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What makes Inspirational Insults inspirational? Help making plausible actions and reactions.

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Miss_Desperado https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YD2i1FzUYA from somewhere getting rained on by Puget Sound Since: Sep, 2016 Relationship Status: Shipping fictional characters
#1: May 27th 2020 at 3:10:09 PM

I recently (at the time of typing this post) found out that I'm not as good at writing inspirational insults as I thought I was. The problem got exposed in a collaborative environment when multiple authors' characters repeatedly reacted in ways that made it clear that the inspiration just wasn't coming across and my characters were being heard as saying just plain old insults. Now I'm trying to figure out why.

I'm blind to what the problem might be in my solo writing, because it's too easy to push cause and effect when I'm writing both insulter and insultee. I'm pretty sure there's some dynamic or something that I'm missing, but I need help spotting it. Otherwise I'll be wondering what the heck about my insulted characters' reactions is ruining my audience's Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

  • What kind of characters respond best to inspirational insults?
  • What kind of characters are good at inspirational insults and what kind are bad at them?
  • Is there a prerequisite relationship that makes it easier?
  • What else could I be overlooking?

If not for this anchor I'd be dancing between the stars. At least I can try to write better vampire stories than Twilight.
Masterofchaos Since: Dec, 2010
#2: May 27th 2020 at 3:22:28 PM

And since I'm part of the collaborative thread you mentioned (Hi Miss!), I'll help you.

It depends on what's being said, how they're saying, and how many times it's being said. At some point, if the character does nothing but insult someone and rarely gives out compliments, then yeah, people are not going to be positive around them. There's has to be a point where the person realizes they're pushing things too far and slow it down.

What appears to be your problem is that you're not completely sure when you want the characters to acknowledge what they're doing is not helping. So here's what I do; I look over my draft of my characters, study it, and think to myself "If i was around these people in real life, would I want to stick around?". If the answer is no, then it's either time for a rewrite OR finding a spot to where they stop and realize "Oh shit, we're alienating people, and we have to change that."

Miss_Desperado https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YD2i1FzUYA from somewhere getting rained on by Puget Sound Since: Sep, 2016 Relationship Status: Shipping fictional characters
#3: May 27th 2020 at 4:17:18 PM

I appreciate your help, but I can continue getting help for the collaborative thread on the collaborative thread. Here, I can pull out excerpts from my solo writing for scrutiny without derailing the collaborative thread. note 

That being said, I already found out the hard way how much is too much, that's like watching a slow-motion train wreck. It's the what's being said and how they're saying it that I want to know more about. If my characters' inspirational insults are too insulting, how do I tone down the insults without losing the insulting part of the insult altogether?

If not for this anchor I'd be dancing between the stars. At least I can try to write better vampire stories than Twilight.
CrystalGlacia from at least we're not detroit (Living Relic)
#4: May 31st 2020 at 12:25:39 PM

Longtime veteran of the CDTs here. I wrote for them for over six years, until I graduated college at the end of 2017, and full-time employment and bills and adulthood happened. I also try to lurk the discussion thread when I can- but not necessarily the story threads themselves -so I know a little bit of what's been going on over there.

From what I've gathered, OP, your characters like to make use of "tough love" to help people, and you realized that this might be a problem when having your characters direct their brand of "help" at characters that you have no control over.

The first thing I want to say is that depending on the plot, there might not actually be a problem in your characters' home story, or it might not be the showstopper that it's been in the CDTs. What works in a story written in a closed environment where you have complete control over everything your characters interact with, the outcome, and the full progression of the plot will not necessarily work in a collaborative story where there is no preplanned plot to speak of, you only have control of a tiny piece of the overall product, and characters can and will react in ways you didn't anticipate. When something doesn't work in the CDTs that you consider important to your story, take it with a grain of salt and review its place in your solo work before diving into revisions.

