#or at the very least can fic writer's get on it

[bonaesperanza]

I saw a similar post that I can't find right now where one of the replies introduced the concept of narrative porosity.

Basically, it's not about how good the piece of media is, it's about how many threads it leaves for you to pick up and follow up on (or how many holes it has for you to fill, hence the word "porosity"). A sort of fandom equivalent to affordances in developmental psych.

If a piece of media has resolved all its character arcs and subplots and dealt satisfyingly with all its narrative themes it leaves you nothing to do. It's all tied in a bow and you can't add anything without ruining it. Lots of more highbrow media is like that because these are things something like, say, litfic or an Oscar bait movie cares about: it has a small number of characters but their psyches are explored to exhaustion and the themes are usually done well because that's litfic's Thing. (That's what makes it good, while Fast & Furious is beloved less for its intricate characterization and more for its excellent car chase sequences.)

OTOH a CW show will have straggling plot threads and characters that appear and disappear ad hoc and themes that get dropped after two seasons and minor characters that are given certain traits for variety but that turn out to have fascinating psychological implications. Mediocre media has lots of threads to pick up on because it's shoddily made and therefore undersaturated with meaning by default.

BUT that's not the only way to have narrative porosity.

Worldbuilding that only hints at certain areas of the world or gives loads of information you can expand on also increases narrative porosity because that also gives you threads to pick up on. You wouldn't call LOTR mediocre but it has a huge fandom for exactly this reason - you get to flesh out all the random blorbos from the appendices or whatever.

This is also why media dealing with institutions and hierarchies and life within them does well - it gives you scaffolding to create your own iterations on those contexts, e.g. making your own Jedi or wizard or shinigami or waterbender OC or writing about the previous or next generation or whatever. The worldbuilding is basically a grid template where only the boxes for the main characters have been filled. OTOH if I wanted to write fic for, say, the movie Anora, I can only do that by featuring the characters of Anora, otherwise it's just a story set in New York.

Having a plot-oriented piece of media means that in-depth exploration of the characters' psyche doesn't fit the genre/format, but if your thing lasts more than like three hours your characters will behave in ways and react to things and if you've made them even the least bit humanlike that can be inferred to hint at hidden depths. Tantalizing glimpses of more complex characterizations that are never paid off in canon also create porosity, because they also leave unaddressed straggling threads. There's tension there, room for a theme or a character arc that the OG writer(s) haven't put in.

I'd argue that having characters and plots fit into easily comprehensible archetypes that are relatively detached from the setting also fits because it gives you AU potential. I recently had a talk on an ASOIAF discord server about how difficult it'd be to make a modern AU version of Theon Greyjoy, because his entire personality and mindset have been shaped by the medieval institution of sending relatives as hostages to guarantee your good behavior it'd be very hard to transplant that without losing a huge chunk of his character and motivations. OTOH more universal character beats or traits: abusive parents, star crossed love, overachieving, yearning for adventure, etc. are easier to play with by making various iterations across various settings. Luke Skywalker could be a random dude from Appalachia and he could have all the character beats from the OG movies - yearning for adventure, coming into his own, encountering his estranged father who turns out to be a dick. This can happen in Ancient Greece or in Alberta, Canada or in the Horn of Africa.

The dissatisfaction people talk about is recognizing that picking up some of the threads I described above would have made for a stronger work, or at least one more interesting to you. They're unresolved and frustratingly so, they're an annoying empty hole asking you to fill it. There's a connection that could be made but wasn't. The work isn't saturated enough with meaning, or a specific thread you care about a lot hasn't been addressed.

You can also connect the work's unresolved threads with other threads inside your head - e.g. I think I would make blorbo happy (readerfic) or I think blorbo would get along with character from fandom Y or whatever. E.g. I'm obsessed with the idea of a modern AU of The Count of Monte Cristo, because I see a novel written by a mixed race man about a man twisted by unjust imprisonment and I think about the modern prison industrial complex and what it does to minorities, and I also see the lavish wish fulfillment descriptions of fast boats and cool clothes and lavish furniture and people being judged on "taste" and I think about the cottage industry that analyzes every expensive object that's ever appeared in Succession and I think a Monte Cristo modern AU would be a crowdpleaser that I would LOVE to see. That's a thread I've connected to something entirely outside the original novel that's relevant and fun to me.

OTOH I think there's a type of work that says very little in the actual text but wields its blank spaces so masterfully that you get this feeling that trying to fill them would make everything worse. The blank spaces already have meanings.

Challengers for example - a lot of its artistry is in expertly wielding the tension, in choosing what to show you and where to cut off. It does feel saturated with meaning even though it leaves so much unsaid because the "narrative whitespace" takes on a meaning of its own, like the arrow in the FedEx logo can only possibly be an arrow. It's hands down my favourite movie of the year, but I'm lowkey kind of scared to look up fic for it in case I ruin it somehow. I feel like extending the narrative beyond the movie's ending would make things less thematically resolved, like adding things to the FedEx logo might.

A lot of my favourite book series play with unreliable narrators and characters' perceptions and what is said and what is implied, and it feels almost crass to break up the way the whitespace in them is set up. I dunno, it feels like easy pickings to write a fic explicitly describing how the Regent abused Laurent from CaPri, or Gen and Irene's first night as a couple for Queen's Thief, or Lymond breaking down emotionally for the Lymond Chronicles. Like circling the FedEx arrow with a red pen and writing "arrow underneath". It kind of kills the tension, because you can already make out the shape of the missing piece from the canon, and writing it point blank kills the delicious tension in it, and perhaps even obscures the meaning and characterisation that was built into the way certain things were not said.

Sorry for the wall of text this is just a really fascinating subject for me

also this might be an unpopular opinion, but i think MOST people are actually completely able to "consume" a piece of a media without anaylzing it through a shipping lense, but i just think they than aren't likely to be posting that analysis on archiveofourown. i think for the most people what's happening is that people are like. going on fandom websites and communities and getting really annoyed they're seeing too much yaoi or whatever, and it's like there's alot of fast food at mcdonalds too, i'm sure the people eating there don't have anything else going on in there lives either

[fictionstudent]

How to read like a writer

If you’ve ever followed any Writergram accounts on Instagram or Twitter, I guess you’d have heard this advice—read like a writer.

People can’t stop glazing about how it’s one of the best pieces of advice any beginning writer could get, how it’s one of the most important skills to study prose and create your own, and all that. But, as you could’ve guessed, there’s a lot of unpacking to be done here.

What does it even mean to read like a writer? How’s it different from reading like a reader, or just for fun? And, how the frick do you even read like a writer?

I had to rant about something, and that’s the topic I’ve chosen today. So, here’s my two-cents on it.

***

#01 - The Basics

So, what does it mean to read like a writer?

I believe that reading like a writer is a form of reading prose where you’re conscious of the artistic decisions the author makes throughout the piece. For example, if there’s a high-stakes action scene, probably a fight scene or something, and you notice that the average length of sentences has suddenly become shorter and punchier.

Firstly, you need to understand that there’s a lot of such artistic decisions that writers take while writing a piece. And, every writer does that. These decisions are primarily related to writing-style, but are also focused on the story-structure, character-development, themes, and more.

