A Terrifying Perspective

As the world builder of my friend group, I am mainly responsible for the building out the lore and things of that nature. But what particularly fascinates me in my world building is one particular event in the history of our story: The Interplanetary War.

See, the Interplanetary War was a thirty year long war that started in 1970 and ended in 2000. When writing this out the first time, I gave a rather vague timeline and made it mainly about the destruction and trauma it caused both the civilians and the soldiers but I was largely detached from it. The most I could do to evoke a feeling out of myself was by attaching a Rambo quote: "Go home John, you've done enough damage" as the thesis for how the veterans were treated when the war ended.

But as I delved deeper into the Interplanetary War, I slowly became more terrified of it and saddened myself.

First, I was writing a section on exactly how the soldiers' armour, cybernetic implants, and genetic experimentation evolved over the course of the war. While the weapons and armour could be equally cool or terrifying, what struck me was the loss of identity. Some soldiers were turned into a Ship of Theseus where once they were human but now they look like Terminators, and some soldiers became so hard to kill with conventional weaponry that flamethrowers and mustard gases were reintroduced to combat them. What particularly inspired me was Charlie Chaplin's speech from The Great Dictator to be able to get the perspective of a soldier's internal monologue.

Then, because this universe is an urban fantasy, I started writing about what it would be like to be a 15 year old soldier seeing monsters appear on the battlefield already filled with metal and dust. And that terrified me, yet somehow didn't terrify me as much as the fact that I had also wrote that those stories of monsters that soldiers tell their kids are the easiest stories to tell because a monster is a wild animal that's scary because it has teeth, a comrade who lost his humanity is scary because it's complicated.

And just last night, I did something that terrified me the most.

The overall genre of the story is a superhero story, the Interplanetary War is just backstory that we learn about later so that's part of why I didn't used to think about it. But the society of superheroes that we know today emerged around the same time that the Interplanetary War was happening, and at the center of two of the most prominent superhero and supervillain societies were twin siblings. The brother, who was the moon, led the superheroes and the sister, who was the sun, led the supervillains.

Their backstory is extremely complicated and you'll learn it eventually but last night I applied The Plagues from Prince of Egypt to a battle that happened between the twins and their other two rivals in 1994, 6 years before the end of the war.

What was meant to happen was that the twins were meant to represent Moses and Ramses, while the gang fighting between heroes and villains represented the plagues. What ended up happening was the twins each taking turns with the lyrics of Moses as they accused each other of being arrogant and looked at the suffering of the people, while the lyrics of Ramses were given to the other two rivals and changed from:

To

So it was more about an outsider's perspective on the whole thing.

But that's not what terrified me.

At the end of each stanza, I wrote about what would be happening equivalently to the plagues. I at first attempted to change it to be just about the gang fighting but I couldn't keep the lyrics in rhythm so the lyrics of the plagues stayed the same.

So, as I wrote about the plagues happening, it wasn't just about the gangfighting. That was a microcosm of the Interplanetary War at the same time and the lyrics pertaining to Ramses and Moses didn't just become about the twins, but the war itself.

Wasn't just about the twins not forgiving each other, but the arrogance of the two major powers dragging out a war for thirty years.

And then, the civilian perspective.

Since the story already had demons and Dark Spirits on the battlefield, it wouldn't be completely out of the question that the lost hope of the civilians combined with a macro war and a micro gang fight caused actual plagues to start happening. Food shortages, pestilent insects, and disease would already be a problem in a city ravaged by war, but the massive spiritual imbalance would essentially cause the literal biblical plagues to occur within the last 6 years of the war.

That absolutely terrified me because the plagues in the original film also terrified me but these plagues were combined with demons, Dark Spirits, and heroes and villains gangfighting each other. It actually got so terrifying within the story, that certain heroes and villains started helping each other protect the civilians from the literal apocalypse that was happening around them.

I generally like to put myself in the shoes of the characters and yeah, this was fucking terrifying.

