#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

[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

[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 ^^

[thenamesblurrito]

What sources did you use to make the Cybertron worldbuilding?

canon plus my brain!

i suggest going on tfwiki.net or even their blog here @tfwiki to find anything canon or franchise or merchandise or fun fact related because they are legitimately the best and most exhaustive wiki i've ever trawled, with the greatest sense of humor to boot. the first couple foodstuffs i drew came from their articles about the (scant few) canon foods mentioned, the map of Cybertron i made was carefully compiled from every mention of a location that this wiki has recorded, and the sheer size/number/reboots/conflicts of canon sources means i can cherry pick the bits i like and expand from there

beyond that, i've got a special interest in worldbuilding and a hoard of random facts that occasionally find use when puzzle pieced into a story, on top of a couple online friend groups that horribly enable me when i bounce ideas off of them. FOR EXAMPLE did you know the yareta forge cyberflora is based off a real plant??? i just Knew about that plant from a nature documentary probably, and the lil factoid stayed in my brain until dingdingding i can make a random piece of transformers worldbuilding out of this!

if you're looking for advice, i suggest A- getting familiar with canon to see if there's something you can work with already (and there really is, there's a LOT), and B- getting familiar with the world around you, because i guarantee there's stuff you can work with in every facet of real life. just takes some imagination to twist it into worldbuilding. beyond that, look into worldbuilding resources and questionnaires online, a quick google should give you dozens

[jamestaylorswift]

My giant goes with me wherever I go: a study of the geographic metanarrative of folklore

This topic has been rattling around in my brain ever since I first heard folklore and I think it’s endlessly fascinating. Cue this lengthy but (hopefully) intriguing piece.

I’m afraid the title may not be an accurate reflection of this essay’s content, so here’s a preview of talking points: geography, existence, metanarrative, making sense of the theme of death, the “peace”/“hoax”/“the lakes” trio, history/philosophy, and exactly one paragraph of rep/Lover analysis (as a treat).

I make the standard disclaimer that analysis is by definition subjective. Additionally, many thanks and credit to anyone else who has written analysis of folklore. I am sure my opinions have been influenced by yours, even subconsciously.

Questions, comments, and suggestions are always welcome, and thank you for taking the time to read :)

——

“Traveling is a fool’s paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me in the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

——

If Taylor Swift’s music is anything, it is highly geographic. Taylor has been a country, pop, and now alternative artist, yet a storyteller through and through—one with a special knack for developing the aesthetic of songs and even entire records through location. The people and places she writes about seem to mutually breathe life into each other.

It is plausible that Taylor, as a young storyteller, developed this talent by using places as veritable muses just like she did anything else. Furthermore, her confessional storytelling became much more geographic as she shifted to pop because of factors including (though certainly not limited to) purchasing real estate, traveling more, writing in a genre that canonically centers coastal cities, and dating individuals with their own established homes. The geographic motif in her work is so identifiable that all of the corresponding details are—for better or worse—commensurate to autobiography.

However, folklore is not autobiographical in the way that most understand her other albums to be. The relationship between people and places in folklore is likewise much less symbiotic.

The first two songs on the record illustrate this. We are at bare minimum forced to associate the characters of Betty and James with New York: the lyrics about the High Line imply a fraction of their relationship took place in this city. Even so, this does not imply Betty or James ever permanently resided in New York, or that Betty is in New York at the moment she is narrating the story of “cardigan.” Taylor places far more emphasis on James and the nostalgia of youth, with “I knew you” repeated as a hook, to develop the emotional tone of the song. Rhode Island also comes to life in “the last great american dynasty” because of Rebekah Harkness’ larger-than-life character. But Taylor, following Rebekah’s antagonism, states multiple times throughout the song that the person should be divorced from the place. folklore locations are never so revered that they gain the vibrancy of literal human life. Taylor refrains from saying a person is a place in the same way that she has said that she is New York or her lover is the West Village.

For an album undeniably with the most concrete references to location, it is highly irregular—even confusing, given that personification is such a powerful storytelling device—that Taylor does not equate location with personal ethos.

Regurgitating the truism that geography equals autobiography proves quite limiting for interpreting Taylor’s work. How, then, should geography influence our understanding of folklore?

I submit that the stories in folklore are not ‘about’ places but ‘of’ places which are not real. Taylor’s autobiographical fiction makes the settings of the songs similarly fictionalized, metaphorical, and otherwise symbolic of something much more than geography. It is this phenomenon which emotionally and philosophically distinguishes folklore from the rest of her oeuvre.

——

As a consequence of Taylor’s unusual treatment of location, real places in folklore become signposts for cultural-geographic abstractions. Reality is simply a set of worldbuilding training wheels.

Prominent geographic features define places, which define settings. The world of folklore is built from what I’ve dubbed as four archetypal settings: the Coastal Town, the Suburb, the City, and the Outside World.

Each has a couple defining geographic features:

Coastal Town: water, cliffs/a lookout

Suburb: homes, town

City: public areas, social/nightlife/entertainment venues

The Outside World serves as the logical complement of the other three settings.

Understanding that real location in folklore is neither interchangeable nor synonymous with setting is crucial. Rhode Island is like the Coastal Town, but the two settings are not one and the same. The Suburb is an idyllic mid-America setting like Nashville, St. Louis, or Pennsylvania; it is all of those places and none of them at the same time. The City may be New York City, but it is certainly not New York City in the way that Taylor has ever sung about New York City before. The Outside World is just away.

Put simply, folklore is antithetical to Taylor’s previous geographic doctrine. While we are not precluded from, for instance, imagining the City as New York City, we also cannot and should not be pigeonholed into doing so.

Note:

This album purports to embody the stereotypically American folkloric tradition. “Outside” means “anywhere that isn’t America” because the imagery and associations of the first three cultural-geographic settings indeed are very distinctly American.

While Nashville and St. Louis are relatively big cities, they are still orders of magnitude smaller than New York and LA, the urban centers that Taylor normally regards as big cities. In context of this essay, the former locations are Suburban.

In this essay, the purpose of the term ‘of’ is simply to replace the more strict term ‘about.’ ‘Of’ denotes significant emotion tied to a place, usually because of significant time spent there either in the past or present (tense matters). Not all songs are ‘of’ places—it may be ambiguous where action takes place—and some songs can be ‘of’ multiple places due to location changing throughout the story. (This does not automatically mean that songs with more than one location are ‘of’ two places. A passing mention of St. Louis does not qualify “the last great american dynasty” as ‘of’ the Suburb, for example.)

Each of the four archetypal settings must instead be understood as an amalgam of the aesthetics of every real location it could be. Setting then exists in conversation with metaphor because we have a shared understanding of what constitutes a generic Suburb, City, or Coastal Town.

Finally, by transitivity, the settings’ metaphorical significance entirely hinges upon the geographic features’ metaphorical significance. This is what Taylor authors.

The next part of the essay is concerned with deciphering geography in folklore per these guiding questions: how is an archetypal feature used as a metaphor? By proxy, what does that say about the setting defined by it? What theme, if any, unites the settings?

The Coastal Town: Water and Cliffs

The Coastal Town is defined by elemental features.

