#loved this one it was very suspenseful

[galoogamelady]

Cam and I have been watching some real bangers lately

[carriehobbs]

if i can be honest here this is really one of my least favourite parts of the way the romances are written. the idea that you can only really fall in love once (and both the related ideas that, if this love is real, then every other relationship you've had must not have really been love and that, if you have been in love before, your previous love somehow cheapens the current love) is so completely juvenile. it's the kind of line of thought you'd expect to see in a young adult novel marketed exclusively to 12- to 16-year-olds for whom every emotion feels like the most intense, ultimate feeling they could ever have, and who do not yet have the life experiences to understand (or appreciate) the complexities of love. "i've only ever loved this one person this way, every other feeling i've thought was love has just been a poor imitation" is a pretty thought but is ultimately a fantasy (and one that i, personally, find incredibly disrespectful towards people who have been in love and then fall in love again).

it would be one thing if this idea was espoused by only one of the characters. if only n (just as an example) bought into the idea that only one love can be your true love, then that would say something about n's character, their romantic and life history, the way they view and interpret the world, etc. but instead all of the ros seem to follow this line of thought - they've all never been in real love before, if they and the detective broke up they'd never experience this kind of love again, they're all soulmates, etc. and in that way this idea is not a characterization choice for particular characters, but an idea perpetuated by the work as a whole. and in my (biased and personal) opinion, it's a childish and unrealistic idea.

[fictionadventurer]

My desire to support a Biblical sitcom done in a respectful way vs. my hatred of the mockumentary style, FIGHT!

[writeouswriter]

Reading a fic that's so well written I wish I could close my eyes and just let the descriptions and atmosphere wash over me, but the dilemma with closing my eyes is, well, I then would not be able to continue reading this fic, now would I.

[sysig]

You’re gonna die if you keep that up (Patreon)

[thecoolerbrother]

i think something moonage daydream was really good at doing was capturing a vibe

[blujayonthewing]

so obviously on a meta level beholders and beholderkin only roll for random eyebeam attacks for game balance reasons, because 'and the beholder has a disintigration beam!! watch out!!' is dangerous in a way that's fun and exciting but 'and the boholder systematically disintigrates each of you, game over' is not, but this mechanic is very funny to me in the specific context of being able to have a gazer as a familiar which is bonded with and theoretically obedient to a player character

all day long he's telekinetically pushing things off your desk over and over like an asshole cat, using fear on passing children, sniping birds out of a flock overhead with frost rays. you get into combat. you tell him to only focus on attacking with frost rays, a thing you absolutely know he is fully capable of doing, and he just simply does not. actually he's gonna go ahead and do whatever he feels like, thanks

[neontokyoo]

Can I just say that the scariest thing about a scary movie is people screaming.

Had a mini movie party and we were watching Before I Wake, and it was just me my husband and 6 friends. And it really wasn’t that scary. But every time something freaky happened they were all screaming and one specific friend was literally bouncing off my walls. She never sat down, she was always either pacing around or she was sitting like a frog so she could start running when something creepy happened. Girl ran into a door at one point, and then another time she literally bellyflopped onto the floor, and then there was quite a while before another “scary” scene, and she literally jumped so high and flopped onto me, my husband, and her fiancé and started screaming.

I was doing fine like it wasn’t that bad at all but when she was running around being a little monster because she doesn’t do very well with creepy movies, she makes everyone else freak out, and then I feel stupid for laughing at them because I’m supposed to be screaming and crying too because it’s a sad and creepy movie, but I’m not because I think it’s hilarious when they’re all screaming because of the one friend who can’t hold still.

I have to throw scary movie parties more often because I haven’t been this entertained in a long time 🤣

[s-ccaam-era-crepe]

I would ramble about Deviser rn but I can’t describe how it makes me feel so uhh listen to Deviser <3

[jomeimei421]

please read Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint

a comic about fix-it fanfics

[thedevotionaltour]

sometimes i really cannot get over how fantastic some of the layouts and the art by gene colan is sometimes his layouts get a little Too playful for good reading but god when it's good it's great. so damn good I HAVE TO GET BACK TO 70SDEVIL. but god. just fanfuckingtastic work truly i say nothing new but well i can add forever to the admiration. so stellar

[arolesbianism]

hello gamers minor life update I have been doing Real bad lately so I will likely continue to be very inactive, but hey on the bright side I have been fleshing out some eternal gales lore I reworked a while back and I can happily say that Dodie no longer completely contradicts the very nature of reality in eternal gales and the fog tower™ officially has a real reason to exist again so hell yeah to that

[gooenthusiast]

This is probably also why so many booktok/bookstagram-famous books are (imo as an avid „actual“ reader) shitty? As in ‚books written by 13 year olds on Wattpad make more sense and are written better‘-shitty.

I‘m not going bash people for liking to read or fantasise about toxic relationships, you do you. I don‘t like it, so I don‘t read it.

But I have no idea how people could stick around for an entire book of objectively bad & inconsistent writing and like it, without doing this parapgraph skipping/ only reading dialogue thing (aka not actually reading).

Do they know that reading is not mandatory? Nobody is forcing them to read?

[aethersea]

another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.

[just-a-cinnamon-bun]

I just got a new job and I’m relieved by how much I like it so far.

[kdrama-movies-more]

That finale's Nam-soon makes me think she's actually a long lost child of Moon and Bong...