#what's going with those folk stories- ANY of the other character's backstories- the institute the player comes from as a whole

[hydrangeyes]

Cloud Meadow Rambles #2

shout out to @chess-blackmyre for giving my the Lab Dialogue from their play-through and feeding my obscene obsession!

(I swear at some point I'll eventually calm down, but for now this is what my brain decided to cling to rn)

Here are some notes I made through out the doc! Spoilers ahead duh

Please be aware that this is purely my own speculation and self world building! In no way do I believe or think what I am rambling about here will become canon or fact.

Giev: Too many. The Liberation was our greatest fight, it cost us our ability to leave this plane, but in exchange, the greatest extant threat to this world, and possibly all worlds was removed.

Me: This part is interesting. That wizards' can apparently move between planes but because of something they did during the war, they are no longer able too. so then where is Giev exactly when we visit him? But also the implication that there is more than one world, which duh other planets but idk the way it's worded after that statement has me thinking.

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Giev: No, I’ve made the best of it, but...The Firmament will never be my true home.]

Me: Is this a wizards are from somewhere else or is it a Giev specifically isn't from this world? or does he just mean this area?

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Protagonist: Naga..Dragon...but it’s much more squat and bipedal? What in the...

Me: I won't lie when I first saw them they logged like that frog in town just on steroids and feral.

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Personal Log Entry 12: A dozen egos crammed into a hall and given a problem, spending days debating a hundred solutions, testing, re-testing, it was...Magnificent. What stands out to me now is Makaris’s hypothesis. Makaris was like a singularity of genius through which esoteric ideas flowed. Makaris posited research into the Mirror World, a dimension that souls entered where they died. Their requests for resources to research further into it were denied. We had deemed the Mirror World too dangerous for further study...Well, save for Kuttler.

Me:

So clearly Makaris worked on this "Mirror world" Idea on the side. which could fall into my theory on him potentially taking over Tro's body or rather someone else taking his body from said place because the rift I am assuming has been opened if He could communicate with makaris despite him being dead. Kuttler could have been in on that as well

Personal Log Entry 12: They, Makaris, invariably suffered the same fate as any who had made forays into investigating the Mirror World. One day they went too far with their research and was...unmade. Was it pride that led them to disobey us, or were they driven by something else?

(Note idk if they is in a sense of Makaris' pronouns or the group that helped plus makaris. through out my notes I flipped between he/him and they/them pronouns for makaris)

Me: Yeah see here, they kept researching anyway. but what does unmade mean? It's clear Tro can say killed/died, but what does Unmade mean??? wait wait, what is this is why Garst doesn't recall who he was???? was reverted and unmade?

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Personal Log, Entry Unknown: P-Personal log, entry...I don’t know, look. I heard them today. Makaris. They...They’re dead! I watched them get unmade in the heat of battle, using a blasted Mirror World Equalizer! There’s no way to recover from that, it’s the same sort of technology we used to ensure the Tyrants’ egos were WIPED from this world…

Me: This… these seems like a case of teleportation issue. rather Makaris actually managed what he was seeking, to access the mirror world, but it ended up dragging him into it as well?? Does this perhaps mean that the Tyrant's egos are there rather than dead?

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Personal Log, Entry Unknown: If their research allowed them even an inkling of ego to exist beyond death, and even to contact me...What if...What if I could undo that wrong while also keeping the world from suffering the Tyrant’s return? A thought for later, I’m going to rest my mind for now, log end.

Me: The use of ego here in substitute of spirit/ghost, is giving proxy vibes. Like I wonder if it's the same type of ego situation as with the Tyrant's egos? and what does that imply?

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[Protagonist: What’s DNA? Giev: Shh! Wizard business!]

Me: This QUESTION. Gods there are a lot of moments where it feels like the protagonist while supposedly the top of their class, doesn't even know the foundations of most topics. Primarily in science and geography to be honest. It also feels interesting Giev's response to this. How does someone who breeds creatures for a living not know what DNA is??????

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Personal Log, Entry 111: Breakthrough! While I was observing my newest patient, by the by I’ve taken to calling it Atlas, I made an amazing discovery! I took a small sample of its blood to see if it would need any particular nutrients, and while studying it, I witnessed a mutation!

Me: Atlas, the alien/creature thing that we release? (Me finding out their name lmao)

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Personal Log, Entry 111: I tried a few more experiments with it, and decided that I could take this small risk, with great success! There are a few errors with this new strand of DNA, but nothing I can’t repair with some ingenuity. Makaris is even here with me now. They’re phantasmal, perhaps composed of some form of psycho-kinetic energy? It’s clear that their experiments were a success too!

Me: so again does that mean the TYRANT'S aren't dead????? since assuming this Makaris that they two can think of using whatever method he is using?

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The capsule of fluid lightly bubbles around a strange, humanoid creature. Your gaze snaps down to the flickering display which activates as you lean closer. The symbols on the screen force your eyes to strain, and through beads of tears, you can somehow glean meaning from the arcane runes…

Me: WHAT IS ATLAS? I mean I would it it's an ego or tyrant variant but wouldn't Tro have mention the similarities. However it WAS with it's DNA that helped further Tro's experiment to the next step.

Edit: On the first not, what are. There are several instances where we could somewhat read apparently ancient or obscure runes/languages.

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The sound of the creature’s body crashing against the ground betrays a density you were not expecting. The creature stirs, pulling itself up as though it were weightless. As you get a clear look at it, it’s featureless face seems to peer through you.

Me: so looking at the image.. I won't lie it does lowkey looking like Tro….. just a smudge...

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Scientific Log, Entry 45: It can within-- ...inject – and transform the wearer into a Saurian! --nly that, but ther is potential for more config—ations! I have – Atlas Strain into three different -ules. Currently the on-- one I have on-hand is the Saurian configuration, but I-- on utilizing the other later. I will store the b-prints in here for –er use!

Me: idk why but feel as tho there are implications of different types of egos/servants. wait- is it egos or servants? is it like a hierarchy, tyrants egos, then servants?

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Personal Log, Entry 153: It has also come to my realization that the Genodrive is too resource-intensive to mass-produce...but there is appeal in having several specialists. Obvious military use aside, imagine the data we could gather from having someone, even if in body, perfectly replicate a species and its powers!

Me: sooo similar to what we are doing with our own farm creatures? the whole cross breeding to get better or worse stats?

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Personal Log, Entry 153: I think I’m almost ready to start presenting my research to my peers. I’ll start with Giev, winning them over will--

Me: Throughout reading this I love the implications that in comparison to every other supposed wizard, Giev is actually a softy?

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Giev: Both...they failed because they believed that the Servants were anything but the creation of their Masters...and succeeded because they brought them back.]

Me: Again. Are Egos servants? or vice versa, we already know tyrants are at the top of the food chain but still. as from this servants are made by the tyrants aka their masters (?) while egos tried to make themselves into beings better FOR the tyrant's.

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Giev: Blast...careful Lilith, it takes a great strength to kill a Wizard. Leaving is advisable.

Me: hmmmm, I do wonder about that

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Last Log: It...It took *cough cough*. Everything I had to put them down. But still it wasn’t enough. I know you came to find your dinnerware set, but I am afraid that it was a lie, much like the small cakes I also promised. A ruse, to further my work. Please, collect my research, preserve it.

Me: "But it still wasn't enough." is this implying that some may have gotten out?????!!!

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Last Log: We made a mistake in rendering them extinct...But I still believe we can reverse that error...someone else, with a more sober mind than I should be able to do something...to see where I failed and not make the same mistakes. I think...I think I can hear Makaris again...strange...he sounds different than when we…

Me: and so comes the area that makes me wonder if Makaris was even talking to him to being with or, rather if someone else swooped in before makaris could guide him the the mirror world with them.

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And there you have it!!! lol long read but fuck it we ball.

There are other dialogue aspects I wanna closely examine as the player's past has me just as curious, but that's for another time~

Again, this is all speculation on my end using the dialogue from the lab quest! I'm gonna wait speculation on the ,main plot tho as it has yet be fully release, tho I am curious about the whole why an apparent high end boss is collecting so much essence (ugh) and what not.

[astoryinred]

"Trese" and the truth in the fiction

In short: why the actual monsters in Trese don't have horns, wings, or summoning rituals

Finally the Netflix anime adaptation of the Filipino graphic novel/comics series "Trese" has dropped. It is available in several languages such as English, Filipino, Japanese, Spanish...just to name a few. It is not a perfect work, both in technical terms as well as an adaptation of the source material, but it is worth a watch. Go watch it. Please.

That being said, there is so much to unpack about the series, and I do not mean in terms of the voice-acting and the ethnicities of the persons involved, or just how crunched together the writing is. I will leave that to the critics. What I am writing here is a view as to the real life truths woven into the horror/supernatural threads of the "Trese" episodes, and why these are important. It's because for a lot of people encountering "Trese" at this point, the actual every day monsters of the tale (or at least of the first 4 episodes) are even more distant than the aswangs, tikbalangs, nunos and other supernatural beings that populate the anime.

This will go into spoilers below the cut

Episode 1: The series opens with a train stopping right near the "Guadalupe Station", and some of its passengers being attacked by aswang as they walk along the railroad tracks. During the course of investigating this and another case (that of a ghost murdered on Balete Drive), Alexandra Trese learns that other spirits using this train line have recently perished in a fire or have also been murdered by aswang in league with a politician.

The squatter/informal settler community mentioned in this episode is based on a real one. That area has gone up in flames from accidental and not so accidental fires over the past few decades. Some of the settlers have moved on, but a good many have stubbornly stuck around despite the land being eyed by a large property developer. That area is a symptom of the inequality that plagues that particular part of the metropolis, since it is only less than a mile away from some of the country's swankiest gated subdivisions. While the powers that be are (probably) not involved in selling anyone for meat, they still have a long way to go to address the woes of that community when it is not election season.

As for the other murder in the episode? There have been several cases of women associated with or married to prominent politicians who have died in mysterious circumstances, with some of these deaths ruled as suicide. In many cases, the truth has been hushed up, or simply swept under the rug.

Episode 2: While Alexandra is pursuing the trail of a tikbalang running wild in the city, she also is called to investigate a mysterious series of electrocutions in a gated village. Along the way she discovers that this is a form of human sacrifice to the bagyons manning the electricity providers of the city.

As reprehensible as the bagyons are, what is truly sickening is the seeming indifference of the people in Livewell Village. It's mentioned more in the comics (but also given a line or two of exposition here by the Nuno) that the people regularly offer an outsider, usually a skilled worker in charge of maintenance, to ensure that the bagyon will bless them. In real life there is the callousness that some people exhibit towards essential workers such as yes, repairmen and electricians who have to endure heights and storms just to ensure the "comfort" of consumers. Although the Philippines isn't a country crawling with litiginous folk and "Karens", there are enough of this sort to make essential workers' lives miserable on a daily basis.

Episode 3: This is a difficult one, both in the comics and the anime. One of Trese's cases leads her to cross paths with an actress named Nova, who is later revealed to have had her child left to die (hence making her a target for a specific type of monster). Nova's story is admittedly not easy to deal with and may be considered incredulous, but there are two important contexts to remember when watching it.

The first is that abortion is still illegal throughout the Philippines. It cannot be legally offered by any clinic or medical practitioner. There are clandestine alternatives available, but at a steep price.

That being said, most Filipinos regardless of where they stand on the abortion issue will still consider the abandonment or murder of an infant to be beyond the pale. Yet this does happen. Every month one can expect to read a story or two of babies being tossed in the trash or left in bathrooms---and those are just the stories that make it to the press. There have been exposes about mothers who have sold off their infants to "adopters" willing to pay thousands of pesos or dollars for an under the table transfer of custody. These happen because of desperation, poverty, and lack of resources to support mothers. Maternity leave is only up to 120 days here in most cases, and there are few resources to support mothers with PPD, mothers abandoned by their partners, or those with just too many mouths to feed. Questions of "bodily autonomy" are not first and foremost in the mind of many women who do the worst to their newborns; the question is food on the table for the next day or the day after. Survival is key. Not independence or empowerment.

With these in mind, it is not surprising that Nova is considered one of the most disturbing and reprehensible characters in this episode. From what we see, her choice of abandoning her child stems from vanity and pursuit of a glamorous career. We can see that this is not because she would be out on the streets if she had a child to care for, or because she was escaping something. It's just portrayed as pure selfishness.

It is interesting that Nova is introduced here almost as a juxtaposition to another mother, Ramona. Ramona, the mother of Crispin and Basilio, is an armed insurgent who engages in a ritual to avenge herself on the military men who forced her to murder her own comrades. It is also implied earlier in the season that it was not just murder involved, but that Ramona had also been a "prize" given to the soldiers who captured her. And yes in this context, it can also mean rape. The Armed Forces of the Philippines does not have a shining record when it comes to its treatment of women dissidents and prisoners. This backstory does not justify what Ramona does for the remainder of her screentime, but it does show why she has absolutely no sympathy or mercy to give to anyone outside of her two children. She is part of a cycle of killing that makes any peaceful resolution of the insurgency in the Philippines so difficult to achieve. Both sides behave abominably, and civillians do get caught in the crossfire (or explosions).

Episode 4: Much of this episode revolves around the events in and surrounding a certain police station located near a large public cemetery. We see that the police chief Captain Guerrero has his hands full with cases and keeping his subordinates in line. The cops in the precinct range from the innocent apparent newcomer Tapia to the more stereotypical "asshole" cops Reyes and company. Later it is discovered that the bodies apparently "stolen" from the graves are resurrected zombies who are being directed to attack the station for a specific reason...and it has to do with how the police run their often bloody operations.

The real life neighborhoods surrounding the cemetery have seen their share of violence and "extra judicial killings". In some houses there are still candles and placards calling for justice for family members killed in raids or accused of having been drug suspects (almost a death sentence in the Philippines 2016 onwards). Eyewitnesses and CCTV footage show members of the police force taking part in these raids and clandestine operations. The worst part? The neighborhoods surrounding that particular cemetery haven't even seen the worst of it. Other disadvantaged communities in the north of the metropolis have seen even more deaths of this sort...with some of the deaths being those of children. Google the name of Kian delos Santos as a test case. Kian's case was one of the few to have extended media coverage, and even then the resolution has been rather wanting.