Second, I reviewed the examples for Inspirational Insult and found that there's not a whole lot of rhyme or reason to what leads to one insult firing someone up but not another one, and it's not even like they'll work consistently for the same person every time. According to the definition, the party doing the insulting can even be doing so with the intent to hurt, and as long as it fires up the recipient, it qualifies for the trope. In addition to the person needing to be receptive to that kind of criticism, the thing that the recipient is being insulted for should probably be something they were already fired up about to begin with, the insulter should probably try not to insult the receiver personally too much, and the one doing the insulting should probably be someone whose opinion isn't too highly regarded by the receiver... unless the receiver and insulter are already in some kind of friendly or allied relationship built upon insults, in which case they'll know what's off-limits and what insults do what. On top of all of that, the insult has to hit a person just right, at the right time, and in just the right way.

...Which is probably just a long-winded what of saying that there's no real way to tell just how someone might logically take any given insult at any given time, whether immediately, after they've had time to think about it, or ever. Depending on what you're trying to say about "tough love", you could probably have characters react to the insults in any way you choose, with almost any set of reasons that fits the plot, and have it make sense.

The only real pitfall I'm seeing is that you don't want everybody or even most people they insult to get fired up, because, again, the characters have no way of telling if their insult's going to inspire someone, especially because some people (me) just don't respond to Inspirational Insults at all, and they're bound to misjudge at some point, with appropriate consequences. For best results, have their insult(s) really hurt someone, if not a few someones, and have a few who continue doing what they were doing in spite of what your characters said to them because why should they give a fuck about what some strangers say? And given that I've seen you say that this is this particular group of characters' primary way of helping people, that could be very interesting.

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
Miss_Desperado https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YD2i1FzUYA from somewhere getting rained on by Puget Sound Since: Sep, 2016 Relationship Status: Shipping fictional characters
#5: Jun 25th 2020 at 10:09:32 AM

I've been trying to make sense of this for a long time, but now I have to admit you've left me even more lost and confused. In addition, it's taken me a long time to write this post.

What do you mean by "depending on the plot"? What kind of plots make inspirational insults effective and what kind of plots make them counterproductive? How am I supposed to tell which is the case for my characters' home story? That's kind of important to know if I'm to take its failure in the CDTs with a grain of salt and review its place in my solo work before diving into revisions.

If there's not a whole lot of rhyme or reason to what leads to one insult firing someone up but not another one, if they don't work consistently for the same person every time, if there's no real way to tell just how someone might logically take any given insult at any given time, then that doesn't make it any easier for me to have characters react to the insults in any way I choose, with almost any set of reasons that fits the plot, and have it make sense. If anything, that just puts extra pressure on my telepath characters to be believable in their effectiveness. Plus, that really undermines both what you said about depending on the plot and the following advice...

In addition to the person needing to be receptive to that kind of criticism, the thing that the recipient is being insulted for should probably be something they were already fired up about to begin with, the insulter should probably try not to insult the receiver personally too much, and the one doing the insulting should probably be someone whose opinion isn't too highly regarded by the receiver...

At least I know that for my Vigilante Militia members aiming inspirational insults at each other, the receiver and insulter are indeed already in some kind of friendly or allied relationship built upon insults, in which case they'll know what's off-limits and what insults do what.

On top of all of that, the insult has to hit a person just right, at the right time, and in just the right way.

Do you have any idea how hopelessly vague that is?

Depending on what you're trying to say about "tough love", you could probably have characters react to the insults in any way you choose, with almost any set of reasons that fits the plot, and have it make sense.

I didn't set out to make any particular aesop about tough love, I was more focused on making aesops against Suicidal Pacifism and for Dare to Be Badass. Tough love just happened to become the go-to option for the Vigilante Militia to use when trying to shock civilians out of Holding Out for a Hero and go defend themselves from the enemy invasion already. If an Accidental Aesop can be read into what I've written, it's probably something like a corollary to the saying "In times of war, the law falls silent," that reads "...and so do a lot of etiquette rules."