For clarity, let’s divide them into two types of decisions—micro-level decisions and macro-level decisions. Micro-level decisions would include the writing-style, scene-descriptions, and all that stuff. Primarily, stuff that you can notice on the very page itself. It’d relate to the sentences instead of the plot. Refer to the example above again—that’s a form of micro-level decision.

Macro-level decision would be an artistic decision where you need to complete the whole, or a big chunk, of the piece to point them out. Such macro-level decisions would relate to the plot instead of individual sentences. For example, the decisions they’ve made regarding the plot, characters, and the underlying themes of the prose.

I tried my best to make the distinction as clear as possible. I hope you guys understand them clearly.

Anyway, each type of artistic decision would need to be checked in a different manner, y’know. To analyze macro-level artistic decisions, you’d need to probably finish the whole novel and do some research and brainstorming related to the themes of the story and the way the author discussed those said themes in their work.

It takes some time to get into the head-space to analyze the story and its themes. And, you might need to recap the story in some form or the other, y’know. At least, I need a little recap. Because generally, it takes me months to complete a novel or TV series. Or manga series. Or anime. Or anything else I need to analyze.

… And that’s because I start a lot of stuff before I finish the previous ones. Not gonna lie, I’m reading around four-five novels at the moment, a couple of which are web-novels on RR, along with three manga series. Please don't ask me why I do that, I hate it myself.

Anyway, now onto the second type: the micro-level artistic decisions. This is where you need to be really conscious while reading the work. In fact, I believe that these forms of decisions are what people generally mean when they talk about reading like a writer.

Micro-level artistic decisions, like I said earlier, include sentence-structures and writing-style of the author. And yeah, it’s really easy to slip out.

I’d like to refer to my favorite lit-fic The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, as an example. Reading the work, you’d see that the style feels… barren. The scene-descriptions are a pain to read; the vocabulary is just too hard. But, vocabulary becomes a lot easier during dialogues. That’s because the scenes are a pain to see, while the characters are losing their power to communicate effectively. I talk about it in detail in a previous blog:

But, man, maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. Maybe that’s why McCarthy wrote the descriptions in this way—to symbolize the mental stress that the characters go through as they experience this world, this form of reality that they were not meant to be in.

And maybe the novel is so lacking in narrations because the characters’ minds have gone numb. They’re forgetting language. With almost zero human interaction most of the time, they are forgetting how to think and interact in words. You lose the skills you don’t really use anymore, y’know. And these guys are so obviously depressed, so they don’t think about the world. They are used to the sad reality they live in. No point in complaining how bad the food is if that’s all you’re gonna eat all your life.

So, a scarcity of narrations tell you a lot about the story and its characters. It reflects something, it symbolizes something.

Also, if you read about Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, you’d observe how the author’s writing-style is often bland and indifferent. That says something about the characters and the plot too—it keeps the readers detached from the story, forcing them to adopt a third-person POV where they can constantly judge the plot and the characters.

Understanding the micro-level artistic decisions also include understanding the different nuances in different authors’ style. For example, sometimes you’d see that authors write scene-transitions like this,

We talked it through, and decided that it’d be the best to continue the conversation once we’re in the safe vicinity of this house. School was dangerous for such serious conversations—what if somebody hears us out and report us to the police?

So, we shut up as we boarded the bus, and twenty minutes later, we were pulling through his house’s driveway. We both stepped outside and…

Personally, I’m not a big fan of such transitions. I’d rather use three asterisks instead, like I do with my blogs here.

***

When to read like a writer and when not?

Yeah, that can be a mess. You don't need to have the writer's eye open every single time you’re reading something.

Personally, I use a trick. I only read like a writer when I feel that the piece is really different from the type of prose I generally consume, y’know. For example, I’m reading Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. The blurb says that the novel is narrated by Death, which is something quite interesting. Apparently, Death appears in the story as a character, acting as a third-person narrator.

However, the story is not third-person omniscient POV. Quite the opposite, actually, for we see the narration alternating between the thoughts of the protagonist and the all-knowing omniscient narrator Death, which makes the writing-style of the novel quite interesting.

So I read the book as a writer—all the way, I’m figuring out how the author masterfully blended both third-person limited and third-person omniscient narrative styles and used the best of both worlds to fully utilize both of them and paint such an amazing writing-style. I don't think I could ever pull that off, to be brutally honest. It’s just awesome what Zusak has pulled off in the prose.

Anyway, I derailed too much. The main point I was tryna make is that The Book Thief is different from what I usually consume—third-person limited POV web-novels. So, I do have to read like a writer. I probably won’t be reading like a writer if I was reading yet another RR web-novel or fantasy light-novel, y’know.

Another factor you might want to consider is if you like the prose or not. If you believe that you really love the novel and want to write something like it, you better study it a little. After all, you’d be writing what’s interesting to you.

A third factor: classics. If the prose is a classic, you might learn something from it. I mean, there must be some reason it’s stood the test of time, y’know, and people are still reading it. Yeah, sometimes, the style just seems outdated, and you likely won't be adapting it. But there are some gems in it too. The Great Gatsby is a really good novel to learn first-person POV.

… And that reminds me, I still haven’t finished The Great Gatsby either. Even though I’ve been reading it for more than a year.

***

#03 - Conclusion

All of this might feel a little overwhelming for you guys. I can understand that.

I mean, that’s just too much information to think about, y’know. And you might not be able to catch up on most of them. Heck, you might not be able to understand any nuances between different authors’ styles at all!

But, just don't give up, pal. It’s kinda tough out here, yeah, but that’s alright. Keep reading, keep practicing it out. You’d get there.

Keep reading and keep writing. That’s all it takes to become a great writer. But, doing both your reading and writing mindfully is what matters the most.

Subscribe to the FictionStudent newsletter to get latest blogs like this straight into your inbox. Also check out the website, as well as my Instagram and Twitter—where I might start posting soon. To be honest, I still don't know how to use social media as a writer, but I’d be trying.

Meet you in the next blog. Till then, bye-byeee!

[chocolatepot]

Saw a post about how you need to read original fiction and not just fic to write books, and I had some thoughts but they're not so much a direct response so I figured I'd make my own post ...

You do need to be conversant with original fiction to write it, but also - that doesn't mean that your fiction diet as you write needs to be primarily original fiction. If you want to write a book, you've probably spent a lot of your life reading original fiction even if you're in fandom now. That all counts. (Assuming what you want to write bears at least some resemblance to what you've read.)

Fanfiction really doesn't teach you to develop characters and settings on your own, it's true. It particularly lets you be lazy about not describing them physically, and not having to do any work for walk-on characters who exist in canon. You also can get used to writing romantic short stories that would be completely unmarketable if they were not fic.

However, fanfiction still can teach you a lot of transferable skills, if you want it to. You can write novels to stretch your ability to plot a longform story and follow through on 60k+ words. You can consciously work to improve your prose, your pacing, and/or your physical/emotional descriptions no matter what your subject matter. You can write a story that focuses on how a character changes and develops, and you can focus on a minor character from canon and do the work to make them three-dimensional. If you're into AUs, you can also work on worldbuilding or writing a believable historical setting. Literally the only thing you don't really have the opportunity to do is create your own main characters from scratch.