Writing Morally Grey Static Characters + Contrast

Before we get into this I want to establish the codenames for who I'll be talking about for the sake of anonymity, followed by a summary of their personalities for the sake of ease:

Okay, let's get down to business

The Jeffersons are morally grey characters and written to be completely static. They never change at any point in the story, never turn fully evil to get punished and they never turn fully good to get rewarded. They make it to the end of the story, past the happily ever after, without needing to go through a character arc.

The first trick to doing this is by limiting their screen time. The audience more easily accepts static characters when they're side characters instead of main characters.

Not every side character needs an arc, but they still need to be fully fleshed out, which means their screentime is about establishing them as people and how they work to flesh them out without setting up an arc.

The second trick to doing this is by making sure you never make them do anything TOO bad or TOO good. If they do something irredeemable, you're establishing them as villains. If they do something too redeemable, you're establishing them as allies.

This is a big part of how I write them. The Jeffersons are antagonistic characters and they can be helpful sometimes, but each of their actions is balanced out by something else.

The Jeffersons first joined OWCA with a somewhat noble intention: the agency was struggling financially due to governments from around the United Planets occasionally pulling funding every time a hero said something they're doing was wrong.

So, because governments really liked war and genocide and heroes didn't, there was a major conflict of interest, leading to the agency surviving on a shoestring budget for the past thirty years, only able to boost funding from Shimura Frollo selling his research that was so legal he didn't inform Mrs. Rivera and Mr. Yama about what it actually was.

But following 2000's end of the Interplanetary War and the upcoming late 2000s financial crisis, OWCA was really in need of money. So, the Jeffersons came along and were like "Have you tried capitalism?"

After several Room Where It Happens where the Jeffersons divided and conquered the Oldheads (Mrs. K took the first dinner, Mr. D took the second, and Mr. T took the last), they managed to convince them to take on sponsorships and allow for companies to build up a revenue to create a higher enrichment for OWCA, which would not only allow them to settle the agency's debts but also pursue ventures they wouldn't be able to otherwise.

I'm an economics student but I don't fully know what I'm talking about in this instance, so I can't fully explain how the new financial system works, just bear with me.

So, the Jeffersons had a noble goal that led to OWCA's stability, but I'm sure you can already see the ripple effects of this new economic system.

Exploitative industries started to pop up that treated heroes like KPop idols, diets and all, as well as Vought-style companies. Luckily, the Vought superheroes were total frauds compared to the heroes who worked to get here so this universe isn't like The Boys since the Supes are the punching bags, but still.

Luckily though, there are enough other Bigweld and True Neutral companies to make sure that nobody's gonna miss it when these riches eventually get eaten if you know what I'm saying.

So, a relatively bad act by a morally grey character can have relatively good intentions behind it and vice versa. This model is kind of how the Jeffersons continue to operate in the story.

Like, they get Shimura Frollo fired from his job, good thing. But they are motivated by pettiness and get an actual teenager to investigate him (don't worry, he's a protagonist), bad thing.

And there's one point where Mrs. K and Mr. T get pregnant, but it's not framed as a reward in the story, just something they decide to do because they wanted to, and this leaves Mr. D to handle the rest of the paperwork following Shimura Frollo's firing.

Also following the Jeffersons' exposé of Shimura Frollo, besides Mr. D being saddled with paperwork he's lowkey mad about, the Moon King decides to attend more board meetings and watch more closely, only needing Mr. Yama to speak for him when he doesn't want to attend United Planets conferences. So, even though the Jeffersons uncovered like the biggest scandal of OWCA's history, it somewhat backfires against them because now the Moon King is actually watching.

But the Jeffersons have a very good and healthy relationship with each other, but are assholes to everyone else.

Bottom line, to keep them static you must reward them and punish them according to both their good and bad deeds. To keep them morally grey you must never make their actions wholly good or wholly evil. The static part is a pretty important qualifier here, and keeping that balanced is very important to making them satisfying characters.

The Contrast: The CEOs

I think I've said enough about the Jeffersons to get to this part. I mean, they are static characters so there's not supposed to be that much to dive into in that regard.

