#reading tpb

[martyrbat]

okay mutuals. you're reading a 1970s/80s comic. the original issue has darker, richer colors but clear aging and the lines/details are fuzzy. the tpb has sharp and clean lines but the colors are flat and dull. which are you reading?

[tossawary]

When writing both original fiction and fanfiction, it's my personal preference and style to remind people who characters are in the narration when I feel it might be needed. It's especially handy when bringing OCs into a fanfiction. Example: "The person calling out to them was [Character's Name Here], the baker they had met earlier that morning." This quirk of narration often reads to me as the POV character internally reminding themselves who someone is.

Sometimes, a character is quite bad with names or wasn't given one, which is where it's handy to refer to this other character by a fixed epithet. Example: "The person calling out to them was the square-faced man from yesterday, who had given them those bad directions." OR: "The person calling out to them was the mayor's daughter." This reads to me as though the POV character is distinguishing people by a particular feature or remembers them by their relationship to someone else, which is a common way to remember people, until their own name becomes more fixed in your mind.

I also think it's important to keep an epithet / title the same across a scene. Epithets are best used, in my opinion, when that particular feature or quality is actually relevant. It's a little weird for a POV character to suddenly think of their own husband as "the tall man" unless his height is suddenly important in some way, and it might confuse the audience into thinking another person is in the room. If a character doesn't have a name, then "the square-faced man" or "the mayor's daughter" effectively becomes their name, and it's confusing to have a character's name change too much with every other paragraph. (It would be fine to also refer to "the mayor's daughter" as "the girl" or "the young woman" as long as there aren't any other nameless girls speaking in the scene.) Keeping the same title allows it to blend in in the same way that the word "said" does, rather than break up the flow of a scene.

Not every person or character is bad with names and remembering people, of course, or is inclined to give them funny little internal titles. There are people who are very good at names. There are tricks to use to get yourself to memorize names as you're introduced to someone. Narrative styles are going to be different by author and by the current POV character. (Sometimes, you might want the audience to be confused and disoriented!)

In fact, thinking about how different characters think about each other is one of my favorite starting places for crafting a perspective voice. A single character might be referred to in the narration as "His Majesty" by one character, "my husband" by another character, "the king" by a third character, "the usurper" by a fourth character, and "Dad" by a fifth. The name that a character calls someone else by will often say a lot about their relationship and their opinion of that other person. If the prince appears to think of his father as "the king" rather than "Father", that implies something about their relationship.

But back to introducing character names, you as an author, in my experience as a writer and reader, generally can't rely on the audience to easily recall very minor character names unless they're very distinct or the character was introduced in a particularly memorable way. Like, if you introduce a character as the protagonist's best friend, Mary, and immediately start refering to her as Mary because it's followed by a conversation between the protagonist and Mary, that's fair! It's reasonable to expect the audience to just learn Mary's name here! But then if Mary disappears after Chapter 1 and doesn't show up again until Chapter 10, I think it's reasonable to subtly reintroduce her to the audience again. Example: "It was Mary smiling at me from the doorway, and I jumped up to hug my best friend immediately."

Like, there's no one way that you have to refer to characters and introduce them and reintroduce them, of course. Characters have different levels of importance and sometimes we don't really need to know who they are. Sometimes, an author wants an audience to feel grounded, to recognize people, and sometimes they want their audience to feel lost and scared. It's all situational. Style is a thing.

But because it's all situational, this is something I like thinking about and I think it's something worth studying when you're reading original fiction. It's interesting to pay attention to how characters enter and exit scenes in different forms of media, and how the narrator introduces them and how other characters greet them aloud. (Shakespeare comes to mind as a neat thing to look at, to see how theatre does it. Comic books and films and visual media will do it differently to a text-only story.) The audience doesn't have the background that you, the author, carry around in your head all of the time, and you often need to give them a helping hand in keeping your cast of characters straight. Even in fanfiction, without including OCs, not everyone in the audience has the whole canonical cast perfectively memorized, and not every character in any given cast actually knows every other character! It's not just OCs who need introductions, whether those introductions happen subtly or a character enters the story with a bang.

Kind of another side note:

One of my favorite character introductions comes from the book "The Princess Bride", in which Princess Buttercup is kidnapped by three men who are referred to only as "the Spaniard", "the Turk", and "the Sicilian". You don't know their names for quite some time. Buttercup doesn't know these people.

