#it’s in shorthand and not structured like it needs to be but like. why am i like this i’m not quite sure

[ilostyou]

there is in fact something curious about my brain that it feels like it can only organize itself properly on paper to the point where it has me writing most of my paper by hand

[fragiledewdrop]

TOLKIEN, MYTH AND THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY

A week ago I wrote a post about my excitement in discovering just how much Tolkien took inspiration from Anglo-Saxon poetry.

I was so lost in my little over-emotional bubble that I was genuinely a little surprised when a few people expressed their disappointment in discovering that "The Lord of The Rings" wasn't wholly original. It makes sense, though, so I thought I'd address it.

These are @fortunes-haven ' s tags:

@sataidelenn already wrote an interesting reply, but I'd like to approach the question from a different point of view. Why? Because the first thing I thought about when reading this comment was how I myself have grumbled under my breath about having to wade through someone's "personal mythology smoothie", only I wasn't reading Tolkien. I was reading T. S. Eliot.

Now, I want to preface this by making it clear that I am well aware Tolkien is by no means a modernist. He did, however, write LOTR in England in the late 30s. He was part of the same culture, the same society, and above all the same historical context that produced "The Waste Land" and "Ulysses", and I think we should take that into account when we discuss his work.

Because by the time Tolkien published LOTR, Joyce and Eliot and Yeats had already discussed and applied the mythic method. Was Tolkien aware of their debates? Did he read and appreciate their books? I have no clue. It would take some research to find out, research I currently (unfortunately) don’t have time for. But I do not think it a stretch to suggest that Tolkien might have been moved by the same need that drove other writers to look back at myth, although in very different ways.

Why did Joyce and Eliot feel compelled to return to the narrative roots of mankind? Why did Yeats devote so much time to Celtic lore? Why did Tolkien write a new epic and base it on the Saxon world?

The answer is the same: because they lived at the start of a century that posed more questions than ever, but provided no answers; a century when time and the human mind and the very structure of matter had ceased to be solid, defined, a foundation to rely on; a century torn apart by brutal, inhumane, sensless war.

When you can't find answers in the present and the future is so uncertain it's laughable, you look to the past. Because the thing is, we can talk about "personal mythology" all we want, but myths are never personal. They are universal. They are tied to a specific cultural context, certainly, but they exemplify emotions, truths and tragedies that are common (or supposed to be common) to all humankind, beyond space and time. Myths are supposed to be eternal.

They are also a very effective shorthand to communicate rather complex concepts.

I can write five pages telling my girlfriend that she makes me feel safe, that she is something I've longed for and fought to gain, something I've dreamed about but that I'm scared I'll lose. I could, and I probably wouldn’t be able to convey exactly what I mean.

Or I could say "She is my Ithaca" and you would get it, wouldn’t you?

There are whole books that try to explain the symbolism behind "The Green Knight", but Eliot can offhandedly mention a chapel and he has basically evoked the whole original poem plus the centuries of scolarship that followed.

Tolkien could have had his characters recite long monologues about how they feel like their world has been lost. Instead, he has one of them sing a song by the campfire. An 8th century song, about a warrior in exile. He achieves in a couple of lines what could have taken him a whole book to convey, and he does it in a way that goes straight to the heart, even if we don't know exactly why.

And that's the thing: not all of us spend years researching myths and old poetry. Certainly we don't do it when reading LOTR for the first time, especially if that's when we are 13 or 10 or 8 years old. But we get it anyway. We know myths, especially Western myths, one way or another, as if through cultural osmosis. We understand myths from other cultures too- we may need a bit of context, but we do- and often we find that the bones of the stories are similar, across oceans and centuries.

That means that using myths as the building blocks of your story is an amazingly effective way to cut to the quick, to get to the core of what the narrative is aiming at.

I have seen so many people talk about the feeling they get when reading LOTR, or even just thinking about it: that nostalgia? That bittersweet hurt? That longing for something bright and lost, for a star or a jewel or a land beyond the sea? That, right there. That is what Tolkien achieves by telling stories inside stories, by having his words have a meaning and weight that we would associate with a bard or a preacher, not a fantasy writer. And, as I have discovered recently, it's almost exactly the same feeling you get when reading Saxon poetry.

It's almost as if he chose it on purpose, isn’t it?

That's not all, though.

As both people tagged above(and many others, myself included) have already written, Tolkien doesn’t just use myths as building blocks. He alters them.

Yes, Frodo's hero's journey is not typical. Yes, there are a lot of similarities between the last part of LOTR and the Odissey, but they are not quite the same.

That's because Frodo is not, and can't be, Ulysses. He isn’t a warrior crowned with glory and cunning who reconquers his home and that leaves it because a god has promised him peace if he does. He is a mutilated soldier coming home from the trenches, only to find that he no longer belongs in the home he has bled for.

Frodo is a new hero, for a new age (just like Ulysses was a new hero for a new age, which I rather think is one of the reasons Joyce chose him as the model for his novel. The Odissey was already subversive in and of itself. "An odd duck", as @sataidelenn put it.)

We have to understand just how traumatic WWI was. It's a shift, a break so immense that it changed society, politics, culture, family structures, the idea of hero and even of manhood. The Western World was not the same after 1918. Of course art changed too.

Would Tolkien have written LOTR had he not fought in that war? Probably. But it would have been a very, very different book. The way it deals with war, technology, trauma, peace and friendship-all the things we love about it- are direct fruits of that conflict. I think the way myth fits into it is, too.

I can understand being disappointed that not everything in Lotr is wholly new, wholly Tolkien's invention. It didn’t even occur to be to be, though, because I am used of thinking of it in these terms.

All the myths he uses- from Kullervo to Ulysses to Beowolf to medieval fairy tales- are means to tell a new story. They come back to life, and while we perceive how timeless they are, they end up telling us something that is rooted in time. A new English epic, yes, but very clearly an epic of England between two world wars. A 20th century heroic tale which offers a desperate, brave hope for the future. How can we not love it?

And look, I might joke about personal mythology smoothies to myself all the time, but the reason I keep reading and studying Eliot and Joyce and Yeats is that they do have something new to say, something amazing. You can take them or leave them, love them or hate them, but "unoriginal" is not an adjective you can, in good conscience, apply to their work.

I think, in a weird way, Tolkien is the same.

"In manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe that Mr. Yeats to have been first contemporary to be conscious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythic method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art." –T.S. Eliot, from Ulysses, Order, and Myth (1923)

[crimmson]

i'm about to vaguepost about playing helldivers 2 because i'm feeling zesty. I have cramps and no patience.

I play helldivers 2 for fun. do not have the audacity to metagame at me while also being the single biggest source of teamkills every time I play with them.

and this isn't specific to them because i love y'all but a solid 75 percent of my helldivers 2 friends do this, but the person I'm mad at also does this, see previous statement about teamkills:

say words when you are throwing your fucking stratagems perhaps?? perhaps say you are throwing a giant nuclear bomb of death near us so we have time to make an attempt to get clear?? like yes silly accidents happen, that's part of what makes helldivers 2 so fun. I laugh my ass off when shit goes sideways. yes, it is genuinely funny when your teammate gets ragdolled and drops their Big Explosion Button right on the team, and I cannot emphasize enough how much I am not being sarcastic. it is genuinely the funniest shit.

but that is completely different from what I'm talking about. I need people to stop shutting down all your fucking lines of communication and going silent every time a fight gets hectic. SAY WORDS. PLEASE. I can at least work with SOMETHING better than I can work with NOTHING. like literally even just making weird noises works because i literally have learned what those noises mean and honestly it's great shorthand. and even something simple like "danger close" is great. but I cannot fucking interpret dead silence.

also open your fucking ears sometimes maybe. I have to assume this is connected to going silent when you're focusing. but nothing pisses me off more than me saying I'm gonna go take out an enemy structure, I have the equipment, I get all the fucking way there, and then they just fucking show up and do it instead. like oh. Okay. so nobody was listening to me at all actually, or did not care. i'm giving fucking status updates the entire time, and half that time I'm being ignored. and i guess it only bothers me because i'm always fucking listening and absorbing everything as everyone is running around and giving their own status updates. Even while i'm fighting for my fucking life in some trench. so i just cannot fathom why it's that hard for other people to fucking listen to me. i'm not saying that's right or fair on my part, but it's happening.

realistically I can forgive a lot of the above when it's literally anyone else except this one person, because I know my other friends' playstyles and personalities so I can adapt pretty well, and everything else just sort of makes up for it, and I don't mind it. But with this one person I lose my fucking mind and i just sit there grinding my teeth because it's also compounded with 500 other things that has nothing to do with the game but I am just always at like 50% Annoyance Capacity with them by default.

i think a good tldr is this game is really great and showing who works well under pressure and who doesn't, and jesus christ some of my friends are really really bad under pressure. and i know this and i love them. and then there are the people who are not my friends, and I cannot forgive them for this.

christ anyway I just don't mesh particularly well with this one person's playstyle but they always fucking show up and I can never seem to play with any of the people I want to play with, WITHOUT that one person. and i'm trying not to be a huge bitch about it but jesus christ i fucking miss playing with some of the other people and other group comps. but I have to be nice and fucking tiptoe around for reasons.

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

How can I have my world full of massive floating structures in the sky and keep it safe enough?

