Writer's Block Daily

Have her actually take actions that are despicable, regardless of the philosophies behind said actions.

I mean, you seem to have glued together a whole bunch of disparate political/philosophical terms, some mutually exclusive, not all of which are inherently evil (even if evil things were done in their names), with no regard toward the coherence of the final result.

So... she supports things specifically because one other individual dislikes them?

That makes her more petty than evil. But, a petty person can do a lot of terrible things to spite the person they dislike, especially if they don't have much of a moral compass in the first place. Hell, she could murder a busfull of orphans to piss the guy off. Arguably such a pitiful motivation could make it even worse.

Now that's what I call I villain!

Let's get serious here, how does the Parasite takes the her doctrine to the most unnatural, wicked illogical extreme of her doctrine.

I honestly don't think making anything approaching a believable villain is possible here. All you've got is a colossal grab-bag of traits, some of them contradictory. How can you want communism and anarchy? Her goals are only vaguely defined and simply reactive to another character. She's barely a character.

When I'm making villains, there are two questions I always ask myself: What do they want? What are they willing to do to get it? For one of my villains, the answers were: he wants safety for a certain borough of his Wretched Hive, and he's willing to do just about anything except harm innocents in said borough. From there, this quickly mushroomed into him becoming a Cop Killer. He frames the major gang in the area for his murders so the cops, pissed at their own getting killed, would perform a crackdown on the borough to drive the gang out and make the place safe.

Don't try to cobble a character together from random philosophies. Find out what they want and how they're going to get it.

She can't take her doctrine to the most extreme because lacks a doctrine. I mean, you wrote she believes her paradoxal ideologies, yet also that she only uses them as tools and embraces them because your protagonist hates them (which makes me wonder why she didn't embrace pacifism and equality, considering Warren wants to genocide the weak).

She is supposed to be an atheist, and thus not believe in the supernatura, yet sees herself as the Devil, and is supposed to be a nihilist, and thus don't believe in absolute good and evil, yet is a Card-Carrying Villain who rejoices in petty evil.

She is supposed to be a communist who believes the "weak" should rule the strong (although with her parasite analogy I believe she'd rather think of herself as clever), yet wants absolute chaos, which would make her goals harder because in times of chaos, generally the strong rule the weak.

You really should pick a direction for her ASAP. Right now, I feel like you tried to fuse all philosophies you hate in a single figure without understand what they are about. I hope I am wrong about your goals, because if there is something I believe should be gone from all fiction, it is Demonization.

EDIT: And how the hell does Altruism fit with her other traits, like her greed and sadism?

edited 7th Oct '16 5:22:07 AM by EternaMemoria

my lord this villians a mess. would it be doable if you might tone it down a little.

If the criteria is that the villain be truly, irredeemably monstrous, the best way is usually to make them still recognizably human in their motivations and character. Don't just mash together various philosophies, even though they motivate; write a person. (The example that springs to mind is Nicodemus from The Dresden Files, a man of absolute evil whose flaw, overwhelming pride, is all too human.)

The alternative—something monstrous and inhuman—is harder to pull off, since if you swing and miss you end up writing a cartoonishly bad character. The thing with an inhuman monster is that evil is a reflection of human nature, and if you don't nail the "human" part you end with something that's not necessarily evil but indifferent. So your monster would still have to be recognizably human enough to be evil. (So, for instance, Judge Holden of Blood Meridian would fall under this category; there are strong hints that he's not human but it's left ambiguous. In contrast, the sleeping god Cthulhu of Lovecraftian fame would not. Whereas the Judge is terrifying because he's familiar, Cthulhu is terrifying because he's not, and I would argue that the first would fall under "evil" whereas the second is in the same category as a hurricane or an earthquake.)

Let me try another crack at this.

So she's a nihilist. And therefore she knows very well there is no evil, no good, no moral value positive or negative, no meaning, none of it.

That would rule her out of being half the other things, at least, from being them seriously. But if what she takes pleasure in is delighting (from that core nihilism of hers) in *contradicting and opposing* all peoples' efforts at meaning or morality, and furthermore inflicting pain and harm and bloodshed as she wills, as she goes, then I can see her idly mastering all kinds of philosophical techniques and approaches - such as anarchy, communism - not because she is an anarchist (she is not) or a communist (she is not), but because these can be useful techniques to her, approaches that she finds work amusingly well in specific situations, when opposed by various other peoples' specific moral systems.

In short: everything's meaningless, but anything can be utilitarian. She has no ideals, and there aren't any such things. How could there be?

