical sides more quickly assert control, replace unhealthy coping mechanisms with healthier ones, or other elements of character progression and growth. Contrarily, a character making progress could, after experiencing significant but unrelated stressors, backslide either into unhealthy coping mechanisms or be blindsided by another attack. This is a powerful fear for the victim, since it can cause them to think ‘all my progress, all my effort, and I am not free!’ This is often a great fear for PTSD users (people with depression often have the same feeling) that find methods of coping are no longer as effective, and the struggle is perceived as one that they’re ultimately doomed to failure. This feeling of inevitable failure can lead to self-harm and suicide as their avenue of success seems to burn to ash right as it was in their hands. More than one soldier suffering from PTSD has ended up concluding: “Fuck it, I can’t live like this,” as horrible as that is. Don’t be afraid to include setbacks and backsliding, those happen in reality, and can be one of the most isolating fears in their lives; if the goal of portraying PTSD accurately is to help remove that feeling of isolation, then content creators must not avoid these experiences. Success as well as failure are essential to PTSD in characters in stories, these elements moreso than any other, I believe, will transcend the medium and form a connection, fulfilling the objective we set out to include in the beginning paragraphs.

Coming Back to the Beginning

It might be counterintuitive at first glance to say “including military PTSD will probably mean it will be a long journey full of discouraging story beats that might make readers depressed,” because that’s definitely going to discourage some readers to do that. I don’t see it that way, though. The people that want to do it should go in knowing it’s going to be hard, and let that strengthen their resolve, and put the best creation they can forward. The opposite is also true. Not every prospective author has to want to include any number of difficult subjects in their works, and that’s perfectly fine. Content creators must be free to shape the craft that they so desire without the need to be obligated to tackle every difficult issue, and so no content creator should be thought of as lesser or inferior because they opt not to include it in their works. I think that’s honestly stronger than handling an important topic poorly, or even worse, frivolously. Neither should anyone think that a content creator not including PTSD in their works means that they don’t care about those who suffer from it or for those who care about them or who simply don’t care about the subject in general. That’s just a terrible way to treat someone, and in the end, this entire excursion was about the opposite

Ultimately, this essay is a chance not only to help improve creative works involving PTSD, but to reflect on the creative process. Those who still want to proceed, by all means, do so. Hopefully this essay will help you create something that can reach someone. If every piece of work that helps portray PTSD can reach someone somewhere and make things easier, even if ever so little, well then, that’s what it’s really all about.

Hoping everyone has a peaceful Memorial Day. Be good to each to other.

SLAL

[i-can-even-burn-salad]

Header description: A photograph of a dark pink pen and small pink flowers on an empty ring notebook.

Icon description: The marriage portrait of the character Elly from the game Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town on light blue background. Elly is a white girl drawn in comic style with brown hair and brown eyes. She’s looking towards the camera with her head slightly inclined and blushing. There are white flowers in her hair, at the sides of her head, and she’s wearing a frilly white vest with a blue ribbon. She’s holding a rainbow flag.

Hi. You can call me Elli for now, I use she/they pronouns and I am an adult. I have been for a while.

I like tag games, but sometimes I just forget, and those that include a rule to “tag x” or “send to x” will most likely end here or be modified, since I know a lot of my mutuals don’t like that pressure. Same goes for chain asks.

I’m also super shy/awkward, and easily startled, so if you want to message me, try more than just ‘hi’, or I might scurry off and hide under a moldy leaf, trembling ;-;

My introduction post: Click My re-introduction post for Whumpmas in July 2022: Click

Likes and dislikes

Things that will appear on this blog:

fantasy settings, love me some magic

torture and despair and such unpleasant things

my own writing and reblogs of others’ writings

whump/writing prompts, memes and shitposts

lots of posts about writing that aren’t whump related

image descriptions on (almost) everything

and the occasional post I found cute/funny

Things that will probably not appear on this blog:

explicit nsfw stuff (but there might be mention)

major character death (of named characters)

modern medical/hospital settings

pet whump/heavy conditioning

unhappy endings

politics/real world events

chain posts/reblog bait (tag games are fine)

There can and will be exceptions to all of those, for example if something is part of a long series I am reading/reblogging.

Images and descriptions

I’m trying to describe all of the images I post or reblog. The exception are decorational banners that add nothing of value to the post, and the replies of previous people in chain tag games.

