Random Questions Thread

@ Titan Jump:

That's pretty poetic and makes this kind of my intended goal for him in a roundabout sort of way. It's certainly less black-and-white than I'd originally tried to go for. It would be a good "end point" for his journey that began with the cracks in his indoctrination and self-righteousness after seeing how it led him into an awful place.

Yeah, all in all very good. Thanks for putting that together and laying out out there.

On the bird story (I'm currently titling it Mustarastas Myrsky, which translates to "Myrsky^note  ("storm", it's a name) the blackbird"), how can i display warfare and the effects of war without over-the-top grimdarkness in a way Avatar: The Last Airbender succeeded and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power failed at? She-Ra's main problem was only focusing on each side's leaders without any focus on outsider civilians or actual effects of war, and feeling like the fact there was an actual war was treated as some sort of an afterthought.

Also, how can i set up the civil war arc so that it doesn't feel like a Shocking Swerve? The story starts way back when Esra and Myrsky are middle schoolers (they're in their early twenties in the civil war arc) and there's a few arcs set there so that i can build up the setting and characters before all of this comes down, show what society was like and why it was unfair to many people, and also a few arcs when they're teenagers just before the direct lead-up to the civil war starts with queen Margherita's sudden death from cancer. The story also continues for a fair while after the civil war^note  (among others featuring a former monarchist soldier who feels betrayed by monarchy and feels like her entire family's deaths in the war are rendered meaningless by queen Kreetta's abdication and declaration of democracy and thus becomes a trush nazi, Kreetta's older brother Oleksi who fell victim to gender-inverted Heir Club for Men and is mad that Kreetta declared democracy instead of giving the crown to him, extremely intense presidential elections where Esra's childhood friend and anti-communist socialist and former resistance leader Oskari Kannel is targeted for assassination because people think socialism = communism, an ex-communist vigilante killer who hunts down monarchist prison camp commanders to avenge herself, a former communist private who's pining for the good old days and becomes a terrorist leader, some communist fighters still being around innthe woods, the monarchists' war crimes having been swept under the rug, and Myrsky learning her magpie father is actually alive and her (by now dead) abusive mother's story about him abandoning them before she hatched being a lie), and i want it all to feel like a coherent narrative. I also don't know what to do with Esra, and if i should hook Myrsky up with somebody else to prevent it from being a tragic lesbian story.

First a question, do you plan to split this story between parts? Just wondering so I can get a gist of what you want.

I want to make it as an animation series or a comic doorstopper that's split into "episodes", but i'm not sure if i'll be able to do that or if i'll have to make it a novel series.

But yes, it's going to be multi-part in any case, and the civil war thing is only one of the arcs. The arcs obviously have multiple episodes each, but i don't know how many yet.

The story starts when Esra and Myrsky are children, and tries to subtly build towards the war arc. The rest of the arcs after that would be about consequences and fallout of the war, and otherwise wrapping things up towards the ending. I don't know how it should end yet.

Edited by Nukeli on May 24th 2022 at 1:18:36 PM

In that case, you can do the set up by showing the causes. Like, characters reflecting on the wealth, the societal status, and so forth. They tend to be causes of a civil war, and in most cases, they start when people less expect. Something like "It Can't Happen Here" even though it may do.

As for these characters, well, it sounds a bit like the Hero's Journey unless that's not the point.

That's what i'm planning to do. The story is supposed to start when Esra and Myrsky are middle schoolers or something, and the civil war arc would happen when they're in their early twenties, in order to have time for character establisment and proper buildup. Figuring out plots for the youngest parts is kind of hard because they're small children. They both grow up poor in an industrializing class society, and speciesism is rampant. Esra's parents die in some sort of industrial accident when she's a small child and she becomes a huutolainen, but her parents's friend "buys" her so she has a mostly normal childhood and isn't treated badly. Meanwhile Myrsky's mother is a violent alcoholic who's mad that she had sex with a different species which produced Myrsky.

.

I came up with the civil war and it's immediate prelude first and it's easier to come up with what goes forward from that, so i'm unsure what the earlier arcs' specific plots should be in order to avoid looking like i'm making a grimdark Shocking Swerve there, and keep the overall tone/darkness consistent so that the fallout arcs won't come off as clearly less visibly/actively dark or violent, and that the pre-war arcs won't feel out of place with the shot that goes down later. To that end, i'm trying to figure out the right way to write the war, the right balance to avoid both an insane gorefest or glossing over it. I brought up Avatar: The Last Airbender and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power in that context, as ATLA is widely praised for it's portrayal of war despite being pretty nongraphic^note  (i would go more explicit with Mustarastas Myrsky, though, and MM includes things like homicidal sexual jealousy and straight-up suicide, and actually shows people bleeding and dying), while myself and many other people feel that SPOP severely failed at it.