I'm thinking these structures would be at least 300m in diameter and have several buildings. Just a single disaster could be horrible if there's say 5000 people up there and just as many or even more people in buildings and streets on the ground.

Obviously, the fastest way to eliminate deaths would be to have these structures over the water or empty ground. But that's still so many people left on these structures itself.

Nobody is going to build these structures if it isn't safe. A single disaster could toss out the entire project of doing technology.

Anyway, disasters WILL happen because they do, but just how much is tolerable before it's deemed too unsafe? I suppose that could be part of plot but I'm not sure how that even works in real life? I don't know about safety thresholds in real life I can look at, especially when this is obviously sci-fi and I don't know where to search.

Finally, I am not sure how to design them. Could they be using anti grav technology? Maybe it's massive ships hovering in the air, either permanently staying still or set to land every now and then so people can travel without needing transport.

Tex: Suspending disbelief is a writing mechanism that’s popular for a very good reason, and shorthanding technology and magic (which in some genres amounts to the same thing) can often help move the plot along better than examining every grain and molecule that makes up a world.

That said, every technology has had at least one disaster during its history. Planes, for example, had a brief period where they used square windows, which had disastrous effects on cabin pressure and kept crashing the plane - now we use rounded windows (Popular Mechanics). And yet, air travel via airplane numbers in the millions nearly every year (Statista).

“Safe” is often a risk assessment measure used to judge whether something is worth doing. It’s unrealistic to assume that a technology will never kill anyone, but historically the general assessment is to constantly improve and make sure any deaths or injuries are accidental and as close to flukes as possible.

I would look at the design of skyscrapers for reference, since they face the same dilemmas as your world, in terms of safety, intra-building transportation like elevators, and area allocation for number of people and utilities.

Ebonwing: Why do the people in your world want to build floating cities? The more pressing the reason, the more likely they are to tolerate safety issues. If living on the ground is for whatever reason extremely dangerous but floating cities are only somewhat dangerous, then people will be far more willing to accept the risks. 

As for how you can construct them within your setting, both antigrav and building them on the back of airships work. I would recommend not getting stuck on this too much. Like Tex already said, suspension of disbelief is necessary for readers to engage with scifi or fantasy fiction and most people won’t question it if you say that this world has floating cities powered by antigrav, or whatever you end up going with, and leave it at that.

Wootzel: One factor you might want to throw in to make your floating structures safer is redundancy. Is it possible that there’s more than one technology they can use for this? Are there the aerial equivalent of life boats? Even if you just use one technology to levitate your structures, having two independent systems powered independently could be a good way to make sure that if one goes down, it can still stay up… or at least float down slowly in a controlled way. 

[princeescaluswords]

Rather than ‘transformative’ I often feel that there should be a shorthand term for fandom/fic writers who attempt to reassert traditional, racist/heteronormative patriarchal social orders into properties that even marginally dare to push against them,

What's he gonna do? Get a job?

The term you want already exists, though it may not have occurred to you in this context.

Bourgeois.

This adjective describes actions or aesthetic choices which support middle-class and conventional values. I will further narrow it in this instance to white middle-class conventional values of the United States, as those are the ones that I know best.

First caveat: of course, this doesn't apply to all fanfiction, even to all fanfiction within a given fandom or even a given ship. But the bourgeois strain of writing definitely exists within the phenomenon. Second caveat: I am not a radical progressive by any measure. There are certainly some conventional values of the white middle-class that I appreciate and embrace. However, that doesn't prevent me from identifying trends in group behavior. If it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.

I will now illustrate what I mean by this with examples from my primary fandom, Teen Wolf, but what I found is that this can easily be applied to many other fandoms, to greater or lesser extents: the Star Wars fandom, the MCU fandom, the Lord of the Rings fandom (!), and so on. The bourgeois need to support aristocratic, privileged, white males as cultural objects and status leaders pervades all of these fandoms; there's a reason Kylo Ren, a genocidal space fascist, received such manic devotion.

What I find extraordinarily interesting is how often elements of transgressive or counter-cultural behavior is introduced to conceal the bourgeois impulse from the audience, or sometimes even from the authors themselves. In the case of my fandom, there is an emphasis on the inhumanity of the characters as werewolves, or a defense of a serial killer, or the reconstruction of the primary romantic relationship as gay (often ignoring canon gay relationships), but this transgressive element never actually threatens the conventional social structure. On to the examples.

Peter Hale's vengeance is recontextualized as justice. The triggering event in canon is the Hale Fire, which is presented as a disruption of the social order, as it should be. And yet, canon's insistence that Peter's resulting murder spree is both self-serving and absolutely destructive vanishes from fanfiction, because it doesn't reinforce the bourgeois idea that the tragedy must be corrected to the satisfaction of white men because of the Hale's privileged status. Peter's actions are vindicated through claims of mental incapacity (which canon rejected), through the conjuration of non-existent social roles (the mythical Left Hand), or through uncritical sympathy (fanon Stiles claiming that he'd do the same thing). You don't see this impulse in fanfiction extended to Noshiko Yukimura's actions at Oak Creek or Tamora Monroe's crusade against the supernatural, because they don't have the same social status.

Ste rek (and Ste ter) is written as heterosexual romance in gay drag. While presented as something radical, the actual details of these relationships are astoundingly conventional. Why, as it often seems, is it required that Derek and/or Peter be alphas? There's no romantic or emotional reason; the impulse is purely about social status, like the heroines of fairy tales discovering that their handsome rescuer is actually a prince. Or how the canonically brave, impulsive, and audacious Stiles is written as a neglected, wilting dormouse, waiting for his (her) true love to rescue him (her) from her oblivious, selfish friends and family. The fact that it's between two men doesn't make it any less a PG-rated rehashed variation on Cinderella.

Scott McCall's role as heroic protagonist MUST be delegitimized. That canon chose a working-class Latino as it's primary focus over wealthy white men is, for many in the fandom, the production's original sin. As a consequence, his role must be rendered invalid. His struggles with school work are presented, contrary to canon, as a result of stupidity or simply being a bad student. His morals are presented as foolishness, tyranny, or the manipulations of a sinister black man. His romances are presented as either vapid infatuation or a dangerous sexual obsession. Above all, he is presented again and again as uncultivated, immature and driven by appetite.

Ever notice how often Scott appears in these fanfictions as a gluttonous eater? How he is portrayed as someone who doesn't know how to cook or clean or take care of himself? How his musical tastes run to the most banal of banal pop? How he's characterized as stubborn or incurious about lycanthropy? Of course, it's all designed to make him unworthy of his position as lead protagonist by positioning him as inferior to the white intellectual middle class, but what strikes me as funny is how much it resembles the critiques of the anarchist labor movements of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, which portrayed labor agitators as an uneducated, unenlightened foreign mob threatening the prosperity of hard-working people.

These are just three examples. I could go on for like, an hour. And then I could select another fandom and give you examples of the same type of behavior, the same laborious defense of white middle-class patriarchal values hidden behind a very carefully constructed transgressive act, one that somehow never seems to disrupt the society in which they live.

Yeah, bourgeois pretty much covers it.

[fuentes-fantasy-writing-n-art]

What 2nd-World Fantasy Isn't

It's not historical fantasy. Those exist, and I salute the authors who do the research and work to write them. But 2nd-world fantasy, which are fantasy stories taking place in worlds that are not, never have been, and never will be, our earth, are not historical fantasy.

Many of us who write 2nd-world choose eras and cultures from history as inspiration. The many centuries referred to as the Middle Ages are popular. Who can resist knights, castles, kings, lords, and serfdom? But no matter how deep our worldbuilding, history is just inspiration. It's vibes. It provides a structure, and in a culture that is literate and highly exposed to media, it gives authors a shorthand.

But it's not history.

An author can choose to have their world adhere closely to a particular area and era, but if we do, we better do our homework. Everything should be accurate, or the explanation that something exists in our world because it's "realistic" falls flat. This is especially important because so much information floating around out there is false or partially incorrect. Often the things that "Everyone knows" are not true.

After all, everyone knows those stupid, immoral people in the "dark ages" married little girls off as soon as their periods started. Except, they didn't. Some cultures throughout the world and history might have, but Middle Ages Europe didn't. Historians have pointed out that the usual age for marriage was 17-21: younger than now, but not close to marrying girls off at 11 or 12. The rich and politically powerful did marry girls young to secure alliances. Often the boys were young, too. But, like today, the rich and powerful were exceptions, not the rule.

Everyone knows that the average lifespan way back then was 40 so people just didn't live past their fourth decade. Our middle school math teachers are weeping because that's not what average means. Remove the tragic number of children who died before 5, and the average life expectancy was closer to 60 or 65.

Authors can't do history by meme or take Enlightenment revisionism as fact and excuse parts of their world as realistic based on those. 2nd-world writers get to choose everything, so we also need to own everything. It is more important for the story and characters to react in a way that makes sense for their environment, culture, and beliefs than it is for a particular detail to be historically accurate. It's important that the readers feel immersed in the story, and that the cultural environment of the world serves the story the author wants to tell.