You only learn the Spaniard's name when the Sicilian leaves him at the top of a cliff, tasking him the Spaniard fighting and killing "the Man in Black" who is pursuing their kidnapping. When the Spaniard is about to fight someone to the death, the book pauses to tell you that his name is Inigo Montoya, and then there is an ENTIRE CHAPTER dedicated to Inigo Montoya's long and tragic backstory, in which you learn about his decades-long quest to find the six-fingered man who murdered his father. And then the book abruptly dumps you the audience back out onto that cliff, where Inigo (no longer just "the Spaniard" and no longer just some random kidnapping thug) is about to fight for his life.

I think it's a terribly fun piece of whiplash that suits the comedic style of the book really well. (The book is a little different to the movie and there are things about it that I don't like, the movie gets across a level of a sincerity and love through the acting that the book misses in places, but there are lots of really funny elements to the book that the movie sadly couldn't cover.) The transformation from "the Spaniard" into "Inigo Montoya" is really neat to me.

[need1etail]

Just finished the graphic novel, 0/10 Bluestar didn't tell Rusty his balls were gonna be chopped off.

[amberberrystar]

every frame of sandpaw in the tpb gn part 1

[metallicat777]

Fuck it. Trailer Park Boys as tweets/text posts part one of ???

[stripewing]

[bonebabbles]

I got up to the Harelight murder stuff and... im done. I can't believe people are praising this. This is the dumbest shit I've read in WC in a long time.

The team managed to create an interesting dynamic between the mastermind schemer and her ambitious lackey usurper and just threw it away for yet another evil atheist murder-loving villain. They even seem to have hamfisted in a "parallel" to TigerClan so obvious and poorly thought out it's fucking embarrassing. There's no other word but cringe.

[consumer-o-content]

And They Were Boyfriends - Barely and Ravenpaw

[artaintfartwarriors]

A scourge on the name of all good cats

[surfinthehighway]

Carnage fancam

[bonefall]

just saw a post by goobiestar where tigerclaw has been put on babysitting duty and they doodled him surrounded by tiny babies thinking "i cant believe bluestar is making me babysit a bunch of drooling pathetic whiny pieces of--" and with bonefall tigerstar being a genuinely good dad (at least when his babies were tiny) i have this image in my head of firepaw imagining this is what's happening and then it cuts to tigerclaw calmly playing teeterstrike with the babies

I'm telling a super different story from the other guys in my orbit LMAO, I've noticed that also. A lot of my.... fellow satellites? Companion Comets. Peripheral Planets. Lean into the comedy angle of Tigerclaw being a nasty little boy

I especially love that one comic (I think it's Blimbo?) Where he sees his younger sibs and just starts kitty-smacking them like a real cat lmao. Top tier. If the punchline is "KITTY SMACK" you'll kill me every time.

But yah BB!Tigerclaw is really important to understand as like... a guy. Just a shitty guy, has some good things about him, but ultimately the darkness within him is run-of-the-mill. He isn't special. Firestar comes to understand that any one of the dozens of assholes in his life could have become Tigerstar-- and that's TERRIFYING.

Evil is mundane and common. Goodness is complicated and unique.

So your image is spot on lmao. Young Fireheart watching him from across camp like, "ill PROVE his evil to bluestar. Look at him now. What is he doing with swiftkit. Something horrible im sure. He probably hates kittens"

And Tigerclaw is pressing his mouth to Swiftkit's baby belly and going PTHHHBBBBB.

[thepurplebacon]

Mr. Afton, what color are your underwear? Although it may sound abrupt or even disrespectful, please allow me to explain.

Human beings are always full of curiosity about beautiful things. After being captured by you physically and mentally, they are still willing to understand you more deeply. It is hard not to praise this character.

So, I have to pose the question again: What color are your underwear? Unfortunately, due to the limitation of cognitive level, we can only stay in imagination.

Is it purple? It is as fragrant as the lavender flowers blooming in Provence.

Is it red? As pure and fragrant as the long river irrigated by Romanee red wine.

Is it white? Just like the iris blooming holyly on the French royal flag.

...

Oh, the color of your panties.

What else can bring me deeper melancholy than you?

You are like the aurora of Lapland, rippling like a dream.

You are like the edge of a comet, shining brightly.

You are like the appearance of the hazy morning light, dazzling and bright.

[himejoshiangels]

I need everyone to look at the first appearance of dukes powers right now

ignore the paneling it's a little confusing but fucking. his mom is fully joker gassed here and fucking Daryl is taunting duke and trying to force out information that duke doesn't even have. his mother snaps out of it, out of her permanent condition, just enough to defend her baby LIKE HELLO??????????

[sporkberries]

Alfred is brutal man

[hazardouscattboy]

Who other than gods favourite ginger to start this blog off

[vernard]

#KillingMyself!