Edited by Nukeli on May 24th 2022 at 4:49:57 PM

It's what I said, you can keep the semi-light-hearted tone but at the same time, make some references to the turmoil through some small snippets of dialogue, some sort of foreshadowing I'd say, and when it blows up, it can be something that could be anticipated but still be a huge shock when it happens.

Sorry if my answers aren't that long, I tend to get straight to the point from what I've read.

It isn't and isn't supposed to be that light. It's supposed to be realistic and pretty dark, and Myrsky travels through the country vertically at least once. It's more about finding the right way to handle it, like Avatar: The Last Airbender did. I already explained that.

It's also not really a hero's journey type narrative either. Myrsky and Esra are supposed to have about equal screentime overall because while Myrsky's the titular protagonist, the whole thing is largely about her and Esra's relationship and their lives. Myrsky's a con artist, burglar, and kind of a dick and Esra's technically also a criminal because she does the right thing even if it's against the law and can go quite far with that even before the civil war arc, but they're not treated as bad because Esra's helping the downtrodden and Myrsky's avoiding death and making a living. So while there is some white it's largely a Black-and-Grey Morality, if you're strict about it, nobody is "actually" good and morality is subjective and generally unconventional.

(I was supposed tl say something else, but i forgot)

Edited by Nukeli on May 24th 2022 at 7:45:16 PM

So, the story that I'm writing is something of a Decon-Recon of an Alien Invasion story with Space Opera and Shonen tones. The deconstruction part comes with how said Alien invasion could be portrayed with the topics and woes of today's world. And in the case said Aliens have a manner of thinking like us, but they're far more advanced.

The Aliens in question study Earth during their path to conquest, and discover many of the Humanities's flaws and vices. Hence, they decide to exploit them in the fourth step of the invasion, which is to reveal themselves, and talk about how they were let down by not just themselves, but also the Galactic community, who saw human history and precedent as a reason not to bother to contact them. But fear not, for as they, the new Alien "saviors" will ensure they will uplift them from their predicament but they have to join their side in exchange for survival and even restore a nation of their liking. So yeah, Humans Are Divided

Most of the story is set in the US and it does portray some of these collaborators. I wrote the typical nutjobs from the US far right, but I'm wondering, would that be accurate for them to join a genocidal alien empire if it means they'll get what they want?

Edited by LoneCourier0 on May 25th 2022 at 10:24:35 AM

Generally fascist groups latch on to whoever they think will get them power. The issue is that their rights-stripping is very much last-in-first-out, so the moment they (or more accurately whatever random usually narcissistic racist they put in charge for looking "strong") think they can backstab the aliens who armed them, they will.

Of course they'll go along with the genocidal alien empire if it means they get to do genocide on the people they specifically don't like. People will happily sell out others if they get to be the enforcer, because the enforcer is an extremely secure and powerful position.

Now the problem is, again, that they're fascists. They are going to declare the aliens "honorary <in-group>" and then if they ever get to the point where they think they're safe to arbitrarily decide the genocidal aliens aren't in the in-group anymore and that it's time for humans to do the genocidal empire thing instead, they will do that. Whether it's actually really safe or not, that's another question, but there will eventually be fighting between the human fascist or theocratic enforcers and their genocidal alien ostensible-rulers the moment that the human enforcers feel secure enough to try something.

The one major problem though is that colonialism and genocide are not sustainable practices. They're brutal in the moment, but unless these aliens have only been doing this for a few centuries, it's unlikely they're going to have a particularly stable economy or government as the demands for extracted resources grow with population (exponentially) requiring exponentially more exploited places. The moment the aliens themselves end up with their main-world economy damaged and redirected (say by a war or something), their empire is going to disintegrate, fast, whether by colony uprisings by the empowered local fascists or simply by their own governors declaring independence to try to turn the extraction territories into extraction states (which tends to lead to the authoritarian enforcers coup-ing very quickly and taking over the extraction state. After all, they're usually the new army because they were the only ones trained)

(This is what happened to most of the post WWI and WWII empires, where they fell apart very quickly once they needed to redirect resources away from maintaining their extraction territories.)

Well, to expand on that point, the Alien empire in particular are esoteric social darwinists, those who believe that only through combat and bloodshed will living beings truly evolve beyond mere stale "peace" and "love". So yeah, they commit genocide on the species they deem "undesirable" for their ideology, but initially took great interest in Humanity because in my universe, their violent history is what made the rest of the galaxy close off any contact with them, and this empire took advantage of such isolation. But yeah, it's not as simple as fulfilling the promise, because they will eventually turn the rest of humanity into mindless shells, both metaphorically and even physically, while leaders get turned into powerless figureheads who parrot alien propaganda while knowing that they're now a slave for an eternity, even when they die. If the Aliens win that is.