So when a reader asks, "Why is there sexism in your book? Why choose a patriarchal system?" my answer isn't that it's realistic or historically accurate, although my inspirations of Babylon, Sumeria, and Persia were patriarchal. It's because many women still struggle with being dismissed and unheard, even in important situations, and I wanted to demonstrate that with my MC's character arc. Part of her arc is taking action when others keep trying to take it away from her (in the name of safety or protection). It's also recognizing that the responsibility for acting on the visions and premonitions she has is hers and no one else's. They were given to her instead of her father or brothers for a reason. A patriarchal setting worked best for that.

Many authors find things they want to express or say in their books. Sometimes it surprises us, and sometimes it's intentional from the outset, but our choices for worldbuilding should serve that theme. We may be wrestling with questions of faith, our place in society, what the right road or path will be, and if that is going to show up in our work, the world should serve it.

2nd-world readers should do this too. Instead of the knee-jerk response of, "It's realistic," when someone challenges something in a fantasy, take the time to think why the author might have put that there. (I am not saying every author has a good reason or answer to that. Maybe they just thought they were being realistic.) GRRM set out to create an astoundingly violent world, and much of history is just as violent (if not moreso), but he also made the choice about how and what violence to put on the page. Was realism the only reason? (You'll have to ask him.)

"It's realistic" is weak sauce for why something exists or doesn't exist in a 2nd-world fantasy. It's there because the author, for some reason, decided to put it there when building the world.

(I will fully admit that the women in my Oracle Quartet wear veils because I love the aesthetic, although covering the head was also a practical way for keeping hair clean.)

[the-corset-witch]

My Writing Vault - Part 1

My Writing Obsidian Vault is what I have worked on a bit more than my BoS/Grimoire Vault. It is built around how I build my world, and this is really phenomenal for me. I had been using Fantasia Archive but this felt a little too... rigid for me. I still load up FA though, and look at how I was using it, and how it can be used, in order to help build templates for my Writing Vault.

The Writing Vault uses possibly 3x the community plugins as my BoS Vault, and I am going to get into these as this goes on.

I am sure that any of this can be applied as anyone wants, but for my own purposes, I am going to try and explain how my world-building happens first.

My World & How I World Build

I write most in High Fantasy, but the sub-genre is constantly shifting and really hard to pin down. There are a lot of little tales that take place in the world that I am building, and some of these connect directly and others seem to have no connection what-so-ever.

The World began with JK Rowling, of all things, and the Hogwarts Legacy game, and my own love for Goblins.... And I said: Self, it's about time Goblins got the respect they deserved, these are some charred biscuits and watered down gravy, and I will have none of it.

So the race of Gobelyns was created, they were handed inventions, but those inventions had to have inventors- and inventors had motive to invent in the first place. And here we begin the building.

This idea of, who did that? And why? is the main way I build things. I feel like it's a very, very organic way to build a world, but it is very time-consuming and requires a ton of notes. This is a "from the inside-out" type of method to build a world, and while things might not happen for a generation or two, it's always worth it (for me, personally, for my personal satisfaction) for me to still know small details of what happens in the between generations.

The two stories that I am currently working on take place at entirely different points in the world's history, but what's more, is I still haven't even built the entire history of the world that predates both of these stories. For me, I need that history, even in shorthand notes, I need some type of bedrock.

Historically, I only have notes right now for year30, when my stories are going to take place about ten generations from this point.

World Building + Obsidian.MD

So with my 2 stories, they also deal with 2 different races of my world. These two races start recording their histories at different points, and around different epoch events. The first thing I needed to figure out was, of the things I know right now, what epoch event happens first. Now I need to work my way from that event to the first story that takes place-- which luckily, is the corresponding story, it would have been much more complex if not.

So after I have that knowledge in my head of my epoch event, here's what we gotta do, we gotta make the Obsidian Vault.

In my next post, I will introduce my own Writing Vault, the Folder Structure, the Plug Ins, & How I built from the Epoch Event, Outward.

[writingwithcolor]

What Does Our "Motivations” PSA Mean?

@luminalalumini said:

I've been on your blog a lot and it has a lot of really insightful information, but I notice a theme with some of your answers where you ask the writer reaching out what their 'motivation for making a character a certain [race/religion/ethnicity/nationality] is' and it's discouraging to see, because it seems like you're automatically assigning the writer some sort of ulterior motive that must be sniffed out and identified before the writer can get any tips or guidance for their question. Can't the 'motive' simply be having/wanting to have diversity in one's work? Must there be an 'ulterior motive'? I can understand that there's a lot of stigma and stereotypes and bad influence that might lead to someone trynna add marginalized groups into their stories for wrong reasons, but people that have those bad intentions certainly won't be asking for advice on how to write good representation in the first place. Idk its just been something that seemed really discouraging to me to reach out myself, knowing i'll automatically be assigned ulterior motives that i don't have and will probably have to justify why i want to add diversity to my story as if i'm comitting some sort of crime. I don't expect you guys to change your blog or respond to this or even care all that much, I'm probably just ranting into a void. I'm just curious if theres any reason to this that I haven't realized exists I suppose. I don't want y'all to take this the wrong way because I do actually love and enjoy your blog's advice in spite of my dumb griping. Cheers :))

We assume this is in reference to the following PSA:

PSA to all of our users - Motivation Matters: This lack of clarity w/r to intent has been a general issue with many recent questions. Please remember that if you don’t explain your motivations and what you intend to communicate to your audience with your plot choices, character attributes, world-building etc., we cannot effectively advise you beyond the information you provide. We Are Not Mind Readers. If, when drafting these questions, you realize you can’t explain your motivations, that is likely a hint that you need to think more on the rationales for your narrative decisions. My recommendation is to read our archives and articles on similar topics for inspiration while you think. I will be attaching this PSA to all asks with similar issues until the volume of such questions declines. 

We have answered this in three parts.

1. Of Paved Roads and Good Intentions

Allow me to give you a personal story, in solidarity towards your feelings:

When I began writing in South Asia as an outsider, specifically in the Kashmir and Lahore areas, I was doing it out of respect for the cultures I had grown up around. I did kathak dance, I grew up on immigrant-cooked North Indian food, my babysitters were Indian. I loved Mughal society, and every detail of learning about it just made me want more. The minute you told me fantasy could be outside of Europe, I hopped into the Mughal world with two feet. I was 13. I am now 28.

And had you asked me, as a teenager, what my motives were in giving my characters’ love interests blue or green eyes, one of them blond hair, my MC having red-tinted brown hair that was very emphasized, and a whole bunch of paler skinned people, I would have told you my motives were “to represent the diversity of the region.” 

I’m sure readers of the blog will spot the really, really toxic and colourist tropes present in my choices. If you’re new here, then the summary is: giving brown people “unique” coloured eyes and hair that lines up with Eurocentric beauty standards is an orientalist trope that needs to be interrogated in your writing. And favouring pale skinned people is colourist, full stop.

Did that make me a bad person with super sneaky ulterior motives who wanted to write bad representation? No.

It made me an ignorant kid from the mostly-white suburbs who grew up with media that said brown people had to “look unique” (read: look as European as possible) to be considered valuable.

And this is where it is important to remember that motives can be pure as you want, but you were still taught all of the terrible stuff that is present in society. Which means you’re going to perpetuate it unless you stop and actually question what is under your conscious motive, and work to unlearn it. Work that will never be complete.

I know it sounds scary and judgemental (and it’s one of the reasons we allow people to ask to be anonymous, for people who are afraid). Honestly, I would’ve reacted much the same as a younger writer, had you told me I was perpetuating bad things. I was trying to do good and my motives were pure, after all! But after a few years, I realized that I had fallen short, and I had a lot more to learn in order for my motives to match my impact. Part of our job at WWC is to attempt to close that gap.

We aren’t giving judgement, when we ask questions about why you want to do certain things. We are asking you to look at the structural underpinnings of your mind and question why those traits felt natural together, and, more specifically, why those traits felt natural to give to a protagonist or other major character.

I still have blond, blue-eyed characters with sandy coloured skin. I still have green-eyed characters. Because teenage me was right, that is part of the region. But by interrogating my motive, I was able to devalue those traits within the narrative, and I stopped making those traits shorthand for “this is the person you should root for.” 

It opened up room for me to be messier with my characters of colour, even the ones who my teenage self would have deemed “extra special.” Because the European-associated traits (pale hair, not-brown-eyes) stopped being special. After years of questioning, they started lining up with my motive of just being part of the diversity of the region.

Motive is important, both in the conscious and the subconscious. It’s not a judgement and it’s not assumed to be evil. It’s simply assumed to be unquestioned, so we ask that you question it and really examine your own biases.

~Mod Lesya

2. Motivations Aren't Always "Ulterior"

You can have a positive motivation or a neutral one or a negative one. Just wanting to have diversity only means your characters aren't all white and straight and cis and able-bodied -- it doesn't explain why you decided to make this specific character specifically bi and specifically Jewish (it me). Yes, sometimes it might be completely random! But it also might be "well, my crush is Costa Rican, so I gave the love interest the same background", or "I set it in X City where the predominant marginalized ethnicity is Y, so they are Y". Neither of these count as ulterior motives. But let's say for a second that you did accidentally catch yourself doing an "ulterior." Isn't that the point of the blog, to help you find those spots and clean them up?

Try thinking of it as “finding things that need adjusting” rather than “things that are bad” and it might get less scary to realize that we all do them, subconsciously. Representation that could use some work is often the product of subconscious bias, not deliberate misrepresentation, so there's every possibility that someone who wants to improve and do better didn't do it perfectly the first time. 

