#i was trying to write an unreliable narrator

[thebaldursmouthgazette]

All of you making complaints about “bad writing” in the game that is actually an unreliable narrator/set up for a plot twist/a natural progression over the decades we’ve been in this world/a plot point being explored/something you literally just missed sound exactly like my dad whenever I try to watch anything with him and he complains about plot holes that dont exist and are just him not paying attention or not letting the story play out to the point where it’s explained btw

[luciaintheskyainthi]

Will the story address other parallels between Peter and Jason? Like the “child soldier” aspect.

In the context of the MCU, Peter was clearly neglected by the adults around him.

Tony is the main one, taking a teenager (legally underage) into a CIVIL WAR with the earth's 'greatest heroes', lying to the boy's guardian, giving him extremely advanced equipment without any training, and essentially being the main one cause of the destruction of Peter's life, directly or indirectly.

Happy was negligent in treating Peter more like a superhero than an inexperienced, traumatized child. The plane scene where he says: “I thought you had super strength” and Peter replies: “it still hurts”, shows that he thinks the boy can handle all because he is enhanced.

May, despite being the most responsible, was relatively emotionally negligent in not addressing the things that happened in Peter's hero's life. No moment in the film shows us a real scene of concern for him beyond the typical “stay safe”.

The end of the third film reinforces how most of the adults involved in Peter's life failed him (even indirectly like Stephen).

I wish Jason would point this out, as an outsider who doesn't connect these actions with the affection that hides the problem from Peter.

(Sorry for the long text :>)

(don't apologise for long texts! We loves it precioussss)

Personally I don't think the whole 'child soldier' thing is something Peter would bring up (at this point!), but this mostly because he doesn't see it that way. You have to keep in mind that Peter is an unreliable narrator, even of his own experiences.

So while he can admit to himself that he's been traumatised by his experiences (hence why he would turn to self-soothing techniques, although even that it flawed since he doesn't do it consistently), he isn't at a point of self-awareness where he can realise that the adults around him sorely failed him through his time as Spider-Man. Rather, his guilt means he sees himself at fault for much of what happened.

Of all the aforementioned adults, Tony is the only one he's starting to see from the light of: 'yeah, what happened with Germany and afterwards was kinda messed up'. But that sentiment of course is warring against the feeling of responsibility he has to do something because of his abilities. After all, Tony did try to protect him! He took the suit away when he realised Peter wasn't 'better'! It was better he had Tony's care with the suit than go without it like he had before! (note I'm saying this as if it were Peter's internal narrative, and note it conveniently leaves out the 'why TF would he bring a 14 yo to goddamn Germany?!')

All of that means, that for Jason to even flip the narrative and highlight the fact that the adults in Peter's life failed him in various ways, he'd have to parse it out of the story Peter tells him... and Peter's already proven himself to be a shit story-teller.

Of course, for Jason to say any of what you discussed about those adults would be something of a hypocritical discussion, considering his own history as a child vigilante.

That's not to say it's not likely to be a discussion that will crop up! Because it is the exact kind of heavy-hitting shit I love to write about haha

[blood-orange-juice]

The embarrassing part is so embarrassing I have trouble sitting through the cutscene. I can't. It's lovely that he doesn't give a shit but I cant.

Ok, 3rd attempt.

This face. "I'm not going to like what comes next." The only other instance where he makes that face is right before the ruin guard scene.

Otherwise I like how unfazed he looks

tbf no, I don't think this is anywhere close to covering the cost of his therapy

The voice here. He sounds so nice. I like how the voice doesn't match the expression.

Oh, I want a fic about previous assessments.

Also he uses a wind glider there. I wanted to write a scene where Lumine teaches him to use one but I guess not.

The voice here as well. Genuine polite surprise. He's very good at pretending.

The understanding "aah" he says when they cave and the little chuckle after are just... ADFGHGFDFGGFDSDFDSDFGDF. CHEWING ON WALLS. This little shit (also none of the translations got this part right, English one is probably the closest).

Also, I think, it's the second time he laughs genuinely?

