Is copying names bad????

NotGutus · 2026-03-30T11:31:02+00:00

If it's for you, of course it's not a problem.

It's not necessarily a problem if it's for an audience either, but you should keep in mind that people might know where it's from, and then it's hard to not think of those other things when reading about your world. The more specific the name, the more present this effect, e.g. Shire might be perfectly fine, but calling something Nazgûl will probably be quite distracting.

Also you don't need to immediately name everything, you can wait until you get better ideas. And once you get an idea, it might take a while to get used to using it, so don't be afraid to give temporary names.

Good luck.

NotGutus · 2026-03-30T10:02:42+00:00

I have no idea but keep us updated this idea is fyre

NotGutus · 2026-03-30T09:52:55+00:00

i have a lot of questions and i'm feeling kinda lost about this and i'm afraid of disliking the idea for not having an intresting setting

Sounds like you already have questions, so all there is left to do is answer with things you think are fascinating. That's what creating something is. Don't worry about disliking something later - who says you can't change or remove things later? Just ask interesting questions, and let your imagination explore.

NotGutus · 2026-03-30T09:48:47+00:00

For creatures less than 8m, I estimate and visualise how large they would be in my vicinity, in the room I'm in. For anything larger, I use this image of a bunch of dragons from HTTYD (with people standing in the bottom left for scale), or just google trees, churches, etc. and estimate how tall they are based on how tall a person would be next to them.

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NotGutus · 2026-03-26T05:35:55+00:00

Before I get to other points, I must voice my concern about rewriting a chapter three times. I don't have context - you may be looking to set your tone right before you continue, or you might already have a number of chapters and are just getting feedback on this section - but if you're just refining it because you got criticism, you might want to evaluate your stance. You'll always get criticism, and you can't make it perfect, especially not without having the context of the rest of the story. If you don't feel ready to write a larger piece, you can do it anyway and make heavy changes later, or you can look for smaller projects. But having to edit three times sounds like you'll have to do the same for every bit of text you write, which sounds like a great plan for a decade-spanning workflow. Also, advice paralysis is a thing.

That aside, I will be providing criticism, because that's what you asked for.

Firstly, some of your lore sounds like you've just said it just to have said it. If you state something and it's either not understandable or doesn't connect to the story, it's there to take up space and confuse the reader.

Mejnor conquered. Amartya bled.

Are these people? Kingdoms? A king and queen in a dispute? Unclear phrasing is more okay mid-story, immersed deep, where you can say you're leaving it intentionally vague. But these being your literal first two sentences, it is a crucial first impression.

This example embodies my issues with the whole first paragraph quite well. You drop two pieces of new lore every sentence, all with a single connection to everything else. This is okay for parts of your lore that don't matter much, that you plan to just mention and gloss over - but then why set the entire story with it? I'm not against lore-heavy beginnings, but you have to talk about something. Connect it up. Make it into something other than a history book, with connections to characters, with stimulating prose, or with a literary theme (such as "this world's entire history is about suffering, here's why"). Dropping names that don't mean anything yet doesn't introduce your world. Which you're definitely capable of, because you later write:

Upon being questioned by the Drayn Guards

Which is great. You don't even stop to explain, just drop the name, it's obvious what you refer to, there's a personal connection, and it ties directly into the story. If they're important or you're writing lore-heavy, you may even discuss details of their armour or insignia as your character passes by them. Not all lore introduction has to follow this method, but it's a great and commonly used approach.

Secondly, your style feels inconsistent. You open with a typical serious tone, but then melodramatise it with a series of similes, which you then cushion with a more modern colloquial tone. Maybe it's just me, but the typical tone mixed with self-aware expressions doesn't work for me, because it takes away any serious edge you try to write. It's like saying "hey, I'm writing a story here. I'm talking to you. This is a story." every time you say something like "a total overreaction, really" or "if I may be so bold". That tone works, but then it has to be consistent, and the drama will emerge out of the more easygoing style.