--Shira

3. Dress-Making as a Metaphor

I want to echo Lesya’s sentiments here but also provide a more logistical perspective. If you check the rubber stamp guide here and the “Motivation matters” PSA above, you’ll notice that concerns with respect to asker motivation are for the purposes of providing the most relevant answer possible.

It is a lot like if someone walks into a dressmaker’s shop and asks for a blue dress/ suit (Back when getting custom-made clothes was more of a thing) . The seamstress/ tailor is likely to ask a wide variety of questions:

What material do you want the outfit to be made of?

Where do you plan to wear it?

What do you want to highlight?

How do you want to feel when you wear it?

Let’s say our theoretical customer is in England during the 1920s. A tartan walking dress/ flannel suit for the winter is not the same as a periwinkle, beaded, organza ensemble/ navy pinstripe for formal dress in the summer. When we ask for motivations, we are often asking for exactly that: the specific reasons for your inquiry so we may pinpoint the most pertinent information.

The consistent problem for many of the askers who receive the PSA is they haven’t even done the level of research necessary to know what they want to ask of us. It would be like if our English customer in the 1920s responded, “IDK, some kind of blue thing.” Even worse,  WWC doesn’t have the luxury of the back-and-forth between a dressmaker and their clientele. If our asker doesn’t communicate all the information they need in mind at the time of submission, we can only say, “Well, I’m not sure if this is right, but here’s something. I hope it works, but if you had told us more, we could have done a more thorough job.”

Answering questions without context is hard, and asking for motivations, by which I mean the narratives, themes, character arcs and other literary devices that you are looking to incorporate, is the best way for us to help you, while also helping you to determine if your understanding of the problem will benefit from outside input. Because these asks are published with the goal of helping individuals with similar questions, the PSA also serves to prompt other users.

I note that asking questions is a skill, and we all start by asking the most basic questions (Not stupid questions, because to quote a dear professor, “There are no stupid questions.”). Unfortunately, WWC is not suited for the most basic questions. To this effect, we have a very helpful FAQ and archive as a starting point. Once you have used our website to answer the more basic questions, you are more ready to approach writing with diversity and decide when we can actually be of service. This is why we are so adamant that people read the FAQ. Yes, it helps us, but it also is there to save you time and spare you the ambiguity of not even knowing where to start.

The anxiety in your ask conveys to me a fear of being judged for asking questions. That fear is not something we can help you with, other than to wholeheartedly reassure you that we do not spend our unpaid, free time answering these questions in order to assume motives we can’t confirm or sit in judgment of our users who, as you say, are just trying to do better.

Yes, I am often frustrated when an asker’s question makes it clear they haven’t read the FAQ or archives. I’ve also been upset when uncivil commenters have indicated that my efforts and contributions are not worth their consideration. However, even the most tactless question has never made me think, “Ooh this person is such a naughty racist. Let me laugh at them for being a naughty racist. Let me shame them for being a naughty racist. Mwahaha.”

What kind of sad person has time for that?*

Racism is structural. It takes time to unlearn, especially if you’re in an environment that doesn’t facilitate that process to begin with. Our first priority is to help while also preserving our own boundaries and well-being. Though I am well aware of the levels of toxic gas-lighting and virtue signaling that can be found in various corners of online writing communities in the name of “progressivism*”, WWC is not that kind of space. This space is for discussions held in good faith: for us to understand each other better, rather than for one of us to “win” and another to “lose.”

Just as we have good faith that you are doing your best, we ask that you have faith that we are trying to do our best by you and the BIPOC communities we represent.

- Marika.

*If you are in any writing or social media circles that feed these anxieties or demonstrate these behaviors, I advise you to curtail your time with them and focus on your own growth. You will find, over time, that it is easier to think clearly when you are worrying less about trying to appease people who set the bar of approval so high just for the enjoyment of watching you jump. “Internet hygiene”, as I like to call it, begins with you and the boundaries you set with those you interact with online.

[samwiselastname]

I'm hitting the part of Mithraic where it is made explicit that there are still some old self-sustaining gods kicking around, and amaurot is the loci of one, and emet-selch suddenly haus covid about it.

which sort of positions elidibus as someone who would actually fit the bill for the term outside of just being shorthand for christ? like. in this timeline the convocation at least postures as a liberatory structure, so while he may not be delivering his people, the original guy whose mantle he has assumed...

and I am already pulling some pseudo-christian bullshit here, we are playing with enlightenment. book two even explains why eden is called eden, something which does not need explaining because the actual answer is ffviii, but I digress

anyway I am absolutely ruminating on MSQ dialogue here. mr "I am not a megalomaniac" learns his erotic fixation on authoritarianism has a quantifiable religious bent and immediately concludes "I need to ask my sub to roleplay human sacrifice for me" (AND HE DOESN'T FEEL GREAT ABOUT THAT LATER, LET ME TELL YOU)

hoping whichever localizer put the word "messianic" in emet-selch's mouth knows how much psychic anguish I am experiencing right now. did they have to do that. was it not enough to give venat 12 disciples and tell you about them in a place called anamnesis. that word doesn't mean that yet. why are you using it. who is she a messiah for

[colorisbyshe]

Have you ever felt that you're "outgrowing" fandom? I used to be an avid fanfic reader/writer when I was in my teens, I began selling fanart in my mid-twenties, and I was kind of a BNF in one fandom. But I just can't muster that kind of energy anymore? I have other concerns now and beyond liking posts here and there I just don't engage fandom like I used to. I wonder if it's part of "growing up" but if that's up, why do so many adults have heated arguments with teens over cartoon characters? 💀

i have no idea what a BNF is but... yeah

Listen, when you're younger, fandom just... has a lot more to offer?

First off, kids tend to have much more free time. Fandom fills it up.

More free time and less of a sense of self = more room for fandom. Fandom offers a vague social structure where you can engage with people and project onto characters (or... real people or songs or worlds or whatever) and explore your sense of identity. Relating to a character (et al) and meeting other peopel who relate to the same person/thing means evaluating who you are, in a way.

As you come more into yourself (and run out of the same amount of free time), you need that less. You form more relationships based on more levels of humanity than "We relate to the same fictional construct" and have an identity that is more complex and self-actualized, so you don't need to sum it up as "It's like I'm Bucky Barnes meets Ash Ketchum" or whatever the fuck. You don't need fandom or media as a crutch to understand yourself anymore.

The same way as I've gotten older, I don't really NEED "representation" the same way I did when I was 12, 15, 21. I don't need to see bisexuality on the screen or nonbinary people or whatever else to feel "validated" because I'm already at a place where... I know who I am and don't need any reflection of my humanity outside of my own.

And the reason why some other adults don't get there is a. they don't have that sense of self or b. they don't have real life communities that actualize themselves with (like friend groups, family units, even work spaces) OOOOOR c. they DO have those things but enjoy the power fandom spaces might offer them (ie younger audiecnes who defer to their "elder" status, followings they might craft if they make fanworks).

Fandom in and of itself isn't harmful or bad for adults to be in. Like... I still enjoy talking about my interests with people, gushing about things like headcanons. Fandom, fanfic, fanart, and other fanworks are all... like "junk food" (I don't like this term because I don't thinka ny food is "junk" but it's nice shorthand here).

Junk food, comfort food has value. There's nutrition there. ANd the cheap and easy flavor is great. But as you get older, you often crave it less or can also appreciate much richer fare. You balance it out with nicer meals. CAuse only eating junk food upsets the stomach.

It's good to eat... just... not all the time. You can continue to like it but your body and brain don't utilize it the same way anymore.

But when you're younger, cheap and easy is sort of the BEST possible thing a food can be. You can live on monster, ramen, and fritos.

You can't sustain your entire life on it (I tried and had to get my gallbladder out because of that... whoops) but for periods of your life, going ham and overindulging is like... peak existence.

That's... fandom. That's creating a sense of self out of what you consume. Fandom is a shortcut to self actualization that works when you're still figuring shit out, it's popcorn, it's quick and easy. But if it's all you have (or most of what you have)--for hobbies, for a social life, for a sense of self--as an adult, you're doing yourself a disservice and it's unhealthy.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Reparative Reading

I would love, and indeed have been meaning for a long time, to talk about a piece of academic writing from one of my favourite theorists that I think has an ongoing relevance. This is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” first published in the mid-to-late 1990’s and compiled in her 2003 monograph, Touching Feeling. There’s a some free PDFs of it floating around (such as here) for those who want to read it in full – and I would recommend doing so, despite its density in places, because Sedgwick has a marvelous critical voice.

Sedgwick’s topic of contention in this essay is the overwhelming tendency in queer criticism to employ what she thinks of as a paranoid methodology – that is, criticism based around the revelation of oppressive attitudes, and that sees that revelation not only as always and inherently a radical project, but the only possible anti-oppressive project. This methodology is closely related to what Paul Ricoeur termed the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and identified as central to the works of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, which were all progenitors of queer criticism. Sedgwick objects to the fact that the hermeneutics of suspicion had, at her time of writing, become “synonymous with criticism itself,” rather than merely one possible critical approach. She questions the universal utility of the dramatic unveiling of the presence of oppressive forces, pointing to the function of visibility itself in perpetuating systemic violence, and identifying the work of anti-oppression as one based in a competition for a certain type of visibility. She also rejects the knowledge of the presence of oppression alone as conferring a particular critical imperative, instead posing the question, “what does knowledge do?”

