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percheduphere · 1 year ago

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The entire series is a love story in every sense of the word. It is a love story, and it is both triumphant and tragic.

The finale was gorgeously executed. It answers every point in Loki's development poetically.

1. He never wanted the throne. It was not about power but loneliness and the need to belong.

2. To have purpose is to choose your burden.

3. Love does not make one soft, it transforms us to be unimaginably strong.

S1 focused primarily on 2 things: 1. a second chance, and 2. Self-love.

The 3 main characters have a relationship in which love cascades. While Mobius loves Loki for who he is outright, his friendship and support allows Loki to have compassion for himself. Sylvie represents all of Loki's trauma and flaws. In loving her, Loki grants her a second chance expecting nothing in return. The second chance Mobius extended to Loki, thus extends to her.

S2 focused primarily on the love between friends, which I do believe turned into unrequited love for Mobius in S1E4 (manifesting as rage and jealousy).

That love turns resigned, and the jealousy reemerges in S2E2 albeit in a constrained, milder form.

Unbeknownst to Mobius, his romantic love is finally returned in S2E5, after Loki experiences enough platonic love for Mobius that the nature of affection shifts upon losing Mobius a second time.

The timing of this realization is profoundly tragic. When they are finally on the same page, the finale sets the stage for Loki to engage with the fourth, most powerful form of love:

AGAPE

A selfless love for everyone. Loki could not have reached this point without first experiencing self-love, platonic love, and yes, romantic love. All forms of love are demonstrated in the series, which gives Loki the strength of sacrifice, confronting his worst fear: being alone.

I find it deeply poignant that Loki uses his magical life force to create Yggdrasil, the tree of life, replacing the cold force of HWR's technology with his own heart, allowing everything and everyone to grow infinitely through space and time. There cannot be a more powerful ending for Loki's character, and the tragedy is the point.

But Loki embraces this burden willingly, lovingly, for all of them, most especially Mobius.

ON MOBIUS

It is only Mobius that senses something is deeply wrong. The first time, he asks, "Are you okay?" The second time, he notes Loki's odd comment, "This time?" The third time, (first for Mobius since he didn't remember each reset) instinctively, he becomes desperate. He grabs Loki by the lapels, "What the shit are you doing?" He tries to stop Loki, but Loki won't let him.

The fourth time, he simply says, "Loki?"

Throughout S2, it is Mobius that Loki turns to when he is afraid, doesn't know what to do, or seeks comfort. He returns what Mobius provides him in S2E2 in the pie automat. In S2E4, he defends Mobius's character to Sylvie and compares where he is now, as a person, with Thor's experience with Jane, a mere Midgardian mortal.

In S2E5, it is Mobius Loki timeslips to the most and the first person his heart seeks out once OB provides him with an answer to his fiction problem.

That Loki seeks Mobius's wisdom one last time and holds onto Mobius's hand as long as he can in the finale is significant. Mobius's words about choosing your burden are devastatingly true. These words propel Loki to make his choice.

And Loki walking out onto the platform in the finale is a direct reciprocation of this (S2E1):

This is an all-encompassing love story. Let noone tell you otherwise.

#loki #loki season 2 #mobius #sylvie #loki series #loki meta #loki spoilers #lokius #my meta #loki season two finale

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pangur-and-grim · 2 years ago

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something I’ve learned from querying: everything has a million subcategories, and it is crucial to actually learn then.

like when I first started, I thought an agent listing ‘speculative fiction’ in their interests was enough to give me a shot! but now it’s like ok. but does that actually mean fantasy (as opposed to science fiction or surrealism)? and if it does, is it constrained to one of the following:

high fantasy

low fantasy

grounded fantasy

magical realism

etc.

and if fate is smiling on me and it is high fantasy, what sort do they like? because mine starts as a medieval George R R Martin clone before morphing into a post-apocalyptic sci fi, so they have to simultaneously be alright with a) cliched shit and b) experimental weird shit.

and say everything aligns, and that genre works for them - even then, they often accept it only in one or two age categories. there’s mg, ya, na (middle grade, young adult, new adult) and adult. mine is adult, which is a huge strike against it given the genre.

