#except when he’s grieving and on the verge of committing murder

[sing-me-under]

I don’t know why, but I get really tired of fics where they’re like “Bruce has been sheltered his entire life and has absolutely no sense for normal people” as though he didn’t go on a world tour in literally every iteration of his existence before becoming Batman. Yes, he was absolutely sheltered as a teenager, and maybe he still held onto some naïveté in his early Batman years, but Batman literally faces every fucking crime there is, and I bet that little Bruce stubbornly traumatized himself with true crime shows and case studies. One does not become Batman and stay sheltered. Yes, unlike most people, he had the safety net of a home and a fat bank account to return to, but that really only applied in the States with legal identification. This man just kinda traveled the world with like the bare minimum and built a name and network for himself from scratch from pure skill, stubbornness, and his weird Mary Sue aura where everyone wants to fuck him. I can guarantee he’s nearly starved to death on multiple occasions, has slept in the worst conditions possible, and actually been fucking tortured in every sense of the word. You don’t need to be born and raised in poverty to have experienced food insecurities and the worst that humanity has to offer.

Anyway, this is just me just being fed up with the fics and posts where they treat Bruce as if he’s never experienced a single hardship in his life beyond the death of his parents when he was 8 years old. Bruce Wayne is the most empathetic, self-sacrificing motherfucker in Existence. He’s still an over controlling asshole, but he’s self aware and tries to understand why criminals do crime things.

Batman deserves to have a backstory where he actually developed and experienced his own coming-of-age as a mature member of society instead of being some vengeful middle school syndrome kid maneuvering a skin sack of nearly 300 lbs of muscle and fancy technology.

[lassieposting]

Tell us about Lucifer’s depression, suicidal ideation, self-harm, and past abuse. I mean I can see the self harm, both the obvious In cutting off his wings and the like as well as the unhealthy self medicating, and the abuse - which honestly comes across as a murky gray area, like some verges on abuse but isn’t quite- but the other things... I need them pointed out to me.

GLADLY, ANON

okay so, to cover my ass: this is just my personal take as someone with trauma & suicidal ideation who self-harms. other people with different trauma and different relationships with self-harm/suicidal ideation might see this whole thing completely differently. This post could be triggering, please pay attention to the triggers in the tags. I am not a professional psychiatrist, and if you are struggling please seek professional help. 

i’m gonna break this down into sections bc, surprise surprise, it got rly long

THE ABUSE:

Now, you’re absolutely right that this is kind of a murky grey area, because at this point we really only have one side of the story: Lucifer’s. And obviously, he’s biased. 

the family dynamics:

But let’s take a look at the family dynamics we see in-show. We’ve only seen a fraction of Lucifer’s family, but it’s still fairly obvious that the ways they interact with one another are unhealthy and tend towards abusive, especially when aimed at Lucifer. 

We have Amenadiel, who: 

Is obedient to his Dad on an almost brainwashed level until he falls. 

Blames everything - including his own actions/failures (i.e. saying Malcolm killing humans is Lucifer’s fault, even though Amenadiel himself raised Malcolm from Hell) on Lucifer.

Does not know how to respond to affection or praise, even though he clearly appreciates and enjoys them (i.e. when Trixie hugs him and says she thinks he’s good). This is the son who’s in God’s good books. And he still clearly doesn’t receive affection or praise often. 

Openly competes with Lucifer for Dad’s attention/love, to the point of rubbing it in his face when he discovers he’s the favourite

Is complicit in Lucifer’s abuse - taking him back to Hell (thereby isolating him), threatening him when he doesn’t want to go, and cutting off any attempt Lucifer makes at reaching out to connect with humanity - for billions of years to try and win his Dad’s approval. 

Straight up tries to have Lucifer killed.

Says he’d love to go to war (with Lucifer, and presumably with Hell as a whole). 

We have Uriel, who:

Takes it upon himself to enforce what he believes is his Dad’s will; he had no instructions from God when he came to Earth. 

Delights in getting the opportunity to beat up Amenadiel, and gloats about it. 

Threatens - and harms - the first good thing Lucifer has had in his life in eons as a way of bullying him into doing what Uriel wants.

When Lucifer complies, Uriel decides to kill both Goddess and Chloe, purely out of spite because Lucifer was “being difficult”.

(There is an interesting meta here on Uriel’s potential motivations that I really like, but this is looking purely at his actions.)

And we have Goddess, their mother, easily the most manipulative and emotionally abusive of the lot. She:

Admits to destroying things God cared about - attacking humanity with plagues and floods etc - out of malice and to get his attention. 

Happily releases Azrael’s blade into human hands, hoping for widespread human deaths, to get her ex to get back in touch. 

Plays Lucifer and Amenadiel off against one another like a pro for her approval. 

Only ever touches her children when she’s trying to manipulate them - there’s a good meta on that here. The one exception to this that I personally believe to be a genuine attempt to comfort (both him and herself) is when she hugs Lucifer after he’s just killed Uriel. 

Doesn’t actually care about what Lucifer wants - he’s told her outright that Earth is the only place where he feels wanted and respected, and she knows he has a life he enjoys and a woman he’s falling in love with, but she expects him to abandon Earth and go back to the Silver City with her regardless - to the point that she actively tries to dismantle his human life and kill his loved ones to leave him with no ties to Earth. 

