Which themes repeat themself in your stories?

Mostly, acid and merciless social commentary on political corruption, LGBT issues and the construction of mindless individuals for the sake of capitalism.

Also, people being unable to relate to others, people being unable to feel love and dark comedy.

Haw Haw Haw

Worthy—not to mention heavy—issues to speak of, My metaphorical hat off to you, sir/ma'am.

• As for me...usually I feature large and intricate organizations that were founded upon some noble principle like protecting the populace from threats (rogue witches, supernatural beings, the odd Eldritch Abomination, etc) but have either fallen into corruption or have simply gone full Knight Templar in the way they do business.

• Another theme is the idea of people who fight monsters being forced through circumstances to turn their weapons on humans (or whatever other sentient races exist in the story), and the cognitive dissonance/mental anguish it causes a person who is supposed to protect people from monsters to be forced to slaughter those same people. It's always a life-or-death situation that forces this issue though, so that it doesn't feel arbitrary.

• Even Evil Has Loved Ones and generally What Measure Is a Mook?—all my characters have pretty rich backstories, even the random guard you just axed to death. So...think about it when you're about to split an enemy's head open, okay?

• Children who have been emotionally and psychologically abused and indoctrinated by parental figures, and the long and slow journey to normalcy and recovery that they undergo during the course of the story. Sometimes their recovery will happen in a dramatic just-in-the-nick-of-time fashion, or sometimes it will be a more realistic start-and-stop process that continues on for the entire story and is implied to last the rest of their lives. It depends on the character's importance to the plot.

• Oh last but not least—-being The Chosen One sucks. It may or may not have glory and respect attached to it, but whether it does or not, you will go through hell. Honestly, I'll just be blunt—-being "chosen" for a purpose basically means you are a tool of someone or something. After all, only tools and machines have set purposes for existing, not people. So of course it's going to be ugly if someone outside your control designates you for some sort of function they need done, even if it is something like saving the world.

edited 1st May '16 12:40:11 AM by Swordofknowledge

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

There are probably several in my works, but two of the most prominent:

• If somebody (usually a villain) shows cruelty towards children, you can be sure that tragedy will strike said character (whether via the heroes or some other means).
• Being a long-time comic reader, my biggest gripe with superhero movies is the fact that EVERY first movie does an origin story. Just once, I'd like the first movie to have established that the hero has already been around for a while (doesn't have to be decades, a la Tom Strong or Jenny Sparks; a couple of years is fine). Sitting through the origin can be an exercise in patience for me, so if what I'm working on involves costumed heroes, and there are any rookies, it's usually established that they've got 2-3 years of experience under their belt.

Now, I'm going to ask you that question once more. And if you say no, I'm going to shoot you through the head. - John Cleese

I just realised, there's also at least one nervous breakdown, one Ethical Slut and one Irishman in almost everything I write.

Stand up against pinkwashing, don't fall for propoganda

I don't want say which stories have them, mostly because I haven't written them yet, but I seem to think about the meaning of birth VS creation. When your child is born, you don't really know what to do with him/her. They can either go in the path you'd like it to go, or have them go on their own path. With creations, you expect it to do exactly what to do, and if it makes some problems, you can try your best to fix these problems. But if the creation is beyond repair, or just refuses to be fixed, you could simply create a new one exactly like it, or better than it, and throw the old one away. There's also the people's feelings towards birth VS creation, there are some people in my stories who were created, but are treated and acting like if they were born. While some people who were born are treated like burdened creations.

edited 16th Jun '16 2:22:25 PM by DokemonStudios

I'm always throwing cosmic horror into my stories.

A lot of times the human characters in my works find themselves facing universal scale destruction and/or extinction. Where they must become some form of god, usually at the cost of their life, to solve the situation.

While I tend to write action girls as my protagonists, the odd occasions where I have a male character he has an older female character act as his mentor, and there is always UST between them.

I like bittersweet endings.

Is not impressed.