And I feel like that's actually the easiest part of writing. Sitting down and writing a story that lasts over 80k words or so, is compelling all the way through, has defined character arcs, etc. is way harder than making up the initial concept. If you're in fandom, you clearly Do Stories whether they're on the paper or onscreen, and so you probably have a lot of character types in your head already to start messing around with.

There was also a point in the post about how if you don't read you're not going to understand where your story fits genre-wise, and you're probably going to think that it's new and genre-breaking when it isn't - and that leads me to two thoughts. One is that not feeling able to place your own story if it crosses genres might be more common to writers than you think: it just came up in a Bestseller Experiment podcast ep I listened to the other day as a normal thing due to the writer being too close to their story. I have good comps for my novel (there's a T. Kingfisher that is incredibly similar in concept and key characters) and I still feel like "oooh ... is it more fantasy or more historical ..."

The other is that fic makes it so you're more likely to actually write something that genuinely doesn't quite fit in the boxes. That's something I've been thinking about since Winter's Orbit. That book, if you don't know, was originally written on fail_fandomanon's spinoff writing meme and posted on AO3. It was always original fiction, but it has a fic-like sensibility: there's a strong political intrigue plot alongside a strong queer romance plot between a playboy who's not really a playboy and a smol bean with trauma. If you read the GoodReads reviews from when it was published, you can find many sf fans complaining that the romance takes up too much space and romance fans complaining that there's too much plot outside the romance. I think now with the rise of "romantasy" there's more tolerance for that, but that label feels like it's getting less useful as it broadens to mean "fiction written by a woman that includes a romance" (and it feels very m/f to me but we don't have time for that now). Because so much of ficwriting fandom focuses on stories that heavily foreground romance but don't hit the traditional romance beats and also writing the characters figuring out who's committing industrial espionage or whatever. In a romance novel, the romance is absolutely the A plot and the whatever is very much B plot (if not somehow C). In sf/f and thrillers, the whatever is the A plot and the romance is around the edges. Fic teaches us to do them both equally, because the point of the story is to see the characters getting together (often not like canon, when it comes to m/m and f/f) while having a plot to deal with (like they have in canon). Also, in a lot of cases of genre-mixing, determining which one it "counts as" is really determining which one it will sell better under, and that's not something a person outside of the industry can generally tell, regardless of what they're reading on their own.

[sluttyminghao]

so, i'm not quite at 10k just yet but I do want to get a headstart on this because it's approaching quickly! i cannot believe there is almost 10,000 of you following me, reading and interacting with my work, all that fun stuff.

thank you, so so much. you honestly don't know what this means to me. anyway! now that the sappy stuff is out of the way, let's get into the celebration.

thank you also to the members of @svthub and also to @sluttywonwoo and @sluttywoozi for all being very slay and keeping me sucked into the diamond horny life ilysm

to celebrate, i'm giving you guys creative freedom to ask me anything you want! you can ask for nsfw OR sfw, but as this is a nsfw blog I will be keeping the sfw to a minimum.

here's what you can ask for:

most to least

reactions (ot13, group, solo, random mix)

drabbles (500 words or less)

send me a member x kink and ill write a drabble

send me a member x prompt of your choice and you'll get a drabble (can be nsfw or sfw)

nsfw or sfw thoughts

you can also send in as many asks as you want!

here is what I won't be doing

full fics - i do not have the time to be writing long fics right now and I'm in a terrible writers block phase right now, so any requests for fics will be deleted.

as always, pls adhere to my guidelines on what I wont write, and have fun! thanks for sticking around!

all asks will be tagged with #10k celebration if you don't wish to see the posts and want to blacklist it!

[garessta8]

yoooooooooooooooooooooooo

first, as a fellow appreciator of statistics and obsessions, I can't help but admire your work gathering the base information here. (wait, does "reading every DE fic" means you read mine, too??? @_@ shit now i really wonder what you thought of them) and as someone who read not every, but a lot of DE fics, I feel like i can give my own two cents regarding the analysis of said information.

i personally find it ironic that out of allllll Kim's problems described and addressed in the game, people choose to attach themselves most to the least addressed one. i.e. Kim being gay. he has one moment about being gay, but he's a binoclard seolite all the time, but fic writers don't care about that as much… no no no. but as you said, it's about reliability. for the sake of statistics, I'm a white cis middle class woman with terrible eyesight (-9.5 miopia + astigmatism; thank god for contact lenses, because glasses for this prescriptions are thick like actual bunoculars and inconvenient af). Out of all Kim's struggles the most relatable is the eyesight one, and even there I'm much better off because our world has way better ophtalmology. So it's not really relatable. I've almost never been ridiculed for having bad eyesight (at least that I remember), and it doesn't interfere with my lifestyle (except that I need a supply of contacts).

harry's portrait conventionally handsome lmao honestly, from the way Kim talks about Harry's age or if he shaves his moustache, Harry actually was intended to look… maybe he was conventionally handsome somtimes, but now it's shit. maybe not horrible, but shit. and don't forget, all potraits are not drawn hyperrealistically. the opposite, in fact.

anyway… concluding all that:

I agree with your analysis - it's all very on point.

that sad phenomenon results in a lot of fics that go over the same old tracks, often in a way that's borderline OOCing. it can get boring and/or just embarassing to read, sadly, which means less reading material for me but i dont't think that addressing DE's themes as the core of a given fanfic would've made for a better story to read. because they'd be same old themes that would've also probably written in very similar way and grew boring quickly. I'd rather wish that fanfic writers stepped aside from those old scenarios and explored all the "what if?"s that fanfiction allows people. There's potential for so many wild stuff, but people just write about Le Retour and Kim&Harry's post-martinaise shenanigans. And casefics (I just don't like crime mysteries sue me). And wildly misenterpret the nature of the Pale.

lame.

but… Fanfic Helps People Cope from what I've observed, similar warping of themes and characters are just as present in other fandoms. it's not just DE "problem" (i put it in quotes, because I don't think this is actually a problem) the thing is… first, not everybody is just good enough as a writer and author to explore themes they don't relate to. they might realise that, or not… their lack of ability might prevent them from realising the themes being present second, writing these themes is a hard effort, especially for people who don't relate, or would prefer to avoid them, etc etc. it's not the type of effort many people would do as a hobby (a person needs to have a certain masochistic type of personality… yeah) putting 1st and 2nd with "fanfic helps people cope" results in phenomena you've described. it's not "worrying" imo, it's just the way of nature. rain falls, wind blows, and fanfic writers ignore canon material to insert their own problems into the characters.

some opinions on fanfic trends for Disco Elysium on AO3 for the past 2-ish years; i address racism, ableism, jean and kim tropes, accesorization of harry and the way the game themes appear to have warped.

some of you may know i've been reading every fic published on the disco AO3 tag chronologically since 2019 for a little over a year and jotting down some trends (not a proper statistical study, just some tracking of when certain tropes are introduced and when and how they reproduce because i like observing that kind of thing.) there's been an uptick in trans(masc) Kim and Jean character studies since late 2022-early 2023, among many others, but these ones were like overwhelmingly prolific once they were introduced.