It is tempting to go into the "all cops are bastards" line of thought with this episode, but I do like how Captain Guerrero is forced to interact with someone who he is trying to save in the station, since as it turns out this person has recently lost a family member to this form of senseless murder. Captain Guerrero and the audience are led to remember that these victims have names. They had families. They had lives. They are more than body counts and statistics. That scene is one of the most humanizing of the series, and shows that while not all cops are bastards, there is enough rot in the institution to make it a problem.

Episodes 5-6: I would go more into Episodes 5 and 6, but those deserve a whole new treatment into the nature of truth, compromise, and even gaslighting (even I am not sure how much of a certain character's narrative is true, and how much is just meant to confuse Alexandra with regard to what she knows of her father). The context she does face before those harrowing revelations is a very real one though: things going wrong in a penitentiary.

The penal system of the Philippines is alarmingly punitive and full of inequities. Privileged inmates like politicians do receive special treatment (including media coverage and becoming leaders of factions) while less privileged inmates languish and must struggle to survive the brutal social hiearchy in some institutions. And yes it has happened that inmates have been sent out to do "jobs" of murder and arson in the outside world, often being snuck in and out. A movie that tackles this aspect better is "OTJ (On the Job)" directed by Erik Matti. That one will keep you up at night.

The ending of Episode 6 is rather ambiguous, and it remains to be seen what Alexandra really experienced during her trials prior to becoming a detective, and what her father really did to her and her sibling. We'll have to wait for another season to get to the bottom of that. But if the anime will continue to draw from the comics themselves for stories/case files, we can count on seeing more societal demons and baddies alongside the supernatural ones. And those are the villains that Alexandra Trese cannot just readily beat; it will take a heck lot more than a babaylan na mandirigma to handle those!

[dr-nero-is-god]

i felt the urge to riff on the hive streams for a little bit since discussion came up on the hive discord, namely, holding issue with the idea that the alpha stream is inconsistent in that it is about leadership when otto is the only leader, and that it’s also possible that the alphas are just kids with specialized skills, and not actually bonded by any particular unifying element.

and, in response, @vulpix-sinistre brought up a quote from the abridged hive fanfic, that goes something like: “there are four streams: main characters, stereotypical bullies, ?, and nerds.”

and i disagree with the first two ideas, but almost completely agree with the abridged fic quote. that is pretty much how the streams work, and it is IMPORTANT that that is how the streams work. 

in the end, you may conclude that the streams system still doesn’t make sense. you won’t be like “well clearly dr. nero was just logically dividing the labor of his students to reflect a specialized training program” because it’s more complicated on that. i  hate to do this to y’all, but a lot of everything streams-related requires an out-of-book explanation to get where you’re going, but i can promise that i will at least try to go

first, let’s think about why h.i.v.e. would have streams at all

on the one hand, it’s inescapable to consider that one primary reason that hive has streams is because harry potter had houses, and for the same reason that percy jackson had cabins, the 39 clues had branches, hunger games had sections (or counties, idk), divergent had factions, and so on and so on. the rise of fandom spaces on the internet was concurrent with a big ya/mg boom in the post-2005 world (after twilight was published), and within those fandom spaces it became important to identify with an aspect of the fantasy world as part of your personality. that became a very marketable thing for a while, and so separating children into streams would, to a publisher, seem like a pretty solid storytelling choice.

however! the alpha stream is not the same as gryffindor house. on the one hand, it seems easy to make an alpha/gryffindor and henchman/slytherin parallel, because one group is good (relatively) and one is bad (or at least antagonistic). but it doesn’t work because while slytherin has a reputation for constituents of poor moral character (which has been largely revised in fanon), being a henchman is where you go, according to the books, if you are unintelligent and burly. it’s not a really sexy stream, is what i’m trying to say. and though there are undoubtedly some readers who would look at the henchman stream and see themselves, i think the majority of readers would likely find the henchman stream a completely undesirable stream to be in. 

and, given how little importance the role of streams have after the first book, i will go out on a limb and say that mark walden knows that the henchman stream is unsexy. we aren’t interested in the hopes and dreams and motivations of the henchman stream; as we learn in book two, the ideal henchman is weak-minded and easily led—so what dreams would they even have? this leads me to conclude that while mark walden might have sold h.i.v.e. on the “there are personality-based groups in the school!” idea, he had something completely else in mind when he started writing and that, I think, is actually far more interesting.

but really, why would h.i.v.e. have streams at all

a few things about mark walden: 1) he studied english lit in school, 2) he has a background as a video game producers, and 3) he likes james bond. i know the first two things because i have read his bio and i know the third thing because i have read his books in conjunction with seeing all the james bond films. so we will call 1-3 facts. 

if you are wondering what a lit degree, video game production, and the james bond franchise all have in common, then let me connect those dots: all three of those things depend heavily on the study and understanding of repetitive structure in storytelling as an interpreter and creator of meaning. each one of these fields requires an understanding of how stories and words work to create meaning in order to be successful. 

and, to quote mr. walden here directly (sourced from this here link):

“So, I was playing with this cat one day and it got me thinking that those old-school Bond villains always just seemed to appear out of thin air with very little back story and that got me thinking about how they became world- conquering megalomaniacs in the first place.  It was only a short mental walk from there to HIVE.”

so, imagine you’re a writer trying to tell a story about a school for villains like those in james bond—you’ve studied storycraft and you have a lot of experience in a job finding believable and compelling obstacles for people to interact with in video games. you have noticed patterns. and you need to make those patterns work for you.

enter: streams

i have watched all the james bond movies (all of ‘em) (i mean it) (just not the unreleased one yet lol) and you know what? 

there’s probably just about four kinds of villains in those movies.

henchmen include the likes of jaws, oddjob, and tee hee. often physically disabled in a cinematically interesting way, these guys are the muscles and the machines in every bond film. they are the ones who tail bond as he takes long train rides and who try to personally throw him into shark tanks. they are the hands and feet of their evil masters and they don’t have a lot of emotional depth or backstory. 

politicians/financiers abound in the james bond franchise because he is a government employee who often hangs out with other government employees (he has no friends). these people are like colonel rosa klebb, georgi koskov, prince kamal khan. there are a lot more, as a matter of fact, because the whole point of james bond is that they are in the cold war and even people without titles have political and financial motivations for screwing around with stuff. these types of villains depend on being well and truly embedded in an existing infrastructure or hierarchy, somebody who worked their way up from being a foot soldier or clerk into a powerful leadership position that gives them a lot of state-sanctioned trust and authority.

technicians and inventors include folks like henry gupta and boris grishenko, who use technology as their primary weapon. they are often inventors or innovators and are really good at making high-tech stuff. however, i think this stream is also a direct result of the character Q, someone who is actually on James Bond’s team and who runs an entire department of people who test sometimes outlandish gadgets for Bond to use in the field. (but we love the gadgets. they are fun.) in other words, Bond arguably has a technical stream at his disposal in MI6, which means the idea isn’t necessarily evil, but, likewise, our James Bond School also needs Qs. it’s the rules. if you are familiar with Q from James Bond at all then you understand

and that leaves us with alphas... the “supervillains.” these are the famous ones. dr. no. mr. big. scaramanga. le chiffre. blofeld. max zorin. emilio largo. goldfinger. these are the ones with the master plan, the dreams to recreate the world as they see it, the passion to see their desires to fulfillment and the resources to make them happen. they are rich. they are fancy. they are larger than life. is it weird that karl stromberg tries to incite a nuclear war between Britain and the USSR so that a lot of people can die so that he can colonize the ocean? yes. but by god, it’s fancy and dramatic, and that’s what counts. 

are there other kinds of villains? oh, definitely. lots more. but you have to understand, that those kinds of villains generally don’t appear in Bond. sometimes! but it’s not a staple. for example, not many people in the bond films are motivated by revenge because each movie is kind of designed to function as a one-shot. villains don’t come back and so there is no revenge. the villain who gets the most notable reprise, jaws, actually ends up finding his true love in space. 

compare: every movie is going to have henchmen. every movie has government stooges making morally questionable decisions. (almost) every movie has Q, or some gadget stuff going on. and every movie has a big bad that has to be better than the last. 

so that explains why the streams are what they are. 

it was a jumping-off point for mark walden to figure out what this universe might look like and how different character types need to function. consider that while the core four are all alphas and are kind of insulated as a group, the teachers all kind of roughly align with one of these groups. colonel francisco, raven, and chief lewis are henchmen types, doing on-the-ground work to get stuff done. ms. tennenbaum and the contessa are political af, they are all about the corruption and infiltrating institutional power. ms. gonzales, ms. leon, and professor pike all have technical skills that help keep an organization moving forward. and over them all is the singular alpha, dr. nero, who is coordinating and monitoring it all for his own evil plan: to run a high school.

honestly, dr. nero’s hive idea operates just like a james bond villain plot! it works, or it does when pitching the idea. the problem is that the books continued after the pitch did, and with worldbuilding came some complications. namely, the fact that the megastructure of james bond villainy does not replicate well into a small friend group on which the narration focuses. so let’s return to the question presented at the beginning:

how can alphas really be alphas when not everyone on the field trip can be a mastermind?

i’m gonna give this to you in two ways. one, the way i personally interpret it as an in-universe explanation, given the background premises we have already established. and the other, why the stream system kind of ruins the structure it sets out to create.

so, for me, the alphas can be alphas because there is more to villainy than being a mastermind and there is more to being a mastermind than being in charge. as i think about it, this novelization is actually the backstory for every one of the students, who will go on to do great and scary things. they will manage big projects and come up with interesting ways to terrorize the British government, because that is what James Bond villains do (and James Bond does canonically exist in their universe). much like your actual teenage years, this is not the main event.

as students, the core four need to learn to do a little bit of everything. you gotta learn some lock-picking, that’s essential. everyone has to be able to climb a rock wall. it’s the rules. and everyone needs to be able to do some programming. that’s just the way school is. though everyone has a different personality and a different way of looking at the world, their education has to cover the basics because the fact of the matter is, none of them are villains yet. will they become one? that remains to be seen. but they are being given the tools to become the greatest villains if that is something they choose. 

the main problem that remains when holding this attitude is that the specialized skills of otto and his friends might be better suited to other streams, in which case, what is an alpha anyways?

here’s the facts: if everyone were assigned to a stream by talent, then there wouldn’t be an alpha stream.

franz? political/financial stream. 

nigel? laura? otto? technical stream.

shelby? wing? henchman stream. 

you can debate me on the specifics of those assignments, but the point is this: all the other streams are based on hard skills. franz can manage a ledger and that is a financial skill. laura can build a computer from scratch and that is a technical skill. wing can do martial arts, and each martial art is a physical skill that can be taught and performed in a measurable level of proficiency. 

the idea of being a “mastermind” is a much softer skill—which is to say, there’s no one recipe that will make it work. my manager at work has coached me by saying that leadership is often about having a “style,” and working at it that way. leadership requires interpersonal flexibility, being able to stay organized and to make important decisions rapidly, it is about being able to prioritize and delegate. and it’s very much open to interpretation, every day, all the time. 

let me tell you something else about james bond: there is a lot of classism, racism, and sexism embedded into every aspect of those films, but that goes for double when it comes to the villains in the show. to vastly oversimplify that very concept, it shows up in the bond films like this: henchmen are working class folks, the villainous equivalent of “the help,” and the supervillains are (usually) rich and glamorous and powerful. henchmen are uneducated (read as: stupid) and ugly and poor. no one cares if they die. (there’s more complexities, as always, but this essay isn’t actually about james bond so we’ll fast forward through My Opinions to the end)

the problem with replicating james bond in your villain school universe is that some of the biases of the james bond universe get replicated in there, too. poor and uneducated folks get turned into disposable henchmen whose lives are irrelevant. people who are educated and talented get fast-tracked to a more glamorous and interesting stream that will catapult them to the top of the ladder as soon as they graduate. if you look at the dialect with which block and tackle are written, they are clearly meant to be seen as a different social class than otto, despite the fact that otto is coming from basically nothing. and we understand that when otto graduates, he will be able to do basically anything that he wants to at all.

so, if you’re asking why wing has a role in the alpha stream when he doesn’t seem as leader-y as otto, there’s a simple answer: because dr. nero believes that wing can be more.

the climax of book one is dr. nero explicitly telling otto, wing, laura, and shelby that they are in his school because he believes in them and he wants to see them grow. they are given an elite status other students do not have despite the fact that they have just literally tried to escape. as we see in the case of duncan cavendish, the main way to get on that highway to a guaranteed career is to convince him that you’ve “got it.” for those who are not believed in, there is no way to make up for the special grooming. you’re stuck with the stream you’re placed in, doomed (perhaps) to be a second-in-command at best.

is all this intentional? probably not. but it is implicit in the structure of the story and, alas, that’s the way it is.

all i can think to say in conclusion is that while the stream system tends to replicate some of the unfair and classist realities present in other media and the world we live in, i think part of the reason we read h.i.v.e. is because the alpha stream is so appealing. imagine! you are competent and you have a desirable, specialized skill as well as a proficiency in many general skills and you are certain you are going to do good things—and all because someone believes in you. to receive someone else’s support and confidence can be life-changing. the magic of h.i.v.e. is that yes—lives are changed and ordinary, boring people were elevated to the level of supervillains. we are only left to wonder, are they the only people who deserved that honor?

[pixelgrotto]

RIP Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog comic (1992-2017)  After 25 years and nearly 300 issues, Archie’s long-running Sonic the Hedgehog comic was officially cancelled earlier this week. The writing’s been on the wall for a while now, since the comic went on a forced hiatus several months ago and none of the creators were allowed to publicly discuss it due to ongoing negotiations between Archie and Sega. But this Thursday, the book’s final fate was declared, and it looks like the Freedom Fighters - who once announced that they could handle anything - couldn’t quite beat the threat of cancellation. A lot of people dunk on the Archie Sonic comic for being overly convoluted, going through some pretty low points or appealing primarily to furries, and all of these things are kinda true, except for maybe the furry one. But warts and all, Archie Sonic is a glorious beast of monstrously complex proportions. First of all, let the fact that Sonic holds the record for having the longest-running North American comic for a licensed character sink in. Seriously, this series ran from 1992 to 2017 and nearly reached 300 freaking issues. In a time when most comics from Marvel and DC can barely reach double digits before either being renumbered to generate a temporary boost in sales or flat-out cancelled, Sonic the Hedgehog kept chugging along, stealthily reinventing itself from its original status as a slapdash funny book to an ongoing saga that manifested lore so deep that it warranted the release of an entire encyclopedia to help people keep everything straight. 