The only real pitfall I'm seeing is that you don't want everybody or even most people they insult to get fired up, because, again, the characters have no way of telling if their insult's going to inspire someone

Yes, that's the case for the non-telepathic members of the Vigilante Militia, but this advice doesn't make sense for the telepaths, who do have a way of telling if their insult is going to inspire someone.

and have a few who continue doing what they were doing in spite of what your characters said to them because why should they give a fuck about what some strangers say?

Because enemies are invading, shooting, bombing, burning, mind-controlling, etc., the defending soldiers are an underfunded undertrained Red Shirt Army, and these particular strangers are the only ones not running around in a blind panic or cowering or getting picked off like fish in a barrel, that's why.

If not for this anchor I'd be dancing between the stars. At least I can try to write better vampire stories than Twilight.
CrystalGlacia from at least we're not detroit (Living Relic)
#6: Jun 25th 2020 at 5:01:57 PM

While that context is nice and offers some clarification, you didn't mention any of it before I wrote my post. I don't know if this context was evident in the CDTs or something, but in case it's not clear, I don't follow the actual story threads beyond what I see people saying about them in the discussion thread. And even if I did follow the actual threads to any real extent (in which case I probably wouldn't have posted in this thread at all), you asked for non-CDT perspectives. You didn't give much in the OP in terms of what your story's about, so I gave general advice. People assuming they'll have to abandon something in their own work just because it didn't work so well in a collaborative environment is not a new thing.

What do you mean by "depending on the plot"? What kind of plots make inspirational insults effective and what kind of plots make them counterproductive? How am I supposed to tell which is the case for my characters' home story? That's kind of important to know if I'm to take its failure in the CDTs with a grain of salt and review its place in my solo work before diving into revisions.

Here, "plot" refers to any occurrence in your story. When your characters deliver their tough love to somebody, the way the receivers take your characters' remarks can change the plot. Let's forget about plot "types", because that's not a helpful concept here. Do you need the receivers to get fired up in a particular way by your characters' tough love in order for the plot to proceed the way you want? What happens in your story if they don't? What happens if they tell your characters to go fuck themselves or accept it, but need another devastating defeat(s) before it sinks in and then they listen, or instead take a third or fourth or fifth option and do something that your characters weren't expecting? What kind of story do you have, then, and is it a story that you want to tell? That's what I'm talking about.

If you need something to go a certain way and make sense, you have to create circumstances where it does. Which brings us to...

If there's not a whole lot of rhyme or reason to what leads to one insult firing someone up but not another one, if they don't work consistently for the same person every time, if there's no real way to tell just how someone might logically take any given insult at any given time, then that doesn't make it any easier for me to have characters react to the insults in any way I choose, with almost any set of reasons that fits the plot, and have it make sense. If anything, that just puts extra pressure on my telepath characters to be believable in their effectiveness. Plus, that really undermines both what you said about depending on the plot and the following advice...

I don't really think I undermined what I said because that's the only correlation I've seen, and even then, it's a shaky one.

I was thinking of people like Dav Pilkey, author of the Captain Underpants series, whose third-grade teacher tore up the Captain Underpants comic book he made and told him he couldn't be doing that for the rest of his life, but he liked making people laugh more than he wanted to listen to his teacher, so he kept doing it and is now a bestselling children's author. Had he been shit on enough for his comics, maybe he would've stopped. We don't know, because people are complicated.

Meanwhile, there's the narrator of The Little Prince, who was told when he was a kid that his drawing was stupid and pointless, so he gave up drawing and lost his sense of whimsy as he grew up until he met the titular Little Prince. Because this is a story with narrative intent, we know that those comments had to hit him just wrong and get him to abandon his sense of whimsy so that we could have a journey about him finding it again from the Prince, and to contribute to later remarks the Prince makes about adults being very strange.

Do you have any idea how hopelessly vague that is?

