Two universal constants of high fantasy living:

I’m sorry, sir, if you don’t renovate your summer keep and live in it at least one month out of the year, we’ll have to charge you with Negligent Dungeonization of Property. The old cellar laboratory might have belonged to your uncle, but if you aren’t going to use it, something will.

The players are a squad of government investigators, trying to prevent monsters from claiming new habitat. It’s mainly negotiation but sometimes people have an interest in attracting dangerous entities for their own purposes.

I love this so much!! GIVE 👏 ME 👏 DUNGEONS 👏 WITH 👏 BACKSTORIES

Heck but I’d play that idea though

Reverse embezzlement.

Evil accountants, hired by people who hate you surreptitiously adding gold to your treasure rooms, increasing your wealth incrementally, until the day the Dragon Event Horizon is passed and you’re ruined.

The group hired to stop the evil accountants are called Robin Hoods. They’re oftentimes nearly too late and end up having to pull some elaborate heist to distribute the gold over a wide enough geographical area that the dragon looses the scent

“Gods damn thee, Hardison!”

Let a building fall into ruin, but every year, go back there and add a bunch of gold

If you get it just right, the Dragon Event Horizon will be reached at the same time as the necromancer moves in, and then you get to sit back, eat popcorn, and take notes on what happens so you can write an article and get published in Mad Artificer Weekly

One trap that All the Time Daydreamers, Sometimes Writers, fall into is this idea that writing is transcribing the daydream.

It’s not. The daydream is a fuzzy thing. There are gaps that you don’t need to fill in a daydream, because you already get the emotional point. A lot of it is emotion. And because it makes you feel like a complete story would, your brain is tricked into thinking that’s what you have.

Then you sit down to actually write the thing and you realize you’re trying to write a Space Opera without actually inventing any planets or space ships. You don’t even know if the characters start out on the same planet. If they’re on a planet at all. You didn’t bother to check.

Now you will vaguely reference this in first-second person in any writing guide you make up for the rest of time.

When you write, you’re building something. It’s not a pale imitation of what you have in your head- what you have in your head can’t exist on the outside. This is a whole new beast. It’s going to ultimately look different and this is a good thing.

Also the internal critic is dumb.

I’m not even trying to be nice to your writing specifically here. The internal critic is looking for a completed story and you don’t have one yet. So anything it has to say flat out does not apply.

This is so relatable that I’ve considered making this post many times.

The idea in your head is wonderful because it gives you all the emotions and ideas without pesky things like concrete details and logic getting in the way. Trying to write it down forces you to decide those things, which makes it a different story from the one that exists as a pure cloud of imagination. Story ideas can have multiple conflicting ideas happen at once–you just know the general gist and it doesn’t matter what order things happen in or which exact words are said. When you write it down, that cloud of possibilities collapses into a single reality–if Character says this line first, that means they can’t say it later; if they say Funny Line A, they can’t also say Funny Line B at that same spot in the conversation; if they go left that means they can’t also go right at that moment. Infinite possibility becomes reality, and those choice can be hard. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the moment you try to nail down a concrete timeline, issues like, “No one would react this way” or “That actually makes no sense” or “What is the mystery they’re trying to solve?” pop up and wreck the beautiful little thing in your imagination.

Any act of writing is an act of translation. You’re adapting it into a new medium. Which makes it not the thing in your head, but which does make it something you can share with your sadly non-telepathic audience. If you can figure out how to write it.

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling

these exchanges and this fiddling about for the collective to appreciate in passing is, to me, true artistic spirit. I don't know what the past was truly like to live, but in my heart i know that humans have always been... like this

this one scene in the latest simpsons episode got dangerously close to classic simpsons levels of heartfelt

the reason homer simpson works when characters that try to copy him dont is because homer simpson actually cares he may be an oaf and do oafish things but that doesn’t stop him from trying, regretting when he hurts someone he loves and actively trying to fix things after he realizes his mistake. apathy is not his failing nor is selfishness, misunderstanding is compare this to american dad ‘i told you to get help and you harpooned me’ attitude which also had an episode where because the dad got a bad deal on a car he intentionally let his life crumble so that he could get a better deal on a car, being perfectly okay with his wife and daughter being implied to having to resort to prostitution to survive as well as spending many months of suffering. if you think homer would be okay with that you dont know homer

