I know I’ve talked about this before, but I’m really sick of seeing writers who should know better say things like, “Tragedy is more compelling than stories where characters have a nice day and nothing bad happens!” without understanding why.

Tragedy is an effective story element when it’s a deviation from the norm. A character’s peaceful existence is disrupted by a catastrophic event that throws everything into chaos. The character now has to either develop so they can cope with the new status quo, or find a way to put things back the way they were. There’s a good story in that.

But when a character’s life is an unrelenting cavalcade of misery, another heaping dose of shit isn’t all that interesting. At that point, a compelling deviation from the norm would be said character having a nice day where nothing bad happens. And modern fiction is chock-full of misery porn, so by this logic, it’s no wonder the coffee shop AU is such a popular fanfiction trope.

Derek Hale getting a dog and putting his life back together is way more interesting than Derek Hale’s life getting worse for the 26th consecutive episode. Creators like to hold up “everything is fine and nobody dies” as a sign that fanfic is bland and badly written, but if anything, it’s an indicator that mainstream fiction is bland and badly written. 

But when a character’s life is an unrelenting cavalcade of misery, another heaping dose of shit isn’t all that interesting 

Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy (tvtropes link) is a thing a lot of writers don’t really seem to understand. There comes a point where you just can’t bring yourself to care anymore.

why i stopped watching game of thrones: that shit is boring

This is why I never read anything tagged Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts on AO3.

Also why I don’t bother buying new installments of The Dresden Files, or A Song of Ice and Fire. The same reason why, besides illogical and badly-researched worldbuilding, the Hunger Games series lost me early on, no matter how much I wanted to like it.

Grimdark isn’t “cool”, it’s boring as fuck and comes off as the author having just one monkey-shit shade of beige on their palette to paint with.

Also one of the reasons why Sherlock S4 lost me. Misery porn isn’t my thing.

It’s also why I gravitated toward Check Please. You CAN have stories where couples are happy together AND have angsty situations AND have things turn out alright. It’s not lazy storytelling.

Also why I write the shit I write. I like a little angst here and there, but I don’t read or write fic where the ending isn’t at the very least hopeful, if not straight up happy ever after.

Somebody needs to sit allllll the writers for Supernatural down for a little chat about this. Because after twelve freaking seasons, having a couple episodes a season where good things happen to Team Free Will without ~*~Cosmic Repercussions~*~ would actually be an excellent change of pace. (Also, I would like to point out that we have never seen how either Winchester would actually navigate a real long-term romantic relationship given their strange and awful lives, and suggest that this just might be a completely untapped source of plot and characterization. Yes, it would require them being happy occasionally, which I’m pretty sure is why the writers refuse. I’m not even pushing Destiel necessarily, I’ll gladly take Sam/Eileen here.)

I actually reblogged this before to say these were great points but I liked/was okay with a lot of these examples personally, but now I feel like I've changed as a reader a bit. I'm a lot more tired of relentless stress type narratives. Even though, I mean, I still read a lot of adventure thrillers and so there's a lot of stress... but my point is that I trusted (and still need to trust) the series that I like, and that's what makes a difference to me.

I trusted GRRM (within his own standards and with his own favorites-- ie, I trusted he'd never kill Arya or Tyrion) and I was interested in the story rather than the characters' happiness. I mean, well, ASOIaF is about dragons and dynastic war, so. With more character-driven, narrowly focused adventure stories (like the Dresden Files or BBC Sherlock), it's a different question. It's whether I trust the writer(s) to make it work out in the end. This depends on two things: my rapport or understanding of the writing and my personal feel for the balance in the story.

I don't think the Dresden Files (or BBC Sherlock) are grimdark, per se, even in the latest installments, which are the darkest. With The Dresden Files, it's definitely gotten dark enough that my trust has taken a big hit (just like with BBC Sherlock). It's now a question of whether the critiques above were simply seeing the stories more clearly than I was. It's certainly looking like it.