harry, kim and jean are overwhelmingly the characters with most fanworks in the tag. and having read a little over 4k works it turns out that people engage in a very distinct way with them for the most part that tracks with the growth of the trans Kim and Jean character studies as a trend.

the disco elysium fandom's english-language writers are, according to my cursory snooping, overwhelmingly trans, some flavor of gay, white and from north america and western europe. given personal anecdotes, i also suspect they are upper middle class (though not as statistically huge as the previous things) and struggle with mental health. in the past decade or so a lot of fanworks have followed a trend of exploration focused on catharsis and personal relatability.

now, kim and harry appear so much in the text with so much detail that there's plenty of personal details to pull from to write them, where as jean's total presence in the game (rarely achieved in one run but i'm taking into account all his mentions and lines) is smaller so it follows that people need to fill in some gaps and there's more characterization freedom. jean is white, younger than both harry and kim, canonically depressed, non-canonically confirmed by his character player an amphetamine addict but presented as a functional person during the game, and covers a very specific narrative hinge that i understand as relevant: he's a bridge between pre-Martinaise Harry and his Martinaise self.

he's objectively a very comfortable character to play with because he's mostly a blank slate except for his relation to Harry and his vitriolic grief towards him. so logistically i understand why people who struggle with mental health, are white, are anywhere between 17 and 35, are functional and able-bodied and may or may not have a complicated relationship with a close person who struggles with addiction or other health issues might go "YES, GOOD CATHARSIS NARRATIVE FOR ME". but the sheer amount of works that value Relatability over engaging with the characters or the themes has resulted in a very strong ripple. which leads to trans kim.

the game paints a deep and vivid image of kim, both from within harry's own perspectives and the objective things he says out loud. he's a walking contradiction, he's alienated from his body and selfhood, he beat himself into submission to stay alive. he's a walking reminder of his assasinated communist parents, the people who killed them paid his salary, his body (racialized, disabled) is both a hindrance to his assimilation and a tangible proof that he could have belonged somewhere but doesn't, that no matter what he does it will be considered first. so he watches his words, his movements, his appearance. so he partakes in hypermasculinity. he's canonically gay, mixed race, diasporic seolite, and disabled. and somehow, the only one of this that is recurringly explored in most fanworks is his homosexuality, usually in the form of being a guiding figure to harry or as a Fellow Gay Cop to jean, or eyes, or someone else.

now, we have the trans kim trope. my opinion on the trope isn't relevant to the point i'm trying to make, but i will say i think transmasc kim is something i enjoy in theory, i think it's a worthy exploration that works very well with the hauntings of embodiment and perception that exist in kim's canon self. but it's very jarring when all of these tales of gay trans kim refuse to engage with race, or with physical disability. like, after you've read 800 trans kim fics you start noticing how solid that avoidance is, how big the elephant in the room is, and i can't help but think that, coupled with the explorations of Jean, the issue is: the white ablebodied writer is unwilling to engage with race and disability.

my charitable reading of this is that the white ablebodied writer doesn't want to write about what they don't know, they don't want to overstep. my neutral reading of this is that the white ablebodied writer doesn't consider how sexuality and gender's material realities are tied to race and ablebodiedness in the real world because they are the Default Categories and it didn't occur to them that kim's experience of them might overlap. my least charitable reading of this without directly falling into the assumption of ill intent is that the white ablebodied writer is uncomfortable with the idea of the fact that their experience of gender and sexuality isn't universal and it's not as emotionally cathartic to think about how they might be racist and ableist because they put on horse blinders and they're trying to write things they like, and understanding this is unpleasant and doesn't belong in their feel-good hobbies.

people love to talk about kim's body without acknowledging the way asian masculinity and femininity exist in relation to whiteness when it's harry or jean in the room. people love to talk about kim's body without engaging with the power relations that exist in many disabled people's sexuality.

the tropes' strength lies in the relatability factor (very high) and the willingness of both author and audience to engage with the canon material for the characters they are writing (very low). and so you end up with a lot of jean character studies about his feelings towards harry (when everyone but kim in the game also knows both harries, but jean is prioritized consistently) and a lot of character studies about kim (that ignore most of the lived experiences of him because they're directly tied to his and his parents' race and alienation that are not particularly cathartic for the white author and reader)

one of the big themes of the game, if not the biggest, is failure. specifically it asks the player to think about what to do when you have failed and you know there are no blank slates, and asks you to empathize not only with harry, whose every thought you're privy to, but to everyone you talk to that has the same rich landscape beyond your brief interaction. when relatability is prioritized in fanworks, this question falls apart, the purpose becomes to find ways in which these characters are like you (the author, the reader) so you can afford them the level of humanity needed to feel emotions about them.

harry's tropification follows four large trends: self-loathing, aggressive addict, psychic omniscient prophet, overwhelmingly emotional and adoring puppy. some authors sometimes are capable of depicting both, usually as if they are unrelated and it's a harry-esque contradiction, but it's truly baffling how rare it is to find stories that engage with all of them or with multiple of them as inextricably bound together like canon material does. harry needs to be relatably lovable (heartbroken, self-loathing, fixable by love, fixable by the universe, capable of change that gets exponentially better) or relatably hateable (physically and emotionally abusive, manipulative, unreasonably needy).

most fics in the relatable lovability fall on the kim/harry ship, most fics in the relatable hateability fall on the jean/harry ship. here's where it ties into the big tropes for kim and jean: the fanworks about a game that asks a question about failure and questioning certainty become stories about inevitability.

jean's vitriol in the game comes from the same place as harry's self loathing: a visceral response to decades of failure. they're not objective truths (i'm thinking about the mirror reveal being intended as a way to make the viewer realize harry isn't a reliable narrator at all, but especially about himself: you see a regular guy, conventionally handsome but clearly in pain and growing old and sick. he calls himself horrible shit, however).

playing up jean's part as the Bridge is comfortable because it allows the player to separate Harry's failures from their agency as a player (something that greatly drives the point of the game home, emotionally speaking -- you're not that different from Harry. Harry's not that different from anyone else he meets. the irreversible failures exist for all of us, as do the chances to try again.) if jean is right in resenting harry, and moreover, he's objectively describing harry's behavior, harry's failures become logical and inevitable consequences of his Way of Being. if Harry calls kim a slur, or threatens children, or scares civilians, that's just because that's how Harry is (according to Jean and Harry's own brain), so the possibility that one of your tries might be meaningfully good becomes... less weighty. it's a fluke, and you'll fail again, so don't get your hopes up. it's almost an excuse to believe that there's nothing new under the sun and going back to old habits is inevitable, but the conclusion becomes "so nothing i do really matters" instead of "it's hard and painful to try again when you've failed so many times before. what does this say about the person who tries?". and in that way jean is an interesting character because understanding why he resents harry for being able to try more freely than him without the weight of memory is important to the theme. what has to click to start climbing out of the grave? can anyone do it? will i ever do it? why now, and why not when i tried to pull him out?

and similarly, when we write about kim, we have to confront what makes him who he is and not another generic character to write, and the fact of the matter is that being a cop, being visibly of seolite heritage, having PTSD, having a visual impairment on record that interferes with his cophood, his cophood being the only identity he appears to have had a choice over, how he treats harry because he's a cop vs. other harry parallels who aren't, how he treats harry whether harry respects him or not... they're important. and trans kim could be a way to approach these themes but it's currently existing in a vacuum of authorial catharsis, and the refusal to address the real politics that give emotional weight to disco elysium is becoming a worrying, overwhelming trend. i urge you all to think about these things a little.

