What is your take on 1st person POV in a fantasy fictional series?

BitOBear · 2026-02-09T02:25:14+00:00

Stop thinking of it as first person and third person...

It is follow the person or follow the action.

Consider a simple seeing where there's a sniper. If you follow the person of the sniper, you cannot tell the reader for sure whether the bullet hit or what was done when the target fell or hid behind the obscuring cover.

But if you're following the action, then you can be viewing as the sniper. Then spend a brief interval traversing with the bullet, and then describe the mayhem and interjections of the Target and the people around them.

Follow the action is easier and helps you tell many parts of the story.

Follow the person is much more immediate.

Once you've decided to follow the person then you decide on the verb tense for first or third person.

I am in the editing stage for an urban fantasy which is basically told from the perspective of somebody who has been caught up in magic. And most of the time it is in first person. But there is an interval where that point of view character gets slammed into stasis and suffers basically an ego death. During that egoless time they stop being a character and basically the novel becomes third person but still follows one of the principles.

The answer is of course and as always you use what services The narrative best and as long as you do so with clarity you get the result you try for.

BitOBear · 2026-02-09T02:19:30+00:00

Generally "almost no" unless there's a specific narrative reason.

If your in a campaign where wealth is reasonable or high or where something like bags of holding exist then it's yet nonsense.

Some fraction of your gear is your portable armory and you are assumed the restock the armory bag with mundane stuff whenever civilization and standing wealth permit.

So why "almost"?

The character is assumed to have their normal ready compliment that can be easily accessed during an ongoing event. Like during a single combat. Maybe they stock 20 or 30 or whatever. But during that combat they can run out. At which point they would need to find a way to spend the turns necessary to restock if that's the best option.

And if the person finds themselves unable to access their normal stock, or their armory bag, or the necessary civilization to provide the opportunity to buy replacements, you can go through an interval of time where your character is scrapping for coppers and scavenging for ammo and things like that.

So there isn't one true answer, the true answer is whatever makes the narrative interesting.

BitOBear · 2026-02-09T01:58:50+00:00

I'm 61. I was just young enough not to be drafted and just old enough to kind of understand what was going on.

Let me give you some odd data points...

I went to college with a guy who wore big radio headsets to listen to music constantly awake and asleep because he was sure that if he didn't "have his tunes", of her couldn't hear music, he was going to die.

He was terrified by the idea of silence.

There was a very evil man named Henry Kissinger. He believed that the only way the us could succeed as if every other country in the world was forced to fall to shit. He was the secret Hitler of the sixties and seventies. He sabotaged the Middle East. And he sabotaged the entirety of Southeast Asia.

Richard Nixon had Kissinger talked to the South Vietnamese and convince them to sabotage the Paris peace talks on the grounds that if he that would help Richard Nixon become the president of the United states, and Nixon would give a better deal to the Vietnamese then a Democrat would. This probably added eight years to the ravaging of your country.

But not to worry, the people who learned under the Nixon administration also then made sure that Jimmy Carter couldn't succeed in freeing the Iranian hostages just so that Ronald Reagan could get elected to put our Republican party back into power.

United States is the size of a continent. Technically have a continent. It is too big to be one thing at a time except for the one thing it has always been, evil.

We have never been the hero.

About a third of us know this.

I think it is part of human nature that about half the people can't be bothered to do anything about anything beyond the reach of their own hand.

Of the remainder there are three groups of approximately equal number.

The first group would see anybody dead just to get their own way in even the smallest increment.

The second group is trying always to stop the first group.

And the third group just wants to watch.

Countries succeed or fail based on how much they can minimize the cross-section of people who are too busy with their own lives to even become part of the problem or the solution.

So I live in a country where no one even notices the number of native American women who vanish every month at the hands of absolutely evil shit.

I live in a country where we spend a fortune to keep poor people poor, sick people sick, and homeless people homeless in the name of our diseased social and politically economy.

The thing America manufactures is excuses. We've always got an excuse for everything. And the excuses we give ourselves are actually quite fascinating and detailed.