The first (brief) mentions of water occur on the first two tracks:

Roarin’ twenties, tossing pennies in the pool

Leavin’ like a father, running like water

“the last great american dynasty” introduces the setting to which the pool (water) feature belongs, our Rhode Island-like Coastal Town. It also incorporates a larger water feature, the ocean, and suggests the existence of a lookout or cliffs:

Rebekah gave up on the Rhode Island set forever

Flew in all her Bitch Pack friends from the city

Filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names

//

They say she was seen on occasion

Pacing the rocks, staring out at the midnight sea

“seven” and “peace” also have brief mentions of water; however, note that these songs remain situated as ‘of’ the Suburb. (More on this later.)

I hit my peak at seven

Feet in the swing over the creek

I was too scared to jump in

But I’m a fire and I'll keep your brittle heart warm

If your cascade, ocean wave blues come

“my tears ricochet” and “mad woman” with their nautical references pertain to the water metaphor:

I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace

And so the battleships will sink beneath the waves

Now I breathe flames each time I talk

My cannons all firin’ at your yacht

“epiphany” also counts, though with the understanding of “beaches” as Guadalcanal this song is ‘of’ the Outside World:

Crawling up the beaches now

“Sir, I think he’s bleeding out”

“this is me trying” and “hoax” reiterate the cliff/lookout geography:

Pulled the car off the road to the lookout

Could’ve followed my fears all the way down

Stood on the cliffside screaming, “Give me a reason”

Finally, “the lakes” features both water and cliffs:

Take me to the lakes, where all the poets went to die

//

Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

//

While I bathe in cliffside pools

With my calamitous love and insurmountable grief

In folklore, water dovetails with permanent loss.

“epiphany” is the most egregious example. Crawling up the beaches of a war zone proves fatal. “the lakes” describes grieving in water, perhaps for the loss of one’s life because there exist cliffs from which to jump. “this is me trying” and “hoax” mirror that idea. On the other hand, in “peace,” death does not seem to have any connection to falling from a height.

Loss can also mean loss of sanity, such as with the eccentric character of Rebekah Harkness or Taylor as a “mad woman” firing cannons at (presumably) Scooter Braun’s yacht.

Subtler are the losses alluded to in “my tears ricochet” and “seven,” of identity or image and childhood audacity, respectively. And in the opening tracks water is at its most benign, aligned with loss of a relationship that has run its course in one’s young adulthood.

The most fascinating aspect of water in folklore is that it is an aberration from water as the symbol for life/birth/renewal, derived from maternity and the womb. folklore water taketh away, not giveth.

As of now, the greater significance of the Coastal Town—the meaning to which this contradiction alludes—remains to be seen.

The City: Nightlife, Entertainment, and Public Areas

Preeminent in Taylor’s pop work is the City; New York City, Los Angeles, and London are the locations most frequently extolled as Swiftian meccas. This archetypal setting is given a more understated role in folklore.

“cardigan,” ‘of’ the City, illustrates this setting using public environments and nightlife:

Vintage tee, brand new phone

High heels on cobblestones

//

But I knew you

Dancin’ in your Levi’s

Drunk under a streetlight

//

I knew you

Your heartbeat on the High Line

Once in twenty lifetimes

//

To kiss in cars and downtown bars

Was all we needed

“mirrorball” paints the clearest picture of the City’s nightlife/social venues by sheer quantity of lyrics:

I’m a mirrorball

I’ll show you every version of yourself tonight

I’ll get you out on the floor

Shimmering beautiful

//

You are not like the regulars

The masquerade revelers

Drunk as they watch my shattered edges glisten

//

And they called off the circus, burned the disco down

“invisible string” briefly mentions a bar:

A string that pulled me

Out of all the wrong arms, right into that dive bar

In addition, “this is me trying” implies that the speaker may currently be at a bar, making the song partially ‘of’ the City:

They told me all of my cages were mental

So I got wasted like all my potential

//

I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere

Fell behind all my classmates and I ended up here

Pouring out my heart to a stranger

But I didn’t pour the whiskey

It goes almost without saying that the City at large is alcohol-soaked. Indeed, alcohol will help us understand this location.

Each of the aforementioned songs has a distinct narrator, like Betty in the case of “cardigan” or Taylor herself, at the very least in the case of “mirrorball” or at most all songs besides “cardigan.” And because the narrative character is so strong, I posit that the meaning of this geography is tied to what alcohol reveals about the speakers of the songs themselves.

“invisible string” and “mirrorball” are alike in the fact that the stories extend well beyond or even completely after nightlife. Meeting in a dive bar in “invisible string” is just the catalyst for a relationship that feels fated. Taylor, in her “mirrorball” musing, expresses concern about how she is perceived by someone close to her. Does existing after the fact (of public perception, at an entertainment venue) constitute an authentic existence? Alcohol, apparently a necessary part of City life, predates events which later haunt the speakers. Emotional torment is then what prompts the speakers to recount their stories.

On the other hand, alcohol directly reveals the emotional states of the speakers in “cardigan” and “this is me trying.” “cardigan” is Betty’s sepia-toned memory of her time with James, in which James’ careless, youthful spirit (“dancin’ in your Levi’s, drunk under a streetlight” and “heartbeat on the High Line”) inspires sadness and nostalgia for their ultimately temporary relationship (“once in twenty lifetimes”). “this is me trying” is tinged with the speaker’s bitterness; hopelessness and regret lead them to the bar and the destructive practice of drinking just to be numb.

These observations suggest that the City is also a site of grief or loss, though not for the same reason that the Coastal Town is. Whereas the Coastal Town is associated with a permanent ending such as death, the City reveals an ending that is more transitional and wistful, tantamount to a coming of age. There is a clear ‘before’ and ‘after’ to loss related to the City: life, though changed, goes on.

The Suburb: Homes and Towns

Noteworthy though the City and Coastal Town may be, the former in particular concerning the pop mythology of Taylor Swift, it is the Suburb which Taylor most frequently references in folklore and establishes as the geographical heart of the album.

The Suburb is defined by a home and town. A “home” encompasses entrances (front/side doors), back and front yards (gardens/lawns/trees/weeds/creeks), and interiors (rooms/halls/closets). The “town” is pretty self-explanatory, with a store, mall, movie theater, school, and yogurt shop.

Observe that the folklore Suburb is the aesthetic equivalent of the “small town” that provided the debut and Fearless albums’ milieu and inspired the country mythology of Taylor Swift. While Taylor primarily wrote about home and school on those albums (because, well, that was closer to her experience as a teenager), the “small town” and the folklore Suburb are functionally the same with regard to pace, quality, and monotonicity of life. Exhibit A: driving around and lingering on front doorsteps are the main attractions for young adults. (From my personal experience growing up in a Suburb, this is completely accurate. And yes, the only other attractions are the mall and the movie theater.)

The Suburb becomes a conduit for conflict.

Conflict that Taylor explores in this setting, including inner turmoil, dissension between characters, and friction between oneself and external (societal) expectations, naturally can be distinguished by distance [1] between the two forces in conflict. As an example, ‘person vs. self’ implies no distance between the sides because they are both oneself. ‘Person vs. society’ is conflict in which the sides are the farthest they could conceivably be from each other. Conflict with greater distance between the sides is usually harder to resolve. One must move bigger mountains, so to speak, to fix these problems.

The folklore Suburb is additionally constructed upon the notion of privacy or seclusion. We can imagine a gradient [2] of privacy illustrated by Suburban geography: the town is a less intimate setting than the outside of the home, which is less intimate than the inside of the home.

I combine these two ideas in the following claim: the Suburb relates distance between two forces in conflict inversely on the geographical privacy gradient. Put simply, the more intimate or ‘internal’ the setting, the farther the two sides in conflict are from each other.