[odos-bucket]

wanted to share this with the netflix Sandman fans who may not have seen it.

Hob's immediate reaction upon waking up in a creepy torture dungeon is to call for Dream for help, then promise his captor will "never wake up from [his] nightmares" do with this information what you will

[robin-with-a-pen]

Okay I’m having ideas I need someone to stop me-

Anyways, so we all know that Chilchuck probably doesn’t have the healthiest relationship with food? Right?

I don’t think he has an eating disorder but more so disordered eating- that hellish middle space, right? I mean “maintaining his body weight at an acceptable level” really sticks out to me

So picture this- my man retires, he doesn’t need to control his weight anymore, no worry about setting off or anything, but he realizes that the unhealthy habits he’s developed over he past ten years are harder to break than he thought

[lunarharp]

"Found out" set in kind of a made-up chapter where the girls are in trouble, or something.

[leifyposting]

!! yes to all this

The irony is strong that the nation of freedom would ban vigilante justice.

gosh okay don't get me started on mondstadt's contradictions. i think there's a strong argument to be made that the most central mondstadt characters are also the least free. jean, diluc, kaeya, eula: the people who most uphold mondstadt's spirit of freedom are also the ones who sacrifice their own for its cause

I like to think Diluc heard that Varka left on an expedition taking all the senior knights and went "gods fucking dammit Varka"

yeah ok headcanon accepted

interesting that you mention varka because i think there is a parallel universe in which diluc becomes varka - he never leaves the knights, ascends the ranks in large part due to his winning personality, and eventually becomes the loud, brash, well-loved grand master. similarly, i think there is a parallel universe in which kaeya becomes eroch: the quiet, subtle right-hand man secretly working to undermine the knights

izabellwit is another mondstadt-centric writer i really like (who mostly writes kaeya and jean) and they have a fic in which they introduce a crepus-eroch-varka trio at the same time as they introduce the diluc-kaeya-jean trio, and although it's not explicitly a full parallel i have never stopped thinking about it that way

it's the only part of his father's legacy aside from his vision that he can uphold so he burdens himself with it. Sure, it acts as an informant network (which I suspect was the case for Crepus) but I don't think he enjoys it.

see this is what i mean when i say i literally don't understand diluc. because while yes i agree i don't think he takes a lot of joy in it, i do think he takes a lot of pride in it - which is maybe close to the same thing for him??

for example, one of his idle lines tells us he does a lot of work at the wine guild. thanks to weinlesefest, we know he's grateful for the mondstadt wine scene and takes an interest in making his winery's products better. at the recent alchemy event, he personally drops by the alchemy stall to strike up a partnership that will enhance the wine-drinking experience. his right-hand man elzer is the chief executive of the wine guild and diluc could very well leave all this to him - but he doesn't

Mr "I acknowledge the past but refuse to speak about it because it's pointless" is in desperate need of so much therapy.

real and true. there's a line in the first GAA event (which you would have missed - sorry op) where kaeya mentions picking seashells with diluc and diluc goes "i didn't know you still remembered anything from back then." and that haunts me. because like - buddy, you still remember it, so why would he have forgotten? just because you refuse to discuss the past doesn't mean everyone else does

The Genshin Impact fandom is fascinating to me when it comes to fanfics, because I feel like I struggle to find any fics that really *get* the characterization of certain characters and I'm loathed to write my own because dammit I just want to read the specific itch I crave without resorting to creating it. Give me three more months and I'll cave in.

For example, Diluc is one of my favorites and I find his backstory fascinating in terms of his father Crepus possibly being more morally ambiguous than most fans are willing to admit and how little we know of Diluc's murder spree in Snezhnaya.

For example which Harbinger(s) did he have a run-in with? Will we find out more about the secret intelligence network that took him in, that he apparently had a high position in? Did he ever find the answers he was searching for? The list goes on.

It's hard for me to find the specific characterization of him I crave for in fics because I think his platonic relationship with Kaeya is incredibly nuanced and complex but I feel like his character often gets assassinated for Kaeya angst but like, the man had the worst birthday ever?

Imagine being Diluc, living through a literal worst nightmare. Your dad is dead after you failed to protect him yourself. Not only is your dad dead but he died after wielding a delusion--you dont even know what a delusion is but its clearly bad news. Why the fuck did your father have it and how?

On top of this, the Favonius Knights--the organization you proudly served and the very organization that your father heavily encouraged you to serve--insists on covering up the truth because it makes them look bad. The Favonius Knights, who are supposed to be honorable and uphold integrity, are anything but that.

Then your adoptive brother, who you've known for years and trust with your life, shows up and tells you he's been spying for a foreign nation since you were kids with the intent of harming Mondstadt and everything about your relationship is possibly all one big lie and well--how do you not snap??

Now, I'm also incredibly fond of Kaeya and he was just as traumatized by Crepus's death. He was wracked with guilt for *feeling* relieved that he didn't have to worry about betraying his birth father for his adoptive father since Crepus was dead. He anticipated Diluc's anger and felt like their duel was a punishment for his lies.

To me, it hints that Kaeya probably didn't reveal the truth expecting Diluc's understanding, but rather he knew how he would react and perhaps he wanted Diluc to strike him down in that duel. Or at the very least, he wanted to distance himself from Diluc and cut off ties in order to avoid emotional attachment stopping him from his mission.

I personally head-canon that Diluc withdrew upon seeing Kaeya's vision because well--why would the gods bless Kaeya with a vision if he truly had the intent to harm Mondstadt? So in spite of what Kaeya revealed, he isn't a threat. But there's still a lot of hurt there to navigate through.

I think it's fascinating seeing where they stand in present game because Kaeya obviously has the ideology of working the system from within. He stayed in the knights (even taking over his brother's position) and with Jean rooted out the Inspector and his cronies.

Meanwhile Diluc just isn't that type of person. He doesn't settle, he refuses to work in a system he views corrupt, he rather accomplish what he can outside of it. Curiously, he doesn't challenge the status quo beyond being vocal of his distaste of the Knights.

This is head-canon fantasyland, but I like to envision Kaeya and Diluc do use a lot of the same informants and collaborate on intel relating to the safety of Mondstadt (especially since Diluc can move in ways against the Fatui that the Knights can't due to political reasons) but they struggle to have the same connection as before.

For example, Diluc's story quest--Kaeya was essentially giving Diluc an alibi with the Knights. Even if Jean damn well knows who it is, they still have to have official documentation stating otherwise.

Kaeya is good at reading people, he has to be given how he was raised to be a child spy. But I like to think he struggles to read Diluc like before. Diluc is much more jaded, pessimistic, quieter than before. He prefers to work on his own as much as possible. From Kaeya's pov, the only person he's seen Diluc willing to fully trust enough to work alongside with is the Traveler, and he states as much.

