Random Questions Thread

A bit fancier: superficies.

That could work if I can't find anything less fancy. One question, though: Does the last syllable rhyme with "species"?

yup

Good, because according to a quick googling, the default pronunciation of the word has double long i in the final syllable, as opposed to a single long i sound (like in species).

Gots more questions, although this one might warrant a thread all on its own. I'll see if it needs one judging by the answers I (hopefully) get. :V

So anyway, what, in your opinion, is the best way to set up a Decoy Protagonist - or in this case, a Decoy Cast - without tipping off the Genre Savvy sectors of the audience that they are in fact Decoys who won't make it past the first act? I figured a logical thing to do would be to give them fleshed-out characters, but I feel it's possible to go overboard and cram in a lot of development in a short time span, which would probably be a huge red flag on its own. And if they turn out to be interesting in their own right, having them suddenly be killed off might leave the audience feeling cheated.

I think that's just a risk one takes with decoys (see Psycho). But you can always introduce the mains as background characters or obvious Red Shirts with no more than a single scene, and introduce the decoys with plans for the future, unresolved conflicts, and tease at character arcs.

(If all that sounds extremely general, perhaps A and B had a fight in the past, and are patching things up so they can go forward being business partners or good parents to their child or something, and C & D know some old, plot-relevant legends and make themselves out to be the wise shamans before being unceremoniously taken out).

Consider the following hypothetical scenario:

Due to the environment she was raised in, Alice has come to believe in Hollywood Beauty Standards to such a degree that despite being of healthy weight, she seriously believes that she's too "fat" to have any chance at attracting men, and thus goes on a stringent dieting regimen to achieve the "ideal body shape" (which, according to Hollywood, has to be "stick thin").

This can be basically summed up as "Alice perceives herself as Hollywood Pudgy and wants to become Hollywood Thin", right? But... What kind of playing with a trope is being done with those two tropes, exactly? Are they just played straight, or are they invoked? Or something else?

You have just described the symptoms of mild bulimia. It is an ongoing issue in (Western, at least) society.

Trope-wise, I'd say that both of them are being played straight and Hollywood Thin's being invoked. Unfortunately, Alice is too delusional for them to be exploited.

edited 24th Nov '17 10:02:43 PM by Millership

Technically, bulimia is when you "binge and purge" (by overeating to make yourself nauseous so you can throw it back up later.) Anorexia is the disorder where you think you're fat despite being a normal/healthy weight, and then you go on an extreme diet regimen but STILL think you're fat.

edited 25th Nov '17 8:54:05 PM by Sharysa

How could a tribe become a melting pot of different races?

Time plus integration.

Wandering a lot and picking up (or kidnapping) strays would probably help as well.

Being near a trade-route. And especially by a coast, along a major river, or on an archipelago, since it's a lot faster to travel on water than land.

edited 2nd Dec '17 12:24:04 PM by Sharysa

Migration and refugees! For example, there's actually an interesting hypothesis on how the Huns who invaded Europe c.5th century AD came to be: several centuries prior, the Han dynasty in China had waged a prolonged and bloody war against the Xiongnu nomads who lived in the Mongolian and Central Asian plains. When the Chinese ultimately won, part of the Xiongnu people submitted to their rule and were relocated from their homeland, while the remainder fled deeper into the Eurasian plains, encroaching Scythia around the Black Sea.

Now, most of these tribes had little in the way of written languages, and apart from some phonetic links, the connection between the two civilisations is largely limited to speculation. But at the time, the region was already home to indigenous nomadic tribes like the Alans and the Ossetians. It's fairly likely that the steppes acted as a melting pot between these tribes and the exiled Xiongnu for a few centuries until voila, out came the Huns. The westward Hunnic expansion, in turn, struck at the tribes residing in modern-day Germany and the Balkans - most notably the Goths and the Vandals. Some of these tribes submitted to Hun rule and were absorbed into their nomadic bands, while the rest took refuge in Roman territories in exchange for military service. When the Huns and the Western Roman Empire faced off on the Catalaunian Plains in 451 AD, both armies were largely made up of various tribal bands that they had either conquered or made allies of earlier.

There's a fairly neat (if fictional) depiction of this phenomenon in Game of Thrones, where the various Wildling tribes, each with their own distinct cultures, band together into a single horde in order to escape the army of the dead.

Also, adding onto Sharysa's answer: you can write a tribal group with a culture that enshrines travel and emigration. A real-life example of this would be the Bugis culture in South Sulawesi (modern-day Indonesia), which heavily took part in maritime trade across insular Southeast Asia and settled outside their home region to such an extent that many of their cultural practices are now ingrained in many other cultures across the archipelago. Bugis sailors also made contact with the Aboriginal peoples of northern Australia in their quest for sea cucumbers, and traces of their linguistic heritage and Islamic practices can be found there to this day. They even set up the first formal banking institution in Southeast Asia, which served to finance overseas ventures and grew via profit-sharing schemes. Note that the early modern trade network in Southeast Asia largely converged in Peninsular Malaya and Singapore - as a result, the indigenous Malay culture of this region ended up absorbing a huge amount of external influences (mainly Arab, Persian, Indian, Chinese and Javanese, in addition to Bugis) and is still a vibrant melting pot of cultures to this day.

thanks for the info.

As for "valuing travel and migration," there's also a whole lot of cultures who were Born Under the Sail (like Austronesians/Polynesians/Pacific Islanders) and Born in the Saddle (Mongols/Native Americans). Ships and horses naturally lend themselves to long-distance travel, and if you also bring in herding like pastoral cultures, you'll have to move your livestock every few months to 1) avoid wrecking the soil and turning things into a desert, and 2) sell to new buyers. Then there's the obligatory mention of the Great Plains Native American cultures, who migrated seasonally because they built their culture around the migratory buffalo herds.

edited 3rd Dec '17 11:20:39 AM by Sharysa

And adding once again to the Plains Natives example (particularly the Comanches), you can give the people around them extra incentive to join - whether it's the downtrodden black slaves looking for freedom, the poor Spanish and Anglo settlers looking to escape extortion and banditry, or other Native tribespeople looking for power and safety in numbers.

What is/was the general attitude in modern (>20 years ago) Japan towards an unmarried couple living together?

I don't know that answer but there's a Japanese Culture Thread.

How can I make something So Bad It’sHorrible to a majority of readers? The stuff I have so far is a Cliché Storm Fetish Fuel Standard Fantasy Setting with a 30-Sue Pileup, but I want to make it worse. How?

Are you making it popularly acceptable fetishes or are you making it weird ones i.e. Dare You Enter My Magical Realm? Because poop-eating demon toilets never fail.

Whatever inspires the maximum amount of Squick. The plot of the story is that a troper is given the chance to travel to a fictional universe. He Jumped at the Call, and is now stuck in what he refers to as a "hell-pit of uncensored yiff" until the Powers That Be can sort it out. All he has going for him is Genre Savvy and some self-defense training.

I don't know that you can force So Bad Its Horrible. Most such works are not intentionally bad; rather, they're made by people who are either utterly clueless or who just didn't care. If you're doing it deliberately, it's way too easy to fall into camp or irony. There's a certain type of reader who fetishizes this sort of thing and will seek it out deliberately, but otherwise, why would anyone want to read a work that is sold as being terrible?

Springtime for Hitler is also possible — some artists have intentionally made Dada-esque self-parody songs (like "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Albuquerque") that ended up being wildly popular precisely for being unconventional.

edited 7th Dec '17 8:39:53 AM by Fighteer

I'm writing it for a bet. Noodle Incidents were involved.

Counterexample: Sharknado.