The picture this paints to me is of two incredibly narcissistic parents who see their children as extensions of themselves rather than as people in their own right. If you compare Lucifer - who’s an asshole, but fundamentally a good man - to his siblings here, you can see that the two who stayed in Heaven have caught fleas from their parents - and part of Amenadiel’s redemption arc is him realising how toxic and damaging his family is, giving himself a damn good flea bath, and doing his best to be a better big brother to Lucifer and a better son to his mom (and, later, a better father to Charlie than his Dad was to him). 

angel life cycle

So apparently in canon, angels were created as adults. My personal headcanon is fuck that, baby angels, but we’ll go with the canon explanation for this, because honestly it still lines up with my theory. 

Even if you’re “born” with a mature adult body and adult-level speech ability etc, you still won’t have an adult’s wealth of life experience, or maturity, or social skills. You’re still going to have to grow and learn and experience situations to learn how to cope with them. 

Now, Tom Ellis has said in the past that he plays Lucifer as essentially having the emotional maturity level of a teenager, which I think is honestly perfect. For an immortal being - or at least a being with a lifespan of many, many billions of years - it’s actually fairly believable that the angels are (depending on the age gap between them) either still in the “adolescent” life stage or emerging into the “young adult” one. 

Lucifer says that he’s spent “most of his life” in Hell. If he’s only a young adult now, at ~11 billion years old, that means he’d have been a juvenile (in terms of life experience/emotional development, even if he was “born” with a fully mature adult body) when he was sent to Hell, and the reason he was sent to Hell is because he wanted free will and started “acting out”. 

Even if your 12-year-old is the most unpleasant, rebellious little shithead on the planet, you don’t kick him out of the house and spent the next decade sabotaging every attempt he makes to connect with people or improve his life. Because, you know. That’s your kid. You signed up to have him, that’s normal shitty teenager behaviour, and the chances are he’ll improve with age. God and Goddess went scorched earth on Lucifer because he was behaving in a completely normal way for a kid beginning to mature into a grownup. 

lasting trauma

Lucifer’s parents’ treatment has left some crazy deep scars. 

He uses a neglectful broken home as an analogy for his celestial family. And he does so incredibly smoothly; this is clearly an analogy he’s thought about before. Chances are he’s seen this dynamic on TV and identified very strongly with it. 

He talks about his mother abandoning him as his “lowest point”.  Not his Fall. Not any of the horrific things he’s seen in Hell. The point where he realised his mom doesn’t love him enough to protect him. 

He doesn’t understand what he did wrong. God punished Lucifer harshly for wanting to control his own life, because narcs often see their children’s developing independence as a threat to their own control over their kids’ lives. Obviously He wouldn’t see it like that, but he’s clearly never explained to Lucifer why what he did was “wrong”. This family has a chronic communication problem. 

He’s paranoid as fuck. He constantly suspects God of having a hand in the events happening around him, and any time it seems He is involved, Lucifer immediately sees whatever’s happening as an attempted manipulation. It never occurs to him that creating Chloe - someone immune to his powers who can really love him without any kind of supernatural influence - could be an olive branch or an attempt to give him what he actually needs. He doesn’t believe his Dad would ever do something positive to/for him. 

He’s so badly traumatized by his childhood that he reacts like this to being called by the name his Dad gave him. And he’s clearly doing well in therapy - he might not know the word for it, but he knows he’s being (unintentionally) gaslit here. He doesn’t handle it well, but he doesn’t put up with it either, refuses to accept being told to see his Dad’s abuse as a sign of love. 

He believes he’s unloveable. When Linda gently suggests that maybe Chloe kissed him purely because she likes him, he tells her that’s impossible and reminds her his powers don’t work on Chloe. He doesn’t think there’s any way someone could love him for who he is, unless he’s either giving them something or using his mojo on them. And it’s his family that’s conditioned him to think that way - look at Amenadiel alone, how many times he tells Lucifer he’s evil throughout the show, as casually as if he were telling him that his hair is brown. This is just a fact of the universe in that family: water is wet, leaves are green, Lucifer is irredeemable garbage. 

He doesn’t for a second hesitate to believe that his Dad wanted to kill him. Or that he would kill him given the opportunity. He even thinks Chloe is his dad’s attempt to get him killed for a bit. 

THE SELF HARM

the wings: 

The blatantly obvious one - and the most deliberate - is when he cuts off his wings. Now when Lucifer talks about this, he frames it as him taking back agency over his own life, freeing himself from his Father’s control, and making a statement about his intention to stay on Earth. 

But when you look at him, he doesn’t look victorious, or like he’s looking forward to starting a new life. Physical pain aside - and an amateur amputation would be agonizing - he looks almost like he’s grieving, gritting his teeth through something he feels he has no choice but to do. 

Someone did a fantastic meta that I thought I’d reblogged at some point that says something like “this isn’t the devil in his moment of triumph against god; this is an abused boy mutilating himself to spite his father”. I wanted to link it, but I haven’t been able to find it again (if anyone finds it, please let me know so I can add a link).  

the self-medicating:

I don’t think he realises this is a form of self-harm, and I don’t think he does it to hurt himself deliberately. But he comes to Earth to overindulge in all the things he can’t have in Hell, all the things he’s been cut off from. 

Touch and affection, which he gets through sex. Oblivion, which he gets by drinking. Euphoria, which he gets from drugs. Socialisation, which he gets from being surrounded by people at all times and partying it up 24/7.