• Antagonists as people. I feel that it's important for the audience to recognise the antagonists as people who fundamentally are not much different from the protagonists, people whom they wouldn't mind hanging around if you could just change a thing or two about them, if you could get them help somehow. Sure, some of them embrace the Card-Carrying Villain trope wholeheartedly. Many more are simply ruthless egotists and crisis profiteers, and all of them are willing to do some truly heinous shit if you push their button hard enough. But most of them are simply people who, believing themselves to be in the right, seek to get The Plan done with minimum fuss, then lay back and unwind in the aftermath. They have their own dreams, fears and little insecurities. They meet up over gourmet wine and cold pizza to discuss their schemes alongside family lives and workplace gossip. They do their damnedest to outwit the heroes and solve their own personal issues - sometimes they slip up and break down under the pressure, and sometimes they triumph against overwhelming odds. And that's what I hope makes it all the more bitter and tragic when the story reminds you, again and again, why they're not the good guys.
• Exploring the lighter Shades of Conflict. I tend to internally divide these into two categories:

  • Cerebral/Rational: The conflict is generated by an external factor or MacGuffin, and the story focuses on how the hero tries to outwit the villain and find a way to use their powers and resources to overcome the latter's. Think Jack Ryan novels.
  • Emotional/Irrational: The conflict is the result of a character's own issues, and might pit them against people they're nominally on the same side with. Even though there should probably be a rational solution, the character is prevented from accessing it by their own crippling personality flaws, and must seek to overcome it at great hardship and peril. Think Anna and Elsa from Frozen.

  • I think that neither category is inherently inferior or cheaper than the other; done right, they are equally capable of serving up a perfectly intense and satisfying story. By combining both archetypes while sticking to the lighter shades of conflict, I hope to:
    • Limit the hero's options.
    • Get the audience interested in all sides of the conflict, and
    • Figure out what's difficult and terrifying for my characters in particular, and set up the story around that. After all, if your main character is a retired black ops operator with parenting issues, you're not going to challenge him in any meaningful way by pointing him at a bunch of remorseless Albanian sex traffickers who just kidnapped his daughter.
• To that end, a lot of my antagonists have close personal relations with the protagonists.
• Highly multicultural casts and settings whenever I can get away with it. I'll admit that this is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that most troper works have Western/anime-inspired settings, but it's also a nice excuse to include all sorts of wacky cultural shenanigans, provided I'm familiar enough with the culture in question to give it a sensible portrayal :P
  • Case in point: Nextlife is set in an Alternate History, future-Bio Punk Singapore - partly because I know the real place rather well, and partly because I wanted an excuse to write in Singlish and pair up the "geeky Asian" trope with all sorts of Bio Punk goodness. Major characters include locals of all ethnicities alongside those from mainland China, Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, France, Kenya and New Zealand, among others - most of them based (with consent) on people I know IRL to one degree or another.

Minor motifs:

• Topics of personal interest: music, astronomy, materials engineering (particularly biomaterials), intellectual rights and wushu. These show up a lot in my speculative fiction pieces.
• Functional Magic: mainly inspired by how well Brandon Sanderson pulls it off in his books. After you set down the limitations for your system, the fun part is discovering all the sorts of off-the-wall craziness that it does allow.
• Scenes set in public transport. You get to show off the world and your character in one quick go.
• Liberal amounts of eyeroll-inducing pun. The Nextlife verse features altitheres, or synthetic programmable animals, for various everyday and industrial uses under the following market names: Sun Dog (pathfinding), Moon Rabbit (medical), Paper Tiger (security), Elephant in the Room (decoration and design), Monkey Model (DIY assistant), Chicken Hawk (speech assistant), Folio Whale (archiving and surveillance) and Requiem Shark (Obviously Evil), among others.