AND THEN! AND THEN! say everything else is perfect. they love high fantasy with elves and unicorns, they want it for adults, they’re cool with genre bending, but in their profile is a phrase I’ve learned to dread: “HEA (which stands for happily every after) required”. I love my little book, but it is dark and full of terrible people.

and then I also have to hope that they’re into queer romance, on top of everything else! it’s a hard process.

currently I have 45 queries sent, 15 rejections, and 30 unknowns, and I think a good portion of those rejections are because I didn’t initially understand that ‘accepts speculative fiction’ shouldn’t be taken literally.

#book #grim just rolled another egg off the counter

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literaryvein-reblogs · 22 hours ago

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hello I was wondering if you had any tips on how to write/create an outline for psychological thrillers/horror?

Hi! I have this post on horror.

Writing Notes: Psychological Thriller

A subgenre of thriller that explores the psychology of its characters, who are often unstable.

The biggest questions revolve around the mind and behavior.

Often incorporates elements of mystery and include themes of crime, morality, mental illness, substance abuse, multiple realities or a dissolving sense of reality, and unreliable narrators.

Generally stays away from elements of science fiction, focusing on events that could take place in real life.

The 3 C's of a Thriller

The contract: An implied promise you make to the reader about what will be delivered by the end of the book. It’s crucial to keep every single promise you make, no matter how trivial.

The clock: The fact that adding time pressure to any character’s struggle will create higher stakes and more interest for the reader. The goal of this element is not to be stunningly original but to add pressure that will prompt conflicts and intense responses from your characters.

The crucible: A box that constrains your characters, offers them no escape, and forces them to act. Your story should present an increasingly difficult series of tasks and situations for the hero that will funnel them into the most severe trial of all. You must make sure that each successive task is harder than the previous one and that, for the hero, there is no escape. If readers begin to sense that the journey is becoming easier, they’ll lose interest.

The 3 Elements of a Good Psychological Thriller

Although psychological thrillers vary widely in their storylines, some common elements include:

Major plot twists: Psychological thrillers can be ruined by spoilers, since so much of their excitement hinges on the unexpected twists and turns that the novel takes.

An unreliable narrator: Revealing the narrator, or another important character, to be unreliable is another way authors create suspense as the reader tries to figure out who they can trust. Lies, paranoia, and flawed memories are all staples in the psychological thriller genre.

Familiar elements: Psychological thrillers often take place in the home (aka domestic thrillers) and feature ordinary-seeming characters. This allows thriller writers to get inside the reader’s mind, making them wonder, “What if this happened to me?” Starting with the familiar also allows writers to slowly introduce characters’ backstories, mental health issues, and other elements that create suspense over the course of the novel.

Tips for Writing a Psychological Thriller

The best psychological thrillers keep readers on the edge of their seats with unexpected twists. While reading a psychological thriller is easy, writing one can be difficult. Here are some writing tips to help you from first draft through editing:

Keep tension high. You can do this descriptively by showing your characters in tense situations, and you can do it structurally by rearranging the parts of a chapter to keep the pacing swift. Both techniques involve withholding information from the reader. By doing this, you don’t get bogged down in details or information dumps that slow down the pacing. Crucially, withholding allows room in the reader’s mind for the growth of questions and ideas.

Craft situations where characters are unable to get the information or tools they need. This forces the characters to strategize and take actions to reach their goals. If you do this, it’s important to construct believable scenarios. Make sure your characters don’t have an easy way of getting the information they need. Otherwise, your readers will lose respect for you and your characters.

Heighten the tension. In general, there are two ways to augment tension in your story. Descriptive elements that create tension are individual; they come from your story and from the forces or events that are pressuring your characters. Structural elements that create tension involve the way you write your story, like starting your chapters with a sense of urgency or blending descriptive passages into action scenes.