But anyway, during The Room Where It Happens, the CEOs saw what the Jeffersons were doing and were like "Hey, I want a piece of that ass" and their companies became like the main Vought/JCJenson/InGen companies we need to worry about.

The CEOs heavily contrast with the Jeffersons because of the fact that they're chasing the Jeffersons' coattails. This actually helps keep the Jeffersons static by having them contrasted with characters who are living in their shadows.

Admittedly, the CEOs are way less developed than the Jeffersons so I don't fully know the reason why they are so obsessed with the Jeffersons but I'm smelling envy and inferiority.

Which gets more interesting when you consider the fact that The Room Where It Happens is divided into the Grownups Table and the Kids Table. The main six directors sit at the Grownups Table, and the CEOs and other companies and divisions of OWCA sit at the Kids Table.

So, even after getting a piece of that ass, they're still regulated to being way more inferior than the Jeffersons.

Another thing that contrasts the CEOs with the Jeffersons is that despite being a trio, they are each fundamentally selfish and don't care about each other.

Mr. Humbug doesn't care what happens to Mr. Peterson. Mr. Peterson would rather save his own skin than help Mrs. Hammond, and Mrs. Hammond would throw Mr. Humbug off a skyscraper if it meant boosting herself.

The Jeffersons are assholes to everyone but deeply love each other, while the CEOs are barely friends.

To summarise, the Jeffersons are like the Vees if they were less evil, the CEOs are like the Vees if they fucking hated each other.

The CEOs aren't there to necessarily make the Jeffersons look better, but more so to serve the purpose I've established: contrast. The Jeffersons are ruthless and way more powerful than the CEO, and I think that makes the CEOs just like their fake heroes.

Another major point of contrast in this world is that the Vought-style superheroes don't train, similar to the Supes in The Boys, and are functionally useless compared to real heroes so the Vought heroes purposefully bully those weaker than them to save their own egos.

The CEOs are very similar in that regard because they are in every way inferior to the Jeffersons so they extort vulnerable people and use them till a scandal breaks out and the public is sick of them.

And after seeing the Jeffersons throw Shimura Frollo under the bus and investigate him, they have all the more reason to be afraid of them. Not to mention the Moon King breathing down their backs like a fucking lion.

Part of the reason why I realised I could contrast the CEOs with the Jeffersons is the fact that they even follow the 2 Men, 1 Woman trio dynamic with Mr. T and Mr. D against Mr. Humbug and Mr. Peterson and Mrs. K against Mrs. Hammond. That was a bit of an accident.

All in all, you shouldn't use contrast to try and make one look better than the other, but rather try to explore things like legacy and cause + effect. Contrast is about dynamics, not serving one character in favour of another.

This is relatively simple advice in my opinion but it can be extremely difficult to pull off when you actually try.

Me and my friends basically can't be trusted to be interviewees

If and when me and my friends get famous for our stories and we get interviewed, absolutely no one will be able to get a proper answer out of us because we do so much for our own amusement.

Bro, I literally have a fantasy story with an all-female main cast I'm supposed to write to show how easy it should be for male writers like myself to write women respectfully by not calling attention to the fact that they are women, and my entire motivation for doing so what that it was funny!

I've mentioned in a previous post a while ago and in my About Me that I'm a rhetorical writer and use script-style formatting while writing in a novel style. Which essentially means I'm using the Ridley Scott method of having a descriptive script, just written in past tense.

A piece of writing advice I can give you if you are a scriptwriter for a film or an animation is that within the descriptions, it's good to make cues in your description.

What do I mean by that? Take this for example:

Now, I am gonna admit it does seem rather a long way to describe a strange looking monster simply looking at a flower given to him by one of his surrogate human daughters and his expression changing, though we can probably use the length of each description to pace the cues out, but we can actually identify the cues in how the animation and cinematography of the scene would play out and it does also help to mention that this style of writing helps novellising the script for a book release of the film later.