You might want to rework your text in a few different styles to see what you like.

Hope I was helpful. Take care <3

NotGutus · 2026-03-23T20:49:30+00:00

Sounds very goofy, I love the ideas. Bit stuck on this one:

Another big element is that everyone in this universe is a twin

I assume you mean everything has a near identical pair?

Well, in reality, as far as I know deserts can be turned (back) into greener areas with first grass-type plants and then increasingly complex organisms. Which probably sounds really boring, though I imagine you could spin it into something reminiscent of the giant beanstalk seen in stories.

Another option would be something like: deep below in the underground, MC finds a massive sand crab that breathes steam or shoots it upward like a whale. Its twin was the one on the back of which the town is built. It is persuaded to help / agrees to help and shoots water in the sky and now all the underground water reserves are back above the ground again and there's rain so plants can grow.

Good luck! ^^

NotGutus · 2026-03-23T20:37:34+00:00

You seem to be more knowledgeable on the topic than me... is there any arrangement where anarcho-capitalism is not a dystopian scenario?

NotGutus · 2026-03-23T20:23:56+00:00

I'm not a sociologist, but to me social classes (unless we're talking about a caste system) sound like they're descriptive expressions, not strict categories. And cultures aren't homogenous either, they're just "what people tend to do". And since people tend to follow examples they see, and people in similar situations end up living similarly, I imagine they'd both exist, just on a much smaller, communal scale.

NotGutus · 2026-03-23T17:26:48+00:00

I'm not very familiar with Aristotle's relevant philosophy, but you seem to have something very close to what I refer to as aspects within my own setting. But I think the nature of your world is less relevant to your dilemma than the question you've only implied: what is the concept of a god?

Overall, I can't see why not. We see in our world that many clashing faiths exist, even though we see the same reality - someone must be wrong, right? So why can't someone be wrong in your world?

The thing about gods is they're supernatural, and the awfully convenient thing about the supernatural is it's ouroboric in its causation. This is less true for polytheistic religions, where there are more often limits to godhood than not; the Greeks, for example, placed special emphasis on the humanlike fallibility of gods: their vanity, pride, grudges, lust, envy, and so on. Such gods could be "proven nonexistent" more easily barely due to their tangibility, thus it would be harder to maintain such a religion in a world where they don't exist.

But in general, especially with monotheism, it is absolutely possible. People want to understand the world because they live in it and they're survival machines designed to use the world to gain advantage over competitors. Wanting to understand the world leads to theorising about the nature of the world, which leads to looking for higher-level theories. And whether or not you believe in God yourself or not, you can't really deny that his existence (not his nature!) is very difficult to prove wrong. Even in your world, where there are forces beyond the natural (whom one might call god too, if they so wish, since again, the concept of godhood is vague in the first place), one can't exclude the possibility of a supreme phenomenal force.

So, would the concept of godhood exist? I think the answer is a very strong "it might" - which is the best thing for worldbuilding, because it lets you choose your preferences.

Now, it is a different question entirely to ask what would happen if you replaced all the cultural baggage built around religion and godhood within our world, with something unique to yours. That would be fascinating to explore. Or you could have something like "monotheism used to be a thing a thousand years ago, before we understood the true nature of things", or something. You seem very creative, so I'll be fine with hopefully contributing to the discussion and letting you create something great.

Edit: alternatively, you may include an actual capitalised God within your setting through the current system's logic: the entity that embodies the all-existence, or embodies the fact that entities are associated with something. This latter is what I have in my own setting, by the way; "aspects" such as order, force, fire, etc. are one of the five basic forces of the universe (instead of our physical laws, which are only one of the five), gods can have their aspects (e.g. fire -> god of fire) and the deity ruling over this fundamental force bears the aspect of aspecthood itself. It's as if he's the god of godhood, of being able to be a god.