Also, hmm, other Harbingers shout at recruits and, according to Childe himself, kill them sometimes and he can't even let them wait for a day. Responsible boy.

I love that we can just say no.

(and *that's* when he offers money. DUDE. you should have started with it. Lumine's 19 Mora feel very lonely in her pocket)

Actually we still can't say no. Oh Lumine...

She is not immune to puppy eyes and a promise of payment.

I think that's his work ethics summed up in three words.

Yup, he's used to people perceiving spars with him as an honour.

Was she trying to say something nice to him? Lumine...

I like how Signora killing recruits is implied but not confirmed. Buddy is an unreliable narrator after all.

This is very interesting. It implies there *is* a reason why he's trying to get stronger (he states the opposite in Labyrinth Warriors)

A proper traveler! Oh this is sad.

The tone implies he knows who did it. <3

Oh, I forgot it wasn't his idea, it was Teucer's. I retract my earlier statement about him being reckless for entertainment points and picking an abandoned factory instead of a nice walk near a river or something.

He can't say no to kids but it's a different problem.

He's awful (affectionate). I bet talent for emotional blackmail runs in the family. Imagine how much worse Tonya is.

Starting Childe's story quest with 19 mora.

For, you know, realism

[heliomanteia]

Another thought: Epic so far (surprisingly) gave no song to Penelope (while even Telemachus already had musical presence), which makes me perceive the whole narrative as an almost entirely Odysseus-centric one with his feelings and reading of the situation dominating the narration. The fact that by the end of the Vengeance Saga he is the only narrator that either escaped or got rid of all of his narrative mirrors also means a lot to me.

With that being said, I think Epic (accidentally?) raises a question of the making of the casus belli.

What I mean by that is, Penelope (and I'll focus on her mostly since she has most presence in Odysseus' thoughts) is consistently brought up as that bargain chip that Odysseus uses to reconcile with his own morals.

I'm just a man who wants to get back to his wife.

I need to see her.

...with my wife.

Looking past the surface "he just loves his wife", I want to specify that in none of these episodes do we see Penelope's perspective and her feelings. Specifically in Epic, Penelope is present through Odysseus' (and once through Telemachus' and Antinous') lens. She is not there as herself, yet. The choices Odysseus makes justified by Penelope — I wonder how she would feel about them? Obviously, they both want to reunite, I presume, in this media too; but will we ever get to hear her point of view on how much Odysseus changed? This is not the man she watched leave for war, this is a ruthless beast that justified many crimes with her name. How does it... feel, to be loved so much you're the reason someone betrays himself and turns into a person he once avoided and feared to become?

Epic omitting Penelope's narration for most of the musical makes it less clear, to me, how she feels. How hard it is for her. This musical is a primarily Odysseus-focused story and it's sure interesting.

[wetslug]

.

[nomsfaultau]

Writing advice

Writing Mandatory Family Reunion has gotten to the point of emotionally convoluted that I'm making scene roller coaster charts and color coding parts of the text by topic. Which, I highly recommend these writing tools. A roller coaster map is something I picked up from theater, and is useful for structuring emotions. A quick example below:

Its where you plot a timeline oscillating between positive and negative emotions, and how quickly they're switched between. It helps to know where you want the emotional peak/pit for a scene/chapter/story, so you can arrange plot beats accordingly. Many stories try to have escalating conflict, so you can use this method to gauge the intensity of reactions to crisis in order to achieve this. The problem I had with my chapter was whiplash between emotions, so by charting it out I could see where transitions needed to smooth jarring flips between emotional extremes. Flooring the gas pedal can also be bad, so the roller coaster method lets you see how quickly you switch between major emotions, and where breathing room may be helpful.

There is a problem with the axis being positive to negative. While capturing the intensity goes alright, it's hard to distinguish different types of emotions. Anger, fear, and sorrow are all negative, but also feel very different to a reader. So at peaks/plummets I made little notes about the majority emotion there. I found the roller coaster method made it easier to understand how my character's would react based off their accumulating emotional/mental state, and you can multiple to track the journeys of multiple characters.