Cue 1

This cue is very obvious, it's when we see the Gentleman's hand and get our first look of him beyond his Tim Burton style clothes. Based on the fact that we're only describing the hand in this cue, we can ascertain that the scene only frames his hand. I don't need to explain this further.

Cue 2

This cue tells the camera and animators to purely focus on his hand and reveal that his nose is truncated, helping us establish the fact that he looks like a skeleton. The action of the girl watching him giddily can either be a jump-cut based on the fact that it's a dependent clause placed after the action of the independent clause without the use of the word "as" to indicate these actions are happening at the same time, but the continuous tense of the dependent clause can also indicate that the girl is meant to be in frame.

Cue 3

This is a classic reveal shot, almost assuredly a close-up shot. It's a very short cue so I don't need to explain it.

Cue 4

Even though there are multiple actions within this piece of the excerpt, this is all one cue as they happen in the same shot. This probably transitions from Cue 3 using a pullout shot so that we can see how his expressions change and get a good look of his face. His eyes and mouth each making a "wonderous O shape" and the "wry, toothy, Cheshire smile with squinted eyes" help early establish how the character moves, similar to the expressions seen by Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Cue 5

This cue isn't really a cue, it's more of a descriptive note for the animators, but the pagespace it takes up can be justified if we assume this means to linger on his expressions so we can absorb them. Now, it would be pretty easy to assume that this story is simply in stop motion based on how the character moves, but I wouldn't need to elaborate on this if that was the case, would I? No, this tells us that the Gentleman is the ONLY character whose expressions change like a stop motion film. This cue tells the animators not to use in-between or transition frames for his expressions. Even in a short expression change in anime where a character tilts their head and smiles with a sparkle background or something, there's a build up, an acceleration of sorts where you see that their expression is about to change. The Gentleman's expressions don't have that. In the equation a = Δv/Δt, t = 0, and you can't divide by 0 which shows how the Gentleman's expressions make no sense and I am fucking talking nonsense, goodbye.

TL;DR Every writer should probably write an unrealistic story at some point. TW: Abuse

One of the best things I ever did for myself was construct a story that was unrealistic while worldbuilding for a story that was semi-realistic.

My superhero urban fantasy story has a complex magic system inspired by Avatar: The Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist and that obeys the laws of physics and biology. I built an entire political system, explored the definitions of evil with demonology, and we created an alternate history and constructed the world's aesthetic, art style, and animation techniques.

It was a lot of work, which is partially why we had to inject more whimsy into it and not have to explain everything, because I got so wrapped up in trying to make sense of everything that I even tried justifying why or when it was a musical before we just said Fuck It We Ball.

And that's probably partially why one of my other stories is less realistic. Although, it's probably not just the amount of work from what I just mentioned because admittedly we did take around 8 years to figure out basic things before we started combining ideas, and it was around 3-4 years ago when we started seriously thinking about the worldbuilding but that's neither here nor there.

In my other story, it's a fantasy story I'll call I See A Dreamer for anonymity's sake, it's way less realistic and focuses more on emotional and social realism rather than a realistic magic system.

In I See A Dreamer, you'll meet a pirate can navigate any storm because the map of the stars is held in the sparkle of his eyes, and he can fight the princess of the sea while surfing on a leatherback sea turtle and I'll do fuck all to explain how that's possible. But you'll also see him fussing over the safety of the kids he had with that princess, and being unable to swim after the princess's father blinded him by eating his eyesight.

You'll meet a Chinese opera singer, she'll meet a Chinese-American bowman, he'll introduce her to the big city and movies, she'll introduce him to Wushu and fighting monsters, they'll fall in love and travel the world, they'll have a kid... and she'll lose her job because she did, and then she'll lose... him. She'll spend the next 5 years raising the kid, trying to get out of that dingy apartment and she'll struggle and cry herself to sleep thinking she failed her son, and she'll eventually succeed by becoming an independent singer. We, in the story, meet her 3 years later, and she'll join the main party on a quest to stop a sorcerer... and she'll meet her husband again, except he's lost his memory now, but his body remembers the rheumatic arthritis in her left hand she developed from years of fractures and sprains, and he'll be gentle with it.