It doesn’t matter to him that the touch is from a stranger, it doesn’t matter that the affection only lasts one night, it’s something and that’s more than he’s getting in Hell. He buries himself in those things to forget that he has to go back. He can bury himself in the next line or the next shot or the next attractive body and, just for a little bit, he can forget who he is.

Sending Lucifer to Hell in and of itself is cruel. Angels are clearly social creatures, and he’s been in solitary isolation for billions of years - it’s a miracle he hasn’t gone insane. Yes, he has the demons, but they don’t interact with him by choice and he’s not safe with them. Hell denies Lucifer everything a young person needs to grow into a stable, healthy adult. 

the self-sabotage:

We also see that he’s got a tendency to sabotage himself when he’s on a downward spiral. This usually comes out one of two ways - either:  

He tries to chase away the people who care about him. This comes from being so terrified of being abandoned and rejected again that he’d rather run them off himself than wait for them to inevitably (in his mind) decide that he’s Not Worth It and leave him. For example: 

He tries to push Linda away when he’s grieving after killing Uriel. 

He punches Dan in the face and gets himself thrown off the case by Chloe - she’s already warned him she would bench him if he didn’t pull himself together. 

He throws Chloe’s initial rejection in her face when he’s on his self-hatred bender in S4. 

He’s absolutely vicious to Amenadiel in this scene, when Amenadiel is trying to communicate that he loves Luci and wants to support him. 

Or he talks shit about himself. You can always tell when he’s having a bad time; he’ll start coming out with shit like, “I’m the devil, remember, I’m evil.” His real view of himself will slip out from under the mask of confidence and vanity. Chloe cuts right to the heart of this in S4; he’s been told so many times that he’s responsible for all evil that he now believes it. He blames himself, even as he vehemently denies having ever made anyone do anything. 

THE SUICIDAL IDEATION:

Jesus fuck, it’s a good thing Lucifer is in therapy. 

The first time we see him actively attempt suicide is in 1x13 when he’s being framed for shooting the street preacher. It’s a case of “the straw that broke the camel’s back” here - he’s been having a really rough time lately:

Groups of zealots are cornering him in the street accusing him of murders he didn’t commit 

Being accused of things he didn’t do is already a trigger for him

His own brother tried to have him assassinated.

His bodyguard and oldest friend betrayed him.

He’s just found out the detective makes him vulnerable. 

He knows Dan - and therefore probably other work colleagues as well - think he’s got something to do with the satanic murders. 

And now Chloe is turning her gun - and apparently her back - on him. She’s no different from anyone else. He was stupid to ever trust her, etc, etc, and now he’s spiralling.

She was the last rock keeping his head above the ocean at this point, and when she goes to arrest him, he goes under. We see that mania come out very quickly; he starts laughing hysterically and tries to goad an inexperienced uni into shooting him. He pretends to have a gun, knowing the cop will fear for his life and instinctively shoot. Since Chloe’s right there at the time, and he now knows he can be hurt around her, that’s attempted suicide. He wants to die. He even admits to Amenadiel he was trying to achieve “a good death…or at least a nice and messy one.”

No one ever addresses this bloody hell why

And then there’s the case with the shooter in the hospital. Lucifer’s grieving Uriel at this point, and he’s up to his eyeballs in self-loathing. He killed his brother. He really is the monster everyone believes he is. He’s spent the entire episode up to this point trying to make people punish him. He’s riled up Chloe at a crime scene and she’s told him off. He’s punched Dan, and Dan didn’t retaliate. He turned down Linda’s offer of continued therapy in a way that’s almost a challenge; he wants her to snap back at him. And when none of these little punishments are enough for him, he escalates and escalates and eventually he steps in front of the sniper’s intended victim and, again, goads him to shoot. He goes a bit further this time, though; he outright begs the sniper to shoot him, and reams the guy out when he says he didn’t think Lucifer deserved it. 

Again, he knows Chloe is there. This is a suicide attempt. He even admits to Chloe that he didn’t care about the intended victim, he was just trying to get himself killed. She doesn’t believe him. And it’s never addressed again, and I’m salty. 

Anyway I hope this clarifies some stuff for you anon? and I’m sorry it took so long to finish I rewrote this so many times for Maximum Sensitivity and kept including stuff and taking stuff out and it got SO LONG and i had to condense it and i have A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THIS OKAY I HAD A LOT TO SAY

[mst3kproject]

509: The Girl in Lover’s Lane

           This is a movie about drifters, which works, because the story just kind of drifts.

           A kid named Danny has decided to run away from home and be a hobo in order to make his parents sorry for getting a divorce.  He’s inexperienced at hoboing, so finds an older, more experienced hobo named Biggs, who promises to show him the ropes of hobohood in return for Danny paying all his bills.  The pair stop in a town called Sherman, where Biggs falls in love with Carrie the waitress in between repeatedly saving Danny from his own stupidity.  Just when Biggs is on the verge of throwing in the hobo towel and settling down, Carrie is murdered and the town decides her boyfriend must’ve done it, despite the guy with the big neon STALKER! sign over his head who’s been hanging around for the whole movie.

           When I say this movie drifts, it’s because it seems to take a while for it to make up its mind whose story this is.  The first bit, where Biggs saves Danny from some thugs at the railway yard, makes it look like we’re about to see a movie about naïve little Danny learning to survive in the big wide world.  Biggs teaches him to hitchhike, to fight, to avoid sketchy hookers, and everything else a good hobo needs to know.  Danny doesn’t get a lot of character development, though, so as long as we assume the movie is about him, stuff just seems to be happening at random.  When it finally settles down to being about Biggs, the audience has to stop and re-examine the first half to figure out what we were supposed to be paying attention to.