The opposite is true of Diluc. Kaeya was his shadow, a quiet but inquisitive, witty observer. Cavalry Captain Kaeya is much more outgoing and friendly, his charm on full display. Did he ever really truly know Kaeya or did he only show Diluc what he wanted him to see? Is Kaeya happier this way?

Fanon often depicts Kaeya as essentially being barred from the dawn winery from the duel by Diluc himself, but I don't think that's quite the case. Much rather, given the reason he told Diluc that night, I think he views himself as undeserving due to unresolved guilt.

Canon seems to hint at all of this through his hangout and Hidden Strife, the latter of which is unfortunately a time-limited event that occurred before I even played (hoyo please stop having heavy lore drops occur in time limited events).

I think the two want to trust each other again, but both are afraid of destroying the tentative truce they have so they leave all of it unaddressed. Kaeya refuses to be completely truthful ever again and Diluc acknowledges the past but refuses to discuss it. The tragedy in their relationship that neither is at fault for what happened--it's a twisted emotional mess of grief and heartbreak.

The last point I'd like to touch on is the parallels between Kaeya and Diluc both being essentially child soldiers for their fathers' causes.

For Kaeya, being abandoned in Mondstadt to be a child spy is the most overt. For Diluc? Despite Crepus's strong ambition to be a Favonius Knight and to have a vision--neither happened for him. In Diluc's vision story, it states that he views his vision being a result of their "shared" ambition, hinting that his vision was granted after Diluc's strong resolve to achieve his father's dreams for him.

We know Crepus heavily encouraged Diluc down this path at very young age, given Diluc received his vision at age 10 and became the youngest Captain at age 14. In some ways, I'm sure Kaeya was a bit jealous of Diluc for having a loving father present in his life that was overtly proud of him.

I am not saying Crepus wasn't a good father, I think he cared immensely for Kaeya and Diluc both, but I do think he did some morally grey shit.

Diluc abandoning his vision is fascinating and it's almost never explored in fics. He is the only vision holder we know of (aside from the Inazumauns whose visions were taken by force) that had their ambition for their vision shaken in such a way that they voluntarily discarded their vision for a time and only took it back after reigniting a new ambition to have it (and as far we know the only allogene that faced no negative setbacks from using a delusion long-term without their vision present).

I don't know where to end all of this, except if you have ragbros fic recommendations that you believe cover it in a more nuanced way, let me know!

[puhpandas]

friendly reminder that commenting on fics saying things like "commenting every day until a new chapter is posted" and then actually following through with that and bombarding a writer that much isnt funny and its actually disrespectful

[the-kipsabian]

a quick hot guide for people that struggle commenting on fics aka things authors love to hear and youre just over thinking it and its actually really simple to leave comments on stuff!!

key smash/emoji spam/reaction image/etc (it conveys emotions way more than you might think)

drop a line you really liked

say how much you love a ship/character and how happy you are that theres content about them

ALL CAPS ANYTHING

"i liked/loved/enjoyed/whatever it!" its better to say the most basic thing than saying nothing tbh; writers appreciate hearing anything over nothing 💜

"thank you for writing this" its short, sweet, and very powerful

think what kind of feedback you'd personally like to receive on a piece of art you made. try to translate that want into comments you leave for other people too

you dont have to be critical or constructive or anything, even if the author asks for that stuff in their notes. they'll get it from someone else, you just do you

i feel like people make leaving comments too hard on themselves, so really just make it simple. if you really dont come up with anything, just say thank you. youre there reading for some reason, tell the author what it is. fic comments dont need to be book analysis essays (tho those are. incredibly appreciated as well if you want to write one!!), writers publishing their works for free online appreciate any kind of feedback regardless if you consider it good or well written. a comment is a comment

bottom line is, leave comments on fics and other written works. its whats keeping this game alive

[stylezxsilvermoon]

okay yeah ! so i think i am gonna do a xmas theme, also i feel like this "promo" for cool kids / i'm faded is me trying toooooooo hard

(big rant under the cut)

, idk i just get very frustrated at these things so i think im just gonna go back to posting when i wanna, like being so real its always been my dream to be a big account and share with my readers, and at my CORE i still wanna be that but the issue is i dont know WHERE to start, and its not like im a new writer i've been writing since i was like 15 (what i'd consider the writing i like) and im just so ????!! about it, like i feel so physically incapable of being a fandom writer like i can't explain it its everything i want but everytime i work towards it i just self implode and stop posting / stop writing, like i still wanna write OBVIOUSLY but the pressure of wanting to "make it big" destroys me like everytime idek? and it seems so easy when i think about it but then when i do it its like LOL NOPE idc idc how much effort you put in. and yes it could be the fact i've never posted a complete fic so there's really nothing for people to know me for, i just feel like people get "suprised" i write on here LIKE YEAH, i post like insanely haphazardly but yeah i do!! and it feels so preformative and ugh.

also i've struggled for a long time on what i wanna do with this account, i wanna speak up about things which includes RB'ing a shit ton, but ive always had an unhealthy imbalance of what i wanna do on here, i wanna be a writing account but what abt the stuff i wanna bring to light by RB'ing, and yes i have other side accounts but they're all for fun, i dont wanna seperate my intrests because they all belong here, just like i do, its kinda my home atp. i feel like i'm one of those people who you dont miss on dash because i rarely curate my own posts and just silently reblog so ig its kinda my fault. idk, the more ive been thinking i feel like the "big fandom writer" thing isn't gonna be for me, and then AT THE SAME TIME i feel like im shooting myself in the foot everytime i complain and wanna pick up the fight again, but idk ive been whining abt it since i was like 15 and im oh so tired with everything going on in the world so i'm just gonna write my fics.

i feel like i write so diff from everyone else, like when i post something i want it to convey something in you, i want you to feel moved and feel appreciated and loved and happy reading something i make, and i dont even know if my writing is built to do that and i may be just dicksucking myself. idek. i dont wanna post for just notes i wanna talk about what i write with other people and for people to ask me why i chose what i did and why i wrote my stories and how it made them feel or what they like about it, and i just feel like im pandering to an audience that doesn't exist everytime i idek, write author's notes, ask for feedback, talk to people about what they like, i've always taken myself way too seriously and i just feel like modern fandom is so. so.

like i grew up reading 2010's fanfics and thats the kinda vibe i like creating, like 2012 chronically online wattpad stories, with long chapters and chatty authors and a bunch of funny comments, i just idk.

[arcane-ish]

Somebody posted just recently that they didn't like how Felicia's death and losing one's head over it made it all personal rather than an ideological divide.

And I get that but for my personal opinion it doesn't have to be either or. It can be a mixture of personal built in top of political (this is a recent fic that springs to mind that portrays a mixture and the old Reconciliation AU I think had a take on the scene where the Drowning spins directly out of a vicious verbal argument throwing everything from politics to insulting each other's upbringing at each other)

Yes it sucks that the show didn't actually portray that divide (alas we know the show writers believe interpersonal motivations are more relatable than political ones). But in my head I like to picture it as both. That Vander and Silco were already at odds and having arguments about it.

There are traces of it in the Felicia scene where Vander talks about raising ankle biters and Silco at this point still jovially disagrees.

There is a vibe almost as if Vander feels done/like they have already accomplished what they wanted (maybe they succeeded in taking over the mines (as we know Felicia and Connel are still working there after the kids are born), or taking over the Lanes). Or that at the very least wants them to take a breather.