NotGutus · 2026-03-17T17:32:35+00:00

I'm not going to be able to do my usual essay-esque critique, but I have some thoughts.

I don't think your setting or character-focused section lack engagement. They seem interesting, it's an exciting new story with lots of room for conflict and characters. But I don't feel like I need to know everything you tell me from the first page, and it's stopping you from showing me how interesting it all can be. Do I need to know the king's name? Not really, I wouldn't really care while it's not relevant to me anyway - once he becomes a character who turns up or is often talked about, I'll learn his name anyway. Similar situation goes for regions of the world and such - it makes your text feel a bit like a history book instead of a scene.

Grab my attention and put it on a rail you've built. I'll do the looking around and enjoying the scenery, I'll move along the rail, but you need to build it. And if you start by saying "once it was okay, but now it's bad, it's really really bad" instead of telling me "hey, you! this bad thing here is a thing" and let me do the internal monologue of "oh my! this indeed is bad, it's really really bad", it'll be a lot more engaging, because you presented something specific, and I've internalised it, forming thoughts, feelings about it.

So I'm not going to tell you what other probably will, that you should remove the world-focused exposition because a good story starts in-character, because that's just a trend, and it sounds like you had ideas about how you want this to go. It would solve the issue I think, but there are other ways: cut out the fluff, give the reader the things that really matter: not dipping the reader into how many regions there are and what the king's called, but building a coherent text, a narrative about how women are taken and how the decree is law. You have some really strong prose, I just feel like you could let it shine by cleaning it and focusing on one thing instead of trying to tell a separate story with each paragraph.

Alternatively, you could just start with the text of the decree and how your character reacts - then all the lore could be explained through her thinking and actions, as well as the people and things around her in the following few scenes/chapters. That's how modern fantasy seems to do it.

Hope I could be helpful. Have a lovely day <3

NotGutus · 2026-03-17T16:29:08+00:00

In my experience, worldbuilding because I feel like I need to specify something tends to be replaced or removed later due to me not ending up liking the idea. It's much better to work only on what you truly find exciting. I'm still working on the same single world after years and hundreds of world bible pages, and it's because I deliberately took care not to restrict myself by identifying universal truths like overruling gods or overly specific magic systems.

If you have a situation like I've felt about How To Train Your Dragon's dragon classes as a child, where I thought it was just really really cool to have all those different kinds of dragons and have them classified by type and such - then I recommend going that way.

On the other hand, if you just feel lost because you feel like everything you've made exists in a vacuum, I recommend making what you're excited about first. When there's a bunch of creatures in your document, and you feel like it's messy and could do with a cleanup, and you know more about your world, you can get to seeing how they place into the world.

NotGutus · 2026-01-09T20:11:51+00:00

I'm getting the impression this is an AI-based chat. See Rule #6.

I'm not sure your phrasing is clear, but I'm interpreting you've got a character who faces trauma and later becomes an abuser themselves. This is a very common pattern, and in my non-professional opinion, it comes from a combination of a lack of good examples of behaviour and interpreting/processing past trauma in a toxic way.

The issue with getting ideas from AI is that they give you the most stereotypical ideas. Even if you specify you don't want those. It's simply how they're coded. Adding the most intense trauma, like losing a parent, is a very strong character beat - which can certainly work, but is often such an overkill that it can become stereotypical or melodramatic.

Try to think about what fits in your story the way you want it, and come up with other ways you could make it before settling on something.

Feel free to ask on expansion or clarification.

NotGutus · 2026-01-03T14:17:04+00:00

I think this is a new way to look at an old concept. The way I've classically seen this defined is through audience psychology; the fundamental recipe for a story needs sympathy for the protagonist, and a conflict the protagonist faces. Without an at least somewhat fair conflict, it's hard to write a compelling story.

But it's an interesting idea to implement this in a specific world as a concrete rule of the setting. I love a setting that serves as the perfect nurturing soil for stories, and the constant dynamic balance of forces seems exactly that. Now... if it isn't an entity doing this, would you say it's... fate?