What’s even more interesting is that Archie Sonic became the one place where you could still see characters carried over from the DiC Saturday morning Sonic cartoon show, which was produced in 1993. The show, affectionately dubbed SatAM by everyone who watched it back in the day, frankly doesn’t hold up that well and is a good example of nostalgia goggles at work. It had an incredible theme song, though (SONIC! HE CAN REALLY MOVE! SONIC! HE’S GOT AN ATTITUDE! SONIC! HE’S THE FAAAASTEST THING ALIVE), and the show did do an admirable job of developing a backstory for a mascot who, at the time, had no characterization other than the fact that he was fast and collected rings. SatAM fixed this by putting Sonic in the surprisingly dark world of Mobius, a place ruled by Dr. Robotnik, a dictator who had “roboticized” the population by turning them into droids. It also gave the hedgepig a variety of characters to play off of, like Princess Sally, Antoine the cowardly French fox, Bunnie the half-roboticized rabbit and Rotor the walrus. Along with Tails, this lot was collectively referred to as the Knothole Freedom Fighters.  Archie Sonic got its start telling stories with the Freedom Fighters while they were still on air, and even after the show was cancelled, the comic continued using them, essentially turning itself into season three of the cartoon. As the decades passed, the SatAM characters and story threads evolved and changed in wondrously unexpected ways - Sonic and Sally fell in love, the original Dr. Robotnik was killed and replaced with a robotic version of himself from an alternate dimension, Bunnie and Antoine got married and Mobius was revealed to be a future version of Earth that was attacked by the Xorda, aliens who had unleashed gene bombs on the planet, mutating the wildlife into anthropomorphic animals. (This was my goddamn favorite batshit crazy bit of Sonic comic lore ever.) Furthermore, the comic increasingly began introducing more elements from the actual Sonic video games, which had finally developed deeper stories of their own thanks to the advancement of technology. So you had stuff like Sonic and the Freedom Fighters teaming up to fight Perfect Chaos and meeting Silver the Hedgehog and Blaze the Cat. It was an unusual, unique combination of Western and Eastern concepts melding together in one pictorial arena, and it made Archie Sonic feel special. 

Speaking of the games, the book was also special because it damn well carried Sonic’s presence in North America during the years when the blue guy wasn’t starring in many video games (the Sega Saturn era) and couldn’t star in any decent video games (the Sonic ‘06 era). Even when Sega was releasing shovelware that damaged the brand, Archie Sonic kept pumping out issues, and its sheer determination to keep going won it legions of dedicated fans. Many of these people, including myself, got stuck on the comic at a young age and stayed long-term. I personally started picking up issues in 1994 or 1995, so basically only three or so years after the book was out. I think I was seven years old. A few years later, I got a subscription and had the comic delivered to my mailbox every month. (I still remember my first issue - it was number 41, when Sonic, Sally and that douchebag skunk Geoffrey St. John went to the Zone of Silence to rescue King Acorn.) The subscription continued until I was in college, and only ended around my junior year, when I forgot to renew it because I was too busy applying to go abroad after graduation. 

In short, I subscribed to a periodical about a damn blue hedgehog for a large majority of my life. Even when I stopped regularly reading around issue 180, I always kept abreast of the book’s developments (like that crossover with MEGAMAN!) and told myself that I’d eventually catch up on the stories I missed, likely in the excellent Sonic Select and Sonic Archives trade paperbacks that Archie was publishing. And there were tons of others like me. The Archie Sonic community is such a vibrant one, filled with 90s kids who grew up on this book and even older folks like the crazy Dan Drazen, a 60-something librarian who wrote the most detailed (and overly picky) online reviews of every issue. Many of these fans went on to work for the comic at one point or another, like the incredible Dawn Best and fan favorite Ian Flynn, who swooped in as a writer in the late 2000s and saved the book when it was suffering from a spell of plodding stories. For a lot of us, Archie Sonic was the preferred Sonic canon, and we got pissed when Sega pulled awful jump the shark moments outta their butts - like having Sonic hook up with human princesses in his broken 2006 game - when there was a wealth of solid lore in this weird little comic coming out in America that they always seemed content to ignore.

In fact, the only time Sega really paid close attention to the book was when Ken Penders launched a lawsuit against it, which may have been a contributor to its eventual cancellation. People better than me have already scripted lengthy writeups about Mr. Penders, and I encourage you to read this extremely in-depth take on the whole fiasco, which is a bizarre tale of copyright arguments and delusions of grandeur worthy of any John Grisham novel. But in a nutshell, Ken was a former writer who helped guide Archie Sonic away from simple gag strips and into the realm of full-on adventure tales. His control over the book was major until he was fired, and a few years later, he went on a vehement quest to prove that he owned all characters he had created while working for Archie, including series mainstays like Julie-Su, Knuckles the Echidna’s girlfriend. He ended up suing Archie multiple times and won on legal loopholes, which prompted him to start attacking the book’s current team while declaring that a buttload of barely-related story concepts were his. He also tried suing Sega when Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood came out, claiming that the enemies in the game were too similar to ones he had whipped up. Archie eventually had to come up with a plot device to kill off (trap in another dimension, really) all of the characters he had created during his tenure, and eventually they instituted a full reboot to wipe continuity clean and remove all traces of the lawsuit from history. Unfortunately, the legal issues did some pretty heavy damage to Archie’s relationship with Sega, who were reportedly pissed that the American comic company had let things get so screwed up. And I don’t blame them. To the Sonic fan community, Ken Penders is largely loathed as a megalomaniac who sabotaged a long-running comic for personal gain. But he doesn’t deserve all of the blame, and he did put out some good stories in the day before going bonkers. Archie’s also at fault, both due to their not-so-great freelancer deals as well as their incompetence at handling lawsuits. (At one point the company even fired their entire legal team and hired new attorneys, yeesh.) In recent years, Archie also seems to be terrible at handling their finances, even though they’re currently spearheading Riverdale, a successful show on the CW that’s made all of their high school characters into hot, emo Millennials. (I call it the “Archie Sex Show” in my head.) I’ve heard rumors that company management wants to streamline their output to ONLY focus on Riverdale-related stuff, and seeing as how the Ken Penders business was a tremendous waste of time that ripped some large holes in their relationship with Sega, it only makes sense that both companies would decide to part ways.  So where do we go from here? Well, it was suddenly announced today that IDW Publishing would be the ones picking up the Sonic license for a relaunch of the book in 2018. IDW’s a fit place for Sonic, since they currently publish the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…which Archie once owned the license for. (Funny how these things go in circles, eh?) Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the current arc that was going on in the Archie books - a charming retelling of the Sonic CD story - is going to go unfinished, and I’m also fearful that we’ll be saying goodbye to the DiC Freedom Fighters. I’d LOVE to be proven wrong, and it would warm my heart to see Princess Sally, Bunnie Rabbot, Antoine, Rotor and Nicole survive a change in publishers. But since Sega’s never “officially” acknowledged those characters in a game (except for Sonic Spinball, which was made by an American studio and doesn’t really count) they’re likely going to be classified as expendable cannon fodder that are no longer relevant. There is some hope, though. Perhaps a miracle will occur and IDW will have the good sense to re-hire guys like Ian Flynn or maintain some semblance of the continuity that an entire generation knows and loves. Until the day we know for sure arrives, I’ll just have to re-read my old issues, revel in the glory of covers drawn by SPAZ, laugh at insane crossovers like the time Sonic met Spawn, and remember an era when a hedgehog with attitude and his Knothole friends kicked Dr. Robotnik’s butt and brought me twenty plus years of wonderful adventures.  For Mobius! For freedom!

The header image of the Archie Sonic cast was drawn by darkspeeds and found on Deviantart. The cover images are just a few of my favorites from the days when I was subscribed to the book, and were taken from Comic Vine and Cover Browser.

[deehollowaywrites]

In the Kentucky Derby episode of the Netflix documentary series 7 Days Out, Travis Stone describes calling a race as building a narrative. The rising action of horses breaking and jockeys positioning builds to a natural crescendo at the wire. The climax of the win is supported by what’s come before it: the horses’ past performances are backstory; they and the riders’ present circumstances are character work; the track condition is setting. A myriad of factors creates a story as the race unfolds.

Naturally, I loved this metaphor.

Dana Byerly, the mind behind Hello Race Fans and current steward of Jessica Chapel’s Raceday360 (AKA the only resources I use if I want to handicap seriously), recently collaborated with HRF co-creator Adam Wiener on Random Replay Generator, which does exactly as it says on the tin. Watching replays is a delightful pastime as well as a great tool for deepening familiarity with track idiosyncrasies, jockey styles, and the nuts and bolts of a full field of horses. I’ve had a lot of fun hitting the button since RRG launched, happening upon everything from the 1988 San Bernardino to the 2018 Kentucky Oaks. The cliche is that the only way to learn is by doing, but the average racing fan is never going to be on horseback at thirty miles per hour--so the endless reel subs in, or long hours spent on the apron, a pair of binoculars instead of a pair of goggles. Chart-calling, the minute art of depicting the movements of a race in words, is telling a story, interpreting a text, so that stewards can make judgments and horseplayers can glean information. 

Fiction writers might look at the same race and tell a different story, because the locus of narrative in fiction is emotion.

The twenty-six letters of the English alphabet can form endless combinations of words. Every day a sentence is created that’s never been spoken before. Similarly, the connections to be made between horses, jockeys, tracks, and fate require only basic tools in humanity’s kit. The set used most often is logic. PPs, Beyer and Timeform, a number-based arsenal, a system that can be learned and applied to any race, any combination of personalities and conditions. It’s appealing to think luck can be augmented by meticulous formulae. Not being a particularly serious horseplayer, I wondered what would happen if I allowed the random chance of Dana’s generator to guide the narrative--if I created a series of hunch bets stemming from outside myself, sort of like writing prompts for the mutuels window. My science project went as follows:

I would play the 1/19 Tampa Bay Downs card, because we are getting a snowstorm in Albany this weekend and I miss the Big Guava.

Therefore, I would let Random Replay Generator provide me with 11 random races for 11 races on the TBD card.

I would make my picks based on some association between the random races and the scheduled TBD races that didn’t involve the horses’ or jockeys’ skill levels, racing styles, or past performances.

I would bet a dollar to show on each pick.

I deposited $20 into my Xpressbet app last summer before the Saratoga meet started, and I’ve had between $15 and $20 in the account since then. We’re not playing with big bucks here, folks, sorry to disappoint. I started off with $18.35 and ended with $18.50, which is… average. A solid C+. Neither good nor bad. The endless cycle begins again. There was not, on this day, an appreciable difference between serious study that would hold up to horseplayer scrutiny and defiant whimsy. So I picked El Mayito for the fifth race because Cape Blanco’s winning Joe Hirsch Turf Classic came up on RRG and I decided, with no evidence, that “El Mayito” translates to “The Little Mayonnaise.” Blanco... White… Mayonnaise… Get it? Well, anyway, El Mayito ran second and paid $6.80. If I learned anything in four years of completing an English major, it’s that you can posit any thesis as long as you find textual support. It’s cromulent to select My Macho for the tenth race when you’re thinking about Cigar’s Oaklawn Handicap, and Tampa, and the cluster of aging Cubans who frequent La Faraona, clouds rising from their maduros onto Seventh Avenue.

My Macho won, but I wasn’t thinking about three dollars and twenty cents.

Thoroughbreds reward attention to minutiae. Whether your bent is bloodlines, running styles, or win percentages, any support for a pick is support enough. Attention, in the Lady Bird sense, compounds in interest when your horse wins and you can proudly point to factors X, Y, and Z that informed you in advance of this result. Had I been at Tampa Bay, and had I been pumping my fist when My Macho pulled ahead, someone along the rail would’ve asked if that was my pick. How I’d stumbled upon it--whether there were notes on the horse’s entry in my program--if I’d seen something in those two failed 2018 starts that the other horseplayer hadn’t. They might not have appreciated my nostalgia for humid Ybor City nights. They might’ve been disgusted that they put in the work to place their bet and came up wanting, while my frivolous ass somehow managed it. 

They might’ve smirked a little, some time later, upon hearing the brief, brutal saga of Diana and the Lecomte. Sure, it stings to casually nail a trifecta and then not bother to place the bet. But it’s not my wallet that’s wounded, because money isn’t the narrative I’m interested in presenting. There are those who love to be seen sporting the finest millinery in front of the Churchill Downs step-and-repeat on the first Saturday in May, or rubbing bespoke elbows in the winners’ circle with world-class trainers and celebrity owners. But to be seen delivering accurate omens--now that’s the ticket. Each correct pick, cashed or no, is another gateway trespassed, another step further in confidence, another box of belonging ticked. 

Racing, like most institutions, is at odds with itself about the narrative it wants to tell. Justify’s narrative bucks Accelerate’s; each of those narratives is just projection, because horses, for all their positive features, can’t read or tell stories. Saratoga’s narrative fights with Suffolk’s, but ultimately they’re complementary, mosaic pieces lovely and meaningful in isolation combining to create a picture more glorious than their parts. Lifelong enthusiasts bred to the life and weekend warriors, thousand-deep bankrolls and $2 show bets, competitive horseplaying and not being sure which window you need to be at: racing splits the difference. If words written are never wasted even if no one reads them, a horse that completes a race ten lengths back hasn’t failed utterly. There is still meaning in the text. There is no wrong way to play. There is no method most impressive for picking the winner. There is only that day’s narrative, that race’s arc, the story of a moment.

[jamesharringtoncreativeworks]

Hi Jim,

  I read a few of your other pieces about character creation and was hoping you could expand more upon how you create a character based on a historical person. I’m trying to do something similar right now, and am really having a hard time. You said that you wanted the character to be as close to the historical person as humanly possible, so I just wanted to know how you accomplished that.

Thanks, Danny

Danny,

I don’t know how much more I can say on the subject without retracing what I’ve already said, but I’ll do my best. In my writings, I’ve incorporated a few historical people as main characters… Let’s take a look at them.

  From left to right, Federico II Gonzaga, Pope Leo X, and Mary Jane Kelly.