theres been MULTIPLE episodes where homer bends over backwards to show he cares for his kids, up to and including breaking into a history museum to make up for missing an opportunity with his daughter you cannot tell me homer doesnt care, the fact he cares is his whole charachter

family guy, which openly admitted to quite shamelessly trying to copy this formula, actually started off in season 1 and 2 with peter griffin saying out loud ‘i would take a bullet for my daughter’ and then rapidly devolved into farting in her face and being placant with his daughters suicidal attitude. not oblivious, he knows, he just doenst care and repeatedly says aloud how her existing is something he regrets. culminating with a whole episode devoted to saying its okay for the daughter to bear the emotional abuse of her family, its a GOOD thing. and yet that episode, airing 8 years ago, isnt even the worst episode of the series it usually floats around fourth or fifth place because of how bad the show makers missed the point entirely of what the simpsons had

it’s just hard not to think about the fact that in 1915, JRR Tolkien went to war not with but certainly in the same army and many of the same battles as his 3 best school friends, all nicely upper class young men who had never known much loss, and only he and one other came back alive - and a couple decades later, he wrote a book in which 3 nicely upper class young men (and one very excellent gardener) who have never known much loss go to war together, or at least they start out together, and they all come home alive. (Though one cannot bear it, and does not stay.)

What more it wasn’t just losing his friends, he was a commanding officer of a battalion of working class men. All farmers and miners from the same area of Lancashire. He felt affinity for them, but wasn’t allowed to socialize between the ranks due to military protocol and he hated it. 

 "The most improper job of any man … is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.“

I don’t think it was even 6 months later that he contracted trench fever and was sent home. 

His entire command was wiped out in one charge shortly after, the majority of a whole countryside’s youths slaughtered while he survived. Youths who were brave and steadfast, but thought of as lesser than their superior officers while still being the ones carrying the actual battle. Youths who deserved fellowship, respect, and above all to go home and dance with their own Rosie.

“My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself”. 

TRIES NOT TO CRY

There is a reason Frodo, who represents the English gentry, in the end falls and is caught by Samwise, who represents the common man.

But there is a soldier in Lord of the Rings who does not come back, and I don’t mean Boromir.

I mean the being who was a common hobbit, but who became corrupted by darkness and poison, who’s face is described in ways reminiscent of a gas mask.

The soldier who doesn’t come home, who is poisoned by gas and stress and insanity.

Is Gollum.

The Lord of the Rings repeatedly stresses the horrors of war. Eowyn’s entire arc is about the truth of warfare versus the way it’s glorified. She starts out glorifying war and combat and soldiers, even when her own brother is telling her war sucks and is terrible. And then in the end, she sees first hand what war does to people.

Aragorn’s entire arc isn’t to be the steadfast hero saving the day, it’s to hold the line in terror and horror and blood while the overlooked folk are the people who save the world. And then, what makes him a king, is not his skill in battle, but his healing hands.

Which then ties into both Eowyn and Faramir’s arcs. Eowyn goes into healing not because she’s a weak and meek woman, but because war is horrible and saving lives is better than taking them. Aragorn is glorified within the text for his healing, and so is Eowyn.

Also, tying into the common man thing, in the movies it’s Faramir but in the books it’s SAMWISE who questions what brings a man so far from home to fight in a war and if he is really so different.

LOTR is anti-war propaganda.

And this is why I don’t get people who find Eowyn’s fate to be anti-feminist. She doesn’t become a healer because she’s a woman, she does because it’s the right thing to do. Both her and Faramir’s futures are to renew the world. That’s a good thing.

It’s because people still take Joss Whedon’s view of feminism, even in the year 2020 CE.

The reason Buckaroo Banzai is such an iconic movie is that they drop you smack in the middle of the story like you're a couple years into a really good comic series—and immediately you find yourself part of a clubhouse of loving, passionate boys who are also nuclear physicists who are also a rock band who are also cowboys who are also racecar drivers fighting an intergalactic war, and you get almost no proper introduction to any of that. Except that a guy drives a pickup truck through a mountain in the first ten minutes.