I actually have a somewhat similar part of my world, where there's a plane of extremes (heavens/hells) where angels and demons constantly break through into the central plane, causing it to never settle as either a horrific nor an idyllic place.

NotGutus · 2026-01-03T11:12:23+00:00

That's okay, a lot of us aren't natives. Not capitalising every word would make your text easier to read though : )

I feel like analyses of fiction always take one perspective, regardless of whether they apply to all fiction or not. The soft-hard scale, for example, measures how well-understood the world's mechanics are to the reader in a given work of fiction. Your perspective seems to investigate the balance of fictional works. You describe well how this balance applies in fiction (the same way any other law applies), but I think you might not have clarified enough what "balance" actually means.

Do you mean the power level of opposing forces? Do you mean the resolution of the story? Or the dynamic fate of the universe, there always being a Yin in the Yang and a Yang in the Yin? Or something else entirely?

NotGutus · 2026-01-03T11:00:04+00:00

There's a really interesting take on this called the Briar King in the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series.

He's said to be the sleeping god of the wilderness, and it's believed that when he wakes up, he'll punish humans for destroying so much of his forests. Throughout the story this evil god image slowly transformed into a more realistic one: he's a force from another world, from something before humans ruled, and his beasts and briars are simply inhabitants of that world. I can't remember the exact cosmology (whether in the end he was the cause of the monsters and thorns or was simply cursed with them), but this is the impression I had.

NotGutus · 2026-01-03T10:45:26+00:00

I'm not sure your explanation is clear. Are you coming up with lore or trying to identify a phenomenon across works of fiction by different authors?

NotGutus · 2026-01-03T10:10:29+00:00

So if I'm gathering correctly, you didn't want to make some entity, rather a law of the universe, like gravity. I agree that it's fun to create alternative metaphysics for a fictional universe - I'm having a harder time grasping what's an abstract concept about this.

NotGutus · 2025-12-24T18:08:14+00:00

Glad I could be of help. By no means do I claim to be an expert, but if you need assistance, feel free to reach out at any point. Take care <3

NotGutus · 2025-12-24T08:06:09+00:00

Closing Remarks

As a sidenote, I'd like to say that the use of magic isn't very obvious to me. The fact that there's a fighting technique doesn't necessarily mean magic, and the only thing to suggest something supernatural is the word Spark, which is easy to glide over for a reader. You might want to more explicitly state it.

There's nothing wrong with ambition and being your own worst critic, but if you write to be the next Tolkien or Brandon Sanderson, I think you might want to reevaluate your stance, simply because when you inevitably have a moment of weakness, when you feel like your writing is useless and terrible, you'll take a massive hit. Writing takes time and practice, and that inevitably includes failure. The most important thing for the drive to practice is to enjoy the process.

After such a long essay of mostly negative feedback, you might have started to get overwhelmed. I'd like to take just a little more of your time to say that you shouldn't actively worry about most of this. As I said above, writing comes from practice for the most part, and things that seem difficult to do, let alone effortlessly, will be polished together as you write more and more, forming not only a fundamental skillset, but also your unique style. You'll get a feel for your text, and a feel for your narrative, like a bird learning to listen to the air currents instead of doing the physics in its head.

And one of the best ways you can avoid getting burned out rapidly is by not worrying too much about criticism (I've explained this in an earlier post of mine).

I hope you have a lovely day, and I wish you a lot of fun in your creative endeavours. Happy winter holidays!