The problem is really that the last book(s) in The Dresden Files have been entirely about a big war in Chicago. There's no way to write a war book gently, with breaks for relaxation rather than boredom and anxiety, so I don't know if *balance* is the problem there. In earlier books, with lower stakes, it hasn't really been so much of an issue. I just feel Jim Butcher went too far for *me*, killed a main character that *I* felt was going too far. But I dunno if it's genuinely bad writing. I do feel that the tragedy wasn't necessary, and I've written about my loss of trust recently in regards to fridging. The issue about the balance of darkness is probably part of it.

In general, I've definitely found myself becoming overwhelmed by too much relentless stress in books.

Y'all…I'm having a very disturbing realization dawn upon me. I don't really have a way of articulating this clearly yet, but I wanted to bring it up in case other people know about it:

I'm noticing that many people (namely white Americans) seem to act as branded-versions of themselves rather than who they genuinely are. Specifically, what I'm beginning to understand how insanely pernicious it is. I knew it existed because I grew up in it, but didn't realize how uncanny it actually looks when you watch it happen, nor what the implications are that we do this instead of connecting with each other as people.

It seems like any descriptor under the sun can become a brand, so long as it's understood that way more than it's understood as just a descriptor. "Man" is a brand. "Punk" is a brand. "Conservative" is a brand. "Left" is a brand. "Queer" is a brand. "Protestant" is a brand. "Catholic" is a brand. "Anticapitalist" is a brand. "Young professional" is a brand. "Good" is a brand. Words like "BIPOC" are also interpreted within a brand context.

I'm not sure if this is something that has always been there, but I only just noticed? Or if it's on the rise with commercialization? A bit of both? Something else?

What makes a descriptor or identity a brand rather than a not-brand?

At the risk of oversimplification: The difference is whether you’re describing it as a circumstance, or prescribing it to yourself as a theme to follow.

Take “man” for example. Used as a descriptor, “man” is simply a gender. But in American society, “man” has ideological connotations: Real men are provisioners. Real men are soldiers. Real men don’t cry. Real men drive huge pickup trucks. Etc. This is no longer describing a gender (what someone is), but rather a type of personality (who someone is). It is no longer a description, but a brand.

Another example: “Queer” as a descriptor means “not straight or cis in some way.” (At least, this was what it meant when I learned it.) However, it also has its own branding. Queer people are gender nonconforming. Queer people are polyamorous. Queer people are actively involved in the queer community. Queer people in heteronormative-looking relationships aren’t actually queer, etc. Again, there’s ideological connotations to “Queer” that go beyond its use as a mere description.

I should clarify that by “brand” I’m not just referring to “a public-facing theme for consumer consumption,” but also a concept similar to that of an animal brand, in that a brand is a mark that indicates the herd someone belongs to. You almost have to curate a brand to display in order to be eligible for human connection, which is all kinds of fucked up.

What happens to those who don’t conform to the branding people expect? I’ll tell you what happens: People get angry.

Boys get chastised for liking pink. Stealthy queer folks have their queerness questioned. If a wheelchair-user stands up to grab something, people accuse them of lying or not being disabled enough. Women are dismissed as “unladylike” if their behavior doesn’t match the branding of “woman.”

What this creates is a situation where people aren’t actually interacting with who the other person is, but with the branding they seem to have, and likewise a situation where people don’t know how to connect with others on the basis of their genuine and emergent character…nor do they know how to demonstrate it without leaning into stereotypes as a vector.

I've noticed this online, where it makes sense to a degree... I mean, to a person interacting with strangers or projecting identity at least in part to strangers. I dunno, but I think the commercialization of the internet has created a dynamic where there's the world of DMs and the world of TikTok/YT branding and content, and these are very different. The issue is that the media and younger people's understanding of reality is influenced more by this commercial filter than by the personal filter in some of ways. Weird.

Anyway, while I see this in the media landscape and how things get represented in the Discourse, I've always assumed the Discourse is bullshit. I think it's 'cause I'm older than 'the youth' (who weren't here when it started) but still significantly younger than the Boomers, who often seem to be losing their minds to fear and reactionism. Though older folks fretting about 'kids today' and 'society nowadays' is as old as dirt. Anyway, it seems like many people even 10 years my junior seem to believe the Discourse is real, and even the Conservatives (as you say) are playing the same game but on the opposite side. Of course, 'real' is always negotiable in society. We made these things, they are now real.