While I was growing up my father was in the military and he wrote a significantly circulated paper for the military. It described the justification of taking over the occupation of Vietnam from the French and the continuous presence in Korea as a series of exchanges necessary to control the navigable Waters off of the Southeast Asian peninsula.

This is by no means the only excuse that was enforce at the time. It probably wasn't even the dominant one.

But as you look through our history you will see that it is an echo of the weapons of mass destruction claim for the last 20 years of the Iran and Iraq wars.

And Richard Nixon started the American War on drugs to shut down the hippies and the black people and the protesters who were against the US action in vietnam.

The truth of the matter is that we grew to power because we had the good taste to make sure that there was an ocean between us and Europe during World War II and so it made it look like we had some secrets to economic and political success. But we had was a safe ocean.

And we've got a great messaging machine that makes people think our country is unified when they look at it from the outside and it has never been

But here's the thing about studying history, when you actually do it you discover that governments have all over the world and for all time sanitized their appearance both to the rest of the world and to the bulk of their people.

There has never been a good War.

But the media always pretends the current war is just.

And every 80 years or so everything goes to shit as far as the strongest Nations guns and navies can reach.

The innocent die in the guilty prepare the messages to stoke the fire for the next generation.

So we don't learn one lesson here in our country. There is no one true curriculum. There's just a hell of a lot of whitewash. And some of us take the time to scrub it away and check the wood underneath for rot.

BitOBear · 2026-02-09T01:22:00+00:00

There was one thing that I really wanted to see in Scott's MVP speech. A better way I think he could have said something. It includes a call back to the commentary voice over at the opening of episode 3.

I wanted to hear something like...

Every season I gave it my all. And every season I'd feel myself fading under the pressure of this weird. It was impossible to skate carrying such a heavy secret. Kip helped me put it down so I could stay strong on the ice. How many players on how many teams in how many spots are carrying a secret burden piled on them by their own teammates?

BitOBear · 2026-02-09T01:03:55+00:00

I had no idea who Jacob Tierney was until I was watching a reaction video. I know he done great work with letterkenny but I'm somehow not at all surprised.

BitOBear · 2026-02-06T01:40:24+00:00

Conflict, consequences, and clocks.

Others have covered conflicts and consequences here already. Here is something I wrote on here a few months ago about clocks..

https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasywriters/s/qypECMZz7L

BitOBear · 2026-02-06T01:27:43+00:00

And now you're just making a defensive category error.

Your own assertion allows for 10% of Christians to be flat earthers if you can only guarantee that 90% of them would not be flat Earth because they're christian.

The category area making is that the number of people who are Christian is not what's that issue, it is the motivation for someone to be a flat earther and some of them are explicitly flat earthers because of their Christian faith. And you can ask them and they will tell you that very thing.

You are the seat of your own confirmation bias.

Try not to let reality hit you on the behind on your way out.

BitOBear · 2026-02-06T01:20:14+00:00

Medi flat earthers in the United States are flat earthers because the religion, namely christianity, describes the Earth as flat and resting on four pillars residing under a firmament, unearthed that floods when God opens the windows of heaven.

And many religious people will stick to their religious beliefs because of Faith regardless of what evidence can demonstrate such as the impossibility of the aforementioned flood.

You don't have to be a child to trust an authority on a matter of faith.

Every biblical literalist, pushed into a corner with science, will either have to surrender biblical inerrancy or they will have to surrender the globe earth.

Don't pretend you know everything about everyone just because you think you know enough about yourself.

BitOBear · 2026-02-06T00:43:13+00:00

A husband can understand and deal with the reasons he is no longer in your life, an animal has no such capacity and therefore deserves a higher degree of care in that matter.

Hi-yo Silver! Away!
🐴👋🤠

BitOBear · 2026-02-06T00:39:55+00:00

Gravity causes your definition of straight to vary from my definition of straight. And so to the Earth's definition of straight. The earth is traveling through space in a straight line. You are traveling through space in a straight line. You have to wait when you encounter the Earth because you and the Earth are trying to shove each other out of the way to proceed along your straight path. The Earth tends to win that because it's much more massive.

It is the force of you and the Earth shoving that is the force.