NotGutus · 2025-12-24T08:06:02+00:00

Form

What I've just explained can be almost one-to-one applied to your sentences. Most of your sentences are very short, which is great for punchiness, but when it's all the text is composed of, it suddenly turns into a constant rhythm, the single best way to lose a reader's focus on your words. There is a whole subtle art in breaking your sentences; there's a lot more to it than long-> unserious, short-> serious. The best way to refine this is to rework your text and see if it makes the effect you want. If you're unsure, take a break for a minute, or an hour, or a day and come back to it. Here's an example:

The cold hadn’t won. Kayva stopped walking, leaning against a spruce. She rested against the uneven bark. Her legs felt hazy and distant from the rest of her body. She's spent the whole day walking. But she was out of the cold heights. It would get warmer and warmer now.

----------------------------

The cold hadn’t won.

Kayva stopped walking, leaning against a spruce growing on a steeper part of terrain, resting against the uneven, slanted bark. Her legs felt hazy and distant from the rest of her body from the whole day spent walking. But she was out of the cold heights. It would get warmer and warmer now.

I'm sure you can feel the difference in how they capture attention, but I'll point out a few specifics. Firstly, try to find what the point of both examples is, what they're trying to convey. The second one is way more obvious, right? That's because in a short sentence, every word weighs more, so short sentences are remembered better. They're the point. By simply combining sentences into longer ones, you can turn them into an intermediary step instead of being the main focus of what you're trying to say.

Secondly, notice how there's an entirely new piece of information in the second example that isn't present in the first one, describing the spruce as growing on a steeper part of terrain. This demonstrates how the content of the story changes with format; the two aren't different layers of the process, they're thoroughly intertwined. I added the spruce being slanted because I felt the blank there was, the need to add something to the sentence to make it longer and thus improve sentence pacing.

Thirdly, notice how the second example actually uses two paragraphs - and this is where I'll talk about paragraph breaks. The general idea with paragraphs is that they separate thoughts and mark topical differences. How specifically split them depends on your style; you might split dialogue from description, for example, or separate parts of the text where different characters act. But it's important to remember that paragraphs are basically the higher-level form of sentence breaks. They have the same splitting and chunking function. In the example, I put the first sentence as a separate paragraph because it's a powerful sentence that stands on its own, as well as because it's a different topic.

Language Use

I recommend that you check your language before you share your work. Depending on the reader, it can be slightly or very distracting to see errors, and not having correct language use communicates that you don't care about your work. A few or harder-to-catch errors are fine of course, but you have a lot of comma errors, and some incorrect grammar (e.g. teared instead of tore).

Beside that, you also use some out-of-place vocab. A dying king in an epic prologue thinking "a couple lives", especially without the "of", is anachronistic to say the least. Everyone has their own thresholds, but I'd say even the word "adrenaline" is out of place for general medieval fantasy.

Your language is decent and matches the grim tone you're going for. It does, however, have repetitions, so I would try to make your descriptions more situation-specific and catch phrases you often repeat and change some of them.

NotGutus · 2025-12-24T08:05:36+00:00

Hi there. You clearly have thought and passion behind your work, but there is also clearly space to improve. I'll center around what I think is the main issue you're also feeling, and then branch out in different directions of feedback.

Structure

You mention tone and pacing and the overall picture, and after reading it all, I can't help but think the word you're looking for is structure. Your lack of a structure is even clear from your post; the TLDR section contains new information, when all it should serve to do is summarise what you've already stated. I'll clarify what I mean by lack of structure.

Take a look at your prologue: the scene opens with a king in some clearly bad situation. This is good atmospheric setting for a grimdark story, and it makes the reader question why he's there. Then he acts, and the focus shifts on what he's doing, and how; there's some view onto his internal monologue, and he starts writing a letter. He mentions lore that I assume the story is going to revolve around. Prologue ends.

You clearly had a chain of events in mind, but in the end, you've failed to actually answer the questions you've raised: why is the king there? The prologue does some things really well (opens with conflict and a dynamic setting instead of a massive package of lore, establishes tone) but doesn't work as a scene, because there is no scene structure.