And alongside the opera singer and a couple of others in the party, you'll meet a nonbinary Scottish actor who can shapeshift using a theatre mask. You'll see them act strange at first, almost childish, and you'll wonder if they can even protect themselves, but you'll see them fend off a teleporting swordsman like a badass and wonder why they seem so weird and why they're afraid of lightning... And then you'll see them have an photo epileptic seizure, and then you'll see how they were psychologically tortured and abused on a movie set into a state of learned helplessness.

I See A Dreamer doesn't explain its magic system, and a lot of the characters' backstories can range from feeling like fairy stories to being really, really unglamorous. I wanted to just do shit with the magic system, and that's partially because I just came up with the characters first and wrote their backstories and personalities then put them together in the story. Like a D&D campaign, you have the players design each of their character sheets and backstories and kinda just go ham and figure out how to make their backstories work together.

Letting off on creating a magic system allows you to do whatever you want and you can hyperfixate on something else, it's fun that way. Especially when you've created worldbuilding so good before you don't need to create a new one in a different story, you just use the worldbuilding you have to tell a different story set in the same universe.

Which, to clarify, doesn't mean I See A Dreamer and my superhero urban fantasy story are set in the same universe, I mean that I See A Dreamer is a bit of a reprieve for me in terms of ease of writing because I didn't have to construct a magic system for it like I did with my superhero story.

One of my proudest accomplishments as a writer was basically naming a political traitor (who in the post before this I codenamed Shimura Frollo since he was based on those two characters) Mr. Evil.

His first name is pretty normal but his last name comes from the murderer of an Agatha Christie novel and it basically SCREAMS Military-Industrial complex and his codename is not exactly pleasant since it's named after a particular job found in monarchal societies that finds its employment after capturing enemies or rebels or accused witches.

The reason why I'm proud of this fact is because the political system I built is designed to be stagnant and while the characters are aware of tropes, Shimura Frollo is one of the founding members of this superhero agency and just acts like a stuck-up and doesn't give away the fact that he's secretly doing evil stuff.

Which means that his political opponents can't oust him from the board on the basis of his name because of the fact that's a very stupid basis to make your argument from, it'd be like arguing that Hannah Loomis over there shouldn't be in the Special Victims Unit purely because her last name matches Billy Loomis from Scream (1996).

It's really stupid, but shockingly bulletproof. As long as your villain isn't twirling his mustache and looking like Wormtongue (who admittedly was talking in the ear of a very sick king) then you're solid with your snakes.

TLDR; Formatting my ideas like I'm marketing them is too self-aggrandising, it sucks, boo

A major problem I have with stuff like Grammarly and why I stopped using it after one try is the fact that I don't like having to market my story concepts.

What I mean is the fact that because out of my friends/siblings I'm the Lore Forger of the story, so I'm often the one writing down the story's mechanics and even the animation details and aesthetic.

When we were developing the story's aesthetic, we came up with Multicultural Solarpunk where we mixed modern and traditional architecture with an overall biophilic semi-futuristic world.

When I described this in the document, I was pretty casual about it and cited the inspirations and what this means in the story.

This collides with the problem I have with marketing story concepts.

When I used Grammarly the first time a couple years ago and I transplanted a paragraph from a document I had explaining a mechanic from a game concept I had, Grammarly had edited it to be a bit more businesslike and ended it with this corny ass "Let's revolutionise gaming!"

And then there's one of the biggest things I hate about marketing my ideas: self-aggrandisement.

I... don't like self-aggrandising unless I'm making a joke. But if I had to put my notes about the aesthetic or animation into Grammarly or any other writing tool and it edited it to be more professional, it would change it to be so that it uses words like "masterfully utilises" or describing subjective opinions objectively.

While I do utilise words like... well, utilise, I never adverb it with things like "masterfully" or "expertly" to describe an animation technique or stylistic design because we haven't brought this to animation yet.