(I offer this claim in the hopes that it will clarify the nebulous meaning of the Suburb in the next section.)

Salient references to the Suburban town can be divided into one of two categories:

Allowing oneself to hope

Allowing oneself to recall

“august” clearly belongs in the first category. Hope is central to August’s character and how she approaches her relationship with James:

Wanting was enough

For me, it was enough

To live for the hope of it all

Canceled plans just in case you’d call

And say, “Meet me behind the mall”

If we interpret the bus as a school bus then “the 1” also belongs in this first town category:

I thought I saw you at the bus stop, I didn’t though

//

I hit the ground running each night

I hit the Sunday matinee

“invisible string” indicates that the yogurt shop is equally innocent as Centennial Park. The store represents the hope of Taylor’s soul mate, parallel to her hope:

Green was the color of the grass

Where I used to read at Centennial Park

I used to think I would meet somebody there

Teal was the color of your shirt

When you were sixteen at the yogurt shop

You used to work at to make a little money

“cardigan” and “this is me trying” alternatively highlight the persistence of memory, with a relationship leaving an “indelible mark” on the narrators. These songs belong in the second category:

I knew I’d curse you for the longest time

Chasin’ shadows in the grocery line

You’re a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town

James’ recollection qualifies “betty” for the second category as well. This song shows that emotional weight falls behind the act of remembering:

Betty, I won’t make assumptions

About why you switched your homeroom, but

I think it’s ‘cause of me

Betty, one time I was riding on my skateboard

When I passed your house

It’s like I couldn’t breathe

//

Betty, I know where it all went wrong

Your favorite song was playing

From the far side of the gym

I was nowhere to be found

I hate the crowds, you know that

Plus, I saw you dance with him

The surprising common denominator of these two categories is that conflict is purely internal in public spaces. Regardless of whether the speakers feel positively or negatively (i.e. per category number), their feelings are entirely a product of their own decisions, such as revisiting a memory or avoiding confrontation. This gives credence to the theory that the Suburb inversely relates conflict distance with privacy.

On the other extreme, the home is a site of conflict larger than oneself, and often more conflict in general. Conflict which occurs in the most private setting, inside the house, is conflict where the two sides are most distanced from each other. Conflict near the house, though not strictly inside, is closer, interpersonal.

“my tears ricochet” is just an ‘indoors’ song. The opening line depicts a private, funeral-like atmosphere:

We gather here, we line up, weepin’ in a sunlit room

There are multiple interpretations of this song floating around. The two prevailing ones are about the death of Taylor Swift the persona and the sale of her masters. In either interpretation, society and culture are the foundation for the implied conflict. First, the caricature of Taylor Swift exists as a reflection of pop culture; second, the sale of global superstar Taylor Swift’s masters is a dispute of such magnitude that it is not simply an interpersonal squabble.

For the alternative interpretation that “my tears ricochet” is about a dissolved relationship, “and when you can’t sleep at night // you hear my stolen lullabies” implicates Taylor Swift’s public catalogue (and thus Taylor Swift the persona) as the entity haunting someone else, as opposed to Taylor Swift the former member of the relationship.

“mad woman” is just an ‘outdoors’ song because of the line about the neighbor’s lawn:

What do you sing on your drive home?

Do you see my face in the neighbor’s lawn?

Does she smile?

Or does she mouth, “Fuck you forever”

It’s clear Taylor has a lot of vitriol for Scooter Braun. Though it’s probably a bit of both at the end of the day, I am comfortable calling their feud more of the ‘person vs. person’ variety than the ‘person vs. society’ variety.

Consequently, the privacy gradient claim holds for both songs.

“illicit affairs” is one of two songs with a very clear ‘transformation’ of geography:

What started in beautiful rooms

Ends with meetings in parking lots

In context, this represents the devolution of the relationship. External conflict, the illegitimacy of the relationship, defined the affair when it was in “beautiful rooms.” Relocating to the parking lot (i.e. now referencing the Suburban town) coincides with discord turning inward. Any external shame or scorn for both lovers as a consequence of the affair is replaced by the end of the song with anger the lovers feel towards each other and, more importantly, themselves.

“seven” is the best example of how many types of conflict are present in and around the home:

I hit my peak at seven

Feet in the swing over the creek

I was too scared to jump in

//

And I’ve been meaning to tell you

I think your house is haunted

Your dad is always mad and that must be why

And I think you should come live with me

And we can be pirates

Then you won’t have to cry

Or hide in the closet

//

Please picture me in the weeds

Before I learned civility

I used to scream ferociously

Any time I wanted

The first few lines exemplify ‘person vs. self’ conflict, a fear of heights. The third segment introduces a ‘person vs. society’ dilemma, shrinking pains as a result of socialization into gender norms. (I am assuming that the child is a girl.) The second verse indicates strife between a child and a father. It leaves room for three interpretations:

The conflict is interpersonal, so the father’s anger is wholly or partially directed at the child because the father is an angry person

The conflict is sociological, so the father’s anger is a whole or partial consequence of the gendered roles which the father and child perform

Both

Is curious that we need not regard sadness and the closet in “seven” as mutually inclusive. The narrator says the child’s options are crying (logical) or hiding in the closet. Both the father’s temper and the closet are facts of the child’s life, either innocuous or traumatic or somewhere in between.

But we might—and perhaps should—go further and argue that conflict in “seven” is necessarily sociological, and specifically about being civilized to perform heterosexual femininity. For, taken to its logical extreme, if only gender identity and not sexual identity incites anger, then men must be socialized to become abusive to women, who must be socialized to become submissive to that abuse. Screaming “ferociously” at any time would also denote freedom to be oneself despite men, not freedom to be oneself for one’s own gratification. Yet the child surely enjoys the second freedom at the beginning of the song. While the patriarchy is indeed an oppressive societal force, the interpretation of the social conflict in “seven” as only gendered yields contradiction. This interpretation is much more tenuous than acknowledging that the closet is, in fact, The Closet.

(Mere mention of a closet, the universal symbol for hiding one’s sexuality, immediately justifies a queer interpretation of “seven” notwithstanding other sociological and/or semantic technicalities. A sizable chunk of Taylor’s extensive discography also lends itself to queer interpretation by extension of connection with this song—for instance, by a shared theme of socialization as a primary evil. To me it seems silly at best and homophobic at worst to eschew the reading of “seven” presented here.)

It is undeniable that “seven” represents many types of conflict and places them inversely on the privacy gradient. The father embodies societal conflict larger than the young child and introduces that conflict inside the house. The child faces internal conflict (i.e. a fear of heights) and no conflict at all (i.e. freedom to act fearlessly) outside.

Reconciling “august,” “exile,” and “betty” with the privacy gradient actually requires a queer interpretation of the songs. To avoid the complete logical fallacy of a circular proof, I reiterate that the privacy gradient is simply a means of illustrating how the Suburb functions as an archetypal location. Queer interpretation is a sufficient but not necessary condition for an interesting argument about Suburban spatial symbolism. Reaching a slightly weaker conclusion about the Suburb without the privacy gradient would not impact the conclusions about the other three archetypal locations. Finally, queer (sub)text is a noteworthy topic on its own.

“betty” situates the front porch as the venue where Betty must make a decision about her relationship with James:

But if I just showed up at your party

Would you have me? Would you want me?

Would you tell me to go fuck myself

Or lead me to the garden?

In the garden, would you trust me

If I told you it was just a summer thing?