Each of these characters presented their own problems in character creation and each had different levels of detail.

Federico and Pope Leo X were both portrayed in Divinity, and for those who have read it, Divinity is basically a story criticizing the church of that time, and by default, institutional religion in general.

Basically, I wanted to show the problems with blind adherence to strict interpretations of doctrine that was, in my opinion anyway, used way outside of its purpose. To do this, I posed the question; What would happen if an angel appeared in 16th Century Europe? What would happen if she were wounded and in need of help? How would people react to what she had to say or how she behaved? Would they take her in and help her, or would they fall back on what they’d been taught, not considering that those teachings might be wrong, and thus assume that she was actually a demonic presence?

To frame the story, I needed to choose the right time period and the right church leader. Yes, the Pope was a villain in the book. I wanted to be careful as I didn’t want to portray someone in a negative light who didn’t deserve it. There were plenty of Popes from the time period I had in mind that did their jobs and were, on a scale, considered benevolent.

Pope Leo X shows up on many of the ‘Worst Popes’ lists out there. He’s was extremely indulgent, driving the church deeply into debt, and then prayed on the ignorance of the faithful in order to sell indulgences to pay down that debt. He was not a priest and he’d had his hands very deep in the pockets of politics of the time.

My portrayal of him is based on that. I presented Leo X as a man who would view an angel potentially going around countering the teachings of the church as dangerous. Especially given that this was a time when the Protestant Reformation was really taking off. Other than his dealings with the church and some backstory of growing up as a member of the Medici family, there isn’t much on his personality traits. So basically, I had to envision what someone would be like who made the decisions he did. What I came up with was an intelligent, well-spoken individual, who was, unfortunately, too easily seduced by power and luxury. He lived by the silver spoon and would go to great lengths to preserve his way of life.

Federico II Gonzaga is a lot more complicated. Aside from allowing the armies of the Holy Roman Empire to pass through his land unmolested, and sack Rome, there really isn’t much on him. I had to dig a little deeper to find more info on him. He was somewhat subversive and underhanded at times, and he had very poor military experience. He essentially was a young man who was thrown into a role he was not equipped to handle. He was deep in the politics of the church, however, given a more passive nature and his manipulation of the system, I was able to portray him a little bit more as a skeptic of what was going on around him.

The lack of information on the personalities of people from several hundred years ago is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, with limited information, you have a lot more freedom. However, if you value history the way I do, you have a responsibility to dig as deep as you can and uncover every scrap of information you can find to make sure you get the character right… and even then you’re more than likely way off.

So let’s take a look at Mary Jane Kelly. (Spoiler Alerts for Soul Siphon. If you don’t want to know about Mary Jane’s character yet, skip ahead.)

Now… obviously I took a LOT of dramatic licenses here… If you don’t believe me… these three pictures portray the same person:

  Mary Kelly was a little easier to deal with for a few reasons;

Outside of her death, she was a relatively insignificant person on the stage of history and it’s likely that her name wouldn’t show up in any historical texts otherwise.

We do have historical accounts of her personality. However, those accounts are based on hearsay and the testimony of a few people who knew her. A lot of it was based on conflicting stories that she herself had told. So there you can pick and choose which ones sound feasible and which ones do not. Example: According to her, she had a brother in the military. This is likely. A lot of people served back then. On the other side, she also has a number of brothers… I think the number was 7. Arguably less likely, especially from the same mother. Not helping matters was that sometimes it was 7, sometimes it was 2 or 3, or sometimes just one and a sister. Needless to say, I kind of dismissed that.

I wasn’t going to portray her as she was back then. My character was the historical person, still alive in the 21st Century. In other words, she’d have 150 years of new experiences and development.

So here’s essentially what I did with her. From what historical accounts we can find on her, she was an Irish-born brothel worker with a sharp tongue. She was known for being quarrelsome and had earned the title of ‘Black Mary’,  which suggests that she knew how to handle herself in a dangerous neighborhood. She was also known for getting drunk and singing Irish folk and patriotic songs… so perhaps I could add some of the cultural characterizations and stereotypes to her behavior. I also based some of her personality on my own experiences with Irish culture, people I’ve encountered, and friends I have from the homeland itself.

So with that information, I was able to build the character personality around those traits and behaviors. However, that original build would have been appropriate for portraying Mary Kelly as she was during the late 1800s. I had an additional hurdle to overcome with her in that she was going to have an additional 150 years of development.

So what would a character like that be like? Well contending with immortality, having to watch friends die, as well as having full memory of her murder, I tried to create a character who voluntarily isolated herself from the rest of the team and shies away from forming bonds out of a fear of loss or abandonment. I then created a backstory where she spent years protecting other prostitutes and brothel workers. When she finally located Jack the Ripper himself, she set out to kill him, only to lose her chance when he attempted to escape to American and drown when his ship wrecked. She later discovered that her failure to catch him sooner resulted in more deaths at his hands.

I used that backstory, coupled with the harsh life she lived, to create a bitter character who was justifiably mad at the world. So when our hero meets Mary, she’s harsh, rude, and extremely condescending. She continuously objects to the main character joining the team and gives him a wide berth. I’ve gotten emails from people who read her character and ask why she’s so mean… and I always smile because I can usually tell where they are in the story.

Truthfully, readers aren’t meant to like Mary at first. I’d actually understand if they didn’t like Mary at all. However, I did want people to understand her. I wanted to make a character that wouldn’t necessarily change, but people would at least grow to understand and even empathize with. You may not like her abrasive personality or attitude, but at least you’d develop an understanding of how she got that way in the first place.

So in the end, the major hurdle is whether or not these people would actually be like the characters I created. Honestly, I have no idea. I used their historical profiles and what personality traits I could find to build a character that is as close as anyone could reasonably get without actually knowing the person. That being said, I fully recognize that I could be completely off. One, because as I said, I never met these people. Two, because I’m exposing them to fictional situations. Given that, it would be impossible to predict how they would react, even from someone who knew them personally.

So I guess in the end, my advice is simply to be careful. Do your due diligence and… I’d personally avoid anyone living or recently deceased. It’s true that you can’t slander the dead, but you’d be surprised at the legal loopholing a famous person’s family can do if desired. If that’s what you want to do though, I’d contact a lawyer first to see what your options are and what you should or should not consider saying about said person.

If they’re from an ancient time period, any surviving family members would have a much harder time making a case against you, and many would first have to be able to trace their line back to said person which isn’t always easy to do in a way that would be accepted by most legal systems.

Anyway, I hope this helps, but let’s open it up to the readers. Does anyone else in the WordPress community have experiences with creating a character from a historical person? Feel free to share your experiences and the steps you took in creating said character in the comments.

Thanks, Jim

  Readers,

Do you have a question about writing, publishing, my stories, etc? Please feel free to post a comment or email me.

jimthewritingwizard@gmail.com

I’ll use those comments to select my next blog post.

I have been writing for several years, have 4 published works, experience with publishing and independent work, so I can hopefully be of assistance.

Please note, I only do one of these a day and will do my best to respond to everyone, but it may take some time.

Also, feel free to check out my works of Fantasy and Historical Fiction, Available on Amazon and where ever books are sold. See the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/James-Harrington/e/B00P7FBXTU

Note: If you have read my books, PLEASE log into Amazon and post a review. I really love to hear everyone’s thoughts and constructive criticisms. Reviews help get my book attention and word of mouth is everything in this business!

Thanks friends!

Catch you on the flip side!

-Jim

The Hurdles of Creating Characters from People of History Hi Jim, I read a few of your other pieces about character creation and was hoping you could expand more upon how you create a character based on a historical person.

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Space 1889, Barry Windsor Smith, Tokien, Prydain

Popular Culture (DVS Press): If you needed more proof that the obsession with fictional corporate franchises has a religious overtone to it, here is a major filmmaker advertising just that. When my viewers were upset about the corporate destruction of Star Wars, calling the franchise a cultural institution, I thought it a bit hyperbolic – after all, these are just stories, and you can’t uncreate what George Lucas did. I see things better now. Star Wars is part of the religious reverence for popular franchises.

RPG (Matthew J. Constantine): Way back in the 80s when I was a wee lad and just getting into tabletop RPGs, I used to see Space 1889 on the shelf at a local game store and I thought it looked pretty cool. Somewhere around there, my father picked up a copy, and I used to thumb through it a bunch.  There was something in the setting that really hit a lot of my buttons. I was an Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne fan, so that was probably enough. But the setting had something that drew me in.

Comic Books (ICV2): Marvel Comics announced Conan the Barbarian: Coming of Conan, the first volume of collected Conan books restored for The Original Marvel Years Epic Collection, for release into trade in June 2020. Conan’s adventures would become legend, but before he became king, he was Conan the Barbarian. In this new trade paperback, Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith bring Robert E. Howard’s barbarian to four-color life, and have restored the art to match the epic majesty of their original editions.

Cinema (Amatopia): So this Birds of Prey movie didn’t do so hot. The usual suspects are blaming misogyny among the movie-going public. The other usual suspects are blaming a marketing campaign that specifically told men that this movie was not for them. Now, both are apocryphal, as I have not found men telling other men not to see this movie because it features women, and I have also not found people involved with the making of the movie telling men “This movie is not for you.”

Tolkien (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): we now know that Tolkien was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature at least three times: in 1961, when he was nominated by C. S. Lewis. in 1967, when his name appeared on the (alphabetical) long list as #58 of 70 nominees. In 1969, when he was #90 on the long list of 103 names. So far as I know he did not make the short list any of these times.

Weird Fiction & Appendix N (Goodman Games): Without August Derleth (1909-1971), you probably wouldn’t have that Cthulhu bumper sticker on your car, that Cthulhu for President poster, and certainly not that Plushie Cthulhu you have staring down at you from your geek-memorabilia shelf.  Not that Cthulhu would not exist, but he (it?) would be just one more forgotten character in a series of stories by an author unknown except to the most ardent of horror literati. Howard Philip Lovecraft’s greatest creation and most if not all of his fiction would have passed into obscurity if not for August Derleth’s founding of Arkham House publishing.

Fiction (DMR Books): These are stories of Jean Ray, who was known as “The Belgian Poe.” Other writers he was similar to are H. P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, and Guy de Maussapant. I first read Ray’s fiction in the doorstopper anthology The Weird by Jeff and Anne VanderMeer which reprinted his stories “The Mainz Psalter” and “The Shadowy Street.” Reading these stories, I felt like I did when I first read Lovecraft. They were tales of cosmic horror of immense power and imagination. I decided I would seek out more of his fiction.

RPG (Black Gate): For twenty years, the folks at Privateer Press have been creating games, primarily set in their Iron Kingdoms steampunk fantasy setting. They began with a series of RPG volumes, including an award-winning trilogy of adventures from 2001. These adventures, later collected into The Witchfire Trilogy, was built on the D20 System from Dungeons and Dragons 3E. Then Privateer Press really came into their own with the introduction of the Warmachine miniature wargame, focusing on armies that control massive metallic warjacks, one of the iconic creatures from their Iron Kingdoms setting.

T.V. (Dark Worlds Quarterly): When I was in graduate school, one of my

favorite television shows was Highlander.  I’d seen the first and second movies, and while I’d enjoyed them, it was the TV show that really captured my imagination and made me think about immortals and immortality. A movie is limited to approximately two hours. By contrast, a weekly show has a lot more time to develop characters, backstory, plots and subplots, and story-arcs that can last for months or even years.

Fiction (Epoch Times): In 1907, the man who composed these verses won the Noble Prize for Literature at the remarkably young age of 41. He also wrote hundreds of short stories and several novels. Many of these were made into films in the 20th century, among which were “The Jungle Book,” “Kim,” “Gunga Din,” “Wee Willie Winkie,” “Captains Courageous,” “Soldiers Three,” and “The Man Who Would Be King.” (Reader, if you haven’t seen this last film, starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Christopher Plummer, treat yourself to a great movie this winter.)

Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): A couple of years ago, Superversive Press announced a series of 12 volumes each containing short stories based on the classic planetary system. 9 were based on the planets, and two were based on the sides of the moon. Each volume would contain stories science fiction, fantasy, horror, and weird fiction, with everything in between. No genre style was off limits. All that mattered was matching tone and theme. As a themed series of short story anthologies, it was quite ambitious.

Retro-Science Fiction (25 Years Later): There are two closely-knit, though not necessarily always interchangeable, subgenres of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Raypunk, or in architectural design circles referred to as Raygun Gothic, is the retrofuture with an eye for a bright future. Atompunk generates dystopian vibes and warns of a dreaded future in which the atomic bomb desecrated all humankind. Atompunk is bleak and afraid. Raypunk is quite excited for what tomorrow has in store.

Cinema (Jon Mollison): Bollywood often gets bandied about as an alternative to Hollywood fare by those cut back on consumption of it’s anti-American resentment.  Taken in by the flashy colors, the obvious national pride of the productions, and for some strange reason the song and dance numbers that break out on the regular, they seek solace in alien spectacle.  Personally, I find the sheer foreign-ness of Bollywood off-putting in much the same way I find anime incomprehensible. . . Enter Furious, the Russian made story of 17 brave warriors who stood up to a full Mongol horde.

Art (Down the Tubes): The Windsor-Smith Studio announced the completion of Monsters, the long awaited graphic novel by Barry, last December, and that the project is on track for a mid-2020 release, but a publisher was not revealed. Assuming it will be launched through traditional distribution routes and not solely through the Windsor-Smith Studio official web site, you’d expect a solicitation through Diamond Previews might soon be in the offing.

Fantasy Fiction (Superversive SF): To both spend time with my children and give them literary food to build their minds, I recently read to them THE CHRONICLES OF PRYDAIN. For them, it was the second reading, but they were too young to remember the first. This time, they were begging for me to read more each night. The stories of Taran and the companions, Fflewddur Fflam, Gurgi, and Eilonwy not only filled their imaginations with adventure but taught them how dragons can be slain (paraphrasing of G.K. Chesterton).

Tolkien (Tentaculii): In August 1955 L. Sprague de Camp reviewed new Conan books and The Fellowship of the Ring, in Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1955. Worth reading right across the spread, as it’s ‘all of a piece’. For those who have somehow not yet enjoyed The Lord of the Rings, note that his review has plot spoilers for the first volume. At that time the second volume was not yet published. Camp must surely have here been the first to draw the comparison between the modus operandi of the ring in the Conan novelette “The Phoenix on the Sword” (1932) and The Lord of the Rings.