I do. There is no formula that will reliably determine how any given character should react to an insult meant to help them and whether it will make sense to the audience, any more than there is a formula that will determine if your story will become a bestseller.

Yes, that's the case for the non-telepathic members of the Vigilante Militia, but this advice doesn't make sense for the telepaths, who do have a way of telling if their insult is going to inspire someone.

See, that would've been good to know from the start. But I've been thinking about this, through times when I've gotten insults that bothered me for a long time and comparing them to the one time when someone's awful nonconstructive criticism of my opening chapter got my novel on its current path, and seeing if there's something a telepath would've been able to see that would've told them in advance how I was going to respond. The latter occasion was at least partially thanks to timing, I know that, because I'd been seeing some things in that community that rubbed me the wrong way and seemed to be rooted in some not-great assumptions. Then that happened and confirmed all of my suspicions, as well as the fact that my gut was right and they were wrong, despite how damn sure they were about being right. That only worked that time because I already had a suspicion that they weren't to be trusted. If I still respected their opinions, I might've shelved the story entirely.

So if your characters were tasked with improving my writing and that community where I got the bad critique wasn't in the picture... what would the telepaths even need to see in order to decide I'd need a good insult? Or would they just leave off "tough love" because they can somehow tell that I tend not to respond to insults except in that one very specific scenario? And if their tactics are backfiring in the CDTs and just making characters angry at them without achieving any desired results, what criteria are they even using?

Remember that it's not necessarily a problem for your characters' tactics to fail sometimes. It can be a good way to allow room for growth, or to show that "tough love" has its place. But evidently, you need it to succeed.

I didn't set out to make any particular aesop about tough love, I was more focused on making aesops against Suicidal Pacifism and for Dare to Be Badass. Tough love just happened to become the go-to option for the Vigilante Militia to use when trying to shock civilians out of Holding Out for a Hero and go defend themselves from the enemy invasion already. If an Accidental Aesop can be read into what I've written, it's probably something like a corollary to the saying "In times of war, the law falls silent," that reads "...and so do a lot of etiquette rules."

By including tough love, or literally any plot-altering action or choice at all in your story and showing its outcome, you are making a statement about that thing, even if it's as simple as just a statement of the scenario as a whole. "This worked for this situation because of reasons x, y, and z." "This failed because of reasons a, b, and c." In the absence of any surefire criteria that can be used to determine if your characters' strategy should work, all that's left is what outcomes serve your plot. What complicates things further is...

Because enemies are invading, shooting, bombing, burning, mind-controlling, etc., the defending soldiers are an underfunded undertrained Redshirt Army, and these particular strangers are the only ones not running around in a blind panic or cowering or getting picked off like fish in a barrel, that's why.

You're going to have to explain exactly what your characters are saying to these people, because this is sounding less like something that would meet the trope definition for Inspirational Insult, and more like what Gordon Ramsay does on Kitchen Nightmares.

An Inspirational Insult is like the stupid negging that my sister's high school tennis coach would do. He'd put people down and actively tell them they were so far below his star player's level he only kept them around to give the players from the opposing school something to do. Remarks like that don't say anything constructive or tell them what they should be doing instead, and the words themselves do not give the receivers any reason to improve themselves beyond showing him up. For maybe two out of eight girls, it got them fired up, but it knocked my sister down so hard she quit and decided her time was better spent elsewhere.

Gordon does not do that. He says things like, "You can't have fucking mold in your fucking walk-in, you bunch of donkeys!" Sure, it insults the receivers by calling them stupid, but it also directly informs them of the problem, which has an obvious solution- learn what your customers are ordering so you don't overbuy food that goes bad before you can use it, and clean out your walk-in fridge. Unlike my sister's dickhole coach and his negging, this is more likely to achieve the desired result.