Flesh out character backstories. One way to create twists and suspense is to slowly introduce surprising elements of your characters’ backstories. A backstory can create a plot twist, or reveal why a character may be unreliable. Backstories can also raise the stakes of a story by giving your characters motivation.

Some Subgenres of Psychological Thriller

The psychoanalysis or ‘psycho-traumatic’ thriller

The amnesia thriller

The stolen identity thriller (including mistaken identity)

The ‘woman in jeopardy’ thriller

The stalker thriller

Serial killers or psychopaths and their psychological profiling arguably fit better in the forensic criminal investigation sub-genre, so they may be classified in the Crime Thriller subgenre.

From the sub-categories listed above, it is obvious that as well as overlap with the crime thriller sub-genre, the psychological thriller is also related to psychological horror. The ‘woman in jeopardy’ and ‘stalker’ thrillers also have elements in common with romance – particularly Gothic romance.

Common Psychological Thriller Tropes

Tropes appear repeatedly for a reason: they're what the readers are looking for. Decide which ones to include in your novel.

The protagonist has an inner conflict exacerbated by an external event.

Some sort of mental health issue plays a major role in the story (doesn't have to be the main character). This could be a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental health issue, paranoia, deep distrust, suspicion, or a slow slipping away of sanity.

Reality comes into question as the story progresses.

The protagonist finds it hard to decide who to trust.

There's a major plot twist at the climax. (There may be multiple plot twists.)

The characters are flawed, complex, and relatable.

The settings are common (home, office, child's school, church, etc.)

The stakes may not be life or death (although they can be), but they should be sanity or insanity, or well-being or a ruined life.

Sources: 1 2 3 4 ⚜ More: Writing Notes ⚜ Mystery ⚜ Tension ⚜ Violence Kidnapping ⚜ Backstory ⚜ Plot Twists ⚜ Crime Fiction ⚜ Character Journey

Hope this helps with your writing!

#psychological thriller #writing notes #writeblr #fiction #spilled ink #writers on tumblr #poets on tumblr #literature #writing tips #writing advice #writing prompt #writing reference #creative writing #dark academia #light academia #lit #writing inspiration #writing ideas #writing resources

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itsawritblr · 5 months ago

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Fuck "sensitivity readers."

I see that a couple of my Followers and other writers on here are obsessed with writing POC "correctly."

As a full-time professional writer of fiction and nonfiction who's also Hapa, I need to point out:

So you're paranoid that you're gonna write something and POC are going to come after you, calling you "racist" or "insensitive" or that you're "appropriating culture."

The only reply you need to make is in 2 steps:

Say:

Then:

There's is no "right way" to write any group of people or any race or ethnicity. Know why?

I've seen this happen. A Black writer will tell white writers how to write Blacks. Then another Black writer will say, "Wait a minute, I'm not like that, my family's not like that. We're not all Urban BLM hip-hop lovers. I'm Christian, I'm against trans in women's spaces, I have several White friends, and I listen to classic country music."

So who's right? Both.

A "sensitivity reader" or some on this hellsite will tell you HOW to write POC. When all they're telling you is their POV. They can't speak for everyone. (A perfect example.)

If you want to write about a person of a race or ethnicity other than your own, sure, do a little research, as you would with anything. If a sensitivity reader tells you your Jewish character should be celebrating Shabbat, a little research on your own will tell you that not all Jews do (as it happens, I learned this from my Jewish boyfriend, whose family never celebrated Shabbat). So that "sensitivity reader" would have given you misinformation because of her or his POV.

Do not panic that you're gonna be canceled or yelled at for "getting it wrong."

There IS no wrong. Look,

All you need to remember is:

Writer and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz was told not to write Black characters because he's white and Jewish. This stunned him. He was supposed to leave Black characters out of his work? But if he did that he'd be accused of not having Black characters.

He didn't obey. In fact, I'm reading his current novel, and he has a perfectly fine Black character in it.