Maybe they had arguments along the lines of "stop doing that/you are being reckless" before and Felicia dying to Vander just saves as proof fir all the other things they have been arguing about for a while.

And the regret, the losing your head is letting it escalate to violence. like maybe Vander thinks their ideological differences were real but he should have found a way to resolve them without violence, without hurting his brother. That that was his step to far, a 'sin' within his moral system. And he bought his way of doing things with this sin born from anger over Felicia (maybe Felicia was also kind of a peacekeeper/negotiator between them, a calming element?).

(I still the relevant but is when Viktor looks into Vander's mind and says he saw Vander's vision for Zaun and it was beautiful. I choose to read that Vander did keep dreaming but it deeply buried)

It's really interesting to me that in the sequence of Vander/Warwick's memories in S2E6, Silco vanishes once Powder and Vi are in the picture. We see Silco and Vander in the mines together, then Silco at the bar, then the scene from the flashback with Felicia... and then he's just gone. We see Vander with young Powder and Vi, but never Silco. I see a lot of people say that the Blisters and Bedrock flashback spoils Silco's character motivations, but I feel like this sequence is specifically showing us that it doesn't.

As detailed very eloquently in this post, Vander and Silco's promise to Felicia was never to look after her kids. Their promise was to keep fighting for Zaun so that her child(ren) could have a better future. And that's exactly what Silco did. His priority was always Zaun over anything else, right up until the last episode of Season 1. Meanwhile, Vander was heavily involved with the kids while Felicia was alive. Silco was presumably still a part of his life given that they started the bridge riot together, but Powder and Vi had become much more important to him, enough that his memories from that period favour them over Silco. It seems like Silco distanced himself from Felicia and her kids for the sake of pursuing his dream, while Vander tried to have both.

In Vander's apology letter, he blames his actions on Felicia's death, but I don't think he was saying that the mere fact that she died was the reason he tried to kill Silco. I think he's saying that was the catalyst for a decision that was most likely many years in the making. He tried to fight for Zaun and be a father figure at the same time, but Felicia's death was the turning point at which he realised that he couldn't have both. The cost of independence simply wasn't worth it anymore, now that he had so much to lose. So, he turned his back on the nation of Zaun for the sake of the kids.

It definitely doesn't seem like he regretted that choice in itself; but even in S1E3, he says that he has "never forgiven [him]self" for what he did to Silco, and I think that's where the "lost my head" part of the letter comes in. In the moment, he was angry and grieving, and convinced himself that killing Silco was a necessary course of action in the shift towards peace for the undercity - despite both being responsible for the destruction they had caused up to that point. He might not regret giving up on Zaun's independence, but he regrets the violent, brutal way in which he went about it. So when you look at it that way, Silco is the one whose ideology has always remained consistent, kids or no kids. Vander is the one who went rogue and broke his promise.

[dogs-leading-dogs]

PapyrusPikmin1997 replied on Chapter 5: Now, this is an amazing fic, but like… how the hell is Olimar and the President dying in like sublevels 1-3 of the dream den? They aren't even that hard, and canonically the Pikmin leaders cannot die by pure damage, as in Pikmin 2 if both leaders "die" the ship just beams them up back to the surface and the day ends. (Unless however, you don't do it like this and instead make their life support damaged or something, which would be a very intelligent workaround)

Anonymous asked a question on my main blog: I know this sounds random, but for DLD, what... "game mechanics" have been changed? Because, so far it seems like the ""game"" is much harder and ruthless. I can infer that no longer does losing both captains just result in the hocotate ship beaming them up, ending the day and causing all the pikmin to die, but what else?

I received this comment reply and anonymous ask a few days ago, and considering that they're talking about very similar things, I figured I'd respond to them both at the same time. The long and short of it is that both of these questions are making a series of aggressive assumptions about how DLD "works" and kinda getting sidetracked as a result. There are also a few misconceptions that I feel are important to correct, because even if you are thinking of things in vague game mechanics terms (and you shouldn't be), they make it much easier to swallow what's going on if you properly account for them.

Fundamentally, DLD is a grounded story with a strong emphasis on how things would play out in a more or less real-world scenario while factoring known series lore; this groundedness is meant to make the emotional conflicts at the core of the story stand out all the better. For more details, let's continue below the cut, starting with correcting the assumptions.

Number one: The President hasn't been accompanying Olimar on any of his trips to attempt to find Louie. He may be physically present on PNF-404, yes, but he's more or less functioning as a middle-manager type or rubber-stamp than doing anything actually useful. This is demonstrated during the first scene of XVI and compounded via the President's noted absence during every other scene in the chapter. The long and short of it is that he's not relevant to the story that needed to be told here, as this story is very much about Olimar, the Pikmin, and their relationship; having the President be present as anything more than a nod to canon would have made things unnecessarily complicated here in a section that already had too much to say.

Next up: Olimar being alone in the Dream Den (aside from the ship's pod and the Pikmin he brought with him) also solves that "difficulty" issue more or less. I also never said that they specifically died on the first three sublevels — the Dream Den obviously has fourteen, and the only important part of the whereabouts everyone died is that the maximum sublevel they could have reached would be sublevel 13. It's important for the mainline sequels that neither Olimar nor the Pikmin encounter the Titan Dweevil here, so they must have all died before getting to that point; other than that, the exact details of their demise are up to the reader's interpretation, with the most likely scenario being a gradual decline in Pikmin numbers until Olimar fucks up in an encounter with any enemy, gets squashed by any kind of boulder or caught in a bomb rock explosion, or takes too great a blow to anywhere near his head such that his already-compromised helmet shatters and leaves him to slowly succumb to the caustic oxygen in the air.

Another thing is that considering what's "canonical" from the game's perspective is kinda the wrong question to ask in a lot of ways. HP bars or stamina wheels or any other kinds of video game abstractions like that work perfectly fine when you're playing a video game, but the second you're not they become really weird to work with and place very awkward limits on things. From a narrative perspective, working with this video game logic — where Olimar can get thrown around willy-nilly for 12-16 hours taking hard falls or getting crushed by boulders or god knows what else, end the day, and come back the next morning like nothing happened — makes things very awkward, because there aren't any consequences for fucking up. None of the Pikmin games have any kinds of systems to account for major injuries, such as Olimar's dislocated shoulder or Louie's implied concussion both from chapter 4; much less do they have any kinds of energy or stamina system to account for Olimar gradually starving in Chapter 1. Some games have systems like these — take the Fallout series as only one of many examples — but limiting what you can write to what is Explicitly Possible in a game just isn't conducive to writing a good story.

Having the day end when both leaders go down but letting the player try again tomorrow with no consequences other than losing a day is a good choice for a game, because it gives the player a chance to correct their mistakes; however, it's a bad choice for a story, because it removes all of the stakes. On the contrary, part of the reason that Pikmin doesn't have a lot of these systems for longer-term consequences and instead handwaves why some of these things aren't happening — such as PNF-404's relative lower gravity being the reason why none of the characters take fall damage — are because adding those systems would be bad for gameplay. In a game that is very fundamentally about doing things quickly and efficiently, it wouldn't just be annoying if e.g. Louie broke his leg and couldn't move and throw Pikmin at the same time due to needing crutches for a realistic length of healing time, it would be bad game design because it would be far too punishing to be fun. In writing, where the goal is to be fun by having higher stakes, the opposite would be the case.