I also think (assume) that people with three braincells to rub together don't actually believe this unless they've been radicalized. Overall... I think most people are too busy and self-centered to be overly radicalized, though it doesn't take a lot of people to create a big problem. But anyway, this can still move the Overton Window and create a chilling effect on the stuff people are willing to say online or in public, 'cause people don't like being bullied/doxxed/etc. And there's the fear that simply being thoughtful and nuanced in the wrong way may include wrongthink about something others we value... value.

I assume this will sort itself out in a few decades, as this sort of thing is probably part of the growing pains of the social Internet. Probably what we understand as the Internet will not be... this way, as in, probably social media will curdle and die, more or less, as we know it. It will take awhile to get back to 'normal', and I'd also be interested if 'actual' VR would create a new hellscape or if we would have learned some way to deal with this sort of thing better by then. Probably a little of both.

I should add, a lot of this is just normal behavior for teenagers. I used to be really into labels, and calling myself things. I mean, it's not like those labels are now false, or I'm not that thing anymore. I guess I now don't think it matters that much (but not like it ever did). My attitude is probably because I'm really asocial and not part of any ingroup (or outgroup... or just group) in any real way, so of course group stuff ceased mattering to me. It's hard to disregard it if you still want to achieve X social acceptance goal, presumably. Anyway, ultimately, part of the issue is that teenagers create the Discourse online, and then it filters down to the activists, the influencers, the media, and finally the antis, who disseminate it for clicks.

Words for Skin Tone | How to Describe Skin Color

We discussed the issues describing People of Color by means of food in Part I of this guide, which brought rise to even more questions, mostly along the lines of “So, if food’s not an option, what can I use?” Well, I was just getting to that!

This final portion focuses on describing skin tone, with photo and passage examples provided throughout. I hope to cover everything from the use of straight-forward description to the more creatively-inclined, keeping in mind the questions we’ve received on this topic.

Standard Description

Basic Colors

Pictured above: Black, Brown, Beige, White, Pink.

“She had brown skin.”

Complex Colors

These are more rarely used words that actually “mean” their color. Some of these have multiple meanings, so you’ll want to look into those to determine what other associations a word might have.

Pictured above: Umber, Sepia, Ochre, Russet, Terra-cotta, Gold, Tawny, Taupe, Khaki, Fawn.

For example: Golden brown, russet brown, tawny beige…

“He was tall and slim, his skin a russet, reddish-brown.”

“His skin was an ochre color, much like the mellow-brown light that bathed the forest.”

Modifiers

Modifiers, often adjectives, make partial changes to a word.The following words are descriptors in reference to skin tone.

Dark - Deep - Rich - Cool

Warm - Medium - Tan

Fair - Light - Pale

Rich Black, Dark brown, Warm beige, Pale pink…

If you’re looking to get more specific than “brown,” modifiers narrow down shade further.

Undertones

Undertones are the colors beneath the skin, seeing as skin isn’t just one even color but has more subdued tones within the dominating palette.

pictured above: warm / earth undertones: yellow, golden, copper, olive, bronze, orange, orange-red, coral | cool / jewel undertones: pink, red, blue, blue-red, rose, magenta, sapphire, silver. 

“A dazzling smile revealed the bronze glow at her cheeks.”

“He always looked as if he’d ran a mile, a constant tinge of pink under his tawny skin.”

Standard Description Passage

“Farah’s skin, always fawn, had burned and freckled under the summer’s sun. Even at the cusp of autumn, an uneven tan clung to her skin like burrs. So unlike the smooth, red-brown ochre of her mother, which the sun had richened to a blessing.”

-From my story “Where Summer Ends” featured in Strange Little Girls

Though I use standard descriptions of skin tone more in my writing, at the same time I’m no stranger to creative descriptions, and do enjoy the occasional artsy detail of a character.

Creative Description

Whether compared to night-cast rivers or day’s first light…I actually enjoy seeing Characters of Colors dressed in artful detail.

