Writer's Block Daily

Feudalism, like any system, can be played as either good or bad. Or as just a fact of life, with no inherent goodness or badness. It all boils down to how the characters (and by extension the world) react to it.

Now, that said, having the protagonist and antagonist both as part of the same system is a little trickier. The way I see it, you have a couple options there:

1) The story isn't about feudalism at all, and is just a struggle between the hero and the villain.
2) If the story is about feudalism, the hero supports the most positive ideal ("the local lord is our Benevolent Dictator and we should support him!") with the villain as a Foil ("he works his peasants too hard!")

You've got some room to play with this.

edited 14th Jun '18 5:21:52 PM by AwSamWeston

I made a tropes page for my webcomic, Insecto Nocturno.

I feel I shouldn't point out all my Shout outs. Should I? Because it can feel, I don't know, less magic?

Writing villains plans is fun, but I have to endure my corny train of thought to make it have some sense.

So after struggling for ages with two different stories (one a sci-fi story with problems in worldbuilding and tone, other a gothic fantasy story with plot issues) I decided to try brutally transplant elements between the two stories to fix the issue.

Obviously it will need some hard and merciless editing, but I'm optimistic about these stories for the first time in quite a while.

So, first time posting here but long time lurker (like almost 10 years long haha).

I've decided to try to revive the Constructive Criticism Thread so maybe I can help a little bit to all the aspiring creators we've got in this site.

As for my personal projects, after reading a very insightful post by a successful web novelist, I decided to try my hand at it. Not for the fame or fortune (I'm a writer after all hehe), but to get myself out of the block I've had. I think having to keep a schedule and the fact that I won't be able to go back and keep editing the same chapter for all eternity, may help me move along with my latest story.

I do wonder if the mods would let us create a weekly thread for us serial web novelist to keep our updates and to comment on each other's works.

edited 25th Jun '18 10:39:10 PM by HugoG

So I'm writing a trilogy of fantasy short films, each centered around a common fantasy archetype.

• One is called "The Paladin," a drama about a paladin on his long quest to defeat a necromancer (this one's already written).
• Another is an action-comedy featuring two rival rogues / thieves.
• The third is an awe-inspiring thing about a magic student.

And I hate my brain right now for the pun I just came up with—

"A-mage-ing."

I hate the pun. It must die.

For my side, I am trying to find a way to got all Fantasy Character Classes in a Urban Fantasy Setting and make them all important.

My MC is a Squishy Wizard and the other protagonists are Melee fighters, ranging from Kung-Fu Wizard to Magic Knight

Hey you know that trope where Hades or any God of death is portrayed as evil? I wanted to play around with the trope by having the antagonist be more of a rebellious anti-hero. Paul Darrell is pluto, titan of death and one of the few chosen titans that defied the entity.

He mostly works on his own and does very unorthodox things when dealing with trolls (monsters the titans hunt down). Rather than mostly purifying them, he kills them outright, not caring if they were once human or not. In his eyes, he’s doing God’s work by putting them out of their misery.

Thoughts on this?

Edited by ewolf2015 on Jun 28th 2018 at 6:29:03 AM

Said trope is Everyone Hates Hades

Also. Given that he is a god, then is weird that he is taken the lethal aproach when his coworkers dont. And you are still using the Everyone Hates Hades trope by making him the most jerkish of them, you just downplayed it.

so maybe make him less jerkish and more neutral? He doesn't really side with anyone until the very end.

And one to thing to note, in this universe, titans are semi-immortal defenders of humanity chosen by this alien being known as the entity. They're feats inspired the mythologies we known today. After the age of myth ended, humanity were safe until a rise of wormholes opening up lead the entity to choose new titans. Paul was one of those chosen.

Sorry for the explanation. Of you still didn't get it pm me.

Edited by ewolf2015 on Jun 29th 2018 at 11:07:27 AM

It isn't quite Everybody Hates Hades trope because in that the death god is also often the traitor of the pantheon and all that stuff. If he is doing the same thing as they are supposed to be doing, but in a more grim fashion, then it isn't pulling the same old horse.

I feel like it still kind of treads on the spirit of the trope. In classic Mythology Hades was among the kindest of the gods, if not the kindest.

Which isn't saying much considering the Greek Gods were childish slap-happy cunts to a man, but I mean, still.

The core principle of Everybody Hates Hades is essentially looking at foreign religions through a western, Christian mindset. The interpretation of Hades and other Underworld gods is because of an association with the Christian underworld, and therefore Satan. Based on that, I think that any representation of a god of death or a god of the underworld as more evil than they were fits the bill. Though I suppose in this case you could argue it's less a matter of Hades being vilified and more the other gods being sanctified.

Like the main premise of this side project is that it's mainly powerful warriors with a astrology motif fighting against life force stealing aliens....that just so happen to be based in Roman and greek myth. So the characters aren't 100% like the myths. It's really more like savior moon if it was manly.

