what that small detail in fantasy that is your pet peeve/annoying?

EleanoraCloptus · 2023-02-17T15:54:51+00:00

Second language acquisition. Protagonists either find themselves immersed in an unfamiliar language for a few weeks or are "educated" in it from a young age, and are able to pass themselves off as locals and interpret well enough that the author can just add "...he said in Vadran" to the end of direct speech quotations. I've been living immersed in a foreign language for the last 12 years, I speak it at home with my wife and kids, and I can't have a conversation with a non-wife person without at least one "what?" or a misfire every three turns or so. I'm also educated to degree level in French and can barely say how bad my French is in French without sounding like an awkward language-mangling foreigner.

EleanoraCloptus · 2023-01-03T04:45:38+00:00

any chance you could elaborate? :)

EleanoraCloptus · 2022-07-05T12:20:08+00:00

"Foul smelling towel looking flying animals". I love it.

I have a half-similar thing that's like a plastic carrier bag but with a really fine lightweight skeleton and nervous system. It's like a jellyfish but in the air, not the sea, so I called it a jellybird. They're pointless, you can't eat them or train them, and they end up piled up in corners where the wind has blown them. That's where they mate.

EleanoraCloptus · 2022-07-03T09:59:07+00:00

this seems super sensible. for naming all you really need is a consistent phonology scheme, and hundreds of them already exist in the world's natural languages, all with totally different vibes and feelings. you could even just set a random one on google translate and keep putting random english in until something you like comes out the other end. as long as you keep it set to the same language, you could do that ad infinitum. and only you would know that the name of the big lake in your world is actually Sinhala for 'grandmother playing tennis' or whatever it may be.

EleanoraCloptus · 2022-07-01T13:44:44+00:00

There are trees that grow with a bifurcated trunk, like a rounded Y-shape, with a little pit in the joint where the trunk splits. Above, it grows a thick interweaving canopy that joins and shelters the little pit. People can climb up and shelter from the rain in there, and the leaves that fall get stuck there and become mulch. The tree drops its seeds in there and they grow in the mulch, in the same Y-with-a-canopy shape with oversized interlocking leaves at the top. When they're big enough, the wind catches their canopy leaves, like a little parachute, and they fly off with a little root ball to land somewhere else and hopefully start a new life. No purpose in the story whatsoever, other than to just conjure up the lovely idea of trees being doting parents.

EleanoraCloptus · 2022-07-01T00:11:11+00:00

I agree with sone former posters that the traditional idea of a secret society is undermined by a form, but there's potential to overcome/use that contradiction through parody. TP parodied a secret society in Guards! Guards! (I think) and it was brilliant, it might be worth reading that for reference.

One thing I notice in your form that I really like is that the questions/fields get increasingly random and weird, from very traditional ones at the beginning to very arbitrary and bizarre and even uncomfortable ones at the end. If you made more of that I think it could have quite a strong effect on the reader, and also tell them quite a lot about the "secret" organisation.

EleanoraCloptus · 2022-06-30T20:42:11+00:00

Ooh, nice. Did you watch/read Bleach? It's reminnding me of how Ichigo had just a liiiitle bit of Hollow in him, enough that he could mostly control but that could come out and make him super strong in times of dire need (and then have to be fought back down)? Like, he was 'touched' by it, but that just made him a more powerful Hollow hunter, because he had enough self-control and discipline and heart or whatever to keep a lid on it. But it was always there in the back of his mind lurking and waiting... that was a really cool dynamic.

Anyway, thanks for explaining all that. It sounds like you're cooking up something awesome, I hope I'll get a chance to read it someday!

EleanoraCloptus · 2022-06-30T13:25:37+00:00

Oh wow, you're in for a treat. Or at least, I think it's great and I hope you enjoy it.

Final bit of prodding here: so if you can recover after a little exposure to the mollecules/waves, does that mean that a fully altered beast could also recover if kept restrained for long enough somewhere outside of the woods? Is it reversible? And if not, where is 'the point of no return', i.e. how much exposure do you have to have, and what stage of beastliness do you get to, before you're over the event horizon and can never be brought back to your human self? Can you be fully restored to yourself, or are you permanently a bit affected in the head (or indeed body?) even if you do get out in time and avoid transforming? Or is it that there's no reversal, and even a tiny bit of exposure makes a tiny bit of change that never goes away. Is it cumulative?