I’ve read loads of descriptions in my day of white characters and their “smooth rose-tinged ivory skin”, while the PoC, if there, are reduced to something from a candy bowl or a Starbucks drink, so to actually read of PoC described in lavish detail can be somewhat of a treat.

Still, be mindful when you get creative with your character descriptions. Too many frills can become purple-prose-like, so do what feels right for your writing when and where. Not every character or scene warrants a creative description, either. Especially if they’re not even a secondary character.

Using a combination of color descriptions from standard to creative is probably a better method than straight creative. But again, do what’s good for your tale.

Natural Settings - Sky

Pictured above: Harvest Moon -Twilight, Fall/Autumn Leaves, Clay, Desert/Sahara, Sunlight - Sunrise - Sunset - Afterglow - Dawn- Day- Daybreak, Field - Prairie - Wheat, Mountain/Cliff, Beach/Sand/Straw/Hay.

“Her face was like the fire-gold glow of dawn, lifting my gaze, drawing me in.”

“She had a sandy complexion, smooth and tawny.”

Flowers

Pictured above: Calla lilies, Western Coneflower, Hazel Fay, Hibiscus, Freesia, Rose

“He entered the cottage in a huff, cheeks a blushing brown like the flowers Nana planted right under my window. Hazel Fay she called them, was it?”

Assorted Plants & Nature

Pictured above: Cattails, Seashell, Driftwood, Pinecone, Acorn, Amber

"Auburn hair swept past pointed ears, set around a face like an acorn both in shape and shade.”

Wood

Pictured above: Mahogany, Walnut, Chestnut, Golden Oak, Ash

“The old warlock’s skin was a deep shade of mahogany, his stare serious and firm as it held mine.”

Metals

Pictured above: Platinum, Copper, Brass, Gold, Bronze

“The dress of fine white silks popped against the deep bronze of her skin.”

Gemstones - Minerals

Pictured above: Onyx, Obsidian, Sard, Topaz, Carnelian, Smoky Quartz, Rutile, Pyrite, Citrine, Gypsum

“His skin reminded her of the topaz ring her father wore at his finger, a gleaming stone of brown, mellow facades.” 

Physical Description

General Tips

Skin Tone Resources

Writing & Description Guides

I tried to be as comprehensive as possible with this guide, but if you have a question regarding describing skin color that hasn’t been answered within part I or II of this guide, or have more questions after reading this post, feel free to ask!

~ Mod Colette

I finally had some time to draw again, so here is the Luidaeg to round out the Toby Daye kick I’ve been on lately.  The series has so many amazing characters but I think she is my favourite!

nothing against this post in particular, but it reminds me that I find it amusing how ~boy positivity~ posts on tumblr always end up taking this cute, infantilizing tone that elides what is actually attractive about men

here are what I think are some ~cute boy things~

if you are a boy who is driven to succeed at ambitious goals you are valid

if you are a boy who arrives at opinions through logical reasoning you are valid

if you are a boy with the confidence to advocate for unconventional ideas and take actions based on them you are valid

why_not_both.gif

Honestly I just thought this post was cute and on point, but then I realized that @worldoptimization was/is this crypto CEO who apparently scammed and/or defrauded a bunch of crypto investors and lived in the Bahamas in a poly fraud harem-house type arrangement....

Somehow that post doesn't seem so cute and funny anymore. A little too on point, really. More... uh... ominously villainesque than anything.

I mean, what even is 2022. On the other hand... speaking as someone who likes and even admires Slytherin sometimes, I dunno why I'm even surprised. This is just... on-brand. For Gryffindors too, tbh. Maybe I should stick to sexualizing Ravenclaws... I mean... the original post is kind of Hufflepuff in spirit, and while I do think it's a bit infantilizing to talk about boys the way they do on Tumblr, this sordid saga shows why Slytherin and even Gryffindor-type men have the reputation that they do. 😳

I think my principle of "whoever starts it should lose it" holds up pretty well for most real world examples:

honestly when you start listing them all out, starting a war begins to seem like a pretty stupid idea!