The thing that Wes Anderson makes fun of in all of his movies—that childish "clubhouse" mentality—that's what Buckaroo Banzai does perfectly sincerely. Without any irony at all. And that's why it's great.

So I was looking at my RID15 toys, and of course there was some mild grousing at how there were so many Decepticons in the show who didn’t get toys, what with so many of them being single-episode guest villains.

And then it hit me that the show was succeeding in making me want toys of these characters not because of some kind of completist urge (not that this isn’t a factor but it’s not THE factor), but because the guest-villain nature of the episodes lets the badguys be a focal point and (ideally) very entertaining as CHARACTERS. They’re given the screen time to get some degree of development, rather than the old tactic of “just plug those toys in the background and have them shoot at the good guys. Whatever.” Although one of the show’s strengths is that you don’t even always need a full episode.

Example. I’d say RID Kickback has MAYBE three minutes of screen time total. And yet I can tell you more about his character from those three minutes than I can about G1 Kickback from his multiple appearances in just about any fiction ever over the last 30 years. I’m sure someone will go “but his bio card says he’s a blackmailer and-” yeah I’m aware, but at what point was this portrayed in-fiction, not merely printed on the back of the toy box or in a bio compilation? He’s never a focal point outside of “yeah he’s one of the Insecticons and um they eat things and clone themselves”. RID Kickback, on the other hand, is a sniveling weasel who tries to ingratiate himself with stronger Decepticons (and none of them like him at all)… and that sticks in the mind. His handful of scenes where he wheedles at Steeljaw’s crew before they use him as bait, then he talks smack about how the new team he got with “respects” him before showing us that no, they really, really don’t, are leagues beyond pretty much the entire run of G1 Kickback’s fictional appearances.

Or take the Octopunches. The G1 guy is just a shell: his thing is he has a creepy octo-man diver-suit Pretender shell. He’s in the background when Bludgeon is around and aside from his monstrous shell there’s nothing TO him. RID Octopunch is a grumpy vaguely-Jackie-Mason-y complainer who is really fun to watch and also isn’t a bad fighter to boot. He’s great.

Ped is neat for being a truck that turns into a colossal Mongolian death worm robot… but his crushing inferiority complex and Eddie Deezen’s voice make him entertaining. Bisk the obnoxious gamer-dork. Quillfire the idiot revolutionary who in a just world would be voiced by Rik Mayall. Crazybolt the “road scholar” who’s really just a speed-obsessed burnout jackoff. Overload the Calculon-level ham actor. Scowl the friendly, easygoing, affable mass-destruction-causing maniac. Scatterspike the Annie-Oakley-gone-bad gol-dang treasure hunter. Stockade the cigar-chompin’ drill sergeant who read your BOOK you magnificent bastard!

No, it’s not a 100% success rate, but the number of “also kinda there” Decepticons who are meant to be anything more than scene filler I could probably count on one hand. And I haven’t even talked about the regular Decepticon cast, Steeljaw and his pack. Each one given an episode to shine before being brought into the group and more fun.

I have no real ending to this, just… it’s a fun show and one of the better villain casts TFs have had in a long time.

Big fan of characters realizing they don't get to die. They have to live. And grow. And be a person. And deal with shit they thought they'd never have to. And be fucked up about it. I would like more of this. Enough dying for honor or as redemption. It ain't. You're just a corpse. There is no moral value in dirt time.

The devastating difference between how much time it takes to write something vs how fast people read it lol

you're falling in the trap!! it will be read by many people, many times, and it will live on in their memories. and maybe no single other human will match you in time spent dedicated to your story, but as a collective we will outlast you. acts of creation only grow when they are shared

This. Writing is not like dinner. It can be consumed many times

Anti-revenge narrative this, anti-revenge narrative that, I personally think that Inigo Montoya had the right idea when he stabbed Count Rugen in the gut and said "I want my father back, you son of a bitch"

There's something poetically, exquisitely just about stabbing your enemy with the shards of your own soul that you only are in a position to use as a weapon because they broke you.

They were fine with that pain when they thought it would stay yours, well, guess what, bitch? you gutted someone generous.

So much translation discourse just boils down to monolinguals not understanding that "coolness" doesn't translate across languages, and you need to re-add it manually on the other end.