And don't even talk about pitch-decking, a studio won't know whether the animation techniques and cinematography compositions we employ, even though I consider them rather basic since they come from Pixar In A Box, are expert or master level... because they haven't been animated yet. Point withstanding, sit your asses back down, ladies and gentlemen.

And on subjective opinions being used objectively, when describing the Multicultural Solarpunk aesthetic of our world, I made sure to clarify the appeal of certain things like particular rich people having Barbie style Dreamhouses to add a touch of whimsy by clarifying that yes, it can look like a bit of a toy box but the world is designed to appeal to the idea of living in a house built perfectly to your own specifications and inner child.

An AI writing tool would just slap a phrase like "including beautifully designed Dreamhouses to liven up a world that rejects Millennial Grey and add a touch of quirkiness", which may be more concise but doesn't get my point across.

Highkey crazy shit I've been told about my writing, according to AI (possible TW):

The Scene In Question - Consistently depicting a Solarpunk society, spirits hanging out with birds, a drunk vampire on a radio station, the depressed protagonist falling over as he puts his pants on...

That's not just... incredibly insensitive but it it assumes that he's at 100% all the time when he's not. Everyone has an equal based power level, but the stronger characters have a higher ceiling.

Certainly, when you phrase it like that, but the half-demon chosen by the ancestor spirits is a play on the Half-Demon Half-Angel trope and an essential part of her character, her being neurodivergent is an effect of me being neurodivergent and therefore all the characters being written to be neurodivergent, everyone in this universe knows martial arts, her being a genius is meant to be part of the fact that she represents Gifted Kid Syndrome, the hurricane she survived was Cyclone Evan which was a real hurricane, there are a lot of Samoan immigrants in America, and I shouldn't change her parents ethnic backgrounds to make her "less unique" because that's bending the rules of the world to suit the main character. Also, she's partially inspired by Alexander Hamilton, so "How does a bastard, orphan, [child] of a whore and a [demon], dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the [Pacific] by providence, impoverished, in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar? This criticism also assumes that all of these are given equal focus when in reality, the only things actually focused on are the fact that she's a prodigy and Half-Demon and Chosen By The Ancestor Spirits, whereas everything else is just a feature. In addition, the more outlandish parts of her that we learn about, such as Cyclone Evan, are legends told from other characters before we meet her, because she's supposed to be one of those characters like Maui or Gojo who people talk about like she's the greatest thing ever and gwara-gwara-gwara. And don't give me that "When dumped in all at once-" I GAVE YOU A FUCKING ORDERLY WAY TO ABSORB THESE PIECES OF INFORMATION AND YOU CHOSE TO SEE IT AS DUMPING EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF HER ALL AT ONCE, THAT'S LIKE READING THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND COMPLAINING ABOUT "CONCERNING HOBBITS, AND OTHER MATTERS" SAYING "IT DUMPS ALL OF THE INFORMATION ABOUT HOBBITS ON ONE PAGE EVEN THOUGH IT'S MULTIPLE PAGES LONG AND WE LEARN MORE ABOUT HOBBITS LATER ON!

Don't insult me to my face and write it off as constructive criticism you fucking immaterial prick, gaan speel in jou ma se boerhol. Dinosaurs are still pretty fucking dangerous, I don't need to level a building every other weekend to make kaiju a threat. And their size is meant to allow for them to not cause so much destruction, so that they can be integrated into the community and roam the Earth peacefully. This is a superhero universe, not an exterminator universe.

Does the DOJ decide which firefighters should put out a forest fire? The board of directors is designed to be stagnant and have inertial friction in order to prevent total system change, this doesn't affect how superheroes operate. I explained already that superheroes operate on a dispatching system disconnected from the board of directors and you somehow chose to ignore that, fucking bullshit.

I can't tell if it's because of Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria or some other wack ass shit but for some reason always kinda… it's hard to say exactly what it is but, I guess I have to kind of explain what I'm dealing with for you to get it.

I have a female character, let's call her A for anonymity's sake, who's kind of the overarching protagonist of the story and she's described as being "well-endowed, unfortunately or fortunately depending on your perspective."