This is such basic stuff that it’s really embarrassing to hear self-described “antiwar” types equating the attacker and defender. The best deterrent to war is for the people to start them to lose reliably! I don’t know that I’d say that this rule always holds, but it’s a pretty good rule, and the more antiwar one is in general the better it looks.

What’s fascinating is that, like, this is super old news. Much like empires no longer call themselves that and all the Departments of War have been renamed to Departments of Defense, one always manufactuers a pretext by which invasions don’t count as wars of aggression; with propaganda, it’s easy to manufacture provocations and construct arguments that a strike is truly preemptive. The interesting thing about the Russian war is that they didn’t even try to do that, which I think is part of the reason the response against it from Europe has been so intense -- it’s an unapologetic war of conquest, one without shame or discretion enough to pose as something else. It seems like a trivial distinction until you see it in practice, at which point it’s like no, that’s actually pretty concerning!

I don't know whether how much you or indeed I follow internal Russian propaganda is enough to actually discuss it, but I do think the internal narrative is that Russia's war is preemptive (and/or a defense of Ukraine's Russian-speaking population). I suppose it's just that it gets muddied by the fact that a) Russians in general are pro-empire, or pro-strength posturing; b) most reasonable people outside Russia just don't relate to how Russians view their situation, and so the explanations and/or propaganda doesn't work, basically. So it would ultimately be... weird if the Russians spoke in a way *we* understood as attempting to justify the war. But to Russians, saying 'NATO support of Ukraine means we're fighting NATO' is enough. Even 'Ukraine threatened to join NATO' is enough to make Russians sympathetic to the treatment of the war as 'defensive'.

Basically, it just doesn't work outside Russia, mostly because people (even people who're not pro-NATO) aren't actually... *afraid* of or threatened by NATO, in the Western world. No matter how crazy people think American politics and Americans in general are, people in the Western world and even in developing countries (outside China) aren't *paranoid* about US influence the same way Russia is. I mean average, reasonable people. And “average”, “reasonable” people (still remaining) in Russia think it's reasonable to think Ukrainians are literally Nazis and the US is as threatening (if not more threatening) than during the Cold War.

TL;DR: it's obviously unapologetic to everyone except Russia.

Basically, epistemically, Europe is in a different universe from Russia. You can only apply Russian epistemology and the Russian context to understand the issue. To be clear, not that understanding would actually help. There’s no bridging this gap. To the average European, Russians are functionally insane. I’m not even sure that’s wrong, tbh. Anyway, I agree that the difference between starting a war vs not is ‘obvious’ in this, our universe of meaning and historical fact. But the Russians (and their Western fans) are living somewhere else.

2014: geek culture needs to change to be more accessible to women. 2015: geek culture has changed, the last pockets of chauvinism are dying. 2016: geek culture is inherently alienating, it needs to be replaced by the blandest of the bland. Welp, that was useless. 

I find that, as I spend more time as a Woman in Finance, I’m more instinctively sympathetic to “such-and-such culture is exclusionary of women and therefore bad” arguments.

I don’t really think my sympathy is justified, though.

Like, it is certainly true that the tech industry, or the finance industry, has aspects of its culture that are more suited on average to men than women, probably because it has many more men than women. And this does make women feel less welcome, so if you terminally value having more women in these fields then like yes, geek culture must be destroyed.

But there is an obvious cost to this, in that it makes the culture less enjoyable for everyone else, and the more male-dominated a field is the more true that will be.

Idk discourse around the culture of spaces is weird … to a first order my response is “safe spaces for everyone!” but I feel like that kind of ignores the ways in which culture gets formed within spaces. Part of me wants to say acquiescing to people who complain about aspects of culture is bad but maybe this is just how healthy cultures evolve over time?

As a woman who likes Star Trek and has no STEM affinity, I feel oppressed by this article.

I don’t really have any personal stakes in this so my opinion probably isn’t worth much, but…

I am someone who just inherently doesn’t “fit” any culture and probably don’t identify with any group. Most kinds of cultural references, whether geeky or mainstream, just go over my head, and I never feel I have much to talk about with most people because we just don’t like the same things.

I see this as my issue and my issue alone. People should not have to abandon what they like for the sake of including me.