Read this article:

No, Authors Should Not Be Constrained By Gender Or Race In The Characters They Create. by Lorraine Devon White, Contributor

This was the BBC.com headline:

Spy Author Anthony Horowitz ‘Warned Off’ Creating Black Character:

Author Anthony Horowitz says he was “warned off” including a black character in his new book because it was “inappropriate” for a white writer. The creator of the Alex Rider teenage spy novels says an editor told him it could be considered “patronising” ... Horowitz, who has written 10 novels featuring teenage spy Alex Rider, said there was a “chain of thought” in America that it was “inappropriate” for white writers to try to create black characters, something which he described as “dangerous territory”.

Dangerous territory, indeed.

What are we to make of this? Is an author limited to only writing characters within their race? What about gender? Religion? Age? Ethnicity? Sexual orientation? Where do the boundaries stop?

The old adage, “write what you know,” is a thesis that implies a writer should limit their imagination to the parameters of their own life and experience. But does that maxim still hold true today? Certainly in these times of viral accessibility, contact, research, knowledge, and interaction with people, places, and things far outside our own proximity is as every-day as 24/7 updates from the farthest corners of the globe. Our ability, consequently, to gain perspective sufficient enough to write outside one’s own “house” is not only doable, but, perhaps, universal and insightful, presuming one does it well.

But is it “patronizing”? Are we, as writers, simply not allowed to write outside, say, our culture, regardless of how well we might do it? Has society become so compartmentalized, so hypersensitive, politically correct, and wary of triggering repercussion, resentment, or misinterpretation that reaching beyond our own skin ― literally and figuratively – has become verboten to us as creative artists?

Interesting questions, these; particularly when you consider that men have been writing about women since time immemorial without particular societal concern that they couldn’t possibly know, couldn’t authentically muster, the requisite experiential perspective. It was a given that they could get the job done; accepted without debate. Yet the specificity, the sensitive and unique nature of being female, could be considered as disparate from the male experience as being black is to a white person, but that hasn’t stopped male authors, from Vladimir Nabokov to Wally Lamb, from creating their women of note.

Which is fair. Because the explicit job of an author is to climb inside the experience of LIFE, real or imagined, to tell compelling stories that reflect the incalculable diversity of detail, nuance, thought, and emotion of any variety of people, places, and things. And the creative mind can find and translate authenticity whether writing about Martians, coquettish teens, dogs who play poker, or characters who exactly mirror the author‘s gender or race.

I’ve had my own experience with this interesting conundrum: my last novel, Hysterical Love, was told through the first-person point-of-view of a thirty-three-year-old man, and it goes without saying: I’m not one of those. Yet I felt completely capable of infusing my story with authenticity by relying on my skills of observation, as well as my experiential knowledge as the sister of five men, the mother of a son, the wife of a man; my years on the road with rock bands, and the immersive research of being a close friend to many, many men throughout my life. I’ve been told I pulled it off, even by the men who’ve read it, so my conviction proved out.

But is the divide between cultures, races, wider than that of gender diversity? Does a white writer delegitimize their prose by including black characters? Is the reverse true?

I don’t think so. I think it depends on the writer, the quality of their work; the depth and sensitivity of their depictions. Those are my initial responses. But I also understand the question:

About two years ago I had an article up at HuffPost titled, “No, White People Will Never Understand the Black Experience,” a piece that became a flashpoint for much conversation on the topic of race. It was written in response to events of the time, particularly the egregious injustice of Sandra Bland’s arrest and subsequent (and inexplicable) jailhouse death, and the cacophony that arose amongst, amidst, and between parties on both sides of the racial divide as a result. My own thesis, my perspective on the tangible limitations we each have in perceiving and assessing the realities of life outside ourselves, is made clear by the title alone. But while there’s obviously much more to that debate, here and now we’re discussing the issue as it relates to the job of being an author and I have some specific thoughts on that.