Sensor Sweep: Space 1889, Barry Windsor Smith, Tokien, Prydain published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[airoasis]

Everything Wrong With Captain Marvel In 16 Minutes Or Less

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/everything-wrong-with-captain-marvel-in-16-minutes-or-less/

Everything Wrong With Captain Marvel In 16 Minutes Or Less

never much like the Stanley cameos and definitely don’t like logos but this is goddamn touching but while we’re on the subject of opening logos for movies let’s frame it this way imagine buying the new Taylor Swift album but before you can hear me you have to first listen to 20 seconds of a universal music group audio jingle it would probably be rocking and full of tight harmonies but it would still forever be 20 seconds of norway’s standing between you and your music that’s what opening studio logos do for movies place my hands so angry oh my god they give us the name of the city the description of that city’s importance and then a third line with an utterly incomprehensible series of letter and number characters do you know what time it is Jesus Marvel movies young Dumbledore young Pope Sherlock Holmes is there any beloved institution that Jude Law hasn’t infiltrated anything you know funny how I was thinking the same thing about this chatty friendly fight scene which happens in every movie there’s nothing dangerous warrior an emotion not even a nuclear weapon a landmine sharp sword sniper’s bullet jagged rocks meat from a plant that once had an e.coli outbreak control your impulses so easy miss start using this there’s so much goddamn pedantic mansplaining in the beginning of this movie that I fast forwarded to the end where Carol blasts the Balrog and watched it three times in a row future VR requires artificial tendrils that get to know you better than your spouse just because it looks kind of cool doesn’t make it practical so the burrito supreme searches your thoughts and becomes the person that you’re closest to before communicating I mean contact got murdered for doing that at the end of the movie so long the scrolls have invaded yet another border planet this time Topher already lost me dude if you think for one minute I’m getting all this down plus the three or four other names organizations planets he mentions in this briefing you sadly overestimate my ability to give it well marvel do you read me anybody copy as technologically advanced as they are at a Cree or apparently still reliant on 1990s cellphone reception this is some dusty furry dust things suspense I’m no expert but maybe if you spent less time screaming you’d be able to do more scrolling no one will be seated during the bunch of old portion of the movie some stuff is happening just try and keep track of the purple in the green they’re on different sides I think movie does a great job advertising the Air Force you don’t now the movie does pile on a bit heavy with this stuff about her constantly being told she’s not good enough I get that people are told that but in movie form maybe we don’t need to see it a dozen times to get the point okay fine we need some back story on why Carroll’s so driven to be the best but this exposition brain probe really feels more like a Nike commercial than an MCU film okay wait can you change the way the camera of your memory tilts so that you can pick up fine details let’s just like the zoom and enhance cliche but for your brain dr.

Wendy Lawson that’s her so Carol can hear the scrolls that are digging around in her memories and she in memory reacts to it you can’t change an event by remembering it right fright she got knocked out cold and captured on that planet with a single blast of one of these space Tasers now she’s impervious to them that’s not exactly full-sized so I guess we can call this a little helm scream in case you thought this movie’s 90s references we’re gonna be subtle she crashed lands into a king blockbuster huh movies playing this is a visual gag but was Carol seriously gonna immediately shoot any non-threatening presents in this environment what if this were the janitor doing a late-night cleaning this top shelf here goes hudsucker proxy hook something else that I’m pretty sure is hamburger hill then first night then jumping jack flash jr.

And just cause I worked at three different blockbusters in my lifetime and you could fire four there you have one job and I think half these movies on the Shelf star Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger how likely in 1995 is it that a blockbuster would be advertising babe with a giant poster and standee when that was only released in August of that year the church wasn’t coming out on video at this point honestly we take care of those dirty looks is quite simply the worst dry-cleaning advertising slogan I could even fathom why does a dry-cleaning service even need a slogan look at you be better off just writing your hours of operation talk about some nuclear yadda yadda how the hell does outdated 90s tech and a payphone and turn into a communicator with the ability to send signals to her people millions of miles away in space all did it book work sure she could make a space phone out of that but she couldn’t bypass Ma Bell in the ill communication once it’s real aliens find the earth to be way less than acceptable cliche okay if this call is urgent enough to use the sirens why not take the cops and shield until after daybreak to respond why was shield alerted at all it’s a broken window in a fucking blockbuster okay this d aging technology has officially gotten creepy as hell I’ll be honest Jana fired Sam Jackson looks pretty awesome here and I am terrified of how that technology will definitely be used in the future this is the most convenient Road near a train situation any city planner ever cooked up in pursuit and she should be easy to track considering she’ll be the only person in Los Angeles to take the train sure Stanley could have been reading Kevin Smith’s mole rat script in 1995 the movie came out on October 20th 1995 so this could be early in the year when it was about to get shot or something the problem is the record story just left Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie and the infinite sadness being advertised here is coming soon or already out came out October 23rd 1995 and while it’s insane that those two things were only three days apart Stan Lee would not have been reading the script in October unless he was just getting nostalgic about his cameo for the residents of LA to jump to an old lady’s needs and all but how is this even possible you’re telling me that after all the kicking Carol’s done three regular ask commuters could temporarily restrain her fight chase on top of a moving train I feel like I’ve never seen that before except always of course it is tunnels the only logical choice once you’ve opted for fight on top of a train what I’m still here at the blockbuster Coulson saw fury take off forever ago so why is he just calling it also look I think the young ending effect they’re using on Sam Jackson is amazing but they must have used all the resources on that because Clark Craig’s face makes Jeff Bridges and Tron Legacy look like fine art look movie no one in a major city subway terminal would look this hard and long and a girl in a weird costume subway terminals are beacons for folks in weird costumes I rode a train once with spider-man and Marilyn Monroe and a guy that look exactly like Richard Grieco only I don’t think that was a costume I think that was just Richard Grieco there you go now that no one can tell that’s an alien no one will ask questions about the body with a jacket thrown over its face inside the wrecked car ah cool the doohickey that the scroll dropped on the train gets inserted into the whatchamacallit and immediately displays plot convenient footage perfectly edited for maximum exposition alta vista internet cafes modems big computer monitors wasn’t 1995 hilarious but seriously how would carol have the first goddamn clue how to work this fad and sure the motorcycle guy was an asshole and probably deserved it but what did this vintage boutique ever do to anyone hey how’s your eye that’s a fine yeah they’re not gonna hem handedly try and shoehorn a reason for Fury’s eye patch into this movie I got word on a motorcycle thief that fits her description but instead of immediately following up on that lead I’m gonna waste valuable time at shield espousing this clunky dialogue might even drink a tear wine and stop by Sam Goody’s to pick up a jagged little pill CD before I act on any of this information toggling Scrolls can only some recent memories of their host bodies that is literally the definition of a stupid restriction to put on an ability just for plot or hero reasons why should they even be able to access any memories if all they’re doing is copycatting where are you born Huntsville Alabama does this do Carroll except to provide a little more backstory for fury is she able to verify this bolt in any way Ruth you’re not a scroll Carol is a dick – what if this is a jukebox from the 90s has to be 30% ac/dc CDs 40% Tom Petty CDs 29% journey CDs and 1% Van Morrison CD is that a communicator yeah state of the art – wig agent which would in no way and work in a bunker like this but I’m gonna keep making these nostalgic references as long as Marvel pays me to do so Oh how did this cat get into this official government covert facility and did they know he was a flirt come if so why is he out roaming the halls hey that’s exactly how Eminem writes his lyrics I’ll assume Lawson was writing the follow-up to Stan I want to question her along that sounds well evil and/or dirty all I know is we take them in to dead or alive dead or alive yeah agreed that’s excessive it makes no sense unless your bosses bosses a scroll poly these are the loudest lights I’ve ever heard can you imagine the constant jump scares you’d have to endure if you were collating these records the CGI cat is a king abomination and yes the actress is allergic and they had to do a CGI cat in some places but just take twenty thousand dollars of the money you’re spending on unifying Sam Jackson and put it into realistic in the cat god damn also they ran into that cat on level five in the storage room and somehow it ran several floors away from that position and got into the hangar and onto a prototype aircraft that they would eventually use Maria Rambo so how do we get to Louisiana I’m sorry but the amount of information they’ve gleaned from a few seconds of glancing through the records like Maria’s exact address is such bull that this movie is actively starting to stink what is Ronan looked like a character from mist here Carol appeared almost lifelike on the hologram earlier and even in full color his accuser tech still using dial-up or something she flashes little moments but I can’t tell what’s real I’ll tell you what’s real someone on this movie set design team thinks this single mother living alone with her daughter keeps a bowl on the table with 16 lemons in it that’s real that happened you’d better come take a look at this cliche that was all that survived the crash well that’s a lie you’re telling me a prototype aircraft crashed and every single piece of it disintegrated into dust including the rest of this dog tag but not this tiny corner of dog tag you know you really should be kinder to your neighbors you never know when you’re gonna need to borrow some sugar this is pretty hilarious but it’s also ridiculous to think that the scrolls stopped off at a fast-food joint to pick up some burgers and shakes on the way to Louisiana and how would you know about the sugar borrowing habits of earthly suburban Knights this soon into your stay on the planet that was before on you you uh before I knew what made you different from me honest Talos had to have gotten this information before the confrontation at the Pegasus base since that’s where he heard the recorder so if he knew that then why did he try to kill Furies ass he knew they were working together and now he’s all peaceful I actually really like this characters turn but given the sequence of events it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense what’s happening it’s loading windows 95 okay so Jude Law shot Lawson before she could blow up the ship but it takes like 15 seconds for him to show up at a distance in all this smoke plus their obstructed somewhat by the crash ship and they’re on the down slope of a hill how did he know where to aim Carol got her powers by being fantastic forward by the warp engine but the energy only hit her despite yon raw and about the same distance away she assumed his power she’s coming with us okay I’d maybe buy that this recording spurred Carol’s memory to recall the crash but she’s being unconscious here so how would she know this part quick question why did they leave the main house and all go to the one day from collapse cabin to listen to the audio it makes a nice shot but it makes no sense from a human being standpoint is this houses only computer out in the decrepit barn why does Talos still have Keller’s jacket on we’ve seen that when they morph into other humans they already have their clothes on but now that he’s turned back into his natural shape that jacket should be gone right she wanted you to help us find the core and why the hell didn’t she tell Carol about the reason for the mission in the first place I know it would have been weird to come out as an alien but they were already in top-secret mode this withholding of information both makes about as much sense as what happened to Poe in the last Jedi did you hear me man this depiction of the friendship between two strong independent women that is emotional but not corny is long overdue and it’s about goddamn time that Marvel showed it so I’m gonna take us in off because I’m totally a social justice warrior or virtue signal or whatever the latest term that’s complimentary but is being used to be derogatory take it off this moonlight shot makes no sense the pole at the bottom right of the shot shows a shadow that matches up with the moon’s location but then the spaceship thing that veers flew here has a shadow that suggests another even stronger light source off-screen to the right when they were handing out kids they gave up a toughest one lieutenant trouble so is everything cool now like KanCare remember everything about her life on earth black box recording was fucking magic what purpose does this function of the spacesuit serve like some cream was almost finished designing it and the supreme intelligence poked its head in and was like don’t forget to add the unnecessary color wheel why did they bring the can captivate this cat will lead her freak out on fury and cut his face but he doesn’t want to do it here in zero gravity which is baffling because I’ve owned a cat before a lawnmower can freak them out a clap of thunder can freak them out suspending in zero gravity but but have them clawing out the eyeballs of all the motherfuckers nearby until they were on solid footing the cloaking activated holy balls is there anything this magical wrist doohickey can’t do can it order takeout purchase ebooks access free porn ah Who am I kidding of course it can access free porn in her note she called us a tesseract you know I’m fine with the timeline of the tesseract the idea that Howard Stark helped found Pegasus in the 80s and handed it over to this project is totally okay I’m just tired of the fucking tesseract it shows up and seemingly every movie being on tesseract and stuff she’s a pinball wizard it’s gotta be a twist a pinball wizard has got such a supple wrist evil dude picked up the cat carried it all the way here and just tosses it casually and that is a ton of wasted effort what did you do to your uniform he got in her head just like we thought when Carol’s been calling with updates constantly since she’s been on earth and there’s no way they would know that the scroll to flipped his jacket it’s killer by the way does the supreme intelligence seriously have the bandwidth and the inclination for pithy one-liners species flirty threat hi so I’ll calmly place a cat’s eyes muzzle over its mouth and I just happen to be carrying on my person without us you’re only human flesh you may be you’re only human to me mistakes this montage of various Carol’s getting up after falling down is excessive and on the nose and over-the-top anjala you were reborn fierce because every sci-fi movie apparently needs an alien race to miss read something and call it something else like Star Trek with Vedra Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes with kolima this goes on for some time I will say this about the movie it waits until the perfect time to unveil Carol’s true powers and this is a goosebumps inducing moment so it absolutely deserves us in off having said that this reveals sets up the same issue as DC has with Superman Carol is all-powerful she hasn’t discovered everything she could do yet but she’s pretty much unkillable now and future movies and game mm we’ll have to do a ton of hand waving and marginalization for her to be included at all into the rest of the MCU okay let playing on just a girl during the climactic scene of this movie that’s more on the nose than anything ever literally the only more on the nose song you could have chosen is Meredith Brooks bitch or maybe Barbie girl or Cyndi Lauper’s well the movie never explains it or even suggests it but jaan raghav errantly has the ability to manipulate metal like magneto and I needs more backstory than anything in this movie that you actually gave a backstory fool god damn huh did that happen the movie is directly contradicting its own previous implications about the power differential here oh they’re dogfighting in the canyons just like an independent Sky Captain and the world of to marvel dude Carroll may be all-powerful but does she also have a GPS built into her headpiece how the hell did she know exactly where yawn Rhonda DUP she didn’t even see him crash poop to me you can beat me this is a great moment but it was also super fucking obvious that it was gonna go down like this this is basically Indy taking out the sword guy with the gun and Raiders of the Lost Ark motherf lurkin I’ll be back before you know it she will not for emergencies only okay and real emergencies too not like of an alien species is invading one of your most populous cities and your shadow government is about to nuke the god of it as a result and really it would take a giant stroke of some luck and some space gravity to avoid total annihilation you could totally handle that you think you can find others like her we found her and we weren’t even looking okay the logic here is stunning and yes they do end up finding more heroes but it’s not because they already existed Carol was a one-in-a-billion fluke banner still hasn’t tested gamma radiation yet Tony has to be kidnapped and build a suit in a cave black widow is just a human badass and Hawkeye is decent too okay with arrows just how amazing with this cat vomit scene be if we didn’t know where the tesseract went during the sequence on lawson’s lab it might have felt worth sitting through the 12 minutes of credits might have there I said it I like a cat ah I’m just a free we have Vincent yeah we happy your father and I were just discussing his day at work why don’t you tell our daughter about it honey Janie today I quit my job and then I told my boss to go himself and then i blackmailed them for almost $60,000 past nice pair your father seems to think this kind of behavior something to be proud of and your mother seems to prefer that I go through life like a king prisoner while she keeps my in a mason jar under the sink tell the supreme intelligence that I’m coming to end it you Tom I’m coming and hell’s coming with me before we get started does anyone want to get out you want to play blind man go walk with the shepherd me my eyes are wide just talk