#TRUEART

edited 16th Jun '16 8:37:07 AM by eagleoftheninth

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

A common theme in my stories is that the themes of romanticism and enlightenment are not inherently opposites. A good exemple are the two factions with the most screen time in my Princes of Tevirre story, which combines aspects of both philosophies. Other two themes, that both factions also show very well, are that reforming is easier than rebuilding and that one of the advantages of Grey-and-Grey Morality is that just because two sides are opposed, it doesn't mean they have to be, as long as the people in them are willing to set their differences aside for time enough to talk rationally with one another:

The first faction is the local technocratic conspiracy, which has advanced tech and an internal eugenics program with almost two centuries of age, operates from inside the church, and while their god is quite real and has a direct line to their oracles even he thinks they are somewhat too fanatic. Not only that, but ironically enough they are the faction most concerned with the effects the rapid growth of industry will have on the environment, and not only because of pragmatic reasons. They also tend to be surprisingly anti-rationality for a technocratic group with superscience, believing themselves to be only gears of a great machine that should focus on their functions, and thinking and worrying more than needed brings only unhappiness.

On the other hand, one of the groups that oppose them is (ruthlessly) capitalistic, enterprising, defends freedom of thought and press, and some of its members are quite progressively minded towards minorities, even if many aren't. However, said group is also backed by a powerful aristocratic family that very often puts blood or friendship above merit, has links to worshipers of ancient pagan religions that would much rather return to the good old ways, and for some reason has a tendency to concentrate byronic heroes like a black hole of angst.

Something worth of note is that neither faction is portrayed as right or wrong, with the first being portrayed as visionary, but oppressively totalitarian and blind to their failings, the second as very corrupt, but with potential for good, and while both are show are more evil than good in their current forms, as the story goes their more well meaning members work to reform them, and even question if being enemies is really worth it as they engage in Teeth-Clenched Teamwork against the advice of their superiors.

There are other themes that are very strong in my work, but my post is already getting too long.

edited 1st Jul '16 8:40:43 AM by EternaMemoria

"The dried flowers are so beautiful, and it applies to all things living and dead."

- Factionalism and office politics feature heavily in almost every organisation that I depict. Often leads to the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
- Vilains failing by incompetence or sheer bad luck. Though that doesn't stop them from hurting their victims immensely in the meantime. Could be summarised as "Vilain shoots self in the foot, injures bystander on the floor below". Protagonists often wryly reflect that their suffering would seem less absurd if the perpetrator had at least got something out of it.
- People affectionately poking fun at their own political views. More generally, I tend to be very meta about politics in my fiction writings.
- Trying to defy some stereotype about a group you belong to, or at least claiming to.
- Alternate history. Essentially all of my stories take place in alternate universes. Often features through small details like non-existent bands, different computer OSes or mergers between companies that are separate in our world, for instance.

edited 1st Jul '16 1:34:46 PM by InigoMontoya

"Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is 0x29a."

• At least one Anti-Hero, often one who was pushed away from traditional heroism by some past hardship or trauma.
• A recurring theme of innocence vs knowledge.
• Good Is Impotent would be stretching it a bit, but evil is often a lot more powerful.
• Double Entendre phrases.
• Arc Words.
• Establishing characterization through mundane dialogue.
• Characters develop romantic attractions for each other, but these never develop into anything.

edited 1st Jul '16 10:36:10 PM by BrainSewage

How dare you disrupt the sanctity of my soliloquy?

• Magic and extraordinary abilities that have a measured, scientific feel to them rather than something mystical. Often heavily rules-based.

• An idealism vs cynicism dichotomy between two of the major characters that results in idealism winning out, but just barely. Earn Your Happy Ending is in full effect.

• Deconstructions of ends-justify-the-means mindsets.

• Short characters

• Isolation, loneliness, and depression

People looking for a purpose in life.

People snapping.