As an example, Sedgwick critiques Judith Butler’s commentary on drag in Gender Trouble, one of the works that she uses as an example of a reading based in a paranoid approach. She identifies Butler’s argument that drag foregrounds the constructed aspect of gender as a paranoid approach, due to its focus on revelation of structures of power and oppression, and she finds Butler’s argument lacking in its neglect in acknowledging the role that joy and community formation play in the phenomenon of drag. Near the end of the essay, she also does an example of a reparative reading of the ending of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, claiming that the narrator’s remove from the traditional familial structure and its temporality is precisely what confers his particular moment joy and insight upon discovering that his friends have aged. Broadly, Sedgwick rejects the implication that readings based in joy, hope, or optimism are naïve, uncritical, or functionally a denial of the reality of oppression.

Now, it’s important to note that the message of this essay is not that paranoid readings are bad, and reparative readings are good. Sedgwick is drawing on a body of affect theories (most prominently Melanie Klein’s) that posit the reparative impulse as dependent on and resulting from the paranoid impulse – reparation by definition is something that can only occur after some kind of shattering, and Kleinian trauma theories generally posit that process as something that produces a new object or perspective than pre-trauma. (Something I love about Sedgwick is that she often sets up these binaries that seem at odds with each other, but end up being mutually dependent.) Furthermore, the critical tradition in queer studies that Sedgwick is critiquing in this essay is one that was itself, in many ways, a manifestation of communal trauma, particularly with the impact of the AIDS crisis. Sedgwick herself acknowledged this last point in a later essay, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” claiming that she didn’t feel she did a good enough job of identifying the AIDS crisis as a driving force behind this trend. So Sedgwick is not discounting the utility of paranoid readings, but rather rejecting the notion that they ought to encompass all of criticism. (In fact, a running theme in Touching Feeling is her representation of various perspectives and methods as sitting beside one another, rather than hierarchically.) And reparative reading, as Sedgwick portrays it, is not the denial of trauma or violence, but a possibility for moving forward in its wake.

Why am I taking the time to outline all of this? Because, while the original essay was written almost 25 years ago, with the academic community in mind, it reflects a similar pattern that I see now in online fandom.

Queer fandom (as that’s what I feel the most qualified to talk about) has a considerable paranoia problem. Queer fandom is brimming with traumatized people who carry varying degrees of personal baggage and are afflicted by the general neuroses that come from existing in a heterosexist, cissexist society. And many people in fandom have been repeatedly burned by the treatment of queer people in media – Bury Your Gays, queerbaiting, queercoded villains, etc. And in such a media landscape, and within such a communal sphere, much of fandom has developed the kind of “anticipatory and reactive” method of media criticism that Sedgwick identifies in this essay.

Fandom gets very excited for new media, certainly, and is prone to adulation of media that seems to fit its ideological beliefs. But it is also very quick to hone in on any potential representative flaw, and use that as a vehicle for condemnation. (This cycling between idealization and extreme, bitter jadedness has been widely commented on). Not only is there a widespread moralistic approach in fan criticism that is very invested in deeming whether or not a piece of media is harmful or not, “problematic” or not, within a simplistic binary framing, but that conclusion is so frequently the end of the conversation. “This is problematic,” “this is bad representation,” “this falls into this tired and harmful trope,” etc, is treated as the endpoint of criticism, rather than a starting point. This is the spectacle of exposure that Sedgwick critiques as central to the paranoid approach – simply identifying the presence of oppressive attitudes in a text is not only treated as an analytic in and of itself, but as the only valid analytic. So often I have seen people jump to take the most pessimistic possible approach to a piece of media, and then proceed to treat any disagreement with that reading as in and of itself a denial of structural homophobia, as naïve, and as not being a critical enough reader/viewer. “Being critical” itself has been taken on as a shorthand for this particular process, which many others have commented on as well.

Now, again, I want to stress that taking issue with this totalizing impulse is not discounting the legitimate uses of identification and exposure, or even of reactivity and condemnation. There are particular contexts in which these responses have their uses – in Sedgwick’s words, “paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.” But that approach has a finite scope. And rejecting the universal application of this particular analytic does not itself constitute a denial of the existence of oppression, or its manifestation in media and narratives. Nor is it about letting particular works “off the hook” for whatever aspects they may have that are worthy of critique. Rather, it’s a call to acknowledge that other critical approaches exist, and that the employment of a more optimistic approach is not necessarily a result of ignorance or apathy about the existence of oppression. It is one that invites us not to lay aside paranoia as an approach, but recognize that it has limited applicability, and question when and how our motives might be better served by another approach.  

I think that “is this homophobic, yes or no?” or “is this good representation, yes or no?” are reductive critical approaches in and of themselves. But I think there’s also room for acknowledgment that not everything needs to be read through a revelatory lens regarding societal oppression at all. Rather than “what societal attitudes does this reflect back?” being the approach, I think there could be a good bit more “What does this do for us? What avenues of possibility does this have?” I think there’s already been leanings in this direction with, for example, the reclaiming of queercoded villains, with dialogues that treat those characters not as reflections of societal anxiety and prejudice, but rather as representative of joy and freedom and possibility in their rejection of norms and constraints. I’d like to see that approach applied more broadly and more often.

Let’s try to read more reparatively.  

[idrellegames]

(Part 1) Hi, I've been following this project since it was Dragon Age themed, and today I wanted to say how much your post today meant to me. I'm a sex-repulsed, highly romantic ace. While I haven't experienced the professional acephobia you have, as a consumer of fiction I have seen its effects. Often in the interactive fiction genre, I feel like there isn't a place for me. I don't think I've read a single one that has an explicitly ace character, let alone as romance options.

(Part 2) When playing I either have no choice in whether my character and their partner have sex, or I'm giving the option to avoid that, but the narrative and the characters still talk like it's happening off screen or will happen at some point. It's hard not to feel like the characters I'm romancing wouldn't actually like me if the game allowed me to be myself. What I'm trying to say is thank you, I know that post was hard to make, but it means a lot to me to know Wayfarer will be better.

Hi anon,

Thank you for sending this message and thank you for sharing your experience. I am with you on how much of a struggle it can be to be ace and to want to consume and enjoy romantic media. I have also felt the lack of a space for me not just in interactive fiction, but any RPG that includes romance. As a writer, I can see why, especially in large scale video games: writing happens quickly, shorthands are employed and romances are constructed in way that are accessible to the largest amount of players. Which means relying on default assumptions about the player character and, in this case, the default is allosexual.

I've noticed a basic formula in RPGs that include romance. This starts with BioWare's games, but I’ve seen it in plenty of other places, including interactive fiction. The scene structure follows a basic arc:

Initial flirt(s)

Romanceable character acknowledges their feelings for the player character 

Player initiates the first kiss

Some padding scene inbetween while the player increases approval points and the main story happens 

Player initiates a sex scene 

No new material for a really long time while the player does story missions

The player reaches endgame and the final mission and there’s one final interaction between the player character and the romanceable character 

Now of course some games go outside this formula or change it up, but most games I find construct their romances around a sex scene as its climax (I swear this is not an intentional pun, I'm just using writing vocab!). This is the point where the player character and the RO are "official" and everything that comes after is just extra padding. All of the character development came before the initial sex scene and once that sex scene occurs, there's no more need to continue romantic development. 

It's similar to the structure of romantic comedies where the story ends with the leads getting together and we never see what happens afterwards (this isn't limited to film, this structure has a long history within theatre stretching back to Shakespeare's comedies and before).

As an ace player, it can be jarring. I can never quite perfectly roleplay as ace because the game assumes that my character wants and needs sex. Which sometimes I don't mind (I play a lot of different types of characters in my RPGs) but sometimes it also just gets tiring. The kinds of important conversations that happen in real life--conversations about wants, needs and sexual compatibility--don't happen in this kind of fiction, especially in the mainstream. 

Either the writers never considered it a valuable thing to explore, or they didn’t feel they could explore it, or they simply didn’t think of it because they didn’t KNOW about it. Which is why ace rep is so important--the more exposure allosexual game writers have to ace romances in fiction, the more they will be able to learn how to construct an interactive romance arc that is ace-inclusive and doesn't make assumptions about sex and romance being intrinsically intertwined. I can say from my experience in the professional field, 95% of the time asexuality is shot down is because of misconceptions, lack of knowledge or plain ignorance.

(As a side note, conversations about sexual compatibility and what the people involved in a relationship want and need out of that relationship is important for everyone, not just ace folks. It is something I would like to see more of in media instead of assuming that the people in the relationship are 100% on the same page just because they're in a relationship.)  

When I look back on the romances I enjoyed the most in gaming, I think about how I gravitated towards Solas and Josephine's romances in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Their romances do not have sex scenes and while there is language that implies that there may have been a sexual aspect to their relationship, it is left up to the player's interpretation. That is the closest that I have gotten to roleplaying an ace character, at least in mainstream gaming.    