Was trying to figure out a way to show that contacting one's dead ancestors for advice was a somewhat-common thing in my fantasy society without infodumping, then realized I could work it into the opening.

A young girl (the main character) attends her grandmother's funeral, distraught that she never got the chance to say goodbye before the grandmother died. Some time later (no more than a week), she puts together a ritual, summons her grandmother's spirit, and says her goodbyes. Her mother comes in and is shocked, because tradition forbids summoning a spirit so soon after their death; they need to get settled into the afterlife first. The grandmother doesn't mind, since if she had minded, she wouldn't have shown up (ancestor-summoning like this merely provides a gateway for them to contact the world of the living and isn't an obligation; it's entirely up to the ancestor to show up or not). She wishes mother and daughter both happy lives and departs.

(Why can a young girl perform a ritual like that? A combination of her being a bookish prodigy and the ritual not being that complicated.)

Spirit summoning is always cool. A lot of modern, post-Tolkien fantasy rely on tropes like Magic A Is Magic A, where magic is essentially just another skill that powerful humans can learn rather than the domain of higher entities as they were in mythology, and I'd really love to see the latter portrayal more often.

Not that I've got much of a work ethic lately, but I just spent the past few days binging the "Appeal to the Moderation" thread and was thus alerted to (or at least reminded of) this forum's existence, so I figured I'd try and get some help for some questions I've been mulling over for quite some time. My primary fandom is Dragon Ball (mainly Z going into Super), but I haven't typed out anything I've written in years, and I kind of cringe to talk about my MC for most-likely-common reasons....

Hello all! I thought about posting in this thread months ago, but I wasn't really productive back then. Finally pulled myself out of my rut and started working on two screenplays, one a short and one a feature.

• The short was actually an old script I wrote years ago, but I finally went back and touched it up. It's called Meat is Murder, and it's a character study of a man named Ken Muntz, a Villain Protagonist who has a malicious side he keeps hidden. Just finished the new version, gave the guy more of a motivation than sheer greed, making him a much more layered character, but definitely not a more sympathetic one. It's got alot of Show, Don't Tell, and I wrote a compelling Motive Rant at the climax, where he calmly reveals his attempted "justification" for the cruelty he inflicts so wantonly. Really proud of this one.
• The feature is the first installment of a Thematic Series of horror films I call "the Bloodbath Trilogy". Entitled Bloodletter's Peak, it's a murder-mystery about a group of teenagers stumbling upon a criminal conspiracy in the titular city, a Town with a Dark Secret. Just finished the first scene, trying to write a scene a day.

I'm also working on my own Video Review Show, because you can't make good media if you haven't seen some truly awful media. Still editing the first episode, hopefully it will be done by next week. I'm reviewing The Open House.

Edited by JoeBlitz on Jul 12th 2018 at 11:32:00 AM

After returning from a holiday I've decided that I spend a portion of every day from now on drawing and writing something in order to get my 'projects' going.

For now I'm focusing on three of them, each in different phase of completion. This way, if I get frustrated with one, I can switch over to avoid complete burnout.

I'm looking for a doomsday device for a sci-fi story; one that isn't powerful enough to utterly destroy a planet, just one that can devastate a population living on the planet. It doesn't even have to kill everyone immediately. I've already ruled out a plague and crashing a meteor into the planet. I'm willing to use something that wasn't originally designed to be a doomsday device, but becomes one when it doesn't work properly.

Edited by WillKeaton on Jul 21st 2018 at 5:35:40 AM

Why cant it be a bio weapon?

They already tried to obtain a plague from a military base, but were stopped. Hence they need to acquire a different weapon. As to the meteor, well that happened once not too long ago and doing it again would be redundant.

Edited by WillKeaton on Jul 21st 2018 at 6:20:59 AM

You can only obtain weaponized diseases from military bases in your world? Must be nice to live there. Well, anything that knocked out a lot of vital infrastructure would cause a lot of deaths. If they could knock out the world's main electrical grids and shut them down for a month or so, either by hacking them or some sort of global EMP effect, that would do it. Alternatively, find a bacteria that is harmless to humans, but breaks down petroleum very rapidly. Going more towad the soft sci-fi end of the spectrum, something to knock out the Van Allen belts around the Earth (strong electromagnets at the poles?), or distributing some chemical to remove the ozone layer very quickly... there's lots of possibilities, depending on how wild you are willing to get.

High-altitude nuclear detonation can create some veeery far-reaching EMP, so they can try that - though it won't destroy all humans by itself, the civilization is going to get very screwed up.

Self-deprecation can do wonders for a character. I had one who liked to pepper her speeches with metaphors ("...FOUR people with a price on their heads like a cute little hat!"), but at one point, I was struggling to come up with a good metaphor. So I picked one of the worse ones, then had her bemoan how bad it was. ("Back on track like a repaired train! God, I need to work on my metaphors.")

I have discovered the wonders of One Note for organizing character and setting info, making outlines, etc.

So much better than the Giant Word Document of Doom