Another bit regarding this plot point, its how much some collaborators will genuinely work with the Aliens like Petain did or secretly throw slurs behind their backs, or a mix of both.

Edited by LoneCourier0 on May 25th 2022 at 1:57:14 PM

How do i explain a character's personality well? For the critique threads and in general?

One of the characters currently has a 1163-words long explanation that's split into two boxes, general personality/virues and character flaws, and i feel each's explanations are badly put together and too long.

Edited by Nukeli on May 25th 2022 at 1:01:10 PM

Well, you can try to just write the most important traits of them in 20 words or so, so can it be easier to read but also enrich your descriptions. At least in my experience.

I mean, this sounds like Les Collaborateurs In Space. Nothing wrong with that and there's plenty of fun and interesting ways to do it. There's plenty of reasons for people to collaborate, from honest support, to greed, to fear, to sheer laziness.

It is indeed.

So, the behavior could be a mix of both, you mean?

How could i anthromorphise a dachshund (or basset, corgi, or similiar) without disturbing its recognizability as a dachshund?

I think keeping the main color scheme and the fur would help.

So, it depends what you're going for an what perspective you're taking. From the summary you give, I'm a bit confused about why they'd bother with 'restore the nation'? They want something from us, right? Presumably it's not tech, given the obvious disparity. They either want resources (which could be gotten more easily elsewhere) or bodies.

They've created a narrative that works (we'll help you, those other bastards are afraid of you and don't want us to) why bother allying yourself with groups that, by dint of wanting a nation restored obviously lack the power to do so instead of just allying themselves with the existing power base, which already has the means in most countries to hire (or conscript) vast numbers of people.

But assuming I'm missing something, well, I guess the place I'd start is think about situations in your own life, or the lives of people you know when someone's 'gone along to get along' or worked for a company/government that did immoral things, or just didn't act against something they believed was immoral. Why did they do those things? It's obviously not on the same scale, but it's the same set of underlying motivations.

But I guess to try to answer your question, would some right wing nutjobs join invaders? Sure. And some right wing nutjobs will view them as instruments of the devil and fight them to the death. And some left wing nutjobs will join them and some will view them as neo-imperialist filth and fight them to the death. Survival and comfort trump politics for most normal people.

Edited by ECD on May 26th 2022 at 11:08:33 AM

That's the thing, the Aliens are aware of the men who yearn for the old "glory" of a nation even though it was a time of darkness for many people except white males, so they take advantage of those feelings with said "promise" for collaboration. And given what we've seen of white supremacy in most cases, they'll take advantage of anything that would give them what they want even if they're not Human.

They also want them to be subjects, part of their twisted Darwinistic ideology, where the strongest come out on top in fights to the death. Resources and money doesn't matter, it's all about "growth" for the sake of evolution.

Edited by LoneCourier0 on May 26th 2022 at 8:17:04 PM

The thing and main trait of gorgis, bassets, and dachshunds is that they're long and have stubby legs. I don't know how to translate that into a humanoid form without losing the basic shape, which is the only thing that clearly identifies them.

Maybe you can make them short and stocky like the dwarves of Lord of the Rings.

If that's the case, it's not at all clear why they'd be interested in supporting a bunch of losers, who have lost? Seems like they'd want to subordinate the strongest, not mess around with a bunch of losers.

But more broadly, if they're trying to operate on a global scale, tying themselves to a broadly despised racial ideology is strikingly bad strategy. I guess they could support a bunch of different groups worldwide, but that doesn't seem like it makes sense with any strategy based on propaganda/manipulation.

I guess I'm not tracking the details (and don't really need to) but the story is very different if this is a method of conquest, or merely that their recruiting local overseers/workers from various local groups.

That's the case in the US, around the world, they get collaborators from many spectrums as well, but for them, in-fighting is the least of their worries, because that would mean there would be less people who are likely to oppose them within their ranks. They studied Human behavior to the nth degree right before the invasion, and made sure to exploit every human weakness they can discover to turn the tide of war in their favor.

As for these people, they believe that they will shape them up to be proper fighters in the field if they're so eager for combat and to "fulfill" their promise, but they would mostly relegate them to be death squads, and if they get in combat, they will force them stand and fight instead of running away like cowards. As the story progresses, the continuing poor performance of these collaborators forces these Aliens to take an extreme measure to ensure they get the strong Humans they want, even if it means they would lose their body and soul.

Edited by LoneCourier0 on May 26th 2022 at 9:33:27 PM

If that's the case, then I don't see the point of revealing themselves at all? Surely it would be better to simply spark the conflicts they believe will produce the raw resources they want, then swoop in at the end and take them without anyone knowing aliens are involved?

But I may not be tracking the narrative flow and this is extraneous to the question you asked.

It's not resources what they want, only "evolution" of all living beings.