[batterymonster2021]

Everything Wrong With Captain Marvel In 16 Minutes Or Less

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/everything-wrong-with-captain-marvel-in-16-minutes-or-less/

Everything Wrong With Captain Marvel In 16 Minutes Or Less

never much like the Stanley cameos and definitely don’t like logos but this is goddamn touching but while we’re on the subject of opening logos for movies let’s frame it this way imagine buying the new Taylor Swift album but before you can hear me you have to first listen to 20 seconds of a universal music group audio jingle it would probably be rocking and full of tight harmonies but it would still forever be 20 seconds of norway’s standing between you and your music that’s what opening studio logos do for movies place my hands so angry oh my god they give us the name of the city the description of that city’s importance and then a third line with an utterly incomprehensible series of letter and number characters do you know what time it is Jesus Marvel movies young Dumbledore young Pope Sherlock Holmes is there any beloved institution that Jude Law hasn’t infiltrated anything you know funny how I was thinking the same thing about this chatty friendly fight scene which happens in every movie there’s nothing dangerous warrior an emotion not even a nuclear weapon a landmine sharp sword sniper’s bullet jagged rocks meat from a plant that once had an e.coli outbreak control your impulses so easy miss start using this there’s so much goddamn pedantic mansplaining in the beginning of this movie that I fast forwarded to the end where Carol blasts the Balrog and watched it three times in a row future VR requires artificial tendrils that get to know you better than your spouse just because it looks kind of cool doesn’t make it practical so the burrito supreme searches your thoughts and becomes the person that you’re closest to before communicating I mean contact got murdered for doing that at the end of the movie so long the scrolls have invaded yet another border planet this time Topher already lost me dude if you think for one minute I’m getting all this down plus the three or four other names organizations planets he mentions in this briefing you sadly overestimate my ability to give it well marvel do you read me anybody copy as technologically advanced as they are at a Cree or apparently still reliant on 1990s cellphone reception this is some dusty furry dust things suspense I’m no expert but maybe if you spent less time screaming you’d be able to do more scrolling no one will be seated during the bunch of old portion of the movie some stuff is happening just try and keep track of the purple in the green they’re on different sides I think movie does a great job advertising the Air Force you don’t now the movie does pile on a bit heavy with this stuff about her constantly being told she’s not good enough I get that people are told that but in movie form maybe we don’t need to see it a dozen times to get the point okay fine we need some back story on why Carroll’s so driven to be the best but this exposition brain probe really feels more like a Nike commercial than an MCU film okay wait can you change the way the camera of your memory tilts so that you can pick up fine details let’s just like the zoom and enhance cliche but for your brain dr.

Wendy Lawson that’s her so Carol can hear the scrolls that are digging around in her memories and she in memory reacts to it you can’t change an event by remembering it right fright she got knocked out cold and captured on that planet with a single blast of one of these space Tasers now she’s impervious to them that’s not exactly full-sized so I guess we can call this a little helm scream in case you thought this movie’s 90s references we’re gonna be subtle she crashed lands into a king blockbuster huh movies playing this is a visual gag but was Carol seriously gonna immediately shoot any non-threatening presents in this environment what if this were the janitor doing a late-night cleaning this top shelf here goes hudsucker proxy hook something else that I’m pretty sure is hamburger hill then first night then jumping jack flash jr.

And just cause I worked at three different blockbusters in my lifetime and you could fire four there you have one job and I think half these movies on the Shelf star Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger how likely in 1995 is it that a blockbuster would be advertising babe with a giant poster and standee when that was only released in August of that year the church wasn’t coming out on video at this point honestly we take care of those dirty looks is quite simply the worst dry-cleaning advertising slogan I could even fathom why does a dry-cleaning service even need a slogan look at you be better off just writing your hours of operation talk about some nuclear yadda yadda how the hell does outdated 90s tech and a payphone and turn into a communicator with the ability to send signals to her people millions of miles away in space all did it book work sure she could make a space phone out of that but she couldn’t bypass Ma Bell in the ill communication once it’s real aliens find the earth to be way less than acceptable cliche okay if this call is urgent enough to use the sirens why not take the cops and shield until after daybreak to respond why was shield alerted at all it’s a broken window in a fucking blockbuster okay this d aging technology has officially gotten creepy as hell I’ll be honest Jana fired Sam Jackson looks pretty awesome here and I am terrified of how that technology will definitely be used in the future this is the most convenient Road near a train situation any city planner ever cooked up in pursuit and she should be easy to track considering she’ll be the only person in Los Angeles to take the train sure Stanley could have been reading Kevin Smith’s mole rat script in 1995 the movie came out on October 20th 1995 so this could be early in the year when it was about to get shot or something the problem is the record story just left Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie and the infinite sadness being advertised here is coming soon or already out came out October 23rd 1995 and while it’s insane that those two things were only three days apart Stan Lee would not have been reading the script in October unless he was just getting nostalgic about his cameo for the residents of LA to jump to an old lady’s needs and all but how is this even possible you’re telling me that after all the kicking Carol’s done three regular ask commuters could temporarily restrain her fight chase on top of a moving train I feel like I’ve never seen that before except always of course it is tunnels the only logical choice once you’ve opted for fight on top of a train what I’m still here at the blockbuster Coulson saw fury take off forever ago so why is he just calling it also look I think the young ending effect they’re using on Sam Jackson is amazing but they must have used all the resources on that because Clark Craig’s face makes Jeff Bridges and Tron Legacy look like fine art look movie no one in a major city subway terminal would look this hard and long and a girl in a weird costume subway terminals are beacons for folks in weird costumes I rode a train once with spider-man and Marilyn Monroe and a guy that look exactly like Richard Grieco only I don’t think that was a costume I think that was just Richard Grieco there you go now that no one can tell that’s an alien no one will ask questions about the body with a jacket thrown over its face inside the wrecked car ah cool the doohickey that the scroll dropped on the train gets inserted into the whatchamacallit and immediately displays plot convenient footage perfectly edited for maximum exposition alta vista internet cafes modems big computer monitors wasn’t 1995 hilarious but seriously how would carol have the first goddamn clue how to work this fad and sure the motorcycle guy was an asshole and probably deserved it but what did this vintage boutique ever do to anyone hey how’s your eye that’s a fine yeah they’re not gonna hem handedly try and shoehorn a reason for Fury’s eye patch into this movie I got word on a motorcycle thief that fits her description but instead of immediately following up on that lead I’m gonna waste valuable time at shield espousing this clunky dialogue might even drink a tear wine and stop by Sam Goody’s to pick up a jagged little pill CD before I act on any of this information toggling Scrolls can only some recent memories of their host bodies that is literally the definition of a stupid restriction to put on an ability just for plot or hero reasons why should they even be able to access any memories if all they’re doing is copycatting where are you born Huntsville Alabama does this do Carroll except to provide a little more backstory for fury is she able to verify this bolt in any way Ruth you’re not a scroll Carol is a dick – what if this is a jukebox from the 90s has to be 30% ac/dc CDs 40% Tom Petty CDs 29% journey CDs and 1% Van Morrison CD is that a communicator yeah state of the art – wig agent which would in no way and work in a bunker like this but I’m gonna keep making these nostalgic references as long as Marvel pays me to do so Oh how did this cat get into this official government covert facility and did they know he was a flirt come if so why is he out roaming the halls hey that’s exactly how Eminem writes his lyrics I’ll assume Lawson was writing the follow-up to Stan I want to question her along that sounds well evil and/or dirty all I know is we take them in to dead or alive dead or alive yeah agreed that’s excessive it makes no sense unless your bosses bosses a scroll poly these are the loudest lights I’ve ever heard can you imagine the constant jump scares you’d have to endure if you were collating these records the CGI cat is a king abomination and yes the actress is allergic and they had to do a CGI cat in some places but just take twenty thousand dollars of the money you’re spending on unifying Sam Jackson and put it into realistic in the cat god damn also they ran into that cat on level five in the storage room and somehow it ran several floors away from that position and got into the hangar and onto a prototype aircraft that they would eventually use Maria Rambo so how do we get to Louisiana I’m sorry but the amount of information they’ve gleaned from a few seconds of glancing through the records like Maria’s exact address is such bull that this movie is actively starting to stink what is Ronan looked like a character from mist here Carol appeared almost lifelike on the hologram earlier and even in full color his accuser tech still using dial-up or something she flashes little moments but I can’t tell what’s real I’ll tell you what’s real someone on this movie set design team thinks this single mother living alone with her daughter keeps a bowl on the table with 16 lemons in it that’s real that happened you’d better come take a look at this cliche that was all that survived the crash well that’s a lie you’re telling me a prototype aircraft crashed and every single piece of it disintegrated into dust including the rest of this dog tag but not this tiny corner of dog tag you know you really should be kinder to your neighbors you never know when you’re gonna need to borrow some sugar this is pretty hilarious but it’s also ridiculous to think that the scrolls stopped off at a fast-food joint to pick up some burgers and shakes on the way to Louisiana and how would you know about the sugar borrowing habits of earthly suburban Knights this soon into your stay on the planet that was before on you you uh before I knew what made you different from me honest Talos had to have gotten this information before the confrontation at the Pegasus base since that’s where he heard the recorder so if he knew that then why did he try to kill Furies ass he knew they were working together and now he’s all peaceful I actually really like this characters turn but given the sequence of events it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense what’s happening it’s loading windows 95 okay so Jude Law shot Lawson before she could blow up the ship but it takes like 15 seconds for him to show up at a distance in all this smoke plus their obstructed somewhat by the crash ship and they’re on the down slope of a hill how did he know where to aim Carol got her powers by being fantastic forward by the warp engine but the energy only hit her despite yon raw and about the same distance away she assumed his power she’s coming with us okay I’d maybe buy that this recording spurred Carol’s memory to recall the crash but she’s being unconscious here so how would she know this part quick question why did they leave the main house and all go to the one day from collapse cabin to listen to the audio it makes a nice shot but it makes no sense from a human being standpoint is this houses only computer out in the decrepit barn why does Talos still have Keller’s jacket on we’ve seen that when they morph into other humans they already have their clothes on but now that he’s turned back into his natural shape that jacket should be gone right she wanted you to help us find the core and why the hell didn’t she tell Carol about the reason for the mission in the first place I know it would have been weird to come out as an alien but they were already in top-secret mode this withholding of information both makes about as much sense as what happened to Poe in the last Jedi did you hear me man this depiction of the friendship between two strong independent women that is emotional but not corny is long overdue and it’s about goddamn time that Marvel showed it so I’m gonna take us in off because I’m totally a social justice warrior or virtue signal or whatever the latest term that’s complimentary but is being used to be derogatory take it off this moonlight shot makes no sense the pole at the bottom right of the shot shows a shadow that matches up with the moon’s location but then the spaceship thing that veers flew here has a shadow that suggests another even stronger light source off-screen to the right when they were handing out kids they gave up a toughest one lieutenant trouble so is everything cool now like KanCare remember everything about her life on earth black box recording was fucking magic what purpose does this function of the spacesuit serve like some cream was almost finished designing it and the supreme intelligence poked its head in and was like don’t forget to add the unnecessary color wheel why did they bring the can captivate this cat will lead her freak out on fury and cut his face but he doesn’t want to do it here in zero gravity which is baffling because I’ve owned a cat before a lawnmower can freak them out a clap of thunder can freak them out suspending in zero gravity but but have them clawing out the eyeballs of all the motherfuckers nearby until they were on solid footing the cloaking activated holy balls is there anything this magical wrist doohickey can’t do can it order takeout purchase ebooks access free porn ah Who am I kidding of course it can access free porn in her note she called us a tesseract you know I’m fine with the timeline of the tesseract the idea that Howard Stark helped found Pegasus in the 80s and handed it over to this project is totally okay I’m just tired of the fucking tesseract it shows up and seemingly every movie being on tesseract and stuff she’s a pinball wizard it’s gotta be a twist a pinball wizard has got such a supple wrist evil dude picked up the cat carried it all the way here and just tosses it casually and that is a ton of wasted effort what did you do to your uniform he got in her head just like we thought when Carol’s been calling with updates constantly since she’s been on earth and there’s no way they would know that the scroll to flipped his jacket it’s killer by the way does the supreme intelligence seriously have the bandwidth and the inclination for pithy one-liners species flirty threat hi so I’ll calmly place a cat’s eyes muzzle over its mouth and I just happen to be carrying on my person without us you’re only human flesh you may be you’re only human to me mistakes this montage of various Carol’s getting up after falling down is excessive and on the nose and over-the-top anjala you were reborn fierce because every sci-fi movie apparently needs an alien race to miss read something and call it something else like Star Trek with Vedra Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes with kolima this goes on for some time I will say this about the movie it waits until the perfect time to unveil Carol’s true powers and this is a goosebumps inducing moment so it absolutely deserves us in off having said that this reveals sets up the same issue as DC has with Superman Carol is all-powerful she hasn’t discovered everything she could do yet but she’s pretty much unkillable now and future movies and game mm we’ll have to do a ton of hand waving and marginalization for her to be included at all into the rest of the MCU okay let playing on just a girl during the climactic scene of this movie that’s more on the nose than anything ever literally the only more on the nose song you could have chosen is Meredith Brooks bitch or maybe Barbie girl or Cyndi Lauper’s well the movie never explains it or even suggests it but jaan raghav errantly has the ability to manipulate metal like magneto and I needs more backstory than anything in this movie that you actually gave a backstory fool god damn huh did that happen the movie is directly contradicting its own previous implications about the power differential here oh they’re dogfighting in the canyons just like an independent Sky Captain and the world of to marvel dude Carroll may be all-powerful but does she also have a GPS built into her headpiece how the hell did she know exactly where yawn Rhonda DUP she didn’t even see him crash poop to me you can beat me this is a great moment but it was also super fucking obvious that it was gonna go down like this this is basically Indy taking out the sword guy with the gun and Raiders of the Lost Ark motherf lurkin I’ll be back before you know it she will not for emergencies only okay and real emergencies too not like of an alien species is invading one of your most populous cities and your shadow government is about to nuke the god of it as a result and really it would take a giant stroke of some luck and some space gravity to avoid total annihilation you could totally handle that you think you can find others like her we found her and we weren’t even looking okay the logic here is stunning and yes they do end up finding more heroes but it’s not because they already existed Carol was a one-in-a-billion fluke banner still hasn’t tested gamma radiation yet Tony has to be kidnapped and build a suit in a cave black widow is just a human badass and Hawkeye is decent too okay with arrows just how amazing with this cat vomit scene be if we didn’t know where the tesseract went during the sequence on lawson’s lab it might have felt worth sitting through the 12 minutes of credits might have there I said it I like a cat ah I’m just a free we have Vincent yeah we happy your father and I were just discussing his day at work why don’t you tell our daughter about it honey Janie today I quit my job and then I told my boss to go himself and then i blackmailed them for almost $60,000 past nice pair your father seems to think this kind of behavior something to be proud of and your mother seems to prefer that I go through life like a king prisoner while she keeps my in a mason jar under the sink tell the supreme intelligence that I’m coming to end it you Tom I’m coming and hell’s coming with me before we get started does anyone want to get out you want to play blind man go walk with the shepherd me my eyes are wide just talk