//

Yeah, I showed up at your party

Will you have me? Will you love me?

Will you kiss me on the porch

In front of all your stupid friends?

If you kiss me, will it be just like I dreamed it?

Will it patch your broken wings?

Influencing Betty’s decision is her relationship with her “stupid” (read: homophobic) friends who don’t accept James (and/or the idea of James/Betty as a pair), her own internalized homophobia, and the trepidation with which she may regard James after the August escapade. The conflict at the front door is external/societal, interpersonal, and internal.

The garden differs from the front door as an area where James and Betty can privately discuss the August escapade. By moving to the garden, the supposed root of their conflict shifts from the oppressive force of homophobia to James’ behavior regarding the love triangle (“would you trust me if I told you it was just a summer thing?”). Much like in “illicit affairs,” motion along the privacy gradient underscores that micro-geography is inversely related to conflict distance.

Next, the implied settings of “august” are a bedroom and a private outdoor location such as a backyard:

Salt air, and the rust on your door

I never needed anything more

Whispers of "Are you sure?”

“Never have I ever before”

//

Your back beneath the sun

Wishin’ I could write my name on it

Will you call when you’re back at school?

I remember thinkin’ I had you

The backyard holds a mixture of ‘person vs. self’ and ‘person vs. person’ conflict. August’s doubts about James manifest as personal insecurities. However, James, by avoiding commitment, is equally responsible for planting that seed of doubt.

The song’s opening scene depicts a young adult losing their virginity. The bedroom can thus be conceptualized as a site of societal conflict because the queer love story expands this location to the geographical manifestation of escapism and denial. James runs off with August as a means to ignore externalized homophobia from a relationship with Betty, who has homophobic friends. Yet they eventually ditch August for Betty, either because of intense feelings for Betty or internalized homophobia—the relationship with August was too perfect, too easy.

“betty” and “august” are consistent with the gradient theory provided we interpret the love triangle narrative as queer. Identity engenders conflict in these songs. The characters then confront the conflict vis-à-vis location. ‘Indoors’ becomes the arena for confronting issues farther from the self, namely concerning homophobia. ‘Outdoors’ scopes cause and therefore possible resolution to individuals’ choices.

Last but not least, consider “exile,” the song with strange staging:

And it took you five whole minutes

To pack us up and leave me with it

Holdin’ all this love out here in the hall

//

You were my crown, now I’m in exile, seein’ you out

I think I’ve seen this film before

So I’m leaving out the side door

“I’m in exile, seein’ you out” and “I’m leaving out the side door” contradict each other. The speaker, “I,” seeing their lover out means that the speaker remains inside the house while their lover leaves. But the “I” also leaves through the side door. Does the speaker follow their lover out? If so, then whose house are they leaving? It is most likely a shared residence. They plan on coming back.

Taylor said in an interview [3] that the verses, sung by different people, represent the perspectives of the two lovers. The “me” in the first segment is the “you” in the second. So our “I” is left in the hall too. Both individuals  in the relationship are implied to leave and stay at different times.

An explanation for this inconsistency lies in the distinction between doors. A front door in folklore is symbolic of trust, that which makes or breaks a relationship (see: Betty’s front door and the door in “hoax”). It also forces sociological conflict to be resolved at the interpersonal level, lest serious problems hang out in the open. Fixing the world at large is usually impossible, and so front doors only create more issues. (The mountains, as they say, are too big to move.) The main entrance is thus a site for volatility and high stakes.

“exile” suggests that a shared side door is for persistent, dull, aching pain. This door symbolizes shame which is inherent to a relationship. It forces the partners to come and go quietly, to hide the existence of their love. Inferred from a queer reading of “exile” is that it is homophobia that erases the relationship. Conflict with society as evinced in individuals is once again consistent with the staging at the home.

Note that few (though multiple) explanations could resolve the paradox between intense shame in a relationship and the setting of a permanent shared home. Racism, for example, may be a reason individuals hide the existence of a loving relationship. Nevertheless, the overall effect of Taylor’s writing is that it is believable autobiography. It is unlikely that she’s speaking about racism here, least of all because there are two other male characters in the song. So a slightly more uncouth name for “exile” would be “the last great american mutual bearding anthem.”

To summarize, the Suburb is an archetypal setting constructed upon the notion of privacy. Taylor makes the folklore Suburb the primary home (no pun intended) of conflict of all kinds. Through an intimate, inverse relationship between drama and constitutive geography, Taylor argues that unrest and incongruity are central to what the Suburb represents.

The Outside World

The final archetypal setting is the complement to the first three—a physical and symbolic alternative.

The Guadalcanal beaches in “epiphany” (which are also alluded to in “peace”) contrast the homeland in “exile” through a metaphor about war. The Lake District in England is opposite America, the setting of most of folklore. The Moon, Saturn, and India are far away from Pennsylvania, the setting of “seven.” India quantifies the lengths to which the speaker of the song would go to protect the child character, while astronomy abstracts the magnitude of the speaker’s love.

This archetypal setting is symbolic of disengagement and breaking free from limitations. Moving to India in “seven” is how the speaker and child could escape problems at the child’s home. Analogizing war with the pandemic in “epiphany” removes geographical and chronological constraints from trauma.

The Lake District is where Taylor, a poet, goes to die. The line “I don’t belong and, my beloved, neither do you” could also suggest that this location is where Taylor and her muse break free from being outcasts (i.e. they find belonging). Regardless, the Lake District is where she disengages from the ultimate limitation of life itself.

——

How is an archetypal feature used as a metaphor? By proxy, what does that say about the setting defined by said feature?

Analysis of each archetypal feature yielded the following:

The Coastal Town is representative of permanent loss/endings

The City is representative of transitional loss/endings

The Suburb is the site of character-defining conflict

The Outside World is freedom from the constraints of the other settings

What theme unites these settings?

Though the majority of songs in folklore are anachronistic, the album has a temporal spirit. Geography seems to humanize and animate folklore: the meanings of the settings mirror the stages of life.

(The theoretical foundation for this claim is a topology of being; that the nature of being [4] is an event of place.)

The City, characterized by transition, is the coming-of-age and the Coastal Town, characterized by permanent endings, is death.

The Outside World, an alternative to life itself, is hence a rebirth. (After all, Romantic poets experienced a spiritual and occupational rebirth upon retiring to the Lakes to die. We remember them by their retreat.)

Outwardly, the Suburb is ambiguous. It could be representative of adolescence or adulthood—before or after the City. Analysis shows that this setting is nothing if not complex. Adult Taylor writes about the Suburb as someone whose opinion of this setting has unquestionably soured since adolescence. Yet she also approaches the Suburb with the singular goal of creating nuance, specifically by exposing unrest and incongruity which the setting usually obfuscates. This setting, ironically one that is (culturally) ruled by haughty adolescents, is where she explores the myriad subtleties and uncertainties coloring adulthood. The Suburb thus cannot be for adolescence because James is 17 and doesn’t know anything. Taylor intentionally situates the Suburb between the City and Coastal Town as the geographic stand-in for a complicated adulthood.

Despite genre shifts, Taylor has always excelled at establishing a clear setting for her songs. She is arguably even required to establish setting more clearly for folkloric storytelling than for her brand of confessional pop. If we can’t fully distinguish between reality and fiction, we must be able to supplement our understanding of a story with strong characterization, which is ultimately a byproduct of setting. Geography is a prima facie necessity for creating folklore.