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

Across most of my work:

• The sense of reality being or becoming more like a dream in its subjectivity and ultimate malleability. Dreams and nightmares have always had this intense emotional power over me, to the point that at times they feel more real and present than the physical world. I have also harboured and repressed the sneaking suspicion that everything is a front for something else or nothing at all since a very early age, so naturally scepticism of the solidity of the real within worlds of my own devising is entirely warranted.
  • The base understanding that characters are real even if nothing else can be confirmed—and even then, many characters may simply be manifestations of others, on some deeper reading. Prretend I'm dead, if it gets you somewhere interesting.
  • Vivid, ambiguously real hallucinations and visionary experiences, particularly in the context of illness or an otherwise disturbed mental state.
  • The idea of being watched and menaced by something that by all rights should be inanimate or not sentient, whether an object, place, intangible entity, or something similarly unlikely to be endowed of personality: An empty room, a stand of trees, the air, sounds.
  • Impossible and improbable architecture. Houses with too many rooms full of windows with unnatural views and staircases far too long and winding all the wrong ways. The Gothic interior as a reflection of the disordered contents of the mind.
• Eyes. Unusual eyes, bright and expressive or emotionless and dead, in all sorts of colours. Too many eyes where they shouldn't be; too few eyes where there should. Empty sockets, sunken or sewn shut. Eyes that reveal things like little windows. Big eyes, wide open, shiny.
• A slightly skewed perspective on love and sexuality as a whole. Best broken down further into...
  • Unhealthy romantic preoccupations loaded with dangerous or neurotic subtext. Falling in love with someone you ought not. Bad scenes. Mutually assured destruction.
  • Blatant homoeroticism and sexual flexibility. One could called this a somewhat politicised outgrowth of personal preference, but I simply feel like it has more unexplored territory, with greater potential for unease and confusion.
    • Questions of gender identity and individuals living outside of the realm of easy answers to such questions. Transgender, non-binary, intersex, hermaphroditic, sexless, agender, non-conformist. Every shade but comfortable and without questions.
  • The various shades of BDSM, whether subtextual or explicit, safe and sane or very much pathological. Power dynamics are played with, often unbalanced and pitched to discomfit. Violence and control as a part of desire. Ties back into the themes of love with strange undertones.
• Liars and manipulators. Masters of half-truths. I think I find them fascinating because I have never been good at lying and I do not entirely understand the desire to deceive, let alone for its own sake. So naturally I try to imagine it and go from there.
  • Psychopaths, malignant narcissists, emotional sadists. People without qualms. Those who subtract things from the lives of others without regret or remorse. Amoral minds and worldviews.
  • Moral frameworks which are intensely personal or antisocial, to the point of being alien to outsiders. Systems of ethics with priorities confusing or unsettling to most people, yet perfectly consistent in their internal logic.
  • Broken people willing to do horrible things out of pain, whether through relentless self-justification or unvarnished anguish and blind rage. Still working correctly on the outside, still sympathetic to the point that one desires redemption—but ultimately too far gone, too wounded, irretrievable.
    • What trauma, mistreatment and ill-fortune turns people into, for good and for bad, is a recurring theme of sorts; but more than that, I think the takeaway in my work, more often than not, is that it is impossible to boil someone down to events alone. One is always more than the sum of one's parts.
• All the birds coming home to roost. Bad decisions and simple mistakes coming back to bite people, often disproportionately. Often of a pieces with the themes of lying and remorselessness.
  • Entropy as karma. Careful plans going dreadfully awry, particularly well thought out and elaborate ones with many moving parts, relying on just one too many variables either improperly estimated or ignored.
  • Implacable destructive forces, particularly returning from the past as if buried and forgotten. Perhaps a proxy for the inevitability of death.
  • Circular resolutions. Plots ending with a thematic or literal doubling back, often with an absurd edge less of the comic variety than the other. Fate as a cycle of empty failure.
• The Japanese concept of mono no aware shows up a lot: That an appreciation of beauty requires experience with pain and death and the subsequent recognition that beauty is valuable because it is fleeting.
• Magic and the divine as unfathomably vast, deeply cryptic things that make the world behave in strange, unsettling ways.
  • The metaphysical assertions made by certain characters in Arthur Machen's work, particularly Ambrose's definition of evil in "The White People" and the description of the Fall in "N.", have been a huge influence in how I approach these ideas.
• Involved descriptions of sensory experiences incorporating language from other senses. Arguably of a piece with the hallucinatory quality but occurs outside of it to denote particular emotional states and extremes.