[caredogstips]

We need to talk about culture appropriation: why Lionel Shriver’s speech touched a nerve

Is it OK for white scribes to take on a black spokesperson? The assert that followed the American novelists address in Brisbane has shed new light on one of cultures hottest debates one that has hundreds of years of backstory and has sounded through literature, rap, stone and Hollywood movies

Lionel Shriver knew she was going to annoy beings. Inviting a renowned iconoclast to speak about community and belonging is like expecting a great grey shark to balance a beach ball on its nose, she articulated. She then used her keynote speech at the Brisbane columnists festival to tear into the debate that novelists most particularly grey writers are guilty of cultural appropriation by writing from the point of view of references from other culture backgrounds.

Referring to occurrences in which members of student authority at an American university faced impeachment after attended a tequila party wearing sombreros, and reports of a ban on a Mexican eatery from making out sombreros, the author of We Necessity to Talk About Kevin announced: The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: youre not supposed to try on other people hats . Yet thats what were paid to time, isnt it? Step into other folks shoes, and try on their hats.

The response was instant. Sudanese-born Australian social activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who was attending the event, walked out and then rapidly wrote a comment part which was contended that Shrivers speech was a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, for the purposes of the guise of fiction.

The argument is one of the most parted yet in a conversation that has a long record across literature, music, arts and rendition. While story might be the catalyst for this discussion, in the eyes of Abdel-Magied and others the issues are deeply rooted in real-world politics and a long history.

The image of the blackface singer creator of 1830s America the lily-white musician decorated up to look like a caricature of an African-American person and play-act comic skits is perhaps the most oft-invoked illustration of culture appropriation from record. The ethnic dynamic of minstrelsy was complex it was performed by African-American and Anglo actors alike but while African-American performers often sought to gain fiscal insurance from these best practices and in some cases use their scaffold to counter negative public stereotypes of themselves, white-hot performers reinforced those stereotypes. This produced within a society which continues to be has not been able to abolished bondage, and in which the political ability dynamic was very much racialized. As the civil right crusade thrived, so did criticism of white people attempting to exploit the pictures and events of people of colour for social and financial gain.

This pattern is recurred of all the countries, particularly in places that experienced colonisation and slavery, such as India, Australia and South Africa. As students, creators, activists and writers of emblazon fought to gain access to mainly grey institutions and public seats, and gained visibility in the cultural globule, they began to criticise the inaccurate images of themselves they construed created by and for the profit of others.

The issue has been heavily explored within the establishments but has reaped momentum in popular culture over the past decade. It underpins criticism of, among other things, Iggy Azaleas sonic blackness, Coldplays myopic construction of India in their music videos, and Miley Cyruss dance moves. Director Cameron Crowe lately apologised for casting Anglo-American actor Emma Stone as a part-Asian reputation in the 2015 movie Aloha not the first time a grey performer has been thrown to play a reputation from a different ethnic background in mainstream cinema. The proof has been assisted particularly by the feminist parish focus on intersectionality crudely the idea that discrimination takes on different forms depending on the hasten, class and/ or gender of the person or persons subject to discrimination.

The charge of culture appropriation is not confined to fiction, but at the moment thats perhaps the most heatedly raced terrain . In March, Harry Potter author JK Rowling was accused of proper the living institution of a marginalised people after a tale produced to her Pottermore website drew upon Navajo narratives about skinwalkers. Shriver herself mentioned the case of vehicles of grey British scribe Chris Cleave, whose novel The Other Hand is partly narrated by the character of a teenage Nigerian girl. In principle, I admire his firmnes, Shriver replied. She then went on to item reviewer Margot Kaminskis concerns that Cleave was manipulating the character, that he ought to be taking special care with representing its own experience that was not his own.

Shriver took aim at the proposal that an scribe should not use a reference they created for the service of a plot they saw. Of trend hes using them for his patch! she suggested. How could he not? They are his personas, to be operated at his caprice, to fulfil whatever purpose he cares to apply them to.

What borderlines around our own lives are we mandated to remain within? questioned Shriver. I would argue that any floor you are able to draw yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the authors its own experience is part of a fiction columnists job.

While it seems obvious that novelists of myth will endeavour to write from perspectives that are not their own, numerous writers of quality bicker there is a direct relationship between certain difficulties they face trying to make headway in the literary industry and the success of grey scribes who illustrate people of colour in their myth and who go on to build a successful literary profession off that. The difference between cultural illustration and cultural rights appropriation, by this logic, lies in the grey novelist telling storeys( and therefore taking producing possibilities) that would be better suited to a novelist of colour.

Some writers argue that it works in reverse, more. In an phenomenon for the Guardian in November last year, Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James told publishers too often pander to the white-hot wife( the majority of members of the book-buying public ), making writers of colouring to do the same. In a Facebook post responding to novelist Claire Vaye Watkins widely circulated essay On Pandering, James used to say the kind of storey favoured by publishers and bestows committees abode suburban white woman in the middle of ennui knowledge keenly observed epiphany pushed columnists of colour into literary conformity for fear of losing out on a journal deal.

Speaking to Guardian Australia, Indigenous Australian author and Miles Franklin winner Kim Scott adds its crucial to listen to the expressions of marginalised people who may not be given enough space to tell their own floors. Fibs are provides; theyre about reform and opening up interior macrocosms in the interests of expanding the shared nature and the common sense of community. So if theres many articulations telling we need more of us addressing our tales, from wherever theyre saying that, then that needs to be listened to.

Omar Musa, the Malaysian-Australian poet, rapper and novelist, told Guardian Australia: There is a history of stereotypes being continued by lily-white the authors and very, exceedingly reductive narrations. Beings are just generally much more cautious of that.

Musa supposes grey scribes should read, support and promote the operational activities of the novelists of emblazon before attempting to encroach on that cavity themselves, if that is something they want to do. But he admits he experiences the issue difficult; the suggestion that writers shouldnt move outside the boundaries of their own experiences comes into direct conflict with what he sees as the purpose of fiction: to empathise with and understand other families lives.

If youre going to write from someone elses perspective, Musa says, its important to shun stereotypes, especially if you want to move the specific characteristics rich and flawed as a good character should be.

Australian columnist Maxine Beneba Clarke. There are two schools of thought about[ culture appropriation] I dont know what the answer is but I can understand both views. Photograph: Nicholas Walton-Healey

Musa has his own experience of writing across the cultural subdivide. His first novel, Here Come The Dogs,was told from the perspective of a reference with a Samoan background. Musa answers consenting criticism is a crucial part of this process: There will be people who will tell you that maybe you didnt quite get this right, and you just have to cop that flack.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian-based novelist of African-Caribbean descent. Her memoir The Hate Race was prompted by a flow of racial insult; her accumulation of short narratives, Foreign Soil, was published to great acclaim after she won the Victorian Premiers Literary award for anunpublished manuscript in 2013. I think there are two situations in which Ive written outside of the African diaspora, she mentions. In both cases the latter are parts of short fiction and the process of writing them took several years, simply because of that consultation.

Beneba Clarke conceives consultation is all-important, but so is examining your own impulse to write from the perspective of another. What does it mean to be a writer “whos not” national minorities writer and wanting to change your literature? How do you do that? I think that was the opportunity for conversation that was missed[ in Shrivers speech] … How do we feel about writing each others stories and how do we go about it? Whats the respectful practice to go about it?

In some ways it comes down to personal ethics, she answers. Whether you feel you are doing no damage; whether you feel you are doing it sensitively; and, I believe, whether the publisher or the reader been agreed that you have done it sensitively.

Helen Young from the University of Sydney English department speaks fiction can have a very real impact on marginalised people. Individual journals have an impact on individual lives, but representation overall composes a seat and an environment in which people can feel like its OK to be who they are.

The politics of representation is a huge question in the science fiction and fantasy worlds very, speaks Young. This was exemplified by the recent expeditions against a comprehended leftwing bias in the Hugo gifts, in which disgruntled rightwing science fiction and fantasy columnists bickered the awards were being diminished by what the hell is experienced as the tendency of voters to opt studies simply about racial prejudice and exploitation and the like over traditional swashbuckling adventures.

Referring to the JK Rowling occurrence, Young suggests precisely because imagination is often to be considered as escapist, doesnt symbolize those stories dont stuff, or that authors should not treat different sources of their brainchild with respect. Theyre still the lived, hallowed narrations of living cultures, she supposes. Theyre the beliefs of real parties. So if from a western view you go, oh well, its just myth, I can do whatever I like with it, thats a problem.

Kate Grenville said she find writing Indigenous attributes was beyond her when she wrote The Secret River. Image: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

In some respects, the dirt seems to be changing. When Kate Grenville wrote her highly acclaimed historic romance about colonial Australia, The Secret River, in 2005, she shunned writing from the standpoint of Indigenous characters because she felt it was beyond her. Speaking to Ramona Koval on ABC radio, she alleged: What I didnt want to do was step into the heads of any of the Aboriginal attributes. I think that kind of appropriation … theres been too much of that in our writing. In her tale The Lieutenant, the sequel to The Secret River, nonetheless, Grenville did go into outlining more rounded Indigenous reputations, but only after deep and careful involvement with the historical records upon which her characters were based.

All the writers who spoke to Guardian Australia say they believe that considering the question of cultural appropriation is decisive, but the tenor of that discussion matters. They say that making a mockery of marginalised peoples concerns about image and appropriation does not constitute a constructive debate.

Scott, who has previously suggested a postponement on grey columnists used to describe Indigenous Australia, speaks lily-white columnists could use fiction itself to explore the tension about representation. Even the desire to occupy the consciousness of the other, that can be explored in story.

For Musa, the transformation needs to go beyond volumes: You probably cant have a change in literary culture without a change in the whole culture of the two countries, he says.

On the question of progress, in Australia at least, Beneba Clarke replies: ���Theres” two institutions of was just thinking about this: that Australian literature is not diverse enough for Anglo-Australian novelists to be even considering writing from other cultures, and the other school of thought is, well, how do we change literature then, given that most of our writers are Anglo-Australian? Are we locking ourselves into an inevitably whitewashed world of literature?

And I dont really subscribe to either thought; I dont know what the answer is but I can understand both positions. But I think what I perfectly cant understand is disregard for any kind of consultation and an inability to understand when people of colour are outraged.

Such articles has been amended to clarify that the Hugo awardings are voted on by the public.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post We need to talk about culture appropriation: why Lionel Shriver’s speech touched a nerve appeared first on caredogstips.com.

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[jamesharringtoncreativeworks]

Hi Jim,

  I read a few of your other pieces about character creation and was hoping you could expand more upon how you create a character based on a historical person. I’m trying to do something similar right now, and am really having a hard time. You said that you wanted the character to be as close to the historical person as humanly possible, so I just wanted to know how you accomplished that.

Thanks, Danny

Danny,

I don’t know how much more I can say on the subject without retracing what I’ve already said, but I’ll do my best. In my writings, I’ve incorporated a few historical people as main characters… Let’s take a look at them.

From left to right, Federico II Gonzaga, Pope Leo X, and Mary Jane Kelly.

Each of these characters presented their own problems in character creation and each had different levels of detail.

Federico and Pope Leo X were both portrayed in Divinity, and for those who have read it, Divinity is basically a story criticizing the church of that time, and by default, institutional religion in general.

Basically, I wanted to show the problems with blind adherence to strict interpretations of doctrine that was, in my opinion anyway, used way outside of its purpose. To do this, I posed the question; What would happen if an angel appeared in 16th Century Europe? What would happen if she were wounded and in need of help? How would people react to what she had to say or how she behaved? Would they take her in and help her, or would they fall back on what they’d been taught, not considering that those teachings might be wrong, and thus assume that she was actually a demonic presence?

To frame the story, I needed to choose the right time period and the right church leader. Yes, the Pope was a villain in the book. I wanted to be careful as I didn’t want to portray someone in a negative light who didn’t deserve it. There were plenty of Popes from the time period I had in mind that did their jobs and were, on a scale, considered benevolent.

Pope Leo X shows up on many of the ‘Worst Popes’ lists out there. He’s was extremely indulgent, driving the church deeply into debt, and then prayed on the ignorance of the faithful in order to sell indulgences to pay down that debt. He was not a priest and he’d had his hands very deep in the pockets of politics of the time.