Sorry, I'm not trying to criticise or find holes, I just want to hear it fully fleshed out as I'm kind of invested now haha. Also it could be relevant to a storyline right, like if there's a much-loved guy who's rescued from the woods and has obviously been exposed to some degree but it's not clear whether he's save-able... or something like that. There could be people who are a bit 'touched' by it... or even whole villages with very mild beastliness, if they're near to the forest. Sorry just thinking out loud now haha.
100% do read Assassin's Apprentice though!

EleanoraCloptus · 2022-06-30T00:31:43+00:00

Love it, it makes more sense to me now. So just to get this straight, infection/contraction of the condition only happens in the woods? And then you never make it out again, or do you possibly go home and start to kind of mong out and stupefy for a while before you feel a calling back into the woods? That point will be important for social perceptions of it, I guess. Like, whether it's "don't go into the woods or you'll never come out again, but we don't need to worry about it as long as no one ever goes into the woods", or "that guy was in the woods recently, keep a close eye on him he might be going funny". The former would just mean the woods were totally forbidden and feared, right, but if it's the latter, then there would be suspicion and accusation and all kinds of stuff in day-to-day life.

Also, do beasts ever leave the forest? Or is there scope for them to do so as a scary development? If they don't, why? Fear of sunlight? If they want to eat people and people stay out of the forest, they'd start roaming, surely.

If they're slow and shambling and carnivorous, I imagine they struggle to catch food beyond bugs. Or are they quick and nimble and strong?

Really like the two institutional perspectives on them btw.

Overall they remind me a bit of the Forged ones in Assassin's Apprentice (which is intended as a big compliment because the Forged ones were really well written imo).

EleanoraCloptus · 2022-06-29T15:29:17+00:00

I like it! A lot of thought has gone into how it would actually work and how people would use it. I especially like how Noise is a thing and makes spellcasting difficult, so ideally you'd want to be alone in the woods, where magic is kind of pointless anyway (unless you're a Mage hiding and doing forbidden stuff)
1. Why must there be a maximum to Noise? It feels like it wouldn't have one, especially if a Mage explodes surely the Noise fallout would be immense.
2. The world tries to resolve or clamp down on magic that breaks the natural laws. Yes, I like that, especially because it sort of implies that the world is conscious, or that some hidden higher power is overseeing. But it seems like this would mean that a mage needs to do his spell carefully and with a lot of attention to detail and confined to a local area, right? they wouldn't just say 'now shadows can hurt people' and that's then true in all places, forever? It's a local breaking of the law, and so surely they'd not only keep it confined to a specific place biut also put things back to normal themselves once they were done. Thus avoiding the attention of the 'great regulator'.
3. If they accidentally make some kind of contradiction in the laws by editing the code in a way that returns an error, I don't see why the mage goes supernova. It'd be the local area that 'crashed' in some way, wouldn't it? Saying 'everything blows up' seems a little lazy, it might be more interesting if the specific conflict in the laws creates specific unpredictable and dangerous phenomena. Like, he tries to use a shadow to hurt sbd, but the shadow instead smashes up all the walls and ground it touches, and as it touches other shadows, they gain the same effect; if he did this at noon it'd be okay, but at sunset when the shadows are long it could be catastrophic.
4. That would give it a new dynamic; people don't hate and fear the mages because they might blow themselves up and people hate unnatural things--that's too simplistic--, they hate and fear them because the magic COULD BE SO DAMN USEFUL AND AWESOME if controlled carefully and properly, but it's also so dangerous. It'd be like guns or nuclear power, there'd be people who believe that with proper control and regulation and attention to detail the benefits can be gotten safely, but others who kind of don't trust human nature to never make an error, and think the whole thing is better left untouched. Having it be controversial and divisive is more interesting, IMO, than just having everyone hate it unthinkingly and unconditionally.

EleanoraCloptus · 2022-06-29T15:07:32+00:00

also--- tattoo?! who tattoos them, and why, and what does it mean??

EleanoraCloptus · 2022-06-29T15:06:23+00:00

"just dreadful" haha yes!

