Really? The impression I've always gotten from the Granny Weatherwax stories is that Pratchett thinks her arrogance isn't a character flaw. Heck, the novella "The Sea and the Little Fishes" that was published in Legends is all about people telling Granny that she should be nicer and/or humbler, and her proving them wrong, wrong, WRONG. *
I wouldn't say being universally relatable is completely impossible. What about a protagonist in a Choose Your Own Adventure style book who has no description of their appearance or past and who takes no actions other than those the reader chooses for them?
edited 16th Jun '11 4:30:31 AM by RavenWilder
What about a protagonist in a Choose Your Own Adventure style book who has no description of their appearance or past and who takes no actions other than those the reader chooses for them?
Even then, the character still expresses some personality, either in dialog (which admittedly is bland most of the time), or in certain involuntary actions.
For example, in one book that I can't remember the name of, your character is left alone with a gun while the rest of his space exploration team moves ahead of him. Because you "never liked guns", you set the gun to "stun" instead of "kill". As a third grader, that annoyed me, and I figured that I'd easily leave the gun on "kill".
There's actually a lot of actions the protagonist does in the Choose Your Own Adventure books while in the process of doing whatever you actually chose to do. Or things your protagonist says that the reader might not think to say or even want to say.
Unless the game/book has infinite variations—to the extent of not only being able to choose dialog options, but also being able to create new ones from scratch—it's going to be making some assumptions about the character and it's going to have to choose between giving the character some characterization, which isn't relatable to everyone, or making him/her a bland cypher, which isn't relatable to anyone.
I hate it when writers Retcon things. It's YOUR universe. Is it that hard to stick to it?
my essay blog! Dalton LiveblogRetcons really annoy me too, though from a storyteller's perspective, I can understand why writers would want to do it. It's often a matter of coming up with a story you think is better than the one you had before, or thinking your old one needs a lot of work, so rather than a reboot, the "simplest" solution is to keep going but change the past.
Of course, it doesn't work and only makes the work look inconsistent.
Another thing to recall with retcons is Early-Installment Weirdness. No matter how hard one works on it, sometimes your world just isn't fully built when you start writing in it. Then you establish things about it, and sometimes they don't quite jibe with stuff from your early works. It happens.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaEven when it is fully planned out, your brain just doesn't stop thinking once you start writing. You get new ideas. Awesome ideas. Ideas that don't quite fit.
Read my stories!Very true. Expanding onto a work and creating more elements in the story doesn't always mean a Retcon, though. It could also mean coming up with a clumsy explanation for why it was never mentioned before, or just ignoring it.
It becomes clear when things like this happen that the author is just making it up as they go along.
Cliff Hangers that end chapters and are suddenly resolved in the first sentence of the next chapter, using Exact Words to minimize their actual effect on the plot. That doesn't make your book a page-turner, damnit, it makes it a spine-chucker.
edited 18th Jun '11 1:20:40 PM by PDown
At first I didn't realize I needed all this stuff...Being a former Warcraft fanatic, I have a very complex relationship with retcons.
To sum up: Usually, they just proof that the writer didn't plan things out. They can be excusable, if they allow something really great to happen, but my tolerance for them is very short usually.
Yup. Either they didn't plan things out and now have to create an explanation for how or why something is a certain way, or they came up with ideas later that they wish they'd come up with sooner, and it's too late to change them.
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Yeah, the only time I ever saw that kind of cliffhanger in print was in the Goosebumps books. Except they'd sometimes be worse, and even say "I knew I was dead" and then "I didn't die."
But regarding cliffhangers, my dad grew up watching the old serials in movie theaters, and from what he told me, they were pretty brazen about their cliffhangers - and have less excuse to be, since movies are a visual medium. Like, you'd see someone get knocked off a cliff, then in the beginning of the next chapter, they simply get knocked to the ground and don't fall off the cliff at all. Literally retconning what you just saw last week. Now THAT is ridiculous.
Okay, I have problems with two extremes:
- Really short chapters. This is more of a strange observation than something I don't like, but they tend to make the pacing seem weird and the content seem more shallow. It's just one of many reasons I put down Daniel X. You don't need chapter breaks for every 2-5 pages.
- No section breaks. This is my number one peeve with The Hunger Games, along with the last book of Gregor The Overlander. There are no section breaks, or at least only a pinceful of them. It did the opposite than having small chapters. making sections run together and lessen the impact of the content. At least Artemis Fowl had section breaks for its long chapters. It's like removing the stop signs. A driver won't figure out that they passed Sequence Ave until they are two blocks away—or had gone to a sudden stop.
Also, other musing:
- Extremely Short Timespan combinded with Character Development: Just another weird musing, but I doubt a person can change from a jerk to a messiah in three days. Only A Christmas Carol can get away with it without making me think about this trope.
- One Made-up Curse Word: Frak, just frak. Does their language only have one strong curse? The Maze Runner avoids this by having three curses.
- Awkward Dialogue Parsing: Apparently, the translators of the Haruhi Suzumiya light novels don't like their dialogue tags (see my review of it). A recent book also has problems with making the narrators dialogue distinct with her thoughts, so I often miss the second quotation mark.
edited 23rd Jun '11 4:13:43 PM by chihuahua0
When I make up my curse words, I try to do so by avoiding F-sounds entirely, but thinking about what makes curses effective (short, lots of frictatives and sharp stops that can be drawn out or spat with for maximum satisfaction) and then working with it. So yeah; F-sounding fictional swears are kind of annoying.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaI just don't really like made-up swears very much, except some times when they're played for laughs. If you actually want the made-up swear to be taken seriously as a swear word, forget it. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing wrong with a good F-bomb every now and then – no need to invent anything.
Always, somewhere, someone is fighting for you. As long as you remember them, you are not alone."Mrifk!" - The Eye Of Argon
That one doesn't even sound like a swear, but more like Angrish.
I do like the idea of fictional curse words being culturally based. It also serves as a form of world-building. Being named after gods, for instance. I mean, here in English, we have a lot of god damn religiously based swears from hell. To say nothing of religious names shouted as exclamations.
Swear words referring to other things, however, would probably be harder to pull off, as the Translation Convention would presumably make "fuck" translate into "fuck", "shit" translate into "shit", and so on. However, non-swearing based insults such as "fascist", which refer to history, could have made-up equivalents.
edited 24th Jun '11 6:32:56 AM by BonsaiForest
I personally like fictitious swear words, especially if they're Rule of Funny-compliant, so I don't care. So I guess there's that. :P
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaThe big problem is when only one is used and when it's supposed to be in a serious context. The former is kind of implausible, isn't it?
Artemis Fowl gets away with it because the book is a little lighthearted at times, but still...

I think the major problem with romance is that it's often used as a substitute for actual Character Development.
Anyways, I'm not a fan of The Everyman or the Audience Surrogate. Too many authors seem to interpret "universally relatable"* as "has no significantly distinguishing characteristics that might make them interesting."