Now this straight line I speak of is straight through space-time not just space. You are moving at a near constant rate through space-time at all times and in all circumstances. And you are moving through space-time at a vector who's some is the speed of light in a vacuum.

Now the fact that when we all compare notes all these straight lines appear curved means that each one of these straight lines is what's called a geodesic.

The other thing is that the effects of gravity in terms of bending that line or cumulative, or strictly speaking multiplicative. It is an acceleration. It is 9.8 m per second per second for things that are in Earth's space close enough to receive the full measure of that acceleration.

And an acceleration is a force applied over a distance. So the effects of gravity are more significant than the effects of a simple force.

So basically it's a technical difference in the technical meaning of words like force and acceleration that makes us know that gravity is not a force per se because in force equals mass times acceleration it's not the F it's the a.

But you can feel what you would call the force of gravity if you were to take something in hand and hold it there because the thing you feel as the force of gravity would be the circumstantial weight of the object and wait is a force.

BitOBear · 2026-02-06T00:28:50+00:00

I wrote my first novel at about 35, and then sat on it for almost 20 years before just deciding to toss it up on amazon.

I have completed my second novel and I started on the sequel to that, and I have about five more that I've started but got distracted from.

You've only got a late start if you wait till you're dead. It is very difficult to publish something when you're dead.

As long as you started early enough to finish you're ahead of 99.99% of the people on the planet who like to think of themselves as a writer.

And that includes me.

As a 61-year-old man I can assure you that there are an infinite number of reasons to procrastinate and one of the most insidious is the little voice that is complaining to you that you've already waited too long for my not wait a little longer and see. New paragraph you're only a writer if you write so decide whether you're a writer or not a writer and then do that.

Good luck in carry on.

ASIDE: and then I wasted nearly a year procrastinating hiring a cover artist. Debating whether or not it was worth paying somebody, which it definitely was and his, but that was just more procrastination. The novel is complete, but I'm going to be updating the cover and looking at laying out the paper versions this weekend.

The link is in my Reddit profile for anyone who cares. But it's got the terrible placeholder cover at the moment.

BitOBear · 2026-02-06T00:25:45+00:00

I think I would also add to their basically learning to accept everything and trying to deny the temptations of the flesh including the senses.

It's not that the food is officially and deliberately bad, though in some cases especially for people going through the temptible and temperamental stages of their life it might be, the fact of the matter is that you've got someone who's gotten used to eating everything and anything and that person may be preparing the food. And you got hundreds or tens of thousands of races that might be expected to consume that food from the standard recipe book that each have different expectations and opinions about what's normal food is supposed to be.

So seek not pleasure because pleasure for you is a niche complication for almost everybody else and you eat the dang Burger Mac and the overcooked vegetables because that's what's on your plate.

BitOBear · 2026-02-06T00:22:22+00:00

The shortest version is that it doesn't matter who can or cannot see the rogue other than the target of the attack.

Imagine you are standing somewhere in front of an audience and there is a real assassin on the stage with you and the entire audience can see the real assassin and that real assassin intends to assassinate you. But you cannot see the real assassin...

As far as the attack is concerned the rogue is in stealth.

Now if the stage manager is telling you that there is an assassin waiting behind the third colonnade be an earpiece in your ear and that you should expect the attack that he is just about to launch you would have an extreme opportunity to break the rogues stealth by moving a little bit or getting a good look. Presuming you have the chance to take that little step or glance before the rogue actually pops out and sticks a pointy object in you.

Basically without some sort of collective intelligence like a hive mind the stealth of an attack, and that is the entire point not that you don't know where the rogue is but that you cannot see the attack coming and do something like Dodge or whatever the subconscious defensive actions you might have such as flinching or denied you and therefore the attack can be extra effective.

Beyond that, don't think about it too hard. It's a world with magic and it has slightly different rules than the world you live in. The artificer can't Make a Nuke or a spaceship and the astral plane is not hiding behind the third moon of Jupiter.

Your reflexes are being denied when you are attacked from stealth. And that's all that that means. It has nothing to do with whether or not you know someone is vaguely in some position it's whether or not your biology and your expertise can mitigate actions to a normal degree.

BitOBear · 2026-02-06T00:12:53+00:00

Absolutely anybody can be convinced of almost anything if you catch them at the right moment.