This further suggests that the ‘life story’ told through geography is the thing closest to a metanarrative of folklore.

I use this term to refer to an album’s overarching narrative structure which Taylor creates (maybe subconsciously) in service of artistic self-expression. Interrogating ‘metanarrative’ should not be confused with the protean, impossible, and distracting task of deciphering Taylor Swift’s life. True metanarrative is always worth exploring. Also, though some conclusions about metanarrative may seem more plausible than others, at the end of the day all relevant arguments are untenable. Only Taylor knows exactly which metanarrative(s) her albums follow, if any. It is simply worth appreciating that folklore allows an interesting discussion about metanarrative in the first place; that it is both possible to find patterns sewn into the fabric of the work and to resonate with that which one believes those patterns illustrate. I digress.

folklore is highly geographic but orthogonal to all of our geographic expectations of mood or tone. Through metaphor, Taylor upends our assumptions about the archetypal settings.

The Outside World is usually a setting which represents a brief and peaceful respite for travelers. Here, it is the setting for complete and permanent disengagement. Hiding and running away was a panacea in reputation/Lover, but in folklore, finding peace in running and hiding becomes impossible.

The City is usually regarded as a modern Fountain of Youth and, in Taylor’s work, a home. However, the folklore City’s shelter is temporary and its energy brittle, like the relationship between the characters that inhabit it. The City has lost its glow.

One would expect the Coastal Town to be peaceful and serene given its small size and proximity to water. Taylor makes it the primary site of death, insanity, permanent loss. The place where one cannot go with grace is hardly peaceful.

The Suburb is not the romanticized-by-necessity dead end that it is in a Bildungsroman like Fearless. Rather, it is the site of great conflict as a consequence of individual identity. The American suburb is monolithic by design; Taylor points the finger of blame back at this design for erasing hurt and trauma. By writing against the gradient of privacy, she obviates all simplicity and serenity for which this location is known. Bedrooms no longer illustrate the dancing-in-pjs-before-school and floodplain-of-tears binary. Front porches become more sinister than the place to meet a future partner and rock a baby. Characters’ choices—often between two undesirable options in situations complicated by misalignment of the self and the world at large—become their biggest mistakes. It is with near masochistic fascination that Taylor dissects how the picturesque Suburban façade disguises misery.

If we have come to expect anything from Taylor, it is that she will make lustrous even the most mundane feelings and places. (And she is very good at her job.) folklore is a departure from this practice. She replaces erstwhile veneration of geography itself with nostalgia, bitterness, sadness, or disdain for any given setting. folklore is orthogonal to our primary expectation of Taylor Swift.

Yet another fascinating aspect of folklore is the air of death. It’s understandable. Taylor has ‘killed’ relationships, her own image, and surely parts of her inner self an unknowable number of times. Others have tarnished her reputation, stolen her songs, and deserted her in personal and professional life. She perishes frequently, both by her own hand and by the hands of others. The losses compound.

I’ve lost track of the number of posts I’ve seen saying that folklore is Taylor mourning friendships, love, a past self, youth…x, y, z. It has literally never been easier to project onto a Taylor Swift album, folks! At the same time, it is very difficult to to pinpoint what, exactly, Taylor is mourning. To me, listing things is a far too limited understanding of folklore. The lists simply do not do the album justice.

Death’s omnipresence has intrigued many, and I assert for good geographic reason. Reinforcing the album’s macabre undertone is nonlinear spatial symbolism: each setting bares a grief-soaked stage of a single life. From the City to the Suburb, Coastal Town, and Outside World, we perceive one’s sadness and depression, anger and helplessness, frustration and scorn, and acceptance, respectively. folklore holds a raw, primal grief at its core.

The geographic metanarrative justifies Taylor’s unabridged grieving process as that over the death of her own Romanticism. For the album’s torment is not as simple as in aging or metamorphosis of identity, not as glorified or irreverent as in a typical Swiftian murder-suicide, not as overt as in a loss with something or someone to blame. folklore is Taylor’s reckoning with what can only be described as artistic mortality.

——

To summarize up until this point: geography in folklore is not literal but metaphorical. The artistic treatment of folklore settings evinces a ‘geographic metanarrative,’ a close connection between settings and the stages of a life spent grieving. I propose that this life tracks Taylor’s relationship to her Romanticism. folklore follows the stages of Taylor’s artistic grief, so we will see that the conclusion of the album brings the death of Taylor’s Romanticism.

It is important to distinguish between the death of Romanticism in general and the death of Taylor’s Romanticism. folklore presents an argument for the latter.

A central conceit of Romanticism is its philosophy of style:

The most characteristic romantic commitment is to the idea that the character of art and beauty and of our engagement with them should shape all aspects of human life.…if the romantic ideal is to materialize, aesthetics should permeate and shape human life. [5]

Romanticism is realized through imagination:

The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind.…The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate “shaping” or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to constitute reality…we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both reason and feeling…imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. [6]

Imagination then engenders an artist-hero lifestyle [7]. This is similar—if not identical—to what we perceive of Taylor Swift’s life:

By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic qualities) was reversed. In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within.…The “poetic speaker” became less a persona and more the direct person of the poet.…The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist. The artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic type.

Taylor’s Romanticism is thus her imagination deified as her artist-hero.

Moreover, the discrepancy between perceptions of grief in folklore is a consequence of the death of her Romanticism.

We (i.e. outsiders) naturally perceive the death of the Romantic as the death of Romantic aesthetics. Hence the lists upon lists of things that Taylor mourns instead of celebrates.

Taylor seems to grieve her Romantic artist-hero. Imaginative capacity predicates an artist-hero self-image, so conversely the death of the Romantic strips imagination of its power. The projected “fantasy, history, and memory” [8] of folklore indeed unnerves rather than comforts. The best example of this is from a corollary of the geographic metanarrative. Grief traces geography which traces life, and life leaks from densely populated areas to sparsely populated areas (it begins in the City and ends in the Outside World). Metaphorical setting, a product of imagination, aids the Romantic’s unbecoming. So, imagination is not a “synthesizing faculty” for reconciling difference; it is instead a faculty that divides.

Discriminating between the death of Romanticism in general and the death of Taylor’s Romanticism contextualizes folklore’s highly individualized grief. It is hard to argue that Taylor Swift will ever be unimaginative. But if we assume that she subscribes to a Romantic philosophy, then it follows that confronting the limits of the imagination is, to her, akin to a reckoning with mortality, a limit of the self.

——

folklore follows the stages of Taylor’s artistic grief. The album ends with Taylor accepting of the death of her Romanticism and being reborn into a new life. The final trio of songs, set ‘of’ the Suburb, Coastal Town, and Outside World in turn, frame the album’s solitary denouement.

In truth, “peace” is hardly grounded in Suburban geography. The nuance in it certainly makes it a thematic contemporary of other songs belonging to the Suburb, however. And consider: the events of “peace” are after the coming-of-age, the City; defining geographic features of the Coastal Town and Outside World are referenced in the future tense; an interior wall, the closest thing to Suburban home geography, is referenced in the present tense:

Our coming-of-age has come and gone

//

But I’m a fire and I’ll keep your brittle heart warm

If your cascade ocean wave blues come

//

You paint dreamscapes on the wall

//

And you know that I’d swing with you for the fences

Sit with you in the trenches

Per tense and the geographic metanarrative, “peace” is Suburban and is the first story of this trio. “hoax” and “the lakes” trivially follow (in that order) by their own geography.