My portrayal of him is based on that. I presented Leo X as a man who would view an angel potentially going around countering the teachings of the church as dangerous. Especially given that this was a time when the Protestant Reformation was really taking off. Other than his dealings with the church and some backstory of growing up as a member of the Medici family, there isn’t much on his personality traits. So basically, I had to envision what someone would be like who made the decisions he did. What I came up with was an intelligent, well-spoken individual, who was, unfortunately, too easily seduced by power and luxury. He lived by the silver spoon and would go to great lengths to preserve his way of life.

Federico II Gonzaga is a lot more complicated. Aside from allowing the armies of the Holy Roman Empire to pass through his land unmolested, and sack Rome, there really isn’t much on him. I had to dig a little deeper to find more info on him. He was somewhat subversive and underhanded at times, and he had very poor military experience. He essentially was a young man who was thrown into a role he was not equipped to handle. He was deep in the politics of the church, however, given a more passive nature and his manipulation of the system, I was able to portray him a little bit more as a skeptic of what was going on around him.

The lack of information on the personalities of people from several hundred years ago is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, with limited information, you have a lot more freedom. However, if you value history the way I do, you have a responsibility to dig as deep as you can and uncover every scrap of information you can find to make sure you get the character right… and even then you’re more than likely way off.

So let’s take a look at Mary Jane Kelly. (Spoiler Alerts for Soul Siphon. If you don’t want to know about Mary Jane’s character yet, skip ahead.)

Now… obviously I took a LOT of dramatic licenses here… If you don’t believe me… these three pictures portray the same person:

Mary Kelly was a little easier to deal with for a few reasons;

Outside of her death, she was a relatively insignificant person on the stage of history and it’s likely that her name wouldn’t show up in any historical texts otherwise.

We do have historical accounts of her personality. However, those accounts are based on hearsay and the testimony of a few people who knew her. A lot of it was based on conflicting stories that she herself had told. So there you can pick and choose which ones sound feasible and which ones do not. Example: According to her, she had a brother in the military. This is likely. A lot of people served back then. On the other side, she also has a number of brothers… I think the number was 7. Arguably less likely, especially from the same mother. Not helping matters was that sometimes it was 7, sometimes it was 2 or 3, or sometimes just one and a sister. Needless to say, I kind of dismissed that.

I wasn’t going to portray her as she was back then. My character was the historical person, still alive in the 21st Century. In other words, she’d have 150 years of new experiences and development.

So here’s essentially what I did with her. From what historical accounts we can find on her, she was an Irish-born brothel worker with a sharp tongue. She was known for being quarrelsome and had earned the title of ‘Black Mary’,  which suggests that she knew how to handle herself in a dangerous neighborhood. She was also known for getting drunk and singing Irish folk and patriotic songs… so perhaps I could add some of the cultural characterizations and stereotypes to her behavior. I also based some of her personality on my own experiences with Irish culture, people I’ve encountered, and friends I have from the homeland itself.

So with that information, I was able to build the character personality around those traits and behaviors. However, that original build would have been appropriate for portraying Mary Kelly as she was during the late 1800s. I had an additional hurdle to overcome with her in that she was going to have an additional 150 years of development.

So what would a character like that be like? Well contending with immortality, having to watch friends die, as well as having full memory of her murder, I tried to create a character who voluntarily isolated herself from the rest of the team and shies away from forming bonds out of a fear of loss or abandonment. I then created a backstory where she spent years protecting other prostitutes and brothel workers. When she finally located Jack the Ripper himself, she set out to kill him, only to lose her chance when he attempted to escape to American and drown when his ship wrecked. She later discovered that her failure to catch him sooner resulted in more deaths at his hands.

I used that backstory, coupled with the harsh life she lived, to create a bitter character who was justifiably mad at the world. So when our hero meets Mary, she’s harsh, rude, and extremely condescending. She continuously objects to the main character joining the team and gives him a wide berth. I’ve gotten emails from people who read her character and ask why she’s so mean… and I always smile because I can usually tell where they are in the story.

Truthfully, readers aren’t meant to like Mary at first. I’d actually understand if they didn’t like Mary at all. However, I did want people to understand her. I wanted to make a character that wouldn’t necessarily change, but people would at least grow to understand and even empathize with. You may not like her abrasive personality or attitude, but at least you’d develop an understanding of how she got that way in the first place.

So in the end, the major hurdle is whether or not these people would actually be like the characters I created. Honestly, I have no idea. I used their historical profiles and what personality traits I could find to build a character that is as close as anyone could reasonably get without actually knowing the person. That being said, I fully recognize that I could be completely off. One, because as I said, I never met these people. Two, because I’m exposing them to fictional situations. Given that, it would be impossible to predict how they would react, even from someone who knew them personally.

So I guess in the end, my advice is simply to be careful. Do your due diligence and… I’d personally avoid anyone living or recently deceased. It’s true that you can’t slander the dead, but you’d be surprised at the legal loopholing a famous person’s family can do if desired. If that’s what you want to do though, I’d contact a lawyer first to see what your options are and what you should or should not consider saying about said person.

If they’re from an ancient time period, any surviving family members would have a much harder time making a case against you, and many would first have to be able to trace their line back to said person which isn’t always easy to do in a way that would be accepted by most legal systems.

Anyway, I hope this helps, but let’s open it up to the readers. Does anyone else in the WordPress community have experiences with creating a character from a historical person? Feel free to share your experiences and the steps you took in creating said character in the comments.

Thanks, Jim

  Readers,

Do you have a question about writing, publishing, my stories, etc? Please feel free to post a comment or email me.

jimthewritingwizard@gmail.com

I’ll use those comments to select my next blog post.

I have been writing for several years, have 4 published works, experience with publishing and independent work, so I can hopefully be of assistance.

Please note, I only do one of these a day and will do my best to respond to everyone, but it may take some time.

Also, feel free to check out my works of Fantasy and Historical Fiction, Available on Amazon and where ever books are sold. See the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/James-Harrington/e/B00P7FBXTU

Note: If you have read my books, PLEASE log into Amazon and post a review. I really love to hear everyone’s thoughts and constructive criticisms. Reviews help get my book attention and word of mouth is everything in this business!

Thanks friends!

Catch you on the flip side!

-Jim

The Hurdles of Creating Characters from People of History Hi Jim, I read a few of your other pieces about character creation and was hoping you could expand more upon how you create a character based on a historical person.

[jamesharringtoncreativeworks]

Hi Jim,

  I read a few of your other pieces about character creation and was hoping you could expand more upon how you create a character based on a historical person. I’m trying to do something similar right now, and am really having a hard time. You said that you wanted the character to be as close to the historical person as humanly possible, so I just wanted to know how you accomplished that.

Thanks, Danny

Danny,

I don’t know how much more I can say on the subject without retracing what I’ve already said, but I’ll do my best. In my writings, I’ve incorporated a few historical people as main characters… Let’s take a look at them.

From left to right, Federico II Gonzaga, Pope Leo X, and Mary Jane Kelly.

Each of these characters presented their own problems in character creation and each had different levels of detail.

Federico and Pope Leo X were both portrayed in Divinity, and for those who have read it, Divinity is basically a story criticizing the church of that time, and by default, institutional religion in general.

Basically, I wanted to show the problems with blind adherence to strict interpretations of doctrine that was, in my opinion anyway, used way outside of its purpose. To do this, I posed the question; What would happen if an angel appeared in 16th Century Europe? What would happen if she were wounded and in need of help? How would people react to what she had to say or how she behaved? Would they take her in and help her, or would they fall back on what they’d been taught, not considering that those teachings might be wrong, and thus assume that she was actually a demonic presence?

To frame the story, I needed to choose the right time period and the right church leader. Yes, the Pope was a villain in the book. I wanted to be careful as I didn’t want to portray someone in a negative light who didn’t deserve it. There were plenty of Popes from the time period I had in mind that did their jobs and were, on a scale, considered benevolent.

Pope Leo X shows up on many of the ‘Worst Popes’ lists out there. He’s was extremely indulgent, driving the church deeply into debt, and then prayed on the ignorance of the faithful in order to sell indulgences to pay down that debt. He was not a priest and he’d had his hands very deep in the pockets of politics of the time.

My portrayal of him is based on that. I presented Leo X as a man who would view an angel potentially going around countering the teachings of the church as dangerous. Especially given that this was a time when the Protestant Reformation was really taking off. Other than his dealings with the church and some backstory of growing up as a member of the Medici family, there isn’t much on his personality traits. So basically, I had to envision what someone would be like who made the decisions he did. What I came up with was an intelligent, well-spoken individual, who was, unfortunately, too easily seduced by power and luxury. He lived by the silver spoon and would go to great lengths to preserve his way of life.

Federico II Gonzaga is a lot more complicated. Aside from allowing the armies of the Holy Roman Empire to pass through his land unmolested, and sack Rome, there really isn’t much on him. I had to dig a little deeper to find more info on him. He was somewhat subversive and underhanded at times, and he had very poor military experience. He essentially was a young man who was thrown into a role he was not equipped to handle. He was deep in the politics of the church, however, given a more passive nature and his manipulation of the system, I was able to portray him a little bit more as a skeptic of what was going on around him.

The lack of information on the personalities of people from several hundred years ago is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, with limited information, you have a lot more freedom. However, if you value history the way I do, you have a responsibility to dig as deep as you can and uncover every scrap of information you can find to make sure you get the character right… and even then you’re more than likely way off.

So let’s take a look at Mary Jane Kelly. (Spoiler Alerts for Soul Siphon. If you don’t want to know about Mary Jane’s character yet, skip ahead.)

Now… obviously I took a LOT of dramatic licenses here… If you don’t believe me… these three pictures portray the same person:

Mary Kelly was a little easier to deal with for a few reasons;

Outside of her death, she was a relatively insignificant person on the stage of history and it’s likely that her name wouldn’t show up in any historical texts otherwise.

We do have historical accounts of her personality. However, those accounts are based on hearsay and the testimony of a few people who knew her. A lot of it was based on conflicting stories that she herself had told. So there you can pick and choose which ones sound feasible and which ones do not. Example: According to her, she had a brother in the military. This is likely. A lot of people served back then. On the other side, she also has a number of brothers… I think the number was 7. Arguably less likely, especially from the same mother. Not helping matters was that sometimes it was 7, sometimes it was 2 or 3, or sometimes just one and a sister. Needless to say, I kind of dismissed that.

I wasn’t going to portray her as she was back then. My character was the historical person, still alive in the 21st Century. In other words, she’d have 150 years of new experiences and development.

So here’s essentially what I did with her. From what historical accounts we can find on her, she was an Irish-born brothel worker with a sharp tongue. She was known for being quarrelsome and had earned the title of ‘Black Mary’,  which suggests that she knew how to handle herself in a dangerous neighborhood. She was also known for getting drunk and singing Irish folk and patriotic songs… so perhaps I could add some of the cultural characterizations and stereotypes to her behavior. I also based some of her personality on my own experiences with Irish culture, people I’ve encountered, and friends I have from the homeland itself.

So with that information, I was able to build the character personality around those traits and behaviors. However, that original build would have been appropriate for portraying Mary Kelly as she was during the late 1800s. I had an additional hurdle to overcome with her in that she was going to have an additional 150 years of development.

So what would a character like that be like? Well contending with immortality, having to watch friends die, as well as having full memory of her murder, I tried to create a character who voluntarily isolated herself from the rest of the team and shies away from forming bonds out of a fear of loss or abandonment. I then created a backstory where she spent years protecting other prostitutes and brothel workers. When she finally located Jack the Ripper himself, she set out to kill him, only to lose her chance when he attempted to escape to American and drown when his ship wrecked. She later discovered that her failure to catch him sooner resulted in more deaths at his hands.

I used that backstory, coupled with the harsh life she lived, to create a bitter character who was justifiably mad at the world. So when our hero meets Mary, she’s harsh, rude, and extremely condescending. She continuously objects to the main character joining the team and gives him a wide berth. I’ve gotten emails from people who read her character and ask why she’s so mean… and I always smile because I can usually tell where they are in the story.

Truthfully, readers aren’t meant to like Mary at first. I’d actually understand if they didn’t like Mary at all. However, I did want people to understand her. I wanted to make a character that wouldn’t necessarily change, but people would at least grow to understand and even empathize with. You may not like her abrasive personality or attitude, but at least you’d develop an understanding of how she got that way in the first place.

So in the end, the major hurdle is whether or not these people would actually be like the characters I created. Honestly, I have no idea. I used their historical profiles and what personality traits I could find to build a character that is as close as anyone could reasonably get without actually knowing the person. That being said, I fully recognize that I could be completely off. One, because as I said, I never met these people. Two, because I’m exposing them to fictional situations. Given that, it would be impossible to predict how they would react, even from someone who knew them personally.

So I guess in the end, my advice is simply to be careful. Do your due diligence and… I’d personally avoid anyone living or recently deceased. It’s true that you can’t slander the dead, but you’d be surprised at the legal loopholing a famous person’s family can do if desired. If that’s what you want to do though, I’d contact a lawyer first to see what your options are and what you should or should not consider saying about said person.

If they’re from an ancient time period, any surviving family members would have a much harder time making a case against you, and many would first have to be able to trace their line back to said person which isn’t always easy to do in a way that would be accepted by most legal systems.

Anyway, I hope this helps, but let’s open it up to the readers. Does anyone else in the WordPress community have experiences with creating a character from a historical person? Feel free to share your experiences and the steps you took in creating said character in the comments.

Thanks, Jim

  Readers,

Do you have a question about writing, publishing, my stories, etc? Please feel free to post a comment or email me.

jimthewritingwizard@gmail.com

I’ll use those comments to select my next blog post.

I have been writing for several years, have 4 published works, experience with publishing and independent work, so I can hopefully be of assistance.

Please note, I only do one of these a day and will do my best to respond to everyone, but it may take some time.

Also, feel free to check out my works of Fantasy and Historical Fiction, Available on Amazon and where ever books are sold. See the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/James-Harrington/e/B00P7FBXTU

Note: If you have read my books, PLEASE log into Amazon and post a review. I really love to hear everyone’s thoughts and constructive criticisms. Reviews help get my book attention and word of mouth is everything in this business!

Thanks friends!

Catch you on the flip side!

-Jim

Hi Jim, I read a few of your other pieces about character creation and was hoping you could expand more upon how you create a character based on a historical person.