But totally invalid, worked-out ideologies make great tools to dismantle and amputate other totally invalid, worked-out ideologies. That's part of the original design, when that ideology was crafted: hit the rival systems of its day where they're weakest. You don't have to believe in a system to exploit its power to cut and crush, and if you can do more damage to the person standing in front of you by using a powerful statement of ideals you know to be baseless, meaningless - why not? Why wouldn't you? She can easily have mastered these ideals insincerely, solely to use as tools, to pick from and choose the best weapon to inflict damage on what the person in front of her believes.

Even the two traits which at first seemed puzzling - believes the weak should control the strong, and Altruism - could both be reflections of her own self-hatred, her own self-wish for annihilation: arguably, a perfectly logical extension of nihilism, albeit by no means an inevitable one.

edited 7th Oct '16 2:39:26 PM by dogimo

She's sounds like some edgy teenager, like most nihilists.

More like a sadist and a narcissist going through a bunch of mental gymnastics to try and justify the fact that they're just a cruel and selfish person than anything else.

Hello everyone, let's get it straight. The Parasite or Laura Satan personality's is unstable, self-destructive, sadistic, cruel and stupid, hypocritical, arrogant, guilt-ridden, parasitic and genocidal conqueror. She is responsible for creating the criminal terrorist organization known as Meggido, Warren Hiedler's transformation to the Bald Eagle Theriomorph and other kids (Ages 7-17) who are abducted and subjected to cruel, frightening and bizarre experiments turning into Theriomorphs for super-soldiers, causing the lynching of Warren's mother, Roxanne and painful transformation of Warren's father into a Tragic Monster, Ryan, all using her Biological Manipulation to induce evil emotions and to control cells, kidnapping scientists to work on her experiments, controlling governments, and other atrocities.

All she does it for the sake of bringing Perdition of Sodom on Earth. She is a Humanoid Abomination that finally turns into a massive Eldritch Abomination that tries to absorb every living or non-living things in New York City and her remaining human parts is turned into a gigantic black heart inside a colossal grotesquerie mother/queen that resembles her human form but mutated with huge wires and arteries and has devil horns and a lamprey mouth and other things which fits her parasite and devil moniker.

Think of her appearance, doctrine and personality like a character fusion of Aki Honda (Narutaru), Sofia Lamb (Bio Shock), the Joker (The Dark Knight), Dahlia Gillespie (Silent Hill) and Grings Kodai (Pokémon)

Yeah, I think the difference that will make it either an effective or an ineffective character is whether she's any good at it. If she's breathtakingly good at using all these things, insincerely and as needed to break certainty, inflict confusion and cut you open while you're scratching your head and/or trying to put your worldview back together, that could be a devious and effective monster. A surface of infinite shallowness: reflect back your best guesses and surest convictions as questions to vivisect you.

It only works if what she brings has the force of rigor and validity, or at least its facsimile. People with hard-held convictions don't get confused by a lot of cockamamie philosopher's argot. If she's mediocre at it, then basically we're dealing with is someone who comes off as an immature, pseudo-profound annoyance, all of whose attributes are of the Informed variety. Something's not scary because someone tells you so, though.

Still. I think it might be possible to execute believably. Very hard, but possible.

You've set yourself a wicked hard challenge with this character Huthman, if you mean to make her a serious and believable menace! Whether she's ultimately insane/irrational or just a malicious user of whatever comes to hand, I'd be interested to see the outcome.

Ah, ok, cancel the above then! Apologies for the misunderstanding on my part, Huthman. I was thinking on the wrong scale, trying to go for a bit more humanscale believability. Which I think can clearly be done, even reconciling all those aspects. But for anyone capable of making the transition to eldritch abomination - that being's large and contains multitudes. Even from the beginning, probably the seeds of all sorts of alien weirdness might be in her, in the form of warring ambitions perhaps. So even without resorting to ordinary explanations like multiple personalities, ideological consistency or even self-contradiction is probably not a problem for her.

I don't think I've got anything that could really add to what you've got already, though. My stuff is mostly smaller-scale believability. I like the small stuff!

Seeing the teaser for John Wick: Chapter 2 reminded me just how much I loved the underworld presented in the first one. It's just so classy. Murdered a bunch of people and need crime scene cleanup? Pick up the phone, call the right number, and request a "dinner reservation". There's an entire hotel for criminals, complete with its own currency. Laundry treats bloodstains just as casually as wine stains. Murdering someone for breaking the hotel's rules is done borderline ritualistically. ("Your membership to the Continental has been, by thine own hand, revoked." quadruple headshot) There's this bit of dialogue from the trailer:

And finally, John gets sent off with, "Mr. Wick? Do enjoy your party." from a guy standing in front of a Wall of Weapons. It's clear he means, "Do enjoy shooting everybody in the face." Everything about John Wick's criminal underworld is just so smooth.

how can i make my staff combat semi realistic but still flashy?