I reblog art containing blood, restraints and similar “whumpy” themes, but never real life depictions of such. If you want to avoid them, block #salad-img.

I avoid gifs when possible, and those I can’t avoid are tagged as #gif warning.

Tagging

I’m trying my best to tag things, both in my own posts and stuff I reblog. I’m tagging in the format word tw for most things. I do not want mentions of a thing for warning reasons to show up in a discussion tag, I hope that’s a way to achieve that. If a tag returns an empty search, I’m not using it.

There will be some cursing on this blog, and I can’t tag it, because I curse in the tags, and if you don’t like that, then this might not be a good place for you.

Here’s a list of warnings and tags I use on my posts.

Have a bunch of common tags I use: writing advice | writing resources | writing positivity | writing woes | writing meme | writing prompt | fluff prompt | self publishing | editing | beta reading | worldbuilding | magic | character development | narrative style | disabled characters | writing characters with ptsd | blind characters | whump prompt | whump meme | whump advice | other people’s books | book recs | game recs | thanks for describing! | image description stuff | tumblr stuff | i love rainbow colored things | sad music posting hours | language stuff | video games | gw2posting | p&p

Usage of those tags is uhhh not as consistent as I would have wanted it to be. Thanks brain! I tried to at least keep the advice ones organized.

All ask games I gather I collect under the tags:

#salad starts collecting oc ask games

#salad should give writing ask games a tag

#salad also collects other ask games

I made one OC ask game myself!

And I also made a WIP ask game!

Feel free to browse (and kidnap), it’s my hoard. I try to not tag the same one twice, to make browsing easier. I’m also always taking asks for those, but please mention which one it’s for if it’s not the latest one :D

Personal tags: salad-txt - random things that managed to escape my brain salad-ask - answered asks, always tagged with the asker as well salad-tag - for tag games salad-img - for whumpy images I reblog salad-desc - for images I described salad-find - my favs, basically salad-books - my book recs salad-games - my video game recs salad-reblog - all full-chapter writing of others that I reblog salad-quote - the text-on-stockimage posts with quotes from my stories salad-char - my char intros

salad-rant - me screaming at my screen, because I can’t scream at real people; extra tag so you can block it if you don’t like virtual negativity. salad-nonfiction - for post where I feel they get a bit too real and serious, if people want to avoid them.

[autisticandroids]

Unrelated to evil tfw love triangle but what besides evildeancasnatural are the supernaturals you are watching? Is institutionnatural its own thing or is that just a rewrite? What are some supernaturals that exist outside the ones you’re watching?

the primary supernatural i am watching, more than evildeancasnatural or even regular ol’ destiel natural, is deangenderstudiesnatural.

dean winchester appeals to me as the ULTIMATE closet narrative and, broader than that, as an extremely compelling tragedy about the trauma of masculinity as a disease inflicted on both self and others. like, it really is that simple. this is the thing about spn, above all else, that’s compelling to me. like, i love cas, and i have an intense emotional connection to him, and in a sort of.... fannish? context? where i decontextualize and play with characters for fun? cas appeals to me the most because he is easy for me. dean is too complex for me to play with without worrying that i will break him, and he is too intensely tragic for me to WANT to play that much. this is why a lot of my casposting is more on the fun side and a lot of my deanposting is more on the analytical side. because i like to think about dean, yes, but i need some distance. 

if we’re talking about actual things that i pay attention to in my supernatural, and not necessarily stuff i think about, the second supernatural that i’m watching, still actually above destielnatural, is..... funnynatural. like, i like it when spn is stupid and fun. i will forgive a character or episode almost anything if i think they/it are funny. this is why i’m such a big fan of the late seasons, or, one of the reasons: i think spn SHOULD be dumb. i HATE when it’s serious. like, for example, ketch annoyed me until the time when he tried to lie about being his own evil twin, the absolute funniest thing a character on spn has ever done, and now i like him. like, for me spn can should and does operate primarily on rule of funny. like i do occasionally enjoy a bit of serious spn, i like very serious dean gender episodes, or very serious destiel episodes, and sometimes even very serious episodes about other shit! but most of the time i would rather there be jokes. not that the jokes always land! there are plenty of absolutely rancid attempts at humor across spn’s long runtime. and not that jokes never fuck up worldbuilding in frustrating ways. i can’t think of an example but i’m sure there is one. but i like spn to be silly, most of the time.