With all that said... I'm still feeling like this whole thread is just concern in search of a problem to be concerned about. Let me reiterate that writing on your own and writing for the CDTs is apples and oranges. It's still not clear just how frequent this "tough love" is in the story, how well you need it to work for the sake of your story, or if it really is ineffective from an audience's perspective. We can give you more specific advice for your situation if you give more thorough details, and offer examples you're concerned about and context- not only from your own writing, but maybe also one from the CDTs for analyzing your telepaths' criteria, because that's over 1.8k posts to go through.

And after this, consider finding a beta reader. This is probably going to turn out to be such a situational thing that you might get better results just letting someone read the whole thing and see all of the context build up.

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
Miss_Desperado https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YD2i1FzUYA from somewhere getting rained on by Puget Sound Since: Sep, 2016 Relationship Status: Shipping fictional characters
#7: Jun 26th 2020 at 12:11:40 PM

Gordon does not do that. He says things like, "You can't have fucking mold in your fucking walk-in, you bunch of donkeys!" Sure, it insults the receivers by calling them stupid, but it also directly informs them of the problem, which has an obvious solution- learn what your customers are ordering so you don't overbuy food that goes bad before you can use it, and clean out your walk-in fridge. Unlike my sister's dickhole coach and his negging, this is more likely to achieve the desired result.

That's actually very helpful to know, and alleviates a lot of my concerns right there, because I am indeed modeling what my characters are saying on Gordon Ramsey even though I didn't quite know it at the time. So if that's not the same thing as Inspirational Insult, then what's it called?

You're going to have to explain exactly what your characters are saying to these people,

Here's the first do-or-die crisis, this is from the first story of the series, about how the Vigilante Militia was founded. Arilay is suffering from dysphoria via traumatic cyborgification. So far gentle coaxing (mostly from non-telepaths) to cure the dysphoria has failed because Arilay was dismissing it as sappy, cliched, and worst of all insincere. Now that it directly puts Moquoql and Murquoql (telepaths) in danger, they've had enough and The Gloves Come Off.

Moquoql wheezed, and switched to telepathy, "Stop pretending that you're still all human! You have no right to sit there in denial of your cybernetic life support when you and Morpho are the only ones not gasping in this planet's thin atmosphere after we've been marooned here and chased all this way!" She faltered to put more focus on breathing.

Murquoql continued, "Now, if you're quite done doing a shoddy job of fooling yourself that you can't breathe this air, if you're quite done wishing that you can't eat those rocks, you have a mine shaft to finish clearing before those tentacled monstrosities come back to collapse the rest of it — because I'm not going to let myself or my sister get buried alive over any excuse lamer than Morpho's excuse that they chased him off with dynamite! And just in case it isn't crystal clear already, under these circumstances, your desire to be a squishy human is SUICIDAL!"

Arilay stood up. "That's it. You just forfeit the right to complain about how gross I look when I do this." And with that, her lower jaw stretched, deformed, and engulfed the nearest of the landslide's tumbled boulders.

At that point, Arilay's cyborg-dysphoria was by no means cured, but that was the first step.

And if their tactics are backfiring in the CDTs and just making characters angry at them without achieving any desired results, what criteria are they even using?

The criteria can be summarized thusly: people who have some sort of innate ability (e.g. superpowers or being genetically engineered) or tool (e.g. magic gems, paralyzing disks, Magic Staff, or Clothes Make the Superman) or altered body (e.g. cyborg, vampire, or Baleful Polymorph anthropomorphic animal), but instead of exploring the newfound potential, they neglect or reject it. People who are explicitly or implicitly thinking "I Just Want to Be Normal", even and especially when being normal would be a detriment to their safety. People who are not daring to be badass with what they've got when With Great Power Comes Great Opposition.

And after this, consider finding a beta reader. This is probably going to turn out to be such a situational thing that you might get better results just letting someone read the whole thing and see all of the context build up.

That's a good idea, even though I feel like I need to clean up what I wrote first. But that's an off-topic bee in my bonnet that I most likely just need to bite the bullet and get a beta-reader, mess and all.