Got the perfect line to illustrate one character's attitude towards the Little Useless Gun trope: "Anyone who thinks a gun is worthless because it's too small should be shot with it."

I've now had five separate people tell me that I should look into get published. My brain wants to keep dismissing it as simple flattery, but I keep hearing it. I really trust these people, but how do I separate what could just be complements with serious suggestions? At what point does it stop being flattery?

To me the best thing you can do works either way: take a look at your stuff and get two or three (or more) of your most appealing things finished, polished, in a form suitable to submit to a publisher. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. As you add new finished works and circulate them to people getting feedback, use everything you learn to keep going. As long as you love writing, you'll want to keep writing anyway right? It doesn't take much extra focus on finishing to build a selection of completed works, ready to go, that you can choose from to best fit the opportunity. One prospective buyer, you may sense your horror epic is not quite right for them, so you hit them with the tragic romance. It's a good feeling to have a selection of material that you're proud of, done and ready to go.

Ultimately when it comes to being publishable, the only people whose opinion has weight are the people who'd be offering contracts and signing checks - but bringing something you've conceived to a satisfying state of completion is never effort wasted. It's be worth doing just for yourself: just to have a completed work you love, and another, and another. If you've got stories in you worth telling (or buying), they're worth focusing on one at a time, and taking them as far as you can take them artistically.

ewolf2015: you mean a combat staff, like a weapon? Or a staff of people who do combat, or...?

a combat staff with magic thrown in.

Well, the flash is going to come from whatever attributes you give it, and the realism is going to come from how consistently you portray its use. People will buy magic, as long as magic doesn't translate into a faked-up light show that can do anything the author wants it to for that scene. Decide what the staff is able to do, and depict it consistently so its limitations are believable, specific, and flow from its powers.

It really depends on you to figure out what the staff needs to be able to do for the story. Depending on your depiction, a magic staff that can catch and throw lightning when there's a thunderstorm near, or combust flammables at a distance, or reroute incoming missile weapons by bending force and space depending on how the holder grasps, angles and swings it - these are three different staves, probably, but any of them can be made realistic. The key to believability is limitation and discipline. Powers that all seem to flow from a principle based on its material and construction is always more believable than a grab-bag of random unrelated powers. It also helps believability when a tool requires some practice and familiarity to wield its full potential. In real life, most tools do.

edited 11th Oct '16 8:13:14 AM by dogimo

Flashy but sensible magical staves? Could make staff spell-casting require a certain amount of motion for whatever reason, and/or necessitate physical contact to get optimal (or any) magical strike in. So the wielder can't channel magic while using the simple, efficient blows one might use if said staff were just a walloping-stick, nor can they stick the thing in the ground and just use the thing as a de facto Tesla coil to zap people with lightning.

I developed a game system where "magic weapons" were mostly inhabited by the spirits of highly skilled warriors. To utilize them, you had to know how to let the spirit channel itself through you, then you got all the skills and bonuses of the original warrior, including magical ones (it could also damage non-physical entities). The weapon itself was just a mundane tool.

how can i make the billy Elliot plot interesting again?

edited 12th Oct '16 6:18:45 PM by ewolf2015

A deeply philosophical conversation about the double meaning of "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" between two cops on stakeout just got derailed when one of them brought up the original context of hiring guards to keep your wife from cheating on you. ("Man, looked at today, ye olden days were messed up.") For bonus points, both cops are women.

Haven't written properly since college, where I wrote but never published a handful of novellas as part of creative writing courses. Wanted to be a TV writer, but other shit got in the way.

Fast forward to a decade later and I really want to get back into my passion mostly because I need some kind of creative outlet in my life.

I've been trying to structure some kind of story with a villain protagonist (mostly because if done right these are some of the more interesting and challenging characters from a writer and audience's perspective). Mostly struggling whether to make the book a sci-fi/fantasy or a more realistic setting—since I have a lot of real life experiences to draw from, but creating a new world from scratch can be challenging for someone who is a bit rusty.

I'll probably be hashing out 2-3 possible scenarios over the next 2-3 weeks and will go with the one that has the most promise.

I'm making major progress on my first feature-length screenplay. I'm 65 pages in (and looking for critiques!) and now all I need to do is flesh out a subplot and build the connective tissue — which I know exactly where to go with. These are exciting times.

Probably helps that I get a lot of down-time at my job working nights at a hotel, so the managers let me write when I'm done with everything else.