the third supernatural i am watching is OF COURSE destielnatural with a (not exclusive by any means!) focus on evil deancasnatural.

and here is a list of other themes (some interrelated, some not) and concepts that are in my brain when i think about or watch supernatural:

- dean always being right

- the erotics and eroticization of violence; supernatural is about sex

- angels and heaven and All That; i wish supernatural had institutions; i wish supernatural had interpersonal politics; institutions are impossible on supernatural because supernatural is a libertarian fantasy, interpersonal politics are impossible on supernatural because only dean can truly be a person

- the dynamics of abuse

- worldbuilding on a very watsonian level: how to make this world work, how to expand our vision of it beyond this insular two brothers against the universe viewpoint

- deviance; why must we, over and over again, kill this monster for the crime of its own existence

- supernatural should be an ensemble cast show; i love [xyz side character]

- late season supernatural as a parody of supernatural or a show about supernatural, even before the chuck stuff

and here are some supernaturals that i know other people watch that i do NOT watch, even though i enjoy watching other people watch them:

- faithnatural; supernatural is about the reverence of the authorfathergod and its loss. i’m really not interested in that one because there’s sort of..... two paths you can take? in reinterpreting supernatural to make it less of a mess? one path is to make the world more fantastic, the other is to make it less so. faithnatural wishes to make the world more fantastic, a world in which the concept of a god worth worshipping is compatible with the worldbuilding of supernatural, a world in which angels are more than what they seem. but i want to make the world less fantastic. i want a sociological reading. i want to know how these people live in a society. i want the material conditions. i would like to hear about the logistics of monster grocery shopping, how many bits of godstiel stained glass exist and what people think about them, how normal society is affected by the increased number of murders and disappearances caused by the widespread existence of monsters. this makes a supernatural where things are more, rather than less, than what they seem, unappealing to me. i don’t think these two things are necessarily incompatible but for me they are. i don’t think a world in which god is unequivocally real is the appropriate world in which to tell a story about faith. maybe it’s because i am an atheist.

- americanatural; supernatural is about america. this theme is fascinating when other people look at it and i love to read posts but it simply does not, rustle my jimmies, as it were, on my own.

- sammynatural; sorry samgirls i recognize your efforts but he’s not my scene, i’m a deangirl through and through. i begin to care about him in the later seasons but not until then

- brothernatural; i’m interested in the winchester brothers’ relationship as it pertains to their own individual characters, but i don’t, say, have specific episodes i like to rewatch to feel emotions about the brothers, or stuff like that. maybe it’s because i am an only child. but i think their relationship was NEVER the driving force of the show for me, dean’s damage was. and the brothers’ relationship is part of dean’s damage but it’s only one part, out of many.

[ren-c-leyn]

For worldbuilding wendsay - and Forgotten gods ofc XD - what does worshipping a God entail? How are the followers organized? How does the magic work - does it only come from the Gods for humans? (I think it was mentioned somewhere elves have it naturally)? And how is writing going? :) @writingonesdreams

The short answer is: it depends on the God. With there being multiple pantheons and hundreds of gods in existence at once, there really isn't a one size fits all thing with worship. Corona, for example, has a lot of temples and shrines with priests and offerings and prayers and such. Several of her worshipers carry around little carved statues of her for good luck.

But others just have like vague commandants. Some demand sacrifices. Some might demand their followers only eat certain kinds of food. Basically, look at all of the diverse and different ways we practice religion in real life, and then add more gods who have their own ideas of what worship should look like meddling in everything and bitching at each other, and you'll start to get an idea.

And no, elves do not have magic naturally. You are probably remembering The Plight of a Sparrow where elves have a higher concentration of magic users in their populations than any of the other races. In Forgotten Gods, magic is not a natural element of the world. It does no occur on it's own. Period. No healing potions, no flaming swords, no wizards, unless a god specifically says yes and makes it so.

The only people who have magic are those who are tethered to either a God or another outside being of equivalent power. And if that mortal pulls too much of their power into their body to use an ability or cast a spell, they will die because their soft, fleshy tissue cannot handle it. A lot of champions are given strict guidance and training to handle their abilities for this very reason, as the closer you are to your god, the easier it is to pull too much of their essence into yourself.

As for how the writing is going, my brain required a break so nothing was written yesterday. I may open it up when I finish waking up, but that has yet to be seen.

Thank you for dropping in! I hope you have a lovely day/evening ^^