So, just a few then?

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

I have a tendency, which I've only noticed recently, towards writing characters who are physically disfigured or handicapped in some way. Couldn't honestly tell you why. I've also got a penchant for contrasting them with characters who are physically fine, but suffer from some form of mental illness.

edited 8th Jul '16 2:01:44 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

• Somewhere between Grey-and-Grey Morality and Blue-and-Orange Morality... not judging the characters on their morals at all. The Aesop is that forgiveness is the best solution.
  • Anti-Nihilist view, if I ever get around to writing anything really epic, it'll have an All-Loving Hero, but that's a little deep for the scale I'm writing so far.

• Author Appeal - Long-Haired Pretty Boy, pure black or pure white hair, Dark Skinned Blond, green or Purple Eyes, bright and compared to gems (you can tell who one of my favorite characters/ships is). Lots of jewelry on everyone. Costume Porn.

• Gender Is No Object, Everyone Is Bi, Ambiguously Brown (e.g. range of skin colors and it's not an issue). Fictional societies that... I guess you could call utopian in this respect? It's not that they have no problems, it's just that those problems don't get in the way. It's also not a focus, it's not pointed out that those issues aren't there, they just do things and no one brings up their genders or whatever. Fashions that are elaborate and gorgeous, and also mostly unisex.

• Actual Pacifist attitude, no fighting, so Non-Action Guy characters.

• Royals! This goes in with Author Appeal, I guess, but I just like the whole royal-court thing. The formality and ritual of it, and the opportunity to have things said-but-unsaid, sort of? The Wise Prince, The Woman Wearing The Queenly Mask - either gender, but from their perspective, what the role means to them, how they feel about presenting themselves that way, their insecurities... Reluctant Ruler, too. Awesome Moment of Crowning shown in detail. Knighting. Really Royalty Reveal. Rags to Royalty. I like taking "ordinary" characters and making them royalty, and having them be pretty uncomfortable with it, but they have to deal with things, and then before they realize it, they've grown into the role. If I ever do vampires, it'll be to make an average character into a vampire prince and have their friends be amazed at the transformation.
  • "Prince" is nicer than "king". "Emperor" is nice, but it's different.
  • Thematically... transformation. The ordinary person becoming the prince. ... not vampires, but some other sort of humanoid magical type who are transformed from humans. Liminal Time, I guess, too? This is why my current thing (see signature) has such a thing about his clothes.. symbolic of the transformation. A lot of that, too.

• I want to do super-twisty-plots subverting a ton of things, that are really complex. But I haven't yet, because I need to start a bit smaller. I get these ideas for big twists that would need to come, like, five books into a series, but nothing for the first five books to set it up ^_^;; but I'm working on it.

edited 8th Jul '16 10:08:44 PM by lavendermintrose

I can definitely sympathise with that last bit, although it's less of a recurring motif than a consequence of the fact that my attitude towards longer works with more characters is set by default to, "Let nothing go unused and let no road remain untravelled." Because I have all the space and time in the world. If I want to flesh out the story of that one side character I think could be interesting, why shouldn't I?

It should not surprise you that the short story and the prose poem were my default forms for most of my early writing career. Novel structure is almost anathema to me. It's more like I'm writing a dozen novellas that slam into one another and make new stories like brane theory or something.

Also worth keeping in mind that nearly all of my shorter work is either horror/weird fiction or dark fantasy, and that certainly informs my longer work, primarily in how I approach bad things happening. Which is to say that there is a waking nightmare quality to them, in terms of their skewed logic, clarity, and sense of inevitability. Or such is my intent.

edited 12th Jul '16 6:22:34 PM by JHM

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

I've got two themes that just always seem to follow me:

• Bureaucracy and all its little bureaucrats, so that everything's warped as a giant catfight between projects, departments, titles (I'll let a Badass Bureaucrat fight an Obstructive Bureaucrat as the battle of good and bad for the corporate souls of their Beleaguered Bureaucrat colleagues. The red tape will fly as much as the blood).