Unfortunately because she's a woman, a woman of colour specifically, and her body draws judgement from old guys who can't keep their eyes to themselves. And fortunately because it's kind of something to be proud of, loving your own body sort of thing.

The "problem" that I know isn't actually a problem comes in when I have descriptions in my writing to say "He cried into her breast."

What this sentence describes is a child that A is comforting because of something that happened.

Breast and chest are two different descriptors that are rarely interchangeable, in this case they are not interchangeable. And that's a child. Would be pretty sus if you tried to make it weird bro.

So, there's nothing inherently wrong with the sentence, it would only be weird if it was pluralised to say "He cried into her breasts", which is… what?

But for some reason I have this weird hang up about people taking it weirdly. Which… is weird, because even though I'm not a professional writer, I write with a plan for animation so people won't see my descriptions until the script is released or novellised.

The major thing about my unnecessary hang ups with this character that I know probably stems from my RSD is the fact that I am quite hesitant to make any sort of jokes about her body.

And I know the difference between what a good joke and a bad joke is but I'm so afraid of the "Written By A Male Author" thing that I kind of just unnecessarily filter out any jokes about her body.

I'm comfortable with joking about male characters in the story who also have big boobs and big butts, and my friends were saying that "When we draw A, we can't forget to give her an ass and titties, everyone's gotta be thicc. Don't matter if you're a man or a woman or whatever." So I only make jokes that have been peer-reviewed.

By the way, the jokes that I'm talking about that I'm hesitant of are like, one of her walking into a "Holy House" and seeing a giant glass mural of her feeding a baby and she's like "I'm severely uncomfortable" and it's kind of meant to show how dangerous people who worship a living person as a deity are, and A is kind of a deity but she's Samoan so she's more of a Maui-like figure and this mural kinda shows these worshippers trying to Christianise her in a way.

The other joke was a more of a Deadpool style quip where she's fighting someone and they strike her in the chest and she's like "Ooh! Right in the Amatitties!" Which fits her characters because she's kind of this foul-mouthed jokester, and while she's not exactly like Deadpool it is something she would say.

I know there's nothing inherently wrong with either of these jokes and that they're not punching down on her body, but I just kind of am weird about them. Maybe I just need to get out of my own head. It's not offensive, and I wouldn't be being "brave", so I should probably just stop being a coward.

So, as a neurodivergent writer, it's pretty difficult for me to write neurotypical people as they always end up being neurodivergent

But, certain characters are neurotypical because I've accidentally found a workaround.

See, I have one who is heavily inspired by Claude Frollo, so a lot of his personality is already derived from a neurotypical character.

And when I went further into writing his psychology, I based it more around logic and what he does to develop his personality instead of trying to create a personality for him from scratch.

It's slightly easier because he's a very serious character so I didn't include minor day to day quirks, because that would quickly devolve into making him neurodivergent.

His personality is shown through how he interacts with others and justifies the evil things he does and the paranoia a man like him has and how he can convince others to do evil.

So, he's not stale or lacking in personality.

And I've essentially created using the neurotypical thought process Top-Down, instead of my usual thought process, Bottom-Up.

Friendly reminder that you don't have to be completely realistic with your stories

I've spent so much time helping with and creating lore for the universe I'm making with my friends that I've forgotten that I don't need to rationalise everything.

The power system? Sure, I can rationalise it. It's partially inspired by shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist, and it's meant to be rational enough that you can believe that this is HOW or THE WAY stuff happens, but less focused on the WHY or HOW IT CAME TO BE. Get it?

And the power system is meant to be internally consistent so that you know how special it is when someone comes along and has powers that are… let's say a bit too complex to be a naturally occurring evolutionary quirk.

And the history and the politics, that ranges from political systems built to have a bunch of loopholes, which people often mistake as being flawed worldbuilding instead of a "realistic" flawed system. And the history is more based on emotions and psychology and parallels to real-world historical events and whatnot.