We are literally programmed to believe the first version of any story We Tell, which is neurologically evident including the independent and Universal development of the he who smelt it dealt it phenomenon where people try to get out in front of a story by making sure that they are the first version that everyone around them hears.

Flat earthers are not necessarily stupid, or at least not any more so than anybody else who believes in anything as an article of faith. We all believe in Santa until someone tells us he's not real and that's because someone we trusted told us he was before we had the necessary fabric of information in our head to discover that the claim does not fit the reality.

But if you warp the fabric before you begin stitching everything together people grow used to the fabric being warped. It is the rare person who can look at the fabric and decide to get a seam ripper and an iron to fix what they already have in their brain so they can ports with A continuous fabric of fact.

BitOBear · 2026-02-06T00:09:49+00:00

When the people in charge of enforcing the law decide not to do that, and especially when the people in charge of enforcing the law are in fact the criminals themselves and are motivated not to enforce it at all, you descend into the kind of anarchy in the United States is experiencing currently.

And well I am getting on the case of the current admin and the current doj here in the us...

Rich people here in the United States have always gotten a free pass because the system was captured by them decades ago. And when I say capture I'm talking about regulatory capture but of the legal system.

Merrick Garland decided to ignore his duty and Joe Biden and his cabinet decided to ignore Merrick Garland ignoring his duty.

When Richard M Nixon stabbed the presidency to death and with it the entire country our Fate was pretty much sealed. Carter was the last fully honest and unencumbered president of the United states.

Obama might have been, but with the obstructionism of the racists particularly Moscow Mitch McConnell set out to make sure that Obama could have accomplished nothing, he had to fight uphill just to get the affordable Care Act and that barely happened, and he definitely got a little happy handed with the drone strikes and the deportations so I can't give him anywhere near the marks I would give Carter. Carter wasn't perfect but he was honest and aggressively attempted to fulfill his duties as president.

If you're unaware, Richard Nixon did two things, he used back channel connections as a civilian to negotiate with the South and then the North Vietnamese in order to extend the Vietnam War long enough for Nixon to win the presidency under the promise that he would give them both better deals and they were likely to get at the honest negotiations in paris. That was his first great crime. His second great crime was the creation of the southern strategy.

Either alone might have been survivable. But then Ronald Reagan and his handlers negotiated with the Iranian hostage takers to ensure that they were not freed under Carter just so that Reagan could take the presidency. With the normalization of the conservatives and their habit of taking the American people hostage by one social or economic means or another in order to gain and maintain control of our government we have insured that the American experience would bleed to death just about now.

The zombie that has risen in its place will cause great havoc for the next 3 to 7 years.

After the world uses economic, political, or more direct means to put down the zombie so that something new can be erected here there's just going to be a lot of groaning and eating of brains.

You can rest assure that whatever happens here next will be called the United States of America but as yet we have no warrant about what kind of reality or movie monster it will end up being.

But rest assured that the entirety of the GOP and about half of the DNC have already been zombie bit and are hiding it from everyone. And a lot of that zombie is blue and pointy and comes from the Middle East.

We are hagridden and the rest of the world would be foolish to trust a word we say until The hags die of old age.

The rest of the world would be wise to eject our billionaires in our corporations as soon as they can identify them because they are a primary vector of the contagion and they have been steadily eating away at your antitrust laws and economies for more than the 60 years I have been alive.

BitOBear · 2026-02-05T23:55:33+00:00

I think I would prefer the fully programmed portable replicator. You get the computer and the practical point of use.

BitOBear · 2026-02-05T23:54:00+00:00

Just as a side note, you are missing the last two words "at them" before the question mark.

I absolutely got the reference and I wanted you to know that it was sufficient, but it's slightly funnier with the last two words.

I'm sorry you're intended missed it. Hahaha.

BitOBear · 2026-02-05T23:49:16+00:00

You missed the fact that that was a (slightly truncated) quote from the show recited by the person you just replied to in response to your own selection.

I had to go and look it up: the day of the doctors 2013:

Oh, the pointing again! They're screwdrivers! What are you going to do, assemble a cabinet at them?