The trio is clearly a story about Taylor and her muse. Understanding perspective in these songs will help us reconcile the lovers’ story and the geographic metanarrative.

We must compare lines in “peace” and “hoax” to determine who is speaking in those songs and when. Oft-repeated imagery makes it challenging to find a distinguishing detail local only to the trio. I draw attention to the affectionate nickname “darling”:

And it’s just around the corner, darlin’

'Cause it lives in me

Darling, this was just as hard

As when they pulled me apart

These two mentions are the only such ones in folklore. Whoever sings the first verse of “peace” must sing the bridge of “hoax” too.

“hoax” adds that the chorus singer’s melancholy is because of their faithless lover:

Don't want no other shade of blue but you

No other sadness in the world would do

Augmenting Lover is an undercurrent of sadness to which Taylor alludes with the color blue. By a basic understanding of that album, Taylor sings the “hoax” chorus.

The fire and color metaphors in tandem make the “hoax” verse(s) and bridge from the perspective of the lover who is burned and dimmed by the energy of their partner, the “peace” chorus singer:

I am ash from your fire

//

But what you did was just as dark

But I’m a fire and I’ll keep your brittle heart warm

Finally, a motif of an unraveling aligns the “hoax” verse(s) and bridge singer:

You knew it still hurts underneath my scars

From when they pulled me apart

//

My kingdom come undone

The “hoax” verse(s), chorus, and bridge are all sung by the same person.

In sum: Taylor sings the first verse of “peace” and her lover sings the chorus of “peace.” (See this post for more on “peace.”) Taylor alone sings “hoax.” “the lakes” is undoubtedly from Taylor’s perspective too.

Now let’s examine “peace” more closely:

Our coming-of-age has come and gone

Suddenly this summer, it’s clear

I never had the courage of my convictions

As long as danger is near

And it’s just around the corner, darlin’

‘Cause it lives in me

No, I could never give you peace

But I’m a fire and I'll keep your brittle heart warm

If your cascade, ocean wave blues come

All these people think love’s for show

But I would die for you in secret

The devil’s in the details, but you got a friend in me

Would it be enough if I could never give you peace?

Taylor’s lover has the temerity to die for her in secret. We can infer from the first verse that Taylor’s coming-of-age brings not the courage her lover possesses but clarity about an unsustainable habit. She realizes that she cherishes youthful fantasies of life (such as “this summer,” à la “august”) for mettle. This apparently knocks her out of her reverie.

The recognition that being an artist-hero hurts her muse frames the death of Taylor’s Romanticism. It is impossible for Taylor to both manage an unpleasant reality and construct a more peaceful one using her Romantic imagination. The rift between her true lived experience (“interior journey”) and the experience of her art (“development of the self”) is what fuels alienation from Romance. The artist is unstitched from the hero.

“hoax” continues along this line of reasoning. In this song, she admits that she has been hurt by herself:

My twisted knife

My sleepless night

My winless fight

This has frozen my ground

As well as by her lover:

My best laid plan

Your sleight of hand

My barren land

I am ash from your fire

And by others:

You knew it still hurts underneath my scars

From when they pulled me apart

The bridge marks is the turning point where she lets go of of her youth and adulthood, both of which are tied to her Romanticism through geography:

You know I left a part of me back in New York

You knew the hero died so what’s the movie for?

You knew it still hurts underneath my scars

From when they pulled me apart

You knew the password so I let you in the door

You knew you won so what’s the point of keeping score?

You knew it still hurts underneath my scars

From when they pulled me apart

Of utmost importance is the very first line. The muse to whom Taylor addresses “hoax” is said to have been present at Taylor’s side through all of her struggles (“you knew”). The first line reveals that the lover did not know that Taylor left a part of herself back in New York (“you know [now]”). Taylor is only sharing her newfound realization as she stands on the precipice of the Coastal Town.

Nearly imperceptible though this syntactic difference is, it is an unmistakable reprise of the effect of the verses and chorus of “cardigan.” (Coincidentally, references to New York connect the songs.) “Knew” and “know” in both songs underscore a difference between what a character remembers (or had previously experienced) and what they understand in the current moment (or have just come to realize). Betty realizes at the very moment that she narrates “cardigan” that it was a mistake to excuse James’ behavior as total ignorance and youthful selfishness. Taylor realizes in “hoax” that she can no longer cling to youth, the romanticization of her youth, or romanticization of the romanticization of her youth. The youth in her is gone forever because she is no longer attached to the City. The adult in her has also matured for she is past the Suburb as well. The Coastal Town thus very appropriately stages the death of her Romantic.

Anyone who listens to Taylor’s music has been trained to connect geography to the vitality of Romantic artist-hero Taylor. In short, aestheticized geography renders Taylor’s Romantic autobiography. By letting go of the parts of her connected to geography, Taylor abandons the Romantic aesthetics both she and listeners associate with location. Divorcing from aesthetics also pre-empts romanticization of location in the future. The bridge of “hoax” is thus most easily summarized as the moment when any fondness for and predisposition towards Romance crumbles completely.

Lastly, we must pay special attention to micro-geography in the “hoax” chorus. We recall from “the last great american dynasty” and “this is me trying” the insanity that consumes the characters who contemplate the cliffs. The Coastal Town is not a beautiful place to die; one is graceless when moribund:

They say she was seen on occasion

Pacing the rocks, staring out at the midnight sea

I’ve been having a hard time adjusting

//

Pulled the car off the road to the lookout

Could’ve followed my fears all the way down

From “peace” we know that Taylor’s lover is willing to die for her, in particular if Taylor’s sadness becomes too great (i.e. if she goes to the sea).

But I’m a fire and I'll keep your brittle heart warm

If your cascade, ocean wave blues come

All these people think love’s for show

But I would die for you in secret

The “hoax” chorus is when Taylor’s sadness balloons. Taylor the Romantic is ready to die:

Stood on the cliffside screaming, "Give me a reason"

Your faithless love’s the only hoax I believe in

Don't want no other shade of blue but you

No other sadness in the world would do

Remember Rebekah, pacing the rocks, staring out at the midnight sea. Taylor is in this same position, on the cliffs, facing the water. Why is she screaming? Taylor is yelling down at her lover, who has already died (in secret, of course) and is in the water below waiting to catch her. (“I’m always waiting for you to be waiting below,” anyone?) Taylor’s singular faith is in her lover, and Taylor wants them to promise to catch her when she falls. In the end, though, the inherent danger nullifies what the lover could do to convince Taylor that the two would reunite safely below.

Taylor examines the water and realizes that her lover’s hue is combined with the blue of the sea. The sea cannot promise to catch her. Already mentally reeling, the admixture of sadnesses—in the setting which represents the culmination of life—makes Taylor recalcitrant. The Coastal Town has too much metaphorical baggage. It is not the place Taylor leaps from the cliffs. The first line of the “hoax” chorus uses “stood,” which implies that Taylor is reflecting on this dilemma after the fact.

The outro reinforces that the Coastal Town is where Taylor the Romantic comes to term with death but does not actually die:

My only one

My kingdom come undone

My broken drum

You have beaten my heart

Don’t want no other shade of blue but you

No other sadness in the world would do

Romantic imagination cannot protect Taylor from all the hurt she has suffered in reality. A calm settles over her as the chords modulate to the relative major key. She reflects on her journey: “my only one” corresponds to the first verse which introduces her solemn situation; “my kingdom come undone” ties to the self-inflicted hurt that froze her ground; “my broken drum // you have beaten my heart” supplements the second verse about suffering from her lover’s duplicity. The last lines are again her rationale for not jumping from the rocks. Finally, after the album-long grieving period, Taylor the Romantic has made peace with her inevitable death.