           I’m not going to pretend for a minute that The Girl in Lover’s Lane is anything but boring and sexist, or that it’s ending isn’t a lousy, gratuitous downer.  It does seem to have a few things to say, though, so I’m going to focus on that because it’ll be less depressing.  The biggest ‘lesson’ of this movie, the one that qualifies as the Moral of the Story and probably the one writer Joyce Heims had in mind, is that you can’t run away from your problems.

           Of three relatively main characters in this story, all of them are trying to escape from something.  Biggs had a tough childhood and doesn’t believe he’s capable of leading a normal life, so he hit the road and never looked back.  Danny loves his parents but feels overwhelmed by the emotions attendant upon their divorce, so he hopped a train.  Carrie is lonely and tired of Jesse the Stalker leering at her.  She hopes that Biggs will either take her away or else settle down with her, either offering her a way out.  At the end, Carrie’s problems catch up with her anyway, Biggs realizes that his running is a problem in itself, and Danny decides to go home and face his troubles like an adult.  They can’t be said to have lived happily ever after because this isn’t that kind of movie, but everybody gets a second chance at things.  Except of course for Carrie, because she’s dead, but she was a girl so she doesn’t count.

           This is also a movie about father-child relationships.  Biggs and Danny both have backstories that hinge on their relationships with their fathers.  Carrie’s father is a major figure in her life, both parent and employer. Biggs becomes a father figure to Danny, while one of the reasons he doesn’t want to commit to his relationship with Carrie is because her father’s drinking reminds him of his own father’s behaviour.

           Because I wasn’t sure whose story The Girl in Lover’s Lane was, it took me a while to key in on just what the relationship between Biggs and Danny was supposed to be.  A lot of MSTies find it homoerotic, as did the Brains themselves. It can be read that way, but I think it’s intended to be that of father and son.  Danny, who has purposefully left his parents, finds he still needs a guiding figure in his life, and so he latches on to Biggs.  Biggs does not initially want to take Danny in, but having done so he rises to this responsibility as best he can.  His efforts to make sure Danny doesn’t get robbed are partly selfish, in that Danny is carrying the money, but there is a protective streak in Biggs that Danny brings out.  This then extends to Carrie, whom Biggs does his best to protect from Jesse.

           The weird little interlude with the prostitute in the bathtub makes the best sense when considered in this light.  Biggs is offered a pleasurable distraction but turns it down because he needs to rescue Danny.  The placement of the scene after he’s met Carrie means it also represents the beginnings of devotion to her alone, although it’s Danny who is foremost in his mind at the moment.  It’s not as effective as it might be, since we’re left to imagine what Biggs might have done in the same situation a week ago, but it does its job.  It’s still a weird little interlude, though.  Why is the bathroom right off the foyer?  Why wasn’t the door locked?  Are customers supposed to just walk in and ‘catch’ a girl bathing as part of some weird live-out-your-fantasy scenario?

           Biggs’ backstory tells us that his father was an abusive drunk, but also that Biggs blames himself for the man’s fatal heart attack.  There is also a suggestion that the reason Biggs never stays in one place long enough to get attached to anything is because he fears that if he were to have a family, he would end up continuing the cycle of abuse. Danny is a surrogate son that Biggs can ditch at any time, so he is, in a sense, able to ‘practice’ having a family without actually committing to one.  He finds he is able to be a better father figure to this younger man than his own father was to him, and that gives him the courage to start to think about settling down.

           After Carrie’s death, Biggs finds himself confronted by her furious and grieving father, who wants nothing more than to beat the shit out of a kid he believes to be a murderer.  Biggs takes every punch and never fights back, too afraid that if he does, this man will drop dead as his own father did.  And finally, when he agrees to go home with Danny at the end, he is accepting a new father figure into his life.  Presumably Danny’s dad will help Biggs get his life together, but by now we’ve also seen Danny grow up enough that he can start offering Biggs advice, which Biggs rejects as if he is the rebellious son in the relationship.  Danny also arrives in the nick of time to save Biggs from Carrie’s father and his friends, so in a sense the tables have turned and Danny has now become a father to Biggs.

           While all this fairly complex stuff goes on with the men, Carrie herself is mere fridge meat – she’s only here so that Biggs can fall in love with her and then cry when she dies, and Tom and Crow are righteously angry about this (so angry, in fact, that they invent fanfiction!).  She does have a bit of an arc of her own, though, and it’s nice that we meet her before Biggs does and get a sense of what her world would be like without him.  She has female friends, though all we ever see her talk to them about is men.  She loves her father, but she’s vaguely discontent with her life and tired of people telling her that all her problems will be solved by the right boy.

           When the ‘right boy’ comes along, Carrie positively throws herself at him, but we’re actually given a reason why.  Part of it probably has to do with the fact that she’s been told all her life that marriage is the answer to everything, but a lot of it seems to be related to the presence of Jesse, the creepy pervert whose ‘village idiot’ status allows him to get away with things he actually does know better than. Nobody in Carrie’s life takes Jesse’s threatening presence seriously, but Biggs is willing to stand up to him, so Carrie tries desperately hard to be what Biggs will want.  She goes so far as to apologize when the dress she wears to their date doesn’t look like the one he pictured!