As for the color coding method, I use it for structuring ideas. I took sections of the text in a scene and colored them based on the topic. Using comment options can also be super useful. A following example, redacted so I don't spoil my readers lol:

This helped with tracking the development of an idea in a scene where many interweaving subjects were being covered. I first focused on just how that idea changed over the course of the scene, and the next and next. Then, I looked at the transitions between each colored block, mostly the last/first two sentences between the concepts. That way I could see if there was a clear flow of logic between one topic to the next. Then, I started rearranging the parts into a way that structured a more solid scene. The scene felt a little bit like a puzzle, trying to get transitions to line up, switching around colored paragraphs into an order that made sense both for the individual argument angle as well as how it contributed to the other topics. I personally was using this for an internal monologue heavy scene, but I imagine it could also work pretty well for conversations.

Anyway, these are just some tools I use when I dislike a scene but can't figure out why. Visualizing the story can really help when trying to structure the ideas and emotions. Happy writing!

[nemaliwrites]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: F��lix Fathom & Amélie Graham de Vanily Characters: Félix Fathom, Amélie Graham de Vanily, Colt Fathom Additional Tags: POV Second Person, Writing Exercise, Quintuple Drabble, Experimental Style, Implied/Referenced Abuse, POV Félix Fathom, Pre-Canon, Bad Parent Colt Fathom, Sentimonster Félix Fathom Summary:

Open your eyes. Breathe. Remember that you are alive.

--

so @torvalvt recommended me The 3AM Epiphany the other day, which is a book full of ‘uncommon’ writing exercises, and i decided to give it a try! 1 out of like...200 done 💪🏽

[fudgelling-away]

A question for readers about an unreliable narrator

Voting is anonymous!

For the purpose of this poll I think it doesn't matter what kind of narration the author uses.

For example:

I notice that X is struggling to contain his anger.

You notice that X is struggling to contain his anger.

Y/N noticed that X was struggling to contain his anger.

Now, what does this sentence make you think about X?

1st option

He's clearly angry. The narrator says he is, so he must be. I do not give it a second thought.

2nd option

I take a mental note that X seems to be angry and I may analyse it later down the line. I am open to changing my mind and I'm eager to get to know the narrator just like any other character in the story.

3rd option

I try not to look at the story through the subjective lens of the narrator. My first reaction is to analyse the narrator's relationship with X. Do they hate each other? Has Y/N been stressed out lately? What could make the narrator jump to the conclusion that X is angry? I think about it all and form my own opinions.

___________________________________

Important note: I think most people sooner or later start to analyze the characters and their motives. In this poll I am just trying to figure out what is your general approach to the described events.

[prince-liest]

You inspired me to write! And I got up to 2k words for the first time ever when it comes to writing for myself... but I'm struggling a bit 😅 Do you have any advice about narrator POV and how you use your verb tenses? It's like I have no idea how you manage to "head-hop" while still being an omniscient narrator so smoothly & effortlessly. And verb tenses. if I write "was" one more time I might pop a gasket lol. any help is appreciated <3 have a good one!

First of all, that's freaking amazing! 2k is a lot, congratulations! That might sound weird coming from me considering how many words I put out, but I 100% remember the struggle of being newer to writing and hitting multiple thousands of words for the first time - I'm so happy for you!

Second of all: I actually write exclusively in third person limited POV, not third person omniscient! Even though I'm writing in third person, the narration is fully from the perspective of the point of view character, which I personally enjoy a lot because it allows for a lot of unreliable narration and also characterization through how their train of thought manifests (choppy, stressed, dreamy, etc). That's why when I'm writing from the point of view of character A, for example, any assumptions about character B's motivations are what character A is thinking, not an omniscient narrator informing you.

That said, you still have to head-hop specifically to write the actual visible actions and dialogue of the second character, and that's actually the most recent thing that I used to struggle with in writing specifically because I got most of my initial writing experience doing roleplay where I was only ever responsible for one character's thoughts and actions at a time.