And then, this is where the fun begins

In the middle of all… that, there's more funsies. I have spent so much time trying to rationalise everything that I've sometimes forgotten to have fun. I tried to create workarounds to give us an excuse or rational explanation for why characters burst into song.

I've tried relegating that power to very specific characters and tried doing it as little as possible to "maintain realism" but with a little budging from the musical lover inside me, and my friends wrapping me over the knuckles, the story is now a musical.

And I like just having characters burst into song without trying to rationalise it, they're not doing it every five minutes but I like not having to explain it. Because the world is stylised like Scott Pilgrim or Spider-Verse, so like how did I forget that part?

There are other examples like crossbreeding that are just for funsies, and there's the world's aesthetic and art style that are full of whimsy.

And, while the Square-Cube Law is obeyed in regards to how big the monsters are, we still have monsters just lounging about and being part of the environment.

Now, we're currently trying to break water physics to create water systems so aquatic people can be integrated into inland environments.

Random phrases I invented

Why do people hate rhetorical writing so much?

Rhetorical is a word which here doesn't mean "If I said "I has been thrown to the leeches" would you agree with that?" it rather means using language persuasively, which in the case of story writing refers often to repetition, sound, and purposeful tweaks to the prose.

I use it a lot because I'm a scriptwriter but I always face "dead-air" or "repetition" critiques because since I write in a novel style, Gemini assumes I'm writing a novel and give me critiques on my prose (and sometimes even tries to advise me too much on using prose to the point that they want me to do the novel thing of explaining things in prose like "He knew that X would Y" even though that can't translate into animation very well). Which can be good, don't get me wrong, but it's very clear when it's deliberate.

If I write "[He] picked up his shoes and walked off to get his pants… which were in the same place as his shoes so he walked back." People say that's dead-air and drags out the scene, so they tell me to cut the line and have him pick up both his pants and his shoes in one fell swoop. But the character in question is depressed, he's not thinking straight, so two objects that are in the same place won't appear that way in his mind, and I added the ellipses so that you knew the redundancy was intentional because if I didn't then it would actually feel redundant in a non-flattering way. This is rhetorical redundancy, not mistaken redundancy.

Similarly, if I repeatedly describe plants and doors as mustardy or wheaty in colour, it's because the character is colourblind so I'm basically putting a reminder in the script that the character is colourblind for if the scene was animated, and I similarly describe dark red colours like wine or cherry as near-black but because wine and cherries don't appear as much in the scene as plants and doors, the rhetoric is missed there. This is rhetorical repetition, not a mistaken repetition.

Rhetorical writing is a legitimate device. If it wasn't, we wouldn't have Tolkien "In rode the [I'm sorry I forgot this guy's name]" repeated across two sentences. We wouldn't have "Doom, doom" as an onomatopoeia repeatedly used to describe the steps of the Balrog. And I'm heavily influenced by Tolkien, which is the only reason my descriptions could be considered good.

(edited to clarify that my main critic is Gemini because this was bothering me this morning cause it felt like lying by omission, so some of the comments might be outdated in assuming the critics were actual people, sorry guys)

Villains can still be villains even if they do good things

People think this exclusively means Save The Cat, but villains can have principles to stand on that don't make them redeemable.

The internet's favourite example is how The Joker hates Nazis and pulled the switch on Red Skull but there's another way to do it in a way that serves the story:

Villains As Blunt Instruments

What do I mean by this?

Well, let's say there was a particular group of evil scumbags nobody likes: not the evil Dark Lord guy, not the main characters, and not the league of ninja assassins.

The main characters are trying to get to the root of these scumbags to bring them to justice, the league of ninja assassins are trying to dwindle their numbers and pick them off while saving the prisoners.

The Dark Lord gets a request from the scumbags to join his empire, and he's so offended by this that so he sends a monster their way.

This gets in the way of the main characters because now that the monster has eaten a lot of the scumbags and destroyed so much, now they can't identify the victims and it's harder to track the remaining scumbags who've escaped.

A villain can stand on their principles and act like a blunt instrument at the same time. The scalpel may be slow to fix the problem, but using a sledgehammer creates a new one.