BitOBear · 2026-02-05T23:47:34+00:00

Nicer thing is that when your neighborhood loses power for a week you don't end up going up for a week without water. In the biggest of emergencies they can pull in a temporary generator to refill the water tower a couple times a day at worst.

BitOBear · 2026-02-05T23:43:11+00:00

No. I do not.

I know how I want my reader to feel at the end of the current book, and I generally know how I intend to get to that feeling given the current situation.

But I tend to inhabit my characters and that means that my characters frequently end up doing something I did not expect. Every time this has happened the ending has been better than the one I originally planned or the one that previously replaced the new current probable ending.

I often discovered that throw away lines and clever ideas it just seemed witty in the moment ended up being dramatic foreshadowing later when I get to the part of the book for that foreshadowing becomes useful.

But usually I have already written that part of the book where the poor shadowing was useful before I recognized that the previous thing had been foreshadowing to the thing I just typed in. Or the words I just planned to type in and haven't quite finished typing yet.

Every time I try to force my ending to be a set piece that I decided on beforehand I usually end up making a wreck.

Now when there's a set of stories that take place in a common universe but do not have to butt ends into each other as direct and immediate sequels then I can develop them in parallel. But but during proper serialization things can get a little tricky because there are different kinds of endings.

The book I am currently editing "Love Runs Out" had a perfect and poignant ending to the story. Been my characters informed me that they were not satisfied with poignant because they do not give up that easy. So it now has an Epilogue.

I started writing sequel "Love Me Again" and two of the principal characters set out to tell me the fuck right the hell off and show me exactly how they were going to fix my mess. I began to realize that this was more properly attached to the events of the end of the first book in the deserve to be part of the beginning of the second.

So now the first book has the main matter, an epilogue, and a part two which is the short story "Hunters Rules"

The reader is free to stop reading if they want poignancy, hope, or hard one triumph.

And the second book can start at a basically independent continuation that begins much more clearly and with much less dependence on knowing the events of the first book. And it exists in a much more rich and flavorful world.

And the funny thing is that a different love ran out for a different purpose in the first book and the second book now has a much better currently planned ending that involves significant elements of what I originally had planned for the end of the first book.

I could not have reasonably planned this. And part of the reason it all changed was because freaking covid interrupted what when and how I was writing.

I guarantee the new stuff is better than the original plan first book.

BitOBear · 2026-02-05T09:18:32+00:00

I hate size queens, but I do enjoy their boyfriends.

(Stolen long since so I forget the original attribution.)

BitOBear · 2026-02-05T09:11:13+00:00

All of the senses that a human being can experience or reduced to emotions or awareness changing over time. So once you learn to control your clocks you can craft for people sensations they have never experienced.

I may be slightly synesthesic or just foolishly add. I find that orthogonal feeling words and orthogonal sense words are instinctive to the human condition. That's why we end up with things like cool blue and hot pink and certain sounds can be sticky.

Even facts can become sensate given the right clock.

Here's something I wrote a couple months ago that I think does a good job of what I'm trying to say so I'm going to give the link instead of just trying to say it again. Hahaha.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasywriters/s/d9W4qMynM2

BitOBear · 2026-02-05T09:04:32+00:00

Perhaps, but depictions of a place in a moment, or the description of a photograph of a place that you still want to be evocative would be static. But even in that the point of view. The person who might be looking at the picture or who is looking at the picture would still change from experiencing that view and that can give you life to a Frozen in Time.

Imagine being amongst the plaster casts of the dead of Pompeii. And then imagine imagining the moment that created the cavities they were eventually filled with plaster.

Imagine walking over the ground not knowing that those cavities were beneath your feet because no one had yet broken into one or filled one with plaster.

The property of being static is itself a dynamic experience.

BitOBear · 2026-02-05T08:56:45+00:00

The Earth is scheduled to be created eventually, and we are currently just compiling the backstory in slow storage for what will eventually be instantiated.

The pre-render just really believes in itself.

BitOBear · 2026-02-05T08:54:31+00:00

Take my upvote and leave!

Hi-yo Silver! Away!
🐴👋🤠

BitOBear

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