           Carrie’s death does tie into the themes of the movie, I guess.  I mean, Biggs tries to run away from her like he runs away from everything else, and therefore another reason he doesn’t fight back against the vigilante mob is because he really does feel like he’s responsible.  He failed to protect her when she needed him.  Carrie, too, is running away, having gone into the woods to have some privacy while she bawls her broken heart out.  The reason Danny isn’t there to help either of them is because he has, on Biggs’ advice and against his own better judgment, already left town.  Once again, running away causes everybody more problems than it solves.

           So while The Girl in Lover’s Lane is not a good movie, it is at least a unified one.  Heims and director Charles Rondeau knew how to tell a story – they just didn’t pick a very good one to tell.  That’s not always a handicap, since a gifted storyteller can turn cliché dross into literary gold in other ways.  Look at some of the contrived crap in Shakespeare!  The Bard could probably have made a plot like The Girl in Lover’s Lane into art, but nobody involved in this movie was anywhere near that level.  The technical aspects of the film are mediocre at best.  The acting is pretty unsubtle.  The lighting does its job.  The direction’s all right.  The sets are mostly okay, apart from that obvious studio set of ‘the woods’ that can only be filmed from one angle.  None of it is good enough to save the story from its own banality, and so here it is, on a screen in front of a dude and his robots.

[aion-rsa]

How Do You Approach Worldbuilding?

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We’re honored to bring this roundtable conversation between three of speculative fiction’s most exciting up-and-coming authors: Emily Tesh, A.K. Larkwood, and Everina Maxwell. In it, the writers and IRL friends have a funny and insightful conversation about everything from fantasy maps (yea or nay?), writing an emerging romantic relationship (how do Tesh and Maxwell do it so well?), and worldbuilding (the struggle!).

In honor of the recent publication of Tesh’s Drowned Country (the sequel to last year’s lush, folkloric fantasy Silver in the Wood), we’re running the first part of the conversation. We’ll finish the conversation in February, in celebration of the publication of Maxwell’s first novel, a gay space opera about princes in an arranged marriage called Winter’s Orbit. (Larkwood’s The Unspoken Name, a fantasy about an orc priestess turned wizard’s assassin, hit shelves back in February.)

Now, without further ado…

A. K. LARKWOOD: Hello, I’m A. K. Larkwood, also known as Kassie, I wrote The Unspoken Name, a book about what happens when you’ve been brought up with a terrible purpose – and then, when it comes to it, you can’t go through with it. Csorwe expects to die in the Shrine of the Unspoken One, but she’s rescued by a strange wizard who says he has a new task for her – and the question is how far she’ll go to serve the person who saved her life. It’s also about loyalty, sacrifice, and the special bond between truly annoying coworkers. I have spent most of the plague year so far doing a series of increasingly recherche craft projects to procrastinate working on the sequel. Surrounded by crochet animals, painted lampshades, wholemeal loaves and small watercolors of fruit, I now have no choice but to… participate in this Q&A.

EMILY TESH: Hi! I’m Emily Tesh, and I wrote the Greenhollow Duology – Silver in the Wood, a story about what happens when the centuries-old avatar of the greenwood meets a handsome young folklore enthusiast with more curiosity than common sense, and its sequel Drowned Country, a story about being a person with no common sense who has accidentally stumbled into the role of a woodland demigod. I am not nearly as good at craft projects as Kass so my plague year procrastination has been spent replaying video games I have already played for hundreds of hours; at this rate my next book will be some sort of thinly veiled Starbound/Mass Effect/Two Point Hospital crossover in which all problems are solved by completing picross puzzles.

EVERINA MAXWELL: I haven’t done anything productive in quarantine but I’ve taken a whole lot of naps. Rounding out the SFF combo, I’m Everina Maxwell and I wrote Winter’s Orbit, a queer romantic space opera about arranged marriage, intergalactic politics, and slow healing from the past. To prevent a war, disreputable media darling Prince Kiem is ordered to marry Count Jainan of Thea, a quiet scholar grieving the loss of his previous husband. The match shouldn’t work, and the political waters are treacherous–even before Jainan is accused of murder. On with the questions!

Q: Let’s kick off with, what are we reading at the moment?

LARKWOOD: I really enjoyed Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected In Water, which is a snappy, funny, and rather touching novella about a nun who joins a group of bandits. If you’re looking for something longer, I also loved The Changeling by Victor Lavalle, which is about… a book dealer whose wife commits a terrible crime. Or is it??? I actually don’t want to tell you anything more about it because it’s such a wild ride. I picked it up and read the first page thinking ‘I’m not sure this is for me but let’s see’, and ended up eating up the whole thing in one go.

MAXWELL: My concentration has been a bit shot lately what with 2020 happening, but I’m excited to dig into Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders by Aliette de Bodard–Vietnamese mythology and murder husbands!

TESH: I have also been suffering from the pandemic of it all when it comes to reading, but I really enjoyed The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo – love the novella length for when you are having a hard time concentrating, and it is gorgeously written.

Q: LARKWOOD: As we know I am a nerd who loves a fantasy map, but I understand you two are map-agnostic verging on anti-map. Please explain this wrong opinion to me. 

TESH: OK, my map agnosticism has two angles:

As a reader and as a profoundly geographically confused person anyway, it is 100% likely that a fantasy map tells me nothing. We are crossing the Pointy Mountains to enter the Forest of Spiders? Fabulous, bring on the spiders. I do not care which direction they are coming from, I promise to be equally alarmed by them regardless of point of origin. I will literally never refer to a map when I am reading a book. It gives me nothing. Probably this is a personal failing.