That's a bit of an oversimplification — not every story benefits from higher stakes, even if DLD itself does — but one could easily write an academic paper about storytelling in interactive vs non-interactive mediums and how they function differently, and I don't have ten billion years to come up with definitions for all of these things to explain everything wrong with applying the rules of a certain medium universally especially when those rules are intended as abstractions. Either way, it comes down to the same thesis statement: "Applying the rules of a very dynamic and choice-based medium to an entirely predefined and non-interactive medium generally does not work well unless you're having your story be about applying those rules and all of the myriad problems or conveniences that it results in." DLD is not about applying Pikmin's video game logic to a non-interactive medium because it has far more important and deliberate things to be about, like communication, trust, personhood, fate, and perhaps most of all, dogs. Therefore, it does not benefit from having simplified video game logic that allows for infinite tries, and would in fact be made infinitely worse if everything that happened so far had no consequences beyond the end results of the immediate day. Olimar needs to die in the Dream Den because this is essential for his character arc; having him just "go down" and "get rescued" to "try again tomorrow" removes all stakes from this, because if he throws himself at the problem enough he'd eventually luck out and be able to save Louie. (Olimar is already very fond of throwing himself at problems until they get fixed; as we'll see, he doesn't need a "get out of jail free" card or a "get out of a bad situation without dying" card to continue with this behavior.)

So if we're not working off of video game logic, how does DLD generally work? More or less real life logic strongly informed by canon material. To some extent it's a vibes thing — I have definitely picked and chosen what works or doesn't depending on my own personal preference, and I've taken liberties with things that happen in the games as necessary to tell the story that I have in mind. For instance, as I've alluded to before, a lot of the rules about Onions and Pikmin work much more similarly to how they do in Pikmin 4 (with the exception of the three-type limit because it's purely a gameplay limitation put in place to not frustrate noobs). Some things, such as the exact symptoms of Olimar's leaflingism, are a blend of various ideas taking inspiration from canon, from other artists, as well as just what works better thematically. (Olimar growing a tail and "fur" certainly emphasizes the fact that he's a dog, not to mention the fact that it's that perfect combination of "cool" and "utterly horrifying", and the fact that his face remains uncovered by leaves has another thematic reading that we'll get to much, much later.)

But a lot of the minor day-to-day stuff is grounded pretty solidly in reality and an understanding of "if you were an inch tall, how would you approach this situation", which is much more effective for conveying the level of Absolute Deep Shit and general danger PNF-404 presents almost the entire time. You would not survive if a boulder three times as wide as you were tall rolled over you; Olimar and the other captains only do because Pikmin doesn't have permadeath, since that would be a very frustrating gameplay experience. You can cheat your way out of things like that hurting as much as they would for you, a Normal Human, especially when you factor in the fact that they are an inch tall, but past a point there's only so much handwaving you can do before you have to accept that half of the things that you only take "major damage" for in Pikmin would just be nearly instakills in real life. Allowing for more realistic damage creates more story, not less; you can't take damage from cornering too tightly in any of the games, but allowing it to jar Olimar's shoulder like that in Chapter 4 gives reasonable stakes that add to the situation rather than detract, as it makes it feel even more like the water wraith is a real threat.

As for other "game mechanics" that have been changed… thinking of DLD as a "game" in general is the wrong question. My philosophy with DLD so far has been to create a relatively grounded story about people and choices using Pikmin as a scaffold. (Not that DLD or any of its side material could ever be divorced from Pikmin itself — they're far too intertwined — but being faithful to game mechanics is literally the last priority that will only ever be nodded at in things such as the occasional mention of the max 100 squad size.) For everything else, I've tried to flesh the setting out using "speculative realism" where possible: by examining how things actually work in real life and applying those same principles to this setting.

For instance, while a lot of the medical science is simplified for a variety of reasons, such as ease of research and reduced scene complexity, almost all of it so far has actually had at least a little bit of research put into it. (Maybe don't orally ingest a topical eye medication, but tetrahydrozoline hydrochloride is a common active ingredient in eye drops or nasal sprays that reduces mucus membrane irritation; Omnicillin Z3 uses the naming convention of antibiotics in the penicillin family, implying that their medical science has progressed beyond ours; and demethoxycurcumin, one of the "active ingredients" in turmeric, is a yellow-orange compound that has anticancer effects among many other health benefits.) I've put a similar level of pseudorealism into the flight scenes as well; I've mentioned Olimar using various kinds of checklists multiple times (Wikipedia only has a page on preflight checklists, but here's a full list of checklists for a 747), and implied that Olimar has been acting as captain and pilot flying while the Hocotate Ship is effectively first officer and pilot monitoring via both of them effectively employing cockpit resource management principles. I even had Olimar do a walk-around on Day 30, though that was admittedly less of an intentional choice than being simply what the scene required for proper pacing. Even a lot of the specifics around how Olimar has been able to live as a leafling up to (and beyond) this point have had a lot of consideration put into them with vague real-life-adjacent explanations — it is admittedly more vibes-based than some of the rest of what I've listed out here, but most of that is because leaflingism in and of itself is a rather hefty lift away from grounded reality.

The long and short of it is: If something is actually important to be thinking about, the story will tell you that. If it's not, it won't. It should be easy enough to figure out what the actual differences are from there, but a lot of those differences simply aren't relevant on any grand scale.

In fact, the only "game mechanic" I can think of that's even vaguely relevant (and isn't essentially rolled into "baseline lore", such as the mechanics of Pikmin and Onions that I mentioned earlier) is Pikmin 1's ending requirements. DLD has simplified these requirements, in that there's no longer a strict two-tiered system with some specific parts being required while others are optional, but the general outline for part count has already been referenced in Chapter 1's title. In these relaxed requirements, you get the bad ending with 24 parts or fewer; the neutral ending with 25-29 parts; and the true ending with 30 parts. (I.E., the only change is that it's any 25 parts being required to get the neutral ending or greater rather than 25 specific parts.) Chapter 1 splits the difference as the exact dividing line between two wildly divergent outcomes of the bad or neutral endings, and thus the chapter title references 24.5, or the numeric dividing line between those endings.

Other than that, the exact game mechanics of all games in the series are for the most part entirely irrelevant. DLD is a story about people, and critically, one of the most important things that a person can do is die. Robbing Olimar and the Pikmin of their ability to end is a choice that must be made very deliberately, with great intent on the part of the story being told, and shouldn't be done merely out of faithfulness to the source material. …And that's about all I can say to avoid unnecessary spoilers.

[novelconcepts]

i don't make resolutions, but if i did

it would be to finish this fic

(and to be kind to myself for however long it takes to actually do so)

[futuristichedge]

So, say that if someone was compiling all the lines/dialogue from a character and sorting it based by media source, type of statement, year, etc... Would it be helpful to include in-level exclamations/descriptions (ex: tutorial, level completion, and mid-level dialogue) OR to leave those out so that there's only cutscene and character interaction dialogue.