So I feel it would be, and I don’t like using this word because it is really overused, sort of entitled to push for people to abandon harmless interests and cultural signifiers just because you want to join their field but have different interests from them.

You have a right to feel uncomfortable because of someone’s interests, but I don’t think other people should be required to drop what they enjoy to cater to you either.

It would be like if I wanted to go to a neurotypical party but demanded that there be no loud music, no alcohol, and nothing sexual whatsoever. I don’t think I’d have any right to demand these things and should probably either stay home or make my own party for people with needs like mine, not take someone else’s and change it.

I also don’t really like the generalization that women just essentially dislike geeky stuff. It comes off as gender essentialism, not to mention it contradicts all those other feminist posts about how women are actually a decent percentage of all geeks and have been shaping geek culture from the beginning.

So this is kind of a mess on every level.

I think this is kind of complicated.

For totally optional social events like parties, absolutely everyone should be able to throw whatever kind of party they want to and it would be silly for me to object to some aspect of a party that I didn’t like (with the exception of someone being nasty to others at the party, I think that should be generally disallowed in like, virtually all spaces).

But if a whole industry has a culture that is more welcoming to one gender than to another (even indirectly/statistically), I think that may be more worth addressing, especially when it’s an industry that’s both societally important and quite lucrative.

And in education, too! When you’re a student you can’t really go and have your own party. Nor do you necessarily want to, if you already have unpleasant associations with this field of study.

I do like cultural diversity and even though I’m not really a participant in tech nerd culture I do like it. So I certainly wouldn’t want to eradicate it or shame people for participating in it. But I am in favor of this line of research which looks for interventions to make places more welcoming to people from outside the culture.

I’m not sure I agree even if we’re talking about work or education, though. I feel like the same principle would apply even then.

Once again, there are no cultures I fit and don’t feel that I have, or should have, the authority to decide what culture any future school or workplace of mine (if any) should have, especially if it’s not actually directly hurting me or anything. 

I feel that I’d only be entitled to either put up with it or find something else, and that’s fine because my preferences are not more important than other people’s and as long as they’re not hurting me or others in a more concrete way I’d rather respect their preferences rather than force mine on them.

As I said, if I can’t get into something because of an aversion to the culture there, that is entirely my issue, not theirs, and I don’t think it should be “addressed” even if I would benefit from getting into the thing. Other people having interests that I’d rather avoid is not a problem (at least, it’s not their problem).

I don’t think I’d even feel comfortable if people started minimizing their interests for the sake of not bothering me. I’d probably actually want to avoid any group that did that or else I’d feel responsible for worsening their lives.

This is some very thoughtful discussion, and I would just like to add that you can pry my Star Trek references from my cold dead female-software-engineer hands.

Yeah, I find this whole approach misguided, not to say a bit terrifying (as a female geek and STEM fan even if not STEM participant). If nothing else, why not encourage female geeks to work in tech rather than... random women who just... want a lucrative job or are working in HR, presumably?

On the other hand, as a Star Trek/sci-fi fan, ironically, I can't help but think the normalization of tech is basically inevitable. In the actual big-F Future, presuming civilization survives, technology will become an invisible and integral part of every field to the point that a concept like 'STEM' will probably mean something different. And not even that long, we're talking decades from now, not centuries. The men and women who're now young children and who haven't yet been born have such a fundamentally different relationship with technology that I don't even know if Star Trek and/or existing sci-fi will click for them. So current tech culture (unlike finance) has an inherently limited lifespan.

So... I dunno. I also doubt we *can* change a field's workplace culture unilaterally, whether or not we should. Pearl clutching aside, however, it's bound to change and grow more bland and conservative as tech matures.

nothing against this post in particular, but it reminds me that I find it amusing how ~boy positivity~ posts on tumblr always end up taking this cute, infantilizing tone that elides what is actually attractive about men

here are what I think are some ~cute boy things~

if you are a boy who is driven to succeed at ambitious goals you are valid

if you are a boy who arrives at opinions through logical reasoning you are valid

if you are a boy with the confidence to advocate for unconventional ideas and take actions based on them you are valid

why_not_both.gif