As a writer I am suspicious of mapping, especially mapping too soon, because it can pin you down to things you are later stuck with (oh no I put a river here and now it’s in the way – or even worse, oh no I need a river and the map says I haven’t got one.) And then that prevents me from using my all-time favourite setting trick, which is ‘Coincidentally We Have Found Ourselves In A Location That Precisely Echoes Our Emotional State.’ (The spiders… are the characters’ feelings.) For example, a good chunk of my novella Drowned Country is set in Fairyland, which ended up as a painfully barren and empty landscape – because that is where the characters are, emotionally speaking, so that was the setting I needed. But I couldn’t have mapped it – I am not a detailed planner and I often don’t know what emotionally significant locations I need until I hit the relevant sequence!

Obviously the usual caveat applies to all this which is ‘you can do anything if you do it well’. Even I can acknowledge that a good fantasy map is a thing of beauty. For example, Kass, I am deeply pleased by the map from The Unspoken Name, which turns a front-of-fantasy-novel standard into a character moment – want to tell us about how you designed it? 

LARKWOOD: I’ll be honest, my intention with the world of Unspoken was to make a fantasy setting that could not be mapped. (For those who haven’t read it: the setting is composed of many worlds connected by portals to an eerie hyperspace labyrinth called the Maze.) I was feeling burnt-out on the idea of a fantasy setting as an alternate universe or RPG setting or any other kind of internally consistent simulation. I wanted to make something not just implausible but impossible, and was feeling very harassed by the idea that someone might ever try to tell me that I was wrong about alluvial plains or something, so the original concept was actively contrarian about geography. For instance, there were rivers but no seas, because they had all been poisoned and destroyed by divine warfare thousands of years ago (take that, The Water Cycle!). 

Having made this unmappable world my immediate thought was “but how do I map it, though?” In the actual book, the Maze serves the dual purpose of giving us kind of a space opera feel, and also lets me do a lot of different surreal landscapes while giving the characters the ability to zip around quite freely from one location to another. So the map in the book is a collage of different fragmentary maps of different worlds – it’s supposed to give the impression that the main character has maybe been compiling it on her travels.

MAXWELL: My editor asked me for a map three times. On her third attempt I realised I could no longer pretend I just hadn’t read that line in all her previous emails, panicked and opened PowerPoint, because Paint intimidates me and all I can do with a pencil is stab myself. This tells you everything you need to know about my mapmaking process.

Read more

Books

The Unspoken Name’s Map Proves It’s A Different Kind of Fantasy

By Megan Crouse

Books

Cover Reveal: Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell

By Kayti Burt

Q: LARKWOOD: So Silver In The Wood/Drowned Country and Winter’s Orbit are both about a winsome fool who eventually kisses someone more sensible. I’m consistently impressed by how well the two of you can leverage an emerging relationship as the main conflict of your books (sometimes I try but I’ve always gotta put in a big snake or a haunted water feature) – what’s your approach to developing romance dynamics in your writing?

MAXWELL: I love deconstructing romance arcs. It’s a good example of something I could never get right when I started out, so I spent years trying to improve it. Different people have different bits of the writing toolkit when they get into the game (I’ve read Silver in the Wood; Emily was apparently born with the romance kit), but having to put work into something does give you a huge appreciation for what you like and an iron-clad knowledge of what you want to put on the page.

For me, it starts out very simple. You have a flawed character. Everyone else looks at them and thinks, oh, a normal person. Except another main character, who gets to know them and goes: holy shit, this thing you do is amazing and hot – which your first character doesn’t recognise, because to them it is Tuesday. This happens both ways round, and now you have pining. Then life comes at them hard (or in the case of Winter’s Orbit, a murder investigation and an irate press officer), and they both use their skills as a crowbar to crack that problem apart while the other one hands them screwdrivers and tries to remember not to stand there with their mouth open. Now you have accomplices, which is even better than pining. Then they start to trust not only in the other one’s skills, but that the other one will use those skills for the partnership—for them. Now you have a relationship built on a rock-solid foundation, and incidentally a team that everyone else looks at and decides is not worth messing with.

The draw for me is always a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Separately they have flaws and chips and a few veins of gold. Together they are brilliant.

TESH: I am so glad Ev had a smart answer because mine is just ‘and then… they kiss’ and that’s a plot, right.

LARKWOOD: you’re both right, and also witches. I didn’t even know there was going to be a romance subplot in Unspoken until like, the third draft.

Q: LARKWOOD: Both your books take place in a setting which puts interesting pressure on those characters, whether it’s the forest primeval or a bureaucratic labyrinth of space offices. For me one of the great pleasures of writing SFF is that you can shape the world however you like (you will notice that in The Unspoken Name and sequel I somehow managed to construct an entire setting around big snakes and bad ponds). How do you approach worldbuilding?

MAXWELL: There are dozens of ways to approach worldbuilding, obviously, but I think the commonality is like growing pearls: you pick a grain of truth and irritate everyone around you until it turns into something that looks shiny from far away but smells fishy close up. That metaphor got away from me. What I mean is you tend to write what you know, which is an old and hackneyed statement but says something useful about how we can get from blank pages to spaceships.