Honestly, the main thing I can say is that it gets much, much easier with practice. When you start out, it will genuinely just take you longer to switch from the mindset of one character to another! I used to take character notes to put together little snapshot profiles of character headspaces to re-orient myself between the characters I was writing when I felt like I was getting lost. They included things like a few traits to keep in mind, behavior mindset, and snippets of dialogue that I thought were very representative. I don't use these anymore, but I do still do things like rewatch episodes or reread portions of books when I'm learning new characters to orient myself to their personality. It's like code-switching to me nowadays.

As for verb tense: I was a consummate Homestuck, so I started out writing in second person present tense, hahaha, and while I've adopted the third person POV (and believe me, this took adjusting), I've kept writing in present tense as a personal preference. I like it because it makes things feel more in-the-moment as they're happening, because there's less grammatical fuckery involved when describing the past vs the present, and just because I'm used to it. That said, past tense is more common and stands out less to people, and I think that you are finding all of your "was"s a lot more noticable than a reader would! People generally don't really notice the tense of what they're reading once they get into the flow of it.

[froggywritessometims]

ive been thinking about writing a story about a person in a psychiatrist hospital and it would be told from their journal entries and notes by doctors (like therapy notes and nurses observations) about psychiatric abuse and anti psychiatry

[passthroughtime]

sunday six (but i don't write anything beside kuwagami)

@jichanxo @four-white-trees @overdevelopedglasses @mike----wazowski

i'm getting my groove back with chapter 5 and don't really want to distract myself with something else, so this week's kuwagami is the ever-changing edition

He got to know. He had to figure out what to do to help Kuwana. Even though the best help he could possibly provide now would be to step away, Yagami wasn’t about to do that. He wasn’t good at that. And if he didn’t do something, then… It was proven time and time again that he couldn’t ever leave anything in Kuwana’s hands.

Out of the two of them, Kuwana was the most prone to fucking up. He was reckless. He was used to taking risks. He wasn’t concerned about his safety— about his life.

Yagami had to do everything for him. How irritating it was, that he cared about Kuwana more than Kuwana cared about himself. He had no right, no capacity to deal with it on his own. How couldn’t he understand? How could Yagami possibly step down and let everything run its course, trusting Kuwana to follow sound judgment? He had none. Yagami knew that better than anyone, and because of that, he had to make sure Kuwana hadn’t done anything stupid and was staying away from further trouble.

If it came to it, Yagami would even risk his life and safety; wouldn’t be the first time, right? He never promised Kuwana that he wouldn’t, and Kuwana had to know him better than to hope his plea was listened to. He should’ve already come to realize just how stubborn and unruly Yagami was… unless he didn’t know him at all.

[pagesofkenna]

yesterday I went to the library after work to grab a stack of highly-rated adult fantasy novels and research what narration styles they all used, not intending to take anything home to read, just doing personal research, and after years of seeing people put Name of the Wind on every fantasy reclist the thing that finally got me to check it out was flipping to a random page in the middle, thinking 'oh wow first person! that's not common!' then flipping to the first chapter to get a narrator description and discovering that it's third person for the entire first sixty pages

[aquaquadrant]

If the htp au was a big media franchise, there would be dudebros falling for your in-world propaganda <3 (compliment)

hadgksgs cursed thought…

“no but if you think about it atlas isn’t even really a villain?? players make mob farms all the time why is a mob hybrid farm any different”

[cultivating-wildflowers]

I need to talk about the skill it takes for a writer to do that thing where they're describing something unfamiliar to the POV character while we the readers get to sit there in slowly dawning horror as we realize we 1) know what that thing is and 2) know how bad it is. it's not something you get in visual media but, if done well, it can be just as horrifying as realizing "the call is coming from inside the house".

[microwaving-tesilid-argente]

snippets from the tesilid/hestio fic bc it's not like im going to be able to post to full thing any time in the next half a year anw 💀

[malrie]

me on the poppy war hate island alone and unloved but clear of mind and content 🤭