Romances are only one small part of Wayfarer's structures, but I am trying my best to create a system that does not make assumptions about the player. That's why I have different sets of icons and text (depending on whether you want to go with a result that implies sexual attraction or one that implies romantic attraction) and you are never locked out of choosing either option. Both will be available, so you can roleplay a character who is demisexual or gray-ace or any other ace character who occasionally feels sexual attraction or chooses to engage in sex.

Friendship arcs are just as important as romance ones, and they give different content that will be just as entertaining and fulfilling as the romances. You do not need to romance any character to get the best version of their story and romance is not an indication of how "close" the MC is to any of the main cast. 

There will be faults in this system. I know I will inevitably mess up and something will be missing or lacking (or it will get too difficult to code). And I also realize that aromanticism has been absent from this discussion and I am working on a way to include that in the game. 

It's become incredibly important to this project that I create a system that thinks outside the box and gives the player agency in how they engage with romance.  

[esonetwork]

The Alpha Male Isn't

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/the-alpha-male-isnt/

The Alpha Male Isn't

You may have run into one of these guys.

Alpha Male Aquaman

They’re big, maybe bearded, scowling. “I am a dominant Alpha male by nature,” they say. “I’m a Bull… a primal hunter. I have no time for any liberal/democrat rhetoric or narrative. I don’t support BS movements and I bow to no one. I am a man’s man.”

They may have the suits, the Ray Bans, the Harley Davidsons, or the Hummers, but they’re not Alpha Males.

Why? Because there is no such thing as an Alpha Male.

And if you haven’t run into one in real life (or you aren’t under the delusion that you are one of those guys) you see them all over popular entertainment, and in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Comic Book movies in particular.

Captain Alpha Male

SF & Fantasy movies are littered with straight-up badasses that all the guys picture themselves as wanting to be (or, in their dreams, actually are). Conan the Barbarian. Captain Kirk. Batman. Tarzan. Aquaman. Wolverine. James Bond (not Fantasy? Think again, my friend!)

The list goes on. Surely these examples, as fantastic as they are, are pure and simple Alpha males?

The answer, my friend, is still; No.

So, how is it that I can say this with such certainty? It’s because the whole concept of the “Alpha Male” originally came about from research on wolves. Research that, it turns out, was flawed.

Rudolf Schenkel wrote about social structure and body language among wolves in 1947. Schenkel studied wolves at the Basel Zoo in Switzerland, where up to ten wolves were kept together in an area of 10 by 20 metres. He saw that the highest ranked female and male formed a pair, and that the hierarchy could change.

“By continuously controlling and suppressing all types of competition within the same sex, both ‘alpha animals’ defend their social position,” Schenkel wrote.

According to another well-known wolf researcher, David Mech, it was Schenkel’s work that gave rise to the idea of the alpha wolf, according to The International Wolf Center website.

Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman

In 1970, the book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species was published, written by David Mech. It was a success. The book helped to popularize the alpha concept, which was soon adopted to human interaction.

The idea of an Alpha Wolf feeds naturally into human interaction. Among any group of men there is always a leader. The expression “Top Dog” is an idiom for the boss. In a competition, it is also the favorite or the one expected to win, and the opposite of the underdog. It may be a shorthand reference for a dominance hierarchy.

And it’s natural that male leaders would lionize themselves as “Alphas” and assume that this means that they represent some sort of superiority either in physical power, emotional dominance or, in a disturbingly high number of cases, genetic supremacy.

But it’s all nonsense.

You see, the research done on the wolf pack structure in the 60s and 70s was mainly done on wolves in captivity. These wolves were not necessarily related and were kept in an unnaturally small area.

Since that time, Mech had studied wild wolf packs on Ellesmere Island in Canada for 13 summers. He discovered that what was commonly called the alpha pair was simply the parents of the rest of the pack. As parents, they consequently led the pack’s activities.

Peggy Carter as Captain Britain

“Dominance fights with other wolves are rare, if they exist at all. During my 13 summers where I observed the pack, I saw none,” Mech wrote in an article entitled “Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs”.

The male will hunt on his own only when the female is nesting with the young cubs. And the male needs to hunt a lot because he ends up having to bring the majority of what he catches home to the family. When the cubs are older the male and the female share hunting duties equally. The cubs begin to hunt as well but they are not yet skilled at it so will hunt in packs until they get better, then will hunt on their own. But a young male hunting on his own does not catch much. It’s tricky for the lone wolf to survive and often times he only does because wolves are physiologically designed to survive on very little.

So what does all this do to the idea of the human “Alpha Male”? Well, it pretty much lets the air out of it.

You see, according to current research, humans look for some dominance in a potential partner, but only to assure that the potential mates are good providers. What turns out to be more of an attraction is kindness

T’Chala as a kinder, gentler Star Lord

The conclusions of a study by Jerry Burger and Mica Cosby suggest that woman do not want a demanding male, and only 12 percent wanted an aggressive person for a date and romantic partner.

Dominance is attractive, but beyond that, the big winners were easygoing and sensitive.

So, what does this mean for our SF, Fantasy and Comic Book heroes?

Well, what it means is just what we see happening. Less emphasis on the unattainable ideal of the “Alpha” hero, and more situations where men and women work together, and where sometimes the women take on the dominant role. More stories where consideration and kindness towards others wins the day over brute force.

More heroes like Captain America, Wonder Woman, Black Widow, Michael Burnham, or Frodo Baggins, who is no one’s conventional idea of an Alpha Male, but is a hero nonetheless. Peggy Carter as Captain America and Steve Rodgers as her devoted sidekick. T’Challa as Star Lord, who’s compassion, and sensitivity, paired with his action hero skills, helps make the galaxy a better place (and who even talks… TALKS… Thanos out of his idea to cull half the population of the galaxy).

The world is changing, slowly but surely and the whole idea of the “Alpha” male is slowly fading into irrelevance. Now and again we hear the plaintive cries of outraged fanboys who are desperate to hold on to the status quo, but it’s all for nought. Things are proceeding apace and those who cling to the past will get pulled further and further away from the “Now”.

There are no “Alpha” males. Might does not make right. One does not become dominant by being aggressive, demanding, or intimidating. These traits are, by and large, disagreeable.

Just like that other Rogers; Fred… Mister Rogers… said: When things get scary, don’t look for the “Man’s Man”… “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

[seeminglyseph]

trying to address my brain fog by reading about greek mythology. I’ve found I can watch very few videos on the subject because of the absolute surety people will say absolute bullshit without any acknowledgement of how much we don’t know, how much history and mythology is missing, and do not at any point acknowledge the holes in their research. I swear I hear the words “Persephone only had one myth” and I go a little crazy.

though that being said I do find ganymede really interesting and I know what he’s supposed to represent and that he’s the very root of the word ‘catamite’ but... as his exact age is not directly addressed I can make him a really young looking twink, and technically since Zeus stopped him from aging physically he could be any age. Honestly I like the idea of a ganymede who has grown old in mind and cynical about the world. also helps that there are a few stories where Eros cheats him though I haven’t read the full writings, it could be interpreted as a frustration with Eros inspiring Zeus’ attraction. (though it is interesting to try and think of what the most beautiful mortal should look like. I think the main descriptions are like... ‘young, prince, shepherd, fair haired, so fucking pretty’ I’ll have to look at some greek male models to try and get an understanding for a good face structure. I need to do that regardless because there are far too many greek gods with button noses and tiny chins in modern art. though I admit I have some trouble translating the completely straight bridge into art. I keep thinking ‘it must dip in from the brow’ but nay tis not the case in a lot of art so hopefully I can find some references from multiple angles.

also I have to get better at drawing curly hair because also there are too many greek gods in modern art with straight hair (though admittedly it’s easier to draw ‘cause it’s got no texture or definite shape, you can ignore straight hair for the most part when you’re drawing, and hide a lack of skill easier.) I also need to learn how to draw beards because I do appreciate that most adult male greek gods were drawn with beards. you know to symbolize their strength and masculinity and stuff. but they are hard to draw and I need to figure out different styles for different gods. I think it’s mostly Dionysus, Hermes and Apollo of the main gods that don’t have beards entirely to emphasize their youth and beauty (hence Dionysus losing the beard when adapted to myths where he’s a younger beauty, old old Dionysus had a beard and represented a lot more than I can ever hope to know because of the nature of time and the loss of information. I am giving him horns back though)

I need to sort through the headwear that set the women apart. Hera and Persephone both have a sort of diadem which makes sense since they’re queens, Aphrodite has like a band holding her hair up, Athena has a war helmet.... I know everyone had shorthand clues for less detailed art (trident, hades’ dual headed spear, zeus’ lightning, hermes’ hat so on...) so I want to find a way to keep those things in the character designs somehow. it’s hard sorting art sometimes because so much has been mislabeled and so much art the online source has since been deleted and ‘all pottery art looks the same’ and it’s like ‘here’s zeus reigning as king’ and it’s hades but he’s in a throne so like assumptions were made. And everyone thinks modern aesthetics should effect ancient hades, yes he was dark robed and mysterious but he wasn’t the weird skinny goth of the brother kings. he just like.... doesn’t have as many myths and was faithful to his wife. Didn’t need a story about why you should respect the god of the dead, whether you feared him or not doesn’t matter in the end when he takes possession of your soul.