I don’t know what it’s like to live in a multi-planet space empire. But I do know, intimately, how large bureaucracies work and the multitude of ways they go wrong. I know what snow looks like through glass on a night when you’re already tired and can’t escape to bed for several more hours, which means I know something about the climate and the rhythm of the day. I know how someone sufficiently charming can avoid learning the requisition system and just walk around security controls, which means I know what that requisition and security system looks like. And that gets built out in layers: every time you add an element, you think through more of its consequences, like layering colour on a page. You can very successfully build a world by starting with mountain ranges and rain shadows, obviously. But alternately you could just start with a deep well of creative frustration at the millionth time you’ve filled out Form 34-B, and build it up from there.

Q: TESH: We have joked at various times about our ‘casts of thousands’ – a phrase I think we stole from an essay by Diana Wynne Jones, discussing her short story Carol Oneir’s Hundredth Dream, where the same tiny group of characters are the ‘actors’ in hundreds of different dream narratives. I know I reuse characters or character types from story to story – spot the Large Sad Man in everything I write – but what about you? Who are your cast-of-thousands characters? What are the advantages of reusing a character type rather than lovingly handcrafting each new character from scratch?

LARKWOOD: I guess for the same reason that it’s easier to buy a box of watercolours than to grind your own pigments from the raw earth? The way you mix and apply them is what’s interesting, unless being the guy who makes his own paints is your whole thing – a cool thing, don’t get me wrong, but not everyone needs to write Ulysses.

Anyway I freely admit to this. The antagonist of The Unspoken Name first showed up in a comic I made when I was 14 in which he was an immortal demon overlord and drug baron, which seems like a bit of an unwieldy career combination now I think about it. 

If I’m remembering correctly, Carol Oneir’s cast eventually goes on strike because of how clunkily she deploys them as stock characters – the lesson I take from this is that you can get away with dropping your immortal demon overlord in anywhere as long as you hide him well enough.

To be continued…

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this conversation, coming at you in February 2021.

Winter’s Orbit is now available for pre-order. Drowned Country and The Unspoken Name are available wherever books are sold.

The post How Do You Approach Worldbuilding? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[daniellewellerfmp]

Ideas for FMP 2

I was all for doing the monk illuminated manuscript idea... except I don’t have any passion for it. Nothing. Even when coming up with ideas to work with characters based in rabbits and demons, which I really want to do, I am unable to feel anything driving me forward. So I began to think; what would keep me passionate?

There’s the story from last year from Susanoo, and while Susanoo is somebody who’s incredibly like me (Passive, patience and a forgetful/unorganized bugger) he isn’t a character I am passionate about. What do I like in a character? I like them to be jerks. I like them to be messed up. I like creating a character and letting the audience decide whether they’re good, sympathetic or completely unforgivable. Which is true to life. I want a protaognist who can be the bad guy.

Brief Description: Two brothers, Daniel and Scott, become orphaned after one released an evil spirit into their household. The guilt inflicts Daniel and he develops an intense fear of abandonment over the years, becoming clingier towards Scott as time goes on and when he is old enough to be given the responsibility of being the town’s executioner he finds ways to rid of anybody who dares takes Scott away from him.

Synposis:

The story is set in medieval times, similar to that of Game of Thrones with supernatural mysterious shrouding the world. It starts off with Daniel Xull as a little boy living on a farm with his mother and father, and his brother Scott Xull. Daniel starts off a cheeky and outgoing lad who likes to collect unique items and relics. He discovers a relic in a Church of his town, and he just can’t resist taking it because of how intriguing it is. He attempts to figure out the puzzle to this relic, and after hours of cracking it; it releases a demon. It’s a deer with dragon like features, skin blazing like hell fire. It knocks Daniel in unconscious, and when he awakes mysteriously outside; he sees that the farm had set ablaze. Scott escaped the burning household with just an inch of his life, but his parents are not as fortunate. They were left orphaned, lonely.

Causing the death of his parents because of his mistake was too much for Daniel to handle. No matter how much he fought against the pain, the intrusive thoughts would keep coming back. The guilt looms over him like a shadow, never leaving and never forgetting. He begins to lose all confidence, and became scared to death of losing the people he loves. He grows clingy towards his brother Scott, who is grieving, angry at the world and the Gods for letting such an unfair act happen. He has no idea what caused the fire, so all he can do is blame the Gods. At first Daniel’s clinginess is harmless, though annoying, but when Scott started to spend more time with his friends, Daniel was always quick to fits of jealousy. He’d plead Scott to stop, even blackmailing him by self-harming. And when that didn’t work, he’d start sabotaging the relationships Scott had. When Daniel was old enough to become the village’s executioner, he pinned crimes on Scott’s closest friends. Families of his friends grew suspicious of Scott due to the amount of friends surrounding him would be blamed for a crime the families swore they didn’t commit. That Scott was purposely getting his friends executed or banished. Gossip of this would go around the village and leading to Scott being severely disliked and keeping him from be able to even go to well for water without being harassed. It wasn’t until one of Scott’s friends who was on the verge of being banished told Scott that she believed that Daniel was the one behind all of this, but Scott couldn’t believe it. However, overtime Scott became paranoid that this was true. ‘Did he do it? Has he been framing everybody I was close to? Is he the reason why nobody will trust me, and avoid me like the plague?!’ Scott’s attitude changed towards Daniel. He would begin to avoid and ignore Daniel on his self-mutilating threats, saying how “you’ve got nothing to hold over me anymore. I have nobody I give a shit about anymore, including you.” This would send Daniel into a spiral of self-loathing and panic. He’s this close to losing Scott. He spoke to the priest Vincent, who he had respected all his life and who had given the job as executioner in the first place. He asked him what to do to mend his relationship with his brother. Vincent told him to confess all his wrong doings to Scott. Everything that hurt him. Daniel does that and confesses to Scott that he did in fact sabotage his life, and was the reason their parents died, though it was an accident. This devastated Scott, and sent him into a fit of hatred and rage towards Daniel. He believed that Daniel killed them on purpose; that he was evil and out to get him. Scott outs Daniel to the village, claiming he’s a monster and he’s been behind all the false banishments and executions. He’s been playing all their lives like a puppeteer. That he was the one who purposely murdered their parents because he was a devil. They dragged Daniel to the town centre, tie him up and proceed to stone Daniel. He’s begs for Scott to forgive him. Claims that he doesn’t care about the village, and what they’ll do to him. He just cares about what his brother thought of him, and his forgiveness. He doesn’t want to lose him, but Scott reacts with contempt for Daniel’s life, telling Daniel that he wished he was dead for quite some time, and he’ll never forgive him. Daniel loses his mind, unable to cope with the revelation. A green glow blooms from Daniel’s chest. Everybody starts to call him a demon, but they were growing scared. Suddenly reanimated bodies of their loved ones emerge from the morgue and graveyard, and they begin to cut down the villagers. It’s a complete blood bath. Daniel doesn’t know what the heck is going on. But by the end of it all, only Scott is alive. Scott is traumatized, backing up into a corner at the other side of the town centre in terror. The dead walk up to Daniel and cut him out of his ropes. Daniel realizes that they’re under his control, meaning he’s a necromancer. He tells them to clear a path for him so he could go to Scott, and so they do that.

