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Damned right.

Regardless of what cynics still resentful of their 11th grade English class experience might tell you, you’re allowed to identify with Holden. You’re allowed to root for Heathcliff. You’re allowed to feel gooey over Romeo and Juliet. 

We got over the idea that literature was meant to always reflect reality and to offer moral instruction a long time ago. Interacting with all the gross, ugly, embarrassing, and/or destructive emotions we encounter in books is part of the reason they’re there.

In my mind, this is the main theme for the late-’90s modern-fantasy real-time strategy game that depicts Kuvira’s campaign to unify the Earth Kingdom.

Legend of Korra - Kuvira theme song | cover by ForTiorI

download mp3: http://www.mediafire.com/file/p8blrdko8tgbb2n/The+Legend+of+Korra+-+Kuvira+theme+song+%28cover+by+ForTiorI%29.mp3 download multitracks: http://...

Jeremy Zuckerman forwarded me this badass, modern metal cover of his Kuvira theme by ForTiorl. I’m confident a certain badass, modern metalbending militaristic dictator would dig it too.

Even more than Betterman? How is that possible?

It’s taken me 30 minutes to take down notes on like 2 minutes of this scene happening. I don’t know that an anime has affected me as much as this has.

Nasty little beastie, but a good doggo nonetheless

Who’s a good ghost doggo?!

I’m actually almost through the campaign right now and...man, you weren’t kidding. As I always say, if a Wolfenstein game has a more nuanced portrayal of mass murder than your story does, you need to sit back and reassess a few things.

At least the guns look neat, tho.

There’s tomfoolery brewing in Squad 7! Bigoted tomfoolery! In this episode Madiha sticks up for the little girl, struggles to drive a tank, and goes looking for a bridge. Who wins, 5 scouts, or 1 speedy girl? Check out our Patreon!

Honestly, you’re actually one of the most interesting people I know, and I’m glad I got to know you.

i know im not very interesting but i try so hard that you should all humor me

I used to think that, but a few years ago an old opinion piece completely changed my mind on the subject. To summarize the piece’s argument (in case the site ever goes down), the key differences between superhero movies and westerns is that:

1. People go to see superhero movies because they like certain characters; people went to see westerns because they like westerns. To put it another way, if you want to see a western, the genre is broad enough that you can see all sorts of different movies. But if you want to see a superhero movie, you usually just want to watch Batman acting like Batman and doing Batman things, or Cap acting like Cap etc...

2. Westerns were small enough and cheap enough to make that directors and writers could experiment widely within the genre; modern superhero movies are so expensive that's there far more pressure to play it safe just so you’ll earn your money back.

3. Great characters usually only have a handful of truly interesting stories. A controversial point, but I think this gets at why superhero films tend to focus on either origin stories or constantly feel like retreads of the same ideas. 4. The actor is the draw of the western, while the character is the draw of the superhero film. With the western you can make different movies that emphasize different aspects of the actor’s persona or even have him play against type, while in a superhero movie the actor is something of an interchangeable widget that takes second place to the character. 5. At the end of the day, the audience doesn’t really want innovation or personal films all that much. This is only a crude summary of the piece’s arguments, so I really recommend reading the linked article above.

Superhero movies are the cowboy movies of our time.

This has become something of a critical issue for sf/f writers in the past few decades. Way back in the early 2000s, when blogs were still a thing, the British author M. John Harrison caused something of a tempest in the online genre community criticizing the concept of “worldbuilding” as detrimental to the creation of literature. The original posts are long gone, but there is a Reddit post copying Harrison’s final summation of his thoughts on the matter.

Even though I’m not a “proper” writer yet, this is an issue I’ve worried about over the years. While I don’t have the philosophical background of Mr. Harrison, my own objections to the primacy of worldbuilding stem from a key complaint Harrison makes: the idea that worldbuilding “literalizes the act of creation.” The essay talks about Harrison’s interpretation of the matter, but here I’ll quickly over my own.

The problem with believing that worldbuilding is all is that it changes the reader’s relationship to the text. If a reader believes that the mechanics and details of a setting are the most important part of a story, they will end up seeing stories not as stories, ambiguous creatures of metaphor and meaning, but as documentaries of alternate worlds. When this happens, the reader both forgoes the suspension of disbelief required to make any story work and unknowingly imposes their own worldview on the story under the guise of “objective reality.” Rather than developing a symbiotic relationship with the story wherein the story is accepted on its own terms, the reader instead becomes an anthropologist in a duck blind scanning the story from afar, compiling a list of points observed. This is how you end up with situations where people complain that characters don’t act “logically” without considering the thematic reasons for their motivations. Obviously no one will ever be able to suspend their disbelief for every part of every story, but some level of acceptance is always required. Without it, the forest just becomes a big bunch of trees.

This attitude also poses problems for the writer, who is no longer expected to be a storyteller, but a God who dreams up and fashions every aspect of their creation from the wings of an aphid to the greatest supergiant stars. Needless to say, this is an awful attitude to have as a writer. Rather than having the reader accept your story and go along for the ride, the entire burden of creating the world falls on you, and the sad fact of the matter is that most of us aren’t God. A few of us out there are polymaths and Renaissance men that can shoulder the burden, but most of us, myself included, aren’t. What happens with most of us is that we develop the belief that we must understand everything before we can create something, which often leads to writers putting their stories off to research things they don’t really need. I’ve been guilty of this myself with things like starting work on a fantasy novel by working out the layout of the solar system and worrying about getting myself up to speed on introductory economics (so much economics in fiction these days...I’m sick of it). Some of this would have been important thematically, but my problem was that I was doing in first instead of figuring out what I actually wanted to tell a story about. I’m sure many of you have similar stories to share.

In short, if you’re the sort of person who loves creating all this intricate background for their fantasy settings, knock yourself out, but just remember that for the sake of both you and you reader that they can’t be everything.

(As a final note, I have actually seen some people drop traditional narrative entirely and write what are essentially fictional textbooks. It’s something you tend to see in the online alternate history community, where the primary attraction is seeing the raw mechanics of historical change play out over centuries across nations filled with millions upon millions of people, the scale of which the human-focused modern novel has some difficulty capturing. They rarely appear on bookshelves because they don’t fit in with the publishing industry’s classifications of genre, but you sometimes get odd anomalies like Robert Sobel’s 1973 work For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga.)

I think the best writing tip I can give (this is untrue, I can probably give many writing tips, but this is the writing tip foremost in my mind at the moment and I needed a good hook to start this post) is that not everything that is read as Lore needs to be important or explicable to what you’re writing. Often times you need a detail or a character to appear to make another detail or character sound more convincing or to appropriately place it in the world, people will latch on, but maybe that’s not the story you’re telling or what’s actually important to you. For me, for example, it’s not important to detail say, the histories of Nochtish tank design bureaus. It’s enough to know that they exist and what they’re making, but the staff and position of Rescholdt-Kolt are not actually crucial to the story.

I think because of wiki culture and general curiosity we want every capital letter noun to be drawn out to us, but some things just exist solely to be a cool name.

Hmmm.

I don't understand how tumblr works.