In general I need to do so much research on poseidon, poor guy I know like none of his myths.... but I’m landlocked and afraid of the ocean so it kind of adds up. even the myths I do know are confusing because like where DO cyclops come from? fuck the illiad and the odessey are so long and require so much active thinking while reading to translate the sentence structure. And the books that summarize or retell myths in a modern language tend to...leave me feeling like I heard a second or thirdhand story and since they aren’t exactly essays with sources and footnotes I end up like ‘okay where is it that Zeus makes the decision to make Zagreus his heir?’ all I can find is that he was made heir and held the lightning bolt which enraged hera, but I swear there was a particular reason Zagreus was put on the throne and now I’m wondering if it wasn’t just ‘Zeus had a shiny new kid and was tired of people threatening to overthrow him so he made the kid the heir to shut everyone up’ trying to find stories about how zeus and demeter ended up having a child indicates that it was definitely rape but like..... it just goes back to demeter taking her daughter back not how zeus came to have sex with her in the first place? though sometimes it’s interpreted as the snakes? Zeus turning into a snake to have sex with both Demeter and Persephone gives me a feeling one myth got split into two but it’s hard to do research when you are....... not a researcher. and doing it casually with various websites that have archives of data and images. I don’t even know where to start looking into academic essays.

ahhh I know there’s shit talking about having things of cultural significance written down and colonialism but not knowing linear b or what happened in the dark ages is probably going to be my villain origin story. ‘hi yes I invented time travel to figure out the mythology that got lost’ like especially when it comes to trying to split off the christian influences (sorry norse mythology, it’s almost impossible to count what all the christians wedged in there sometimes)

also my knowledge of the heroes is really limited I found the gods way more interesting but I do need to figure out all the stories of like theseus and heracles in order to get the fullest story of the gods. I know the bare bones of heracles but I swear there was a prophecy he would overthrow his father but all I can find is the prophecy about metis’ hypothetical future son. which would be interesting to work with because as far as I’m aware you can’t actually avoid prophecy and if you do something to prevent a prophecy from happening it actually causes the prophecy to happen, right? and last I checked metis was still alive in there, acting as Zeus’ advisor and having forged Athena’s armour.

there’s so much information I need to learn before I start figuring out what to disregard to make up my own story... people are gonna complain about my Dionysus but I do not care, I liked him when he drove people mad for not respecting him and was a god of undesirables.... y’all can think the guy on my calf is there to get wasted but it is my own tiny declaration of rebellion. (I have in my head this idea of Hellenization of Dionysus being a plot point. since Zeus had already decided Dionysus would be the god of wine and relief from stresses, I see Dionysus returning to mt olympus grown and more serious than what zeus wanted with horns that both reminded him of Zagreus and of a more serious and dangerous kind of god. So his horns are broken off and he’s influenced to function among the olympians in a more agreeable fashion until you know... a return to sorts. It’s not a fully planned story and it’s is partially inspired by the lyrics ‘they broke your throne/they cut your hair’ and so on. maybe I am very angry and projecting that anger onto Dionysus but I like it... there’s so much work to do before I can even think of publishing a finished product in some form that my little fictional universe of greek gods can adapt to what I emotionally need in a story being constructed in my head?maybe it’s cathartic to be angry at a dad who is a fictional representation of the king of the gods and not dead in a small box in my parents room.

Also I feel like Dionysus is one of those gods who’s been ‘prettied up’ so much he’s almost unrecognizable and combined with the myths about him being raised as a girl it’s a really relatable idea to have him be forced to perform a version of himself that is untrue to gain approval from his family, but burning up with anger and pain inside until.... I guess in the fictional universe I am creating he starts a rebellion and a new war of the gods? which means I have to research each god thoroughly to figure out whether they’d be with Dionysus or Zeus. (kind of where Ganymede comes in as another man forced into a role of perpetual youth for the enjoyment of others, comes in as a co conspirator. like I know sometimes he’s also the constellation aquarius but I’m thinking... what better ally for the god of wine than Zeus’ official cup filler? I think they would have an ability to connect.)

[hangingslothcentral]

Here’s what writing an episode of Spirit Box Radio looks like...

If you’ve ever wondered how episodes of Spirit Box Radio are written, here’s a little overview of that process!! If you like this, I can also write up a similar breakdown of the sound design process!

Most, but not all, episodes are born in the ‘Episodes’ section of the Show Bible. The Show Bible is a document of epic proportions - 50k in length and growing every day - which contains all the essential information about the show, from the continuously evolving methods I use to edit different character voices as I learn more and more about audio editing and production, right to ‘sketches’ of the episodes for all three series of the show. There is also a large section called ‘Ideas and Notes’, where I’ll write freeform dialogue between characters and keep track of themes and ideas to try and keep them consistent. These are all numbered, and referenced in a seperate spreadsheet I have of all the characters with significant and/or speaking roles in the show.

The full break down is under the cut!!!

The grandaddy of the the plans in the Show Outline, where I go over all of the main ideas I want to be talking about in the show and roughly mark out the outline of the shape of each season. The first draft of the Show Outline was very messy and rough, but subsequent versions are broken down into Season-by-Season chunks, all talking from a multi-series perspective so as to place the ideas of the show along a three-series-long arc.

Season Outline

Season Outlines take those ideas for the shapes of the series from the Show Outline and refine them further from a beginning-to-end-perspective. I'm a goal-oriented writer, which means my story ideas tend to come from a very ‘the end’ kind of place, and the stories that lead up to that ending are all about serving that ending. Quite often the ending itself changes a long over the planning and writing process for me, but that’s the great thing about a plan! Once you have it, you can change it if you need to. What a plan does, however, is provide you with a framework for understanding what bits of a story you have, and what bits you still need to make.

The three seasons of Spirit Box Radio are quite deliberately split into two halves. There are lots of reasons why and one of them is that it gives you a very specific kind of shape to be working from. A season with a mid-season break has a part one which has it’s own escalation of tension and climax, which comes at the mid-point of the season-long escalation, where the story might otherwise sag a little.

Beyond splitting the plan into Parts 1 & 2, I typically also break episodes into ‘Blocks’. This is partly practical; I can refer in conversations with my guest writers to where it falls in a specific block of episodes, and where that block fits in the story as a whole, and it also makes splitting up the episodes for sending out scripts to my actors a lot more straight forward. Part 1 of Season 1, for example, was broken into three blocks; episodes 1.1-1.7; 1.8-1.13; 1.14-1.20. I won’t go into detail about how this effects the structure of the episodes themselves, but it’s usually about building characters up to making a certain decision, or following a certain subplot more closely before pulling away.

Episode Sketch

A ‘sketch’ is a very brief summary of what needs to happen in that specific episode. This can be concrete, like ‘find [x] item’, or vague, like ‘establish that Character A has Trait Y’. Sometimes I’ll make a note to include a specific sound or character beat, or I’ll reference a noted scene from the ‘Ideas and Notes’ i think would fit in there. It’s usually at the sketch summary stage that I figure out whether or not there will be other characters in a specific episode. The sketches for almost all of the episodes in Season One were written between August and October 2020.

Episode Plan

This stage takes those necessary elements from the sketch and fleshes them out into a coherent story. The key thing about podcast episodes is that they have to be able to be entertaining on their own, minute by minute, as well as serving the whole series (I talked a lot more about this in the last episode of Hanging with the Sloths on Patreon which is only £2/equivalent pcm to access if you’re interested!!)

Whilst I’m making my episode plan, I’ll look back at the sketches for the episode I’m working on and those before and after it, and refer to the series outline where I can, to make sure I’m keeping a handle not just on the individual pacing of the episode, but the pacing of the show overall.

I like to have Episode Plans done by about a month before I need to have a script finished.

The Script Itself

Spirit Box Radio scripts are either agonising or happen in the blink of an eye. I do not have a set approach to how I write an episode. Sometimes the plans come with sections of dialogue written months before and I’ll drape the rest of the episode around those moments and see where I end up. If there is a character other than Sam in an episode, I’ll typically attempt to write that section of the script before the rest, so that I’ll definitely have it locked by the time I need to send it to the actors. 

Any script that is for other actors (i.e. not me) has to have notes, direction, and additional information included to help the actors give their best performance. That’s difficult sometimes because I guard my show secrets closely, so it’s often a game of working out how much I can tell an actor without including spoilers for later important plot points unless absolutely necessary, and how to supplement gaps in their information. I’ll usually compare a character to a character from something else as a shorthand for performance.

This means there are two versions of every script which needs to be seen by people who aren’t me. My scripts, which I call the master scripts, have all my audio cues, breaks for drinking water in recording sessions, character notes that are Top Secret, sound scaping ideas, specific sounds I’ll need to use at different moments, and specific audio cues. As I get better at sound design, my version of the script only gets messier and messier to look at. Sometimes, when I’m writing scripts, I’ll actually even start with sound design notes now!!

Script Locking

This is the point at which a script can no longer be changed. Scripts with other characters in them have to be locked before scripts for just Sam, because they need to go out to actors and I need to ensure that I have time to go back and ask them to redo things if necessary, and also to make sure they have proper time to rehearse and organise read-throughs as they’d like to. That means sometimes sections of an episode are locked way before other sections are even written. This can be challenging as a writer because sometimes I’ll come back to a section which I know still needs work, and find I’m extremely limited in what I can do because I’ve already sent an actor a script to record from - sometimes for later episodes, I’ll have the lines from otheres already recorded and ready to go before I finalise some of Sam’s lines for a specific episode.