Inspired by the many responses and conversations that ensued after the aforementioned article, as well as others written on the topic of racial conflict, bias, and injustice, I took one of the stories referenced, about an interracial couple’s experiences with police profiling, and developed it into a character-driven novel called A NICE WHITE GIRL, a title that reflects commentary made within some of the conversations I had.

This “sociopolitical love story” is told through the intertwining points-of-view of a black man and white woman dealing not only with pushback to their new and evolving relationship, but the ratcheting impact of police profiling that ultimately leads to a life-altering arrest. It’s a story that’s human, gut-wrenching, and honest, built on the foundation of my own experiences in a long-term interracial relationship earlier in my life, as well as journalistic research and interviews, personal interactions, even friendships with members of the black community. Given a commitment to creating the characters outside my demographic as authentically and sensitively as I possibly could, without watering them down or pandering to political correctness, I believe I served both my story and its cultural demands well. Did I?

Every author relies on, taps into; mines the wealth of thought, opinion, perspective, and acculturation of their own unique life experience. Certainly that’s true. But as artists, as observers and chroniclers of life by way of prose, we go beyond that pool of reference. We reach out, we expand; we explore plot lines and include characters that stretch our imagination, that dig deep into worlds, events and experiences, imagined or real, that can pull us onto less traveled roads that might demand the challenge of research, of specific observation, even outside consultation. We take these extra steps, even for fiction, because we want to infuse our work with inherent realness. Particularly when writing characters outside our culture. That was certainly the demand I faced when embarking upon this latest novel.

But I am a white woman who’s written a book with a black male character, inclusive of his mother, his sister, and various friends. I’ve depicted their family life, their interactions, relationships, thoughts and feelings. Do I not have the creative right to do that? Will I be seen as patronizing, insensitive, off base, and inappropriate? Will this make my book too controversial for representation, for publishing, for sale? Will it garner derision and disdain from members of the black community? Even members of the white community who may resent the harshness with which I depict some of the police?

I don’t know. Maybe. But it was a story I felt passionate about, compelled to write; that took the many debated aspects and elements discussed in my articles and put them into fictional form, with imagined characters who embodied and borrowed from people I knew, from conversations I’d had, from ideas, agendas, politics, and passions that had been conveyed to me by real people expressing essential and sometimes controversial perspectives. I was determined to honor them by candidly, honestly, and without apology, telling the story.

But perhaps, as Anthony Horowitz was told, I’m entering territory that is off-limits, that puts me at odds with those who might frame me as presumptuous and patronizing. “A nice white girl” who’s stepped outside of culturally acceptable boundaries.

I hope not, because I, like Mr. Horowitz, see that as “dangerous territory.”

Just as brilliant male authors have gorgeously written female protagonists; as female novelists have conjured male characters ringing with truth; as writers of one ethnicity have honestly depicted another; as fabulists have invented entire worlds of imagined wonders, authors must be limited by... NOTHING. Not a thing. They must be free to create without fear of cultural naysaying, societal judgment, threat of reprisal, or the discomfort of crossing cultural boundaries.

The only mandate to which they’re obligated is GOOD WRITING. Writing with wit and clarity. Honesty. Authenticity. Sensitivity and depth. Engaging prose, compelling plots, and visceral emotion. And, if need be, if determined helpful, the use of “sensitivity readers” who can ascertain if the writer got the cultural references right.

But just as Idris Elba could certainly make magic as James Bond, as Anthony Horowitz could create an intriguing black spy for his books; as I can write characters both male and of a culture outside my own, so must every author of merit and worth be allowed to view the entire panoply of life as fuel for their imagination. Anything else is antithetical to the mission of art... and stymying art serves no one. Not the writer, not the reader, not the myriad members of our diverse world hungry for stories that reflect their lives. Art is imagining; creating, mirroring, and provoking... all of which can and must be achieved by artists free to explore without the limiting effect of creative and cultural boundaries.

#writblr #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing community #writerscommunity #writing tips #writing advice #sensitivity readers #writing #creative writing #write what you want #WOC writer #writers #writing stuff #on writing #writing problems #writers life #writer's life #writing life

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