Romanticism is Taylor’s giant which goes with her wherever she goes. Running, hiding, traveling, and uprooting are indeed the fool’s paradise in her previous albums. Impermanence of setting—roaming the world for self-culture, amusement, intoxication of beauty, and loss of sadness [9]—engenders an impermanence of self, which fuels the instinct to cling tightly to what does remain constant. Naturally, then, Romanticism is Taylor’s only enduring companion. It becomes the lens through which she understands the world, yet the rose-colored one which by virtue inspires problems on top of problems. Forevermore does her Romantic inspire a cycle of catharsis that plays out in real life. Thy beautiful kingdom come, then tragically come undone.

Taylor chooses to go to the Lakes to escape from the constraints of this cycle:

Take me to the Lakes where all the poets went to die

I don’t belong and, my beloved, neither do you

Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

I’m setting off, but not without my muse

Of the death story in the “peace”/“hoax”/“the lakes” trio, it is impossible to ignore the mutualism of Taylor and her muse. Neither of them belong of this life—and ‘of’ American geography—anymore. Taylor’s last wish is to go to the Outside World and jump (“[set] off”) from the Windermere peaks with her muse, who is ever willing to both lead Taylor to the dark and follow her into it.

Taylor bids a final goodbye—appropriately, in the tongue of Romance—to the philosophy which has anchored her all this time:

I want auroras and sad prose

I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet

'Cause I haven’t moved in years

And I want you right here

Romanticism, her art and life in tandem, brought Taylor what she values: union with her muse in the privacy of nature and her imagination. The final ode holds respect.

Finally, her death. The journey of grief concludes with Taylor both accepting death and, fascinatingly, being reborn into a new life:

A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground

With no one around to tweet it

While I bathe in cliffside pools

With my calamitous love and insurmountable grief

In keeping with metaphorical geography, old life dwindling in water is exactly concurrent with new life flourishing on land.

Observe that the rebirth concerns ice frozen ground, an element of “hoax,” which is set in the Coastal Town. The rebirth must happen back in America even though the death happens at the Lakes.

Despite the imagery, this is not a Romantic rebirth. Begetting a new life is the juxtaposition of two things Taylor once romanticized toward opposite extremes—a red rose for beauty and an ice frozen ground for tragedy—with her simple refusal that either be distorted as externalities of her experience.

This final stanza is wide open for interpretation with regards to the story of the two lovers. It allows a priori all permutations of Taylor and/or her muse experiencing rebirth as the red rose and/or the frozen ground:

Taylor and her lover experience a rebirth together

Taylor is the red rose and her lover is the ice frozen ground

Taylor is the ice frozen ground and her lover is the red rose

Taylor and her lover are indivisible: they are both the rose and the frozen ground

Taylor alone experiences a rebirth

Taylor is the rose

Taylor is the ice frozen ground

Taylor is the rose + ice frozen ground

The lover alone experiences a rebirth

The lover is the rose

The lover is the ice frozen ground

The lover is the rose + frozen ground

(2) and (3) make death at the end of “the lakes” purely sacrificial. This is inconsistent with the disproportionate emphasis placed on the lovers’ mutualism. I am thus inclined to dismiss (2) and (3) as consequences of combinatorics.

There are also two interpretations of the final lines of the bridge:

Taylor the Romantic is the implied ‘I’ overcome with grief; her muse is her calamitous love with whom she bathes

Taylor the Romantic possesses both calamitous love and insurmountable grief; her lover, as per usual, dies with her in secret

It is unclear which is the truth. Still, (1) is relatively straightforward: there are two entities said to bathe in the Lakes and two entities said to be involved in reincarnation.

There need not be ‘parity’ between old life and new (reincarnated) life with respect to the lovers’ relationship status. If Taylor’s muse dies, does her relationship dissolve? Or must her muse, who dies at Taylor’s side, be reborn at her side too? If Taylor declares her devotion to her lover before her death, does that ensure that they are together in perpetuity? Or is that sentiment purely a relic of her past life, in which case her love disappears anew? Perhaps the invisible string tying the lovers together bonds them in eternal life. Perhaps the string snaps. Which is the blessing and which is the curse?

Whatever you make of ‘parity’ in reincarnation, it is important to remember that Taylor insists the relationship between her and her muse is at least a spiritual or divine one—if not also a worldly one—for it exists in conjunction with her own metaphysic.

How does reincarnation betray Romanticism?

A. Taylor is the red rose and the lover is the ice frozen ground.

Taylor as the rose does not trivially align with a bygone Romanticism, for the rose epitomizes Romance. Key, therefore, is the line about tweeting. Taylor abhors the practice of cataloguing and oversharing in service of knowing something completely—effectively ‘modern’ Romanticism.

Digital overexposure is an occupational hazard [10], but Taylor refuses to let ‘modern’ Romanticism to become invasive this time around. New life shall not be defiled by social media. It shall remain pure by individual will. Though Taylor’s rebirth into a new life happens on land in America, that it does not become a hyperbole of local Twitter is the proverbial nail in the coffin of Romanticism, distortion in service of aesthetic.

Rose imagery also draws a direct parallel to “The Lucky One,” Taylor’s self-proclaimed meditation [11] on her worst fears of stardom. The “Rose Garden” in this song contextualizes the “lucky” one’s disappearance from the spotlight:

It was a few years later

I showed up here

And they still tell the legend of how you disappeared

How you took the money and your dignity, and got the hell out

They say you bought a bunch of land somewhere

Chose the Rose Garden over Madison Square

And it took some time, but I understand it now

Emphasis on individual choice in the aforementioned star’s return to normalcy bears a striking resemblance to the individualistic philosophy of “the lakes,” as exemplified by Taylor and her muse choosing to jump from the Windermere peaks and Taylor keeping her rose off social media. Mention of a “legend” that describes disappearance and simultaneous return elsewhere is another connection to the “the lakes.”

Taylor as the rose could alternatively represent a chromatic devolution of true love (“I once believed love was burnin’ red // but it’s golden”). That is, becoming a rose suggests she may have changed her mind back to believing that love is burning red. This more generally represents returning to the beginning of a journey that began in the Red era. Perhaps Taylor sees Red as the beginning of her calamitous Romanticism. She realizes by folklore the fears which she surveyed in “The Lucky One,” so choosing a new life presents an opportunity to protect post-Speak Now Taylor from self-inflicted wounds which fester and prove fatal to her Romantic. (In essence…time travel.)

Taylor’s lover, ice frozen ground, is reborn frigid not blazing, the opposite of their raging fire. Taming the lover’s wild essence renders it impossible for them to be a Romantic muse in a new life. If the two lovers do indeed share an eternal love, then death reveals a conscious choice not to glorify it.

Additionally, Taylor’s artist-hero imagination has no power in her new life. Taylor and her lover have effectively switched spots. All we previously knew of the lover’s secrets and secret death was from what Taylor wrote, so Taylor (for lack of a better phrase) concealed her lover. The lover, ice frozen ground, is now the one concealing Taylor, the rose. As a smothering but not razing force, Taylor’s lover thus is reincarnated into the role of a public protector. Reincarnation reveals that the death of Romanticism is abetted through the death of secrecy, which always allows distortion of truth.