Sam is recorded a minimum of three weeks before an episode is due to air, and I’ll record in 3-episode stints, usually. I like to have the scripts locked a week before I record so I have time to read them through at my own pace, but sometimes I won’t manage to have them locked until three days out. On one hateful occasion, I threw out an entire script after I’d recorded an episode and re-recorded the whole thing the day before airing. I do not recommend doing this and whilst I am much happier with the result it was an agonising experience because once I’d rewritten and re-recorded that episode I then had to edit it before it was due for release, a process which takes about six hours minimum. I was making tweaks until 20 minutes before the episode went live. Do not recommend.

Editing

Speaking of editing, the final stage of writing an episode actually happens in the cutting room. Sometimes episodes are simply Too Long. Sometimes stuff that worked on paper just don’t work in audio. Sometimes I can’t say a word correctly for the life of me and have to cut a whole sentence to cover it over. More rarely, but still often enough an occurence it bears mentioning, I’ll realise in the editing process that a conversation is better in a different order than the one given in the script, and pull and move around the dialogue to adjust the flow. Sometimes I’ll move sections about a bit to accomodate similar problems with narrative flow.

Annnnd that’s it! That’s what the process looks like!

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia! I'm a huge fan of your work and deeply enjoying FFS rn, it really shows the love and care you've put into this world and characters and it's an amazing read 🥰🧡

Idk if you've actually answered this question before or if it's a bit too much? So feel free to skip it. Do you have any advice on how to write a therapist and sessions with them? And to go along with that, a therapist&patient relationship that doesn't feel inauthentic but that's a healthy one?

I've had to visit both psychiatrists and psychologists a couple of times along my life, which has almost always been a positive experience to me, but when I get down to business and want to write a character going to therapy, I fall into a bunch of the psychoanalytic clichés US films have hammered us down with, even if I'm not from an Anglophile country!

Thanks a bunch in advance!! Ilu, have a nice start of the year🧡✨

Hiya anon!

I have a few thoughts about writing therapy sessions so I’m just going to put them down in no particular order.

Firstly, I don’t actually think it’s always a good idea to write therapy in stories, and a lot of the time I avoid writing it even when a character is actively seeing a therapist. This is particularly true in The Wind that Cuts the Night where all we see of Alex and his therapist are snippets, and nothing more than that, because therapy sessions would slow down the pacing, focus and value of the story.

Where possible, characters don’t see therapists, but talk to people in a way that is therapeutic, usually with love interests or members of the ensemble cast (Augus and Fenwrel in The Court of Five Thrones, Jack and Eva in The Golden Age that Never Was, Jack and North in From the Darkness We Rise/Into Shadows We Fall, Cullen and Cassandra, Cullen and Bull in Stuck on the Puzzle). All of those characters need therapy, but writing therapy sessions tends to slow down the pace of a fic pretty dramatically, and even I had misgivings about writing Efnisien’s sessions with Dr Gary at first because I’m acutely aware of the fact that:

1. Therapy sessions can be draggy and boring 2. They often take away important emotional realisations from other characters, ruining potential hurt/comfort and character relationship development moments with your actual cast / love interests 3. Fiction is meant to be fiction, not reality. 4. A lot of therapy sessions are actually not that interesting to sit in or write or observe, which is why writers do often find themselves falling into certain cliches while writing them to make them more interesting. Even I cut out huge chunks of sessions to get to the more interesting parts, lol. 5. You can write a character going to therapy without writing the therapy. You can just choose to have the character remember bits and pieces of the session later as it’s relevant to their life. 6. Therapy is different for everyone, and some readers (myself included) don’t enjoy reading it when the therapy is a kind that doesn’t resonate or feel right.

So you really need to ask yourself why you want to write therapy specifically, because a lot of the time it gets boring or - as you point out - falls into cliched territory. Writing a character going to a doctor a lot in detail for regular injections is boring. Writing them thinking about how they have to do this in brief while their love interest is sympathetic to them getting those injections is more interesting. Writing a character suffering from an illness that they need regular injections for, with their love interest comforting them? Interesting.

Falling Falling Stars is a unique fic in that Efnisien has no one before he meets Arden, except for Dr Gary and Gwyn. If you’re writing an FFS style fic, writing therapy sessions might be appropriate. It might be worth really thinking about the kind of fics you want to write, why you want to write therapy, how that will affect your pacing, etc.

If you’re still dead set on writing therapy sessions, then I have some suggestions re: writing more realistic/healthy therapy and how to find that knowledge yourself, and I don’t really know how to shorthand some of it:

1. Get books on therapy that are designed for the therapist. These are often expensive, but sometimes libraries stock them - and university libraries in particular will often have photocopy abilities (or you can just photograph the pages you need) because these books look at how sessions should be structured. Books with case studies are ideal, since they often show dialogue chains between the client and therapist. Books that obviously deal with the mental illnesses you’re planning on writing about are the most ideal.

2. With a view to this, learn about different therapeutic modalities (for example are you trying to write psychology or psychoanalysis or both? Are you writing social work? Are you writing cognitive behavioural therapy, dialectical behavioural therapy, expressive therapies, narrative therapy, transcendental therapy?) Be aware that different modalities have different session structures and learn what they are. Wikipedia is your friend, but your closest friend will be actually acquiring textbooks on the subject. This is a pretty significant financial barrier at times, I’ve been collecting books like this on psychology since like 1997.

3. Learn about your character’s mental instabilities that require them to go to a therapist and then look up the most recommended forms of therapy for your character’s specific issues. Will they suit your character? Why/why not? Will they have a therapist who realises and switches modality if it doesn’t suit? Or will they be lucky and find someone who helps them straight away?

4. All therapy sessions have a structure to them. And therapy often has a narrative arc through the course of therapy over many sessions. They should generally have the attempt at a beginning (greeting / setting up the problem to be discussed), middle (highlighting the source of conflict or inner conflict) and end (helping the client to focus on less stressful things, possible homework assigned, and potentially talking about future work/sessions). Learn this structure. Even if you’re not writing the whole session, you need to know where in the session you’re writing, beginning/middle/end will be different tonally. Structures will be different per therapeutic modality, and a therapist that knows many different modalities (like Dr Gary) will often be using slightly different structures each time depending on the character’s mood/issue.

5. In a healthy therapist/client relationship there will be the ability to discuss boundaries, grievances and the therapist won’t be revealing much about their personal life at all (unless anecdotally it’s super relevant and even then it will be deliberately vague). This is one of those things that will - in many cases - make for more boring sessions on the page, depending on the ‘client.’ For example, if you’re writing someone seeing a therapist for the first time, it might realistically take months or years before they start showing progress or trust. That’s not interesting (there’s a reason ‘therapy fiction’ isn’t a genre), so of course it’s tempting to shortcut into more dramatic moments.

*

I would say if you’re finding yourself leaning towards more cliched or dramatic forms of writing re: therapy, your writing brain may sense that the entire scene/s may not be suited to the story, and is trying to find a way to make them more interesting to yourself and the reader. If that’s not the case, then a lot more research is needed! It’s time to sink many hours into actually understanding what you’re trying to write. This doesn’t matter as much if you’re writing unrealistic or unhealthy therapy, but it’s 100% necessary when you’re trying to write healthier therapy depictions.***

Also a couple of sessions of experience is a start, but you might want to watch or find a way to watch more therapy sessions, because you’ve missed out on experiencing longer arcs, different modalities etc. (This is where my hands on experience with 19 therapists since 1995 is actually really helpful, lmao - I’ve had close to like 800~ sessions by now, with good and bad therapists; I cannot pretend that hasn’t given me a knowledge base that most people don’t share). You can still learn that stuff via research, MedCircle on Youtube is a good place to start, since it offers 30 minute snapshots on what CBT and DBT sessions will look like etc. and has some great playlists.

Most fics I’ve read don’t do a great job of depicting therapy, but the Babes!verse series by @rynfinity has probably some of the most realistic and still really interesting sessions I’ve read as an ongoing arc. The series is long, because it needs to be re: what it’s dealing with, but it’s great, and I definitely recommend looking at another example of how an author tackles these sorts of scenes. Out of the Mouths of Babes / The March of the Damned are the two intertwined series.

I apologise if this sounds discouraging overall, or daunting, but I just want to stress there’s a reason that I’m often not writing therapy in my writing, as anything more than the occasional scene with a non-therapist, or snapshots that are reflected on and that’s it. Falling Falling Stars is the exception to the rule, and unless you’re writing an exception to the rule as well, it’s really worth reflecting on the first six points I wrote - it’ll save you a fuckton of time and research. And if you go ahead with it, I wish you well! :D

*** Also disclaimer: But I still am writing very indulgent therapy that is not beholden to being either a 100% healthy or 100% realistic depiction. The fact is, real therapy sessions are pretty boring for observers except for maybe ten or twenty minutes in the middle at times.

(ETA: It’s just occurred to me that therapy fiction does exist, esp. in the mass media, but that it is - afaik - all unrealistic, dramatised or unhealthy. But if you want to watch a great show - I highly recommend In Treatment with Gabriel Byrne, just by aware that it is depicting, for the most part, unhealthy dynamics which are more character studies than anything).