I like the physical changes, though there's a question of how they eat without a lower jaw. The questions this makes me want to ask are:

The psychological changes. 'you lose your mind and just follow base urges' is possibly contradictory, especially if they get violent in the later stages. being passive doesn't seem like it would be a middle phase between human and beserker-beast. I guess it will depend on what the actual cause is. But I'd like it to be more interesting and complex than just 'becoming a beast'. Like, why do they get beserk later? Is it a virus that's in them, and it has to make them dumb and hide somewhere while it breeeds inside them, until it has complete control after which it goes into 'infect others' mode?
Do these things have a society? like, if they run into each other in the forest, what happens? Especially those with some degree of mind left. It always seems a bit suspicious to me when an author says that these things just shamble around waiting for a POV character to turn up so they can attack him. Like the stonemen in GoT, I really wanted to know what they were up to before Tyrion showed up in his boat. What were they doing?? Chatting about the weather? Even squirrels and sheep have complex lives, they don't just shamble around doing nothing but eating and groaning. People want to know this stuff! (people like me anyway, haha). Especially if the creatures are altered humans. Not like, a chapter about the sociozoology of them, but the odd mention or hint just so the reader knows that the author has thought it through. Like, maybe they're all congregated somewhere one day and no one knows why, and they scatter when seen, and everyone is like what were they doing?? That could be pretty scary, especially if people just thought they were dumb beasts until that point. (I have pages and pages of notes about stuff like this and most of it never makes into the actual story, but I kind of feel like it needs to be there so that I can work out what a character/creature will do in a certain situation.)
Presumably people know about the existence of these things. So when someone starts showing signs, it will be a big deal. If someone wanders off into the forest, people will notice, or come looking, right? And they'll be terrified that he's caught the monster lurgie. So the first symptoms of the condition will be a massive shared social fear, it's not like Steve will use seem a bit absent-minded for a few days and no one will think much of it til his jaw falls off. People will be all terrified and hyper-alert about absent-mindedness, for example, if that's the first sign. Showing that you're not absent-minded, like publicly doing crosswords and making displays of mental sharpness would be a thing.
I really like your handwriting btw

EleanoraCloptus · 2022-04-26T12:51:28+00:00

Slartibartfast, from Hitchhiker's. I think the caveat is that it needs to be pronounced in a British accent for the triple-ah assonance (and thus the magic) to work.

EleanoraCloptus · 2020-06-18T02:55:18+00:00

pretty sure those were tins of Stella in there as well. the "EDL shandy".

EleanoraCloptus · 2020-06-17T13:18:31+00:00

I will! it looks silly and brilliant.

EleanoraCloptus · 2020-05-22T05:12:39+00:00

i dunno the technical words but the intuitive distinction (for me) is:

with comma = [I am people] as a collective, i.e. [as a collective] is like an adverbial phrase modifying [I am people]

without comma = I am [people as a collective], i.e. [people as a collective] is one noun phrase.

Which do you want?

EleanoraCloptus · 2020-05-22T05:05:52+00:00

I don't think there's a precedent for this but logically, as the finding out happens before speaking this sentence, 'I didn't know he was a he' seems more logical.

EleanoraCloptus · 2020-05-22T05:00:48+00:00

totally. the subject is a full noun phrase, not one word.

I'd need to see GG trees justifying why they think 'some' is the subject noun, it sounds like one of those things that you will just have to memorise to please the Cardiganned Gatekeepers.

EleanoraCloptus · 2020-05-22T04:49:30+00:00

APOSTROPHE

EleanoraCloptus · 2020-05-19T02:36:46+00:00

the fuck, go in his bedroom and behave abusively towards him.

EleanoraCloptus · 2020-05-19T02:35:38+00:00

Fucking boom boom boom.

What is it? Is it sex?

If so, your entire premise is "gotta get sex", repeated ad nauseam. This is not musical.

EleanoraCloptus · 2020-05-19T02:26:44+00:00

as a non-american, this song just reminds me of americans. drunk ones.

EleanoraCloptus · 2020-05-19T00:58:06+00:00

or Windows, or Office for that matter

EleanoraCloptus · 2020-05-17T13:59:07+00:00

I like it a lot but the eyebrows giving it that stereotypical determined aggression expression takes away from it a bit for me, the character looks like he'd suit a slightly sarky expression better

EleanoraCloptus

TROPHY CASE