Another possibility: the secrecy surrounding the lover is that they were the ice frozen ground. If Taylor confirms that the lover was something ‘tragic’ before, then after the death of Romanticism they counterintuitively may become beautiful. Or, the lover continues to be tragic, and paramount again is Taylor’s choice not to sensationalize her muse.

B. Taylor is the ice frozen ground and the lover is the red rose.

Many of the themes above apply to this interpretation too.

Taylor reborn as ice frozen ground does not change her essence from “hoax.” By not ‘shaking off’ a sadness with her rebirth, she subverts the usual expectation—a product of the many years devoted to fixing any and all criticism [12]—of artist-hero Taylor Swift.

The lover reborn as the red rose means their being surfaces where they once were hidden and/or that they are not the golden love they had been in reputation, Lover, and “invisible string.” New life brings the bright, burning “red” emotions. Either what was once very bad is now very good and vice versa, or these emotions are simply not very anything because Taylor doesn’t want to sensationalize them as a pastiche of Red. If Taylor’s love is eternal, then she will be more subdued when sharing it; if it is not eternal, then she will simply move on.

This interpretation implies that Taylor’s Rose Garden is eternal love without the necessity of elevating her partner to Romantic muse status. No one being around to tweet the rose bursting through the ice means that Taylor alone gets to appreciate her lover for their pure essence before modern society does—lest the lover be perceived at all.

C. Taylor and her lover are indivisible: they are both the rose and the frozen ground

Taylor’s “twisted knife”/“sleepless night”/“winless fight” froze her ground but her lover’s “sleight of hand” made the land barren, unable to sustain life. The two lovers are emotionally at odds, but Romanticism acts as the “synthesizing faculty” which unites them in their old life.

The metaphor of the rose and frozen ground does not work without each part. It is possible that the lovers remain equally united in their new life; the lovers’ spiritual connection yields unity after reincarnation. Abiogenesis is therefore the phenomenon which betrays Romanticism. The lovers exist alongside each other naturally, not because they are opposites which Romanticism has forced together.

This is probably the most lighthearted interpretation of the last stanza in “the lakes.” Extreme hardship helps the lovers grow, and they remain intertwined through eternity.

——

The geographic elegy of folklore is that for Taylor’s giant, her Romantic, something both treasured and despised right until its end. (How appropriately meta.)

This raises the question: what replaces it?

Nothing.

folklore can—and perhaps should—be understood as a Transcendental work rather than a Romantic one. From this angle, Romanticism is that which prevented Taylor from connecting with something deeper within herself, something more eternal.

“Transcendental” does not mean “transcendent” or beyond human experience altogether, but something through which experience is made possible. [13]

Transcendentalism and Romanticism were two literary and philosophical movements that occurred during roughly the same time period [14].  Romanticism dominated England, Germany, and France in the late 18th and early 19th centuries slightly before Transcendentalism swept through America in the mid-1800s.

The two movements heavily influenced [15] each other. Transcendentalists and Romantics shared an appreciation for nature, doubt of (Calvinist) religious dogma, and an ambivalence or dislike of society and its institutions as corrupting forces. We see Taylor align herself with these ideas by the end of the album. “the lakes” holds a reverence of the natural world, disregard of predestination, and contempt for Twitter.

But Transcendentalism sharply diverged from Romanticism along the axis of faith. Transcendentalism thrived as a religious movement that emphasized individualism as a means for self-growth and, in particular, achieving a personal, highly spiritualized [16] understanding of God:

For many of the transcendentalists the term “transcendentalism” represented nothing so technical as an inquiry into the presuppositions of human experience, but a new confidence in and appreciation of the mind’s powers, and a modern, non-doctrinal spirituality. The transcendentalist, Emerson states, believes in miracles, conceived as “the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power…”

Romantics, for instance, viewed nature as a source of imagination, inspiration, and enlightenment, whereas Transcendentalists saw nature as a vessel for exploring spirituality. Transcendentalists believed in an innate goodness of people for possession of a divine inner light [17]. Occupied with the perverse and disparate, Romantics believed people were capable both of great good and terrible evil.

It’s tempting to scope Taylor’s shift from Romanticism to Transcendentalism to this album alone. It’s true that folklore is filled with individualism, a hallmark of Transcendentalist philosophy. However, I argue that spirituality reveals a journey towards Transcendentalism that began well before folklore.

Consider the evolution of faith from reputation to Lover. Taylor places more emphasis on personal spirituality as she becomes increasingly disillusioned with organized religion/religious dogma. In “Don’t Blame Me,” Taylor defies religious convictions in favor of chasing the high of her forbidden love. Then her quiet and private life with her lover in “Cornelia Street” advances whatever traditional religious beliefs she possessed towards a self-defined spirituality (“sacred new beginnings that became my religion”). Individual spiritual enlightenment and religious conviction become mutually exclusive by the end of Lover, for the lovers would still worship their love even if it is a “false god.”

The final scene proves most important for establishing the album’s philosophy. In the end of “the lakes.” Taylor chooses death and is reincarnated into new life, kept pure also by individual will. (It should be noted that Transcendentalism was heavily influenced [18] by Indian religions, of which reincarnation is a central tenet.) Choosing reincarnation—to the extent that one even can—reflects a greater understanding of oneself. Choice, the ultimate power granted in the self, engenders spirituality. It is the means by which one follows a divine, guiding spark (i.e. “inner light”) in search of connection with others and the natural world. The album’s ending marries individualism with spirituality, which makes Taylor a true champion of Transcendentalism.

——

Transcendentalism is considered one of the most dominant American intellectual movements. Exploring the significance of Transcendentalist Taylor Swift is a rather unimaginative end to this essay. If we try hard enough, we will always be able to connect its philosophy to any art that exists in conversation with American culture.

Perhaps a more gripping conclusion comes from the assertion that philosophy doesn’t matter…

…at least, not in the way this essay regards philosophy as the ultimate Point.

So identifiable is the geographic motif in Taylor’s work that it is nearly impossible to ignore. This is especially true for folklore, an album that would literally not be folkloric if not for the blending of reality and fiction, real location and setting elevated as metaphor. So moving, moreover, is the grief at folklore’s core that it is natural to wonder what else it could represent. Hence, this essay’s charade of poking around both to see if they convey a deeper meaning.

A strong philosophical foundation establishes the ethos of art, that with which we resonate. However, we will never know to what philosophy Taylor subscribes. The interaction between her beliefs, creative spirit, and innate sense of self will always be a mystery. Any and all conclusions about the philosophical foundations of her art thus (1) are highly subjective and (2) reveal more about the ones making them than about Taylor herself.

Ironically, it is paramount to appreciate Taylor’s (Romantic) style above all else. The ways she uses basic building blocks of literature—theme, imagery, mood, setting, to name a few—piques curiosity. After all, without those building blocks, one would not be able to cultivate (should they so desire) an interest in the metaphorical, philosophical, or otherwise profound.

——

Disclaimer: this essay references (explicitly and implicitly, by way of citing expanded theoretical work) the ideas of Emerson and Heidegger, two preeminent thinkers whose ideas have had especially deep and lasting impacts on society. They are also two individuals noted to have had poor and even abhorrent political/personal views. I do not condone their views by referencing any ideas connected to these individuals (done mostly in service of rigor). I furthermore leave the task of generating nuance to those who dedicate their lives to critical examination of these individuals’ personal philosophies and the impact of their work on society.