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so many things try to emulate the Beatrice/Benedick relationship and so few of them get it right bc they’re like ‘oh it’s about the banter’ and YES, obviously, but if you make it JUST about the banter you’re going to fail! it’s about the RESPECT!!! it’s about the scene after Hero’s shaming where Benedick drops the banter entirely and sits there with Beatrice as she rages and weeps and then chooses to side with HER instead of the boy’s club that he’s been hanging out with for the entire play, both because he loves her and because she’s RIGHT!

like, it’s not some impulsive thing to make her like him, and it’s not just talk; he asks her if she’s sure and then he agrees and then he remains cold and determined when he meets Claudio and Don Pedro and they try to get him to joke around with them like old times.  i think that’s one of the things that gets me the most; that there’s a scene that you half-expect to fall into that same sort of joking, where Claudio and Don Pedro are specifically like, “Huh, we inexplicably feel kind of sad after ruining this woman’s life and reputation, I bet Benedick will cheer us up!” and he just. utterly refuses to engage. and it’s so powerful and it’s such a tonal shift and such a strong indication of just how much he loves and values Beatrice and!! anything that gets the banter but doesn’t get that completely fails to understand their relationship! THB!!

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this 'being really tired after work' thing is really getting in the way of this 'pursuing my artistic hopes and dreams' thing has anyone else noticed this

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In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

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"You could get up early and do it before work" I could also wait for a magic beanstalk to start growing in my living room LMAO. Let's focus on things that happen in the real world

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One of the best stories I ever read as a child was a fantasy novel by some local dude selling books out of a suitcase on the sidewalk downtown, and I don't remember what it was called or who the author was, and it's so obscure that no matter how many elements I remember, I've never been able to find it through web searches. I only vaguely remember the story - it was a love story, something about a tower on an island and two characters on a quest to discover their forgotten past. They fall in love and at the end the only way to stay together is to allow themselves to forget again, and you realize that they're right where they started, in the exact same tower, and they're doomed to go on this same quest over and over again, never completed, but that also means they'll fall in love over and over again forever. And I remember how that ending blew up my little child brain into a million pieces.

I don't know what happened to the book, and I'll probably never read it again, but if you're somewhere out there and you were once selling fantasy novels from a suitcase on the sidewalk in the suburbs of Chicago, and if you ever felt like your writing never meant anything or went anywhere except a hundred copies you had printed yourself and sold for almost nothing, please know that your story buried itself in my young brain and has probably shaped my worldview in ways even I don't understand.

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it's so hardcover –> we're so paperback

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i can't express how absolutely important it is that when you make an edgy, brooding, badass character who's tough as nails and good at fighting and whatever, you HAVE to give them at least one reason to become completely helpless and pathetic. you have a panic attack quota to fulfill.

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[staggering to my feet and wiping a single perfect drip of blood from my mouth] i have to get back on my bullshit. no matter the cost

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It's like idk man, I still wash my paint brushes the way my art teacher taught me how a decade ago. I eat tortillas the same way as the ex I haven't seen in years. You can fly to the other side of the world and the shop will play the song your dad played in the car when you were a kid and it still sounds exactly the same. My hair grows funny in one spot because I got a scar on my scalp when I was six.

Sometimes I reach for light switches that aren't there, that have never been there, because I used to live someplace that had a light switch in that spot. And I think maybe life is about repeatedly reaching for light switches that aren't there. In a few years you'll be somewhere else, and you'll reach for the light switches you have now.

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𝙻𝙰𝙸𝙺𝙰 𝚃𝙾 𝙶𝚁𝙾𝚄𝙽𝙳 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚃𝚁𝙾𝙻 — I miss you , Have I told you that yet?

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dear god we don't talk much but please give me the strength to start that project, the determination to start that project, and the fortitude to start that project. thanks

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so it’s a wednesday night in july and you’re at home and you’ve showered and you’ve masturbated and you’ve gnawed at the inside of your mouth and you’ve eaten and washed the dishes and fixed a corner of the fitted sheet on your bed and texted your grandmother and thought positive thoughts and still the feeling comes. what then

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i’m like if a writer did not write and did other things instead

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how it feels rn

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i like how tristan keeps beating the shit out of every knight he runs into and afterwards they’re always like dude that was awesome, where are you from?? and when he tells them cornwall their reaction immediately changes. they’re like to i can’t fucking believe i got my ass handed to me by some guy from cornwall. im selling my house. never speak to me again

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overhearing my neighbor rant on the phone top of his lungs and his friend is saying something in calm voice and he goes NO. NO NUANCE. STOP SAYING NUANCE. MY BOSS NEEDS TO DIE