Spanish and French understand the anglicism so just say "eso es muy cool" or "c'est très cool" if the context is not particularly formal

No no, not literally the word "cool" I mean the [concept of coolness]. Things that sound cool, poetic, funny, dramatic, etc in one language will completely fail to land if you simply go 1-to-1 word equivalents.

In the Japanese version of Fullmetal Alchemist, the antagonists are named after the seven deadly sins, in English. As in, rather than the Japanese word, "Greed" is still Greed in the original.

Because loan words from English are often pretty "cool", as with your Spanish and French example.

But this presents a problem, because, to give them a bit of flair, the antagonists are sometimes given a proper Japanese adjective along with their name, to make a sort of title of sorts.

"Greedy Greed"

The italicized part would be a Japanese adjective, and the bolded part is an English loanword. This is fine in Japanese, but would be totally nonsense in an English translation.

After all, it's common sense to keep the names the same, duh, and obviously the whole point of what you're doing is to translate the Japanese.

Greedy Greed. You cannot call him that.

You can't go 1-to-1. To keep the [concept of coolness], you have to identify what made the original cool, and then recreate it in the new language.

And here, we have a foreign word, and a native word, both meaning the same thing, paired together to give an antagonist a cool sounding title. So how do we do that in English.

Well, the seven deadly sins, being Christian and Catholic and all, have fancy names in Latin. Or well, they just sound fancy in English, because Latin was the language of intellectuals for a long long time.

And in fact, while we also have the word "greed", English has a fancier sounding word that means the same thing, but whose etymology comes from the fancy Latin. That might give a similar cool-loanword feeling, right?

Let's try it.

"Greed the Avaricious"

Oh yeah. That's definitely, undeniably, "cool".

When it's escapism doesn't mean you aren't running to something

Gentle reminder that often creativity decides to hibernate for a bit.

It’s okay.  You’re not broken, you’re resting, and much like spring, creativity comes back.

In Art Therapy we call this incubating.

You’re incubating ideas. Like an egg. There’s stuff growing inside. Your ideas are collecting and culminating and melding, merging into something.

Don’t crack it open before it’s ready. Wait until you hear it tap tap tapping with its egg tooth. Then slowly help it from its shell bit by bit.

Be kind. Be gentle. We are all growing things tender and soft but capable of great power if given the time to grow and change.

had the phrase “like the handgun in the first aid cabinet” come to me in a dream and damn that’s evocative. fuck if i know what it evokes though.

Oh, I like this a lot, actually. I hang my first aid cabinet on the wall so whenever someone is hurt and needs help, I can put my hands on the necessary item right away. Bandages, lidocane, disinfectant, a thermometer, it all has a home and it all says something about how I fix things. You can open my first aid kit and the bandaids have cartoon characters on them and there’s a small-size ankle wrap for little ankles and that tells you a lot about what problems I expect to encounter. If you open a first aid cabinet and the only thing in there is a handgun, it’s going to tell you a lot about the problems that person thinks they’re going to be facing and how they plan to deal with it.

If your toolbox only has a hammer in it, every problem is gonna start to look like a nail.

Sometimes the only way to save one life is to end another.

It’s the last aid cabinet.

Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!

Heads up that this is a very extensive questionnaire and might be daunting to a lot of writers (myself included). That being said, it is also an amazing questionnaire and I will definitely be using it (or at the very least, some of it).

“i am a monument to all your sins” is such a fucking raw line for a villain it’s amazing that it came from halo, a modernish video game, and not some classical text or mythos

classic texts have nothing on the crazy people come up with in modern times tbh

– Joshua Graham, Who Is A Fallout New Vegas NPC, Something Most People Throwing This Quote Around Don’t Realize

– Shadow the Hedgehog in what is widely considered one of if not the single worst game in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise

this is the source for this text and it haunts me on a regular basis

Huh, it’s almost like art isn’t just fine art…

this is my addition to this ever growing list of raw quotes originating from unexpected sources

#discovering that the profound is lurking behind the absurd#just waiting for the chance to peek through like sunlight through the clouds#is one of the best things in life once you start to notice it

this is a beautiful way to put it and i’m gonna cry abt it

this post has gotten so much better since the last time I saw it