Edited by Miss_Desperado on Jun 26th 2020 at 12:15:23 PM

If not for this anchor I'd be dancing between the stars. At least I can try to write better vampire stories than Twilight.
CrystalGlacia from at least we're not detroit (Living Relic)
#8: Jun 28th 2020 at 8:13:21 AM

So if that's not the same thing as Inspirational Insult, then what's it called?

Probably being a Caustic Critic or Jerkass Has a Point, if we're going by tropes. They could also be a variant of Drill Sergeant Nasty, but in order for that to work, the recipients should either want to be there and understand that that particular drill sergeant experience is part and parcel of what they signed up for, or they have no choice but to comply because they see (not necessary that they actually are; perception is everything here) the consequences of going their own way or refusing to comply as worse.

The criteria can be summarized thusly: people who have some sort of innate ability (e.g. superpowers or being genetically engineered) or tool (e.g. magic gems, paralyzing disks, Magic Staff, or Clothes Make the Superman) or altered body (e.g. cyborg, vampire, or Baleful Polymorph anthropomorphic animal), but instead of exploring the newfound potential, they neglect or reject it. People who are explicitly or implicitly thinking "I Just Want to Be Normal", even and especially when being normal would be a detriment to their safety. People who are not daring to be badass with what they've got when With Great Power Comes Great Opposition.

This is giving me a lot of thoughts. To start, the example you gave appears to literally be a life-or-death scenario, where if something isn't done pretty much immediately, people will die, and the empowered character among those who will die (or whose enhancements might allow them to survive) seems to be the only one around who can save the day. This looks legitimate out of context; I probably wouldn't question why the empowered character decided to suck it up and listen to the other that time.

We're going to have to talk about the CDTs a bit here to understand what might be going on in your solo writing. From what I saw MOC say in this thread, all of your characters' encouragement in that thread was of the caustic variety, all Gordon-esque "you better get us out of this shitshow you fucking donkey". But if you watch an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, you'll see that Gordon isn't mean and foul-mouthed like that all the time- he's mostly like that in the beginning. He does that to shock people out of their holding patterns, get them to pay attention, and convey the severity and urgency of their mistakes. The rest of the time, he's still blunt and efficient with occasional spots of real warmth and tenderness, but instead of taking the time to include personal digs, he's focused on showing the restaurant how to improve. When it's a bit later and he's showing the kitchen a new recipe for their revamped menu and a prep cook's having some trouble with their knifework, he doesn't quip about how it's obvious they never went to culinary school or how he thought they did, he just efficiently shows them why what they're doing isn't working, and why the proper way is better. If they give him attitude in the face of constructive criticism, then he gets in their face, but other than that, he doesn't really insult people after that initial teardown of the restaurant unless they do something truly bad/dumb that he hasn't seen yet because the shock and attention-grabbing aspect of his famous vitriol-laden rants wears off pretty quickly and just distracts from whatever he's actually trying to help them improve. Criticism laced with personal insults beyond a Gordon-style initial shock (if that; even still, those are frowned upon outside dire or life-threatening first meetings) is more likely to prove ineffective, waste precious time, distract from whatever you're trying to improve, and erode trust and morale than just simply stating what's wrong and what should be done instead.

But Glacia, you say. Insults are how these characters roll.

I mean, there's technically nothing wrong or narratively improper with having characters who continually insult people outside of a truly dire or immediate life-and-death early or first meeting and call it "tough love". It's just an inefficient way to get people to change or improve. Characters who swoop in and act like assholes in an attempt at forcing people up off their asses to fight an invading enemy army and never let up on the constant browbeating can be a legitimate part of a story, if one that might make it hard for readers to sympathize with the characters. I'm going to guess you want readers to like these characters, though, so leave the insults for the initial shock and those the characters know very well. Once they've gotten the recipient's attention, they can be blunt and efficient in their efforts to help the recipient improve without either using personal insults or demeaning language, or coddling.

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
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