He begins to walk over to Scott, reaching his hand out. “Scott...” Scott looks up at him, and whimpers as he begins to crawl away and then proceed to run from them to the Church. Daniel, who is hurt from the stoning, hitches a ride from a rotting dead horse and then proceeds to head towards the church. He searches for Scott inside the Church but instead found the priest Vincent. Vincent tells Daniel that he was waiting for this day. He told him that he knew that Daniel took the relic all those years ago, he wanted him to. He made Daniel an executioner because he knew he’d abuse the power. He knew that one day Daniel would have the village murdered and revive them as part of his army. Daniel asks him how does he know all of this, and why did he want this to happen? Vincent explains that it was because their God told him the future, and that she wanted to use the souls from the village to restore her disfigured face and arise from the Hell she was banished to centuries ago. She wanted Daniel to be her captain in fights; to use the dead and take over the kingdom she had lost before her banishment. Daniel is angry, wondering why they would manipulate him into something so horrible and ruin his family’s life. Vincent explains that there had to be certain conditions met to become a necromancer. There had to be conditions such as the death of loved ones, and the blood of a traitor. Daniel wants to know more, so he follows Vincent, who took him to where Scott is tied up, which is on a sacrificial circle. He hands a knife to Daniel, telling him to kill Scott, which will release their God from Hell. Daniel is left in a panic, asking himself if he should let Scott live even though he hated him, or to let him live in with a relationship full of doubt, and let all this suffering be for nothing. His brother took care of him for so long, and that he’s suffered with his entire life. In the last second he slices Vincent’s throat, letting him die. Daniel releases Scott and then run away.

They return home and are awake during the night, sitting in quiet in front of the fireplace. Daniel swears to Scott that he’ll try to be a better person, and that he was sorry for everything he has done to Scott. That all of this happened because he didn’t want to lose him. Scott says he forgives Daniel, saying how he understands the fire was an accident and he sympathises with Daniel pain. Daniel feels at peace at being forgiven, thinking that they both have a future together after all. He went to sleep, which was the best sleep he’s ever had. The following morning he wakes up to find all of his stuff was gone and that Scott had left’. Daniel goes into a blind panic in trying to find Scott, but to no avail.

[angstandhappiness]

Interesting tags

I don’t know why, but I get really tired of fics where they’re like “Bruce has been sheltered his entire life and has absolutely no sense for normal people” as though he didn’t go on a world tour in literally every iteration of his existence before becoming Batman. Yes, he was absolutely sheltered as a teenager, and maybe he still held onto some naïveté in his early Batman years, but Batman literally faces every fucking crime there is, and I bet that little Bruce stubbornly traumatized himself with true crime shows and case studies. One does not become Batman and stay sheltered. Yes, unlike most people, he had the safety net of a home and a fat bank account to return to, but that really only applied in the States with legal identification. This man just kinda traveled the world with like the bare minimum and built a name and network for himself from scratch from pure skill, stubbornness, and his weird Mary Sue aura where everyone wants to fuck him. I can guarantee he’s nearly starved to death on multiple occasions, has slept in the worst conditions possible, and actually been fucking tortured in every sense of the word. You don’t need to be born and raised in poverty to have experienced food insecurities and the worst that humanity has to offer.

Anyway, this is just me just being fed up with the fics and posts where they treat Bruce as if he’s never experienced a single hardship in his life beyond the death of his parents when he was 8 years old. Bruce Wayne is the most empathetic, self-sacrificing motherfucker in Existence. He’s still an over controlling asshole, but he’s self aware and tries to understand why criminals do crime things.

Batman deserves to have a backstory where he actually developed and experienced his own coming-of-age as a mature member of society instead of being some vengeful middle school syndrome kid maneuvering a skin sack of nearly 300 lbs of muscle and fancy technology.