• Kid with the Leash, which is a running favourite. There's nothing so funny to me as having my main and very passive protagonist running around with a psycopathic monster who's favourite way to deal with stuff is, "Let's kill it and go get coffee. Or wait, can we get the coffee first?" It's just cool watching that protagonist build his confidence over time, to the one day that he's strong enough to get a proper handle on his pet dragon. Pretty much like how Ash Ketchum earned his Charizard's respect, only with more cursing!

edited 12th Jul '16 6:58:47 PM by Tartra

The Other Kind of Roommate - Like Fight Club meets X-Men meets The Matrix meets Superbad.

Why bureaucrats? It's intriguing, certainly, but what an odd recurring motif.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

A big underlining theme in my Golden Star verse is that God Is Flawed, and not exactly almighty. That does not means God is an antagonist, or pathetic, or unworthy of respect. It is just my personal way of explaining why horrible things happen, and how the universe can be an inherently flawed and dark place despite the existence of a benevolent creator.

Note that doens't means God is useless, and if I include Them as an "on-screen" character in my work (something I am unsure if I will), Their intervention will be effective and result in a better ending for all parties involved than what would have happened otherwise, even if not instantly or without some sacrifices.

I am still unsure of how directly exposed I want the theme to be, however, as in my 'verse God is also mostly an non-intervenctionist in non world-ending events, and even my most epic plotlines revolve more on interpersonal conflict than great cosmic struggles against dark forces.

The nature of the divine in my verse is already somewhat hinted through how the seraphim act more like a very divided group of Precursors than like angels or gods, yet for all their bickering and infighting they share the goal of creating and nurturing life and beauty in the universe.

On a very related note, in my work acts of divine creation and acts of artistic creation(which can take almost any form imaginable) are so closely linked the distinction is only of scope, not of the nature of the act itself, and that "playing God", if done responsibly, can be a form of worship on itself. If not done responsibly, you probably already know the drill.

edited 12th Jul '16 7:38:50 PM by EternaMemoria

"The dried flowers are so beautiful, and it applies to all things living and dead."

No idea! When people usually talk about world-building, they mean environments, races, magic systems, wildlife, or even religions, but apparently I get my kicks from organization maps and employee codes.

The story I'm writing now has its No Such Agency in charge of rounding up the planet's superhumans and harvesting their powers. Twice, their big conflict was about who's authorized to read what files. I swear I made it interesting, but my first draft once went all the way into explaining their weapons inventory management, and this is the fourth story I can name off the top of my head that was at least 40%, "Nope, hold that plot, we have to define our mission statement and then assign our staff to the necessary departments."

I chuck people out of windows and stuff too, though. Gotta have that balance.

edited 12th Jul '16 8:12:23 PM by Tartra

The Other Kind of Roommate - Like Fight Club meets X-Men meets The Matrix meets Superbad.

Do you have a habit of literal defenestration?

I can't call it a habit if it's only happened once, but give me a few months. I'll get there.

edited 13th Jul '16 5:16:16 AM by Tartra

The Other Kind of Roommate - Like Fight Club meets X-Men meets The Matrix meets Superbad.

here's some more themes:

• feminine male characters
• Straight Gay
• trans humanism
• sexy men
• Dude Looks Like a Lady

i admit i like sexy dudes

edited 13th Jul '16 1:38:06 PM by ewolf2015

MIA

@Tartra: That sounds delightful, honestly. Not a big fan of superhero or conspiracy narratives, but bureaucrats bickering over extramundane subject matter like it's Accounting versus Sales over the water cooler? Count me in.

Nothing wrong with that, so long as your work can stand on its other merits. Manservice alone does not a good story make.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

Depends on what kind of story you're reading...

Is not impressed.