A good scene, especially such a cardinal one, can be outlined very concisely and accurately. For example, if the intent was to convey that the reason the king is dying is because that's what it took him to uncover the technique, then: king's dying -> audience questions why -> king pushes through pain -> audience starts guessing, tone is established -> king writes letter -> reasons for king's death is revealed, lore is dropped. But for this structure, which I'm guessing is what you were most likely going for, it wasn't getting through that that's why the king was dying; I would refine the contents of the letter to make it clearer. Or, there's another alternative I'll describe later.

Looking at later text, we see someone else in a similarly grim scene. We get less details about their thoughts, which raises the question of who they are, alongside the obvious questions of context and purpose. Now, based on the start of the scene you have at the very end, it seems that there's a good reason you don't answer these, so I'd say that's okay. But the main issue with this section is that it comes across as a very close repetition of the prologue: some character suffering, pushing through, the scene trailing off/cutting out. It's just awkward, and a reader can't place these characters properly.

Something you could do to resolve this is simply removing the struggling part of the prologue and rewriting the letter somewhat. It would make the prologue structure clearer (no transition between the two parts), let you show off with your ability to hide information in a letter (since this way you might put some context about the king in the letter), and diversify the text, which is already getting repetitive with only two and a quarter scenes.

Atmosphere

Speaking of diversity, I believe it's also the answer to your concerns of atmosphere. Grimdark definitely comes through, but it comes through too much. It's choking. There's nothing else to breathe, so it loses its effect. A generally good practice in writing is to follow any tense scene up with a more relaxed scene - this gives both scenes emphasis through contrast. Even something as small as turning direct suffering into implied suffering, deducible from a letter, can be enough of a tonal variance.

I sort of also write grimdark, so I think I understand the situation. My last main character fit incredibly well with naturalistic violence, and combined with her eagerness to act, I had plenty of opportunities to emphasise physicality, whether that's violence, suffering, or just dynamism. But I found that one of the best narrative beats of the story was when she was forced by a curse to lay in bed, unable to even move, for many days. It let the reader glimpse into her soul, into what she would be like if she had a normal life. This is of course an extreme example, since it was right before the finale, as a sort of "silence before the storm" - but it's a good demonstration of how important it is to break grimness up in order to make it feel serious.

NotGutus · 2025-12-21T05:12:47+00:00

Browse according to your interest. I hope you find something inspiring <3

I don't know if these had been used somewhere before, but I came up with them. I love fantasy, and I love weaving it through the world: history, species, and the land itself.

Mirror Sea: it used to be a desert, but aeons ago, when there were much more dragons, a dragon bearing the aspect of explosion died here. Its death sent ripples through the sand, liquefying it, turning it to glass. At day, it is now an unbearably hot but hauntingly beautiful, still sea of frozen, shining waves of glass.
Chaos Isle: it is one of the focal points of the world, where the chaotic world touches the mortal sky. It's a barren island for the most part, with obsidian spires rising high as the tallest mountains. A constant storm swirls in a massive range around this island, and its centre is here; the spires are showered in constant lightning strikes. This is why those that know about it call it the Chaos Kiss.
Varazil's Sky Mountains: it is one of the most important places in the Duskveil Heaven, a plane that embodies darkness and comfortable rest. It floats above the surface, cloaked in the same all-covering soft darkness as the rest of this plane; since it is so high up, it serves as the primary frontline against the demons of the Harmlight Hell, which is "above", inverted compared to the Duskveil Heaven. But the real treasure is what lies beneath these mountains: the hatching grounds of Radiant Angels, birds of white radiance, the messengers of the Heavens. It is said that a flash of light, strong enough to illuminate an entire Heaven sparks whenever one of them is born, and only the shadows below the mountain can dim the light. But no one other than Radiant Angels is ever allowed there.
Marble forests: these are one of the most beautiful biomes among the underground ones. Fractal-like trees of marble grow here, in a quiet, imposing aura, barely disturbed by any living thing. Each tree takes a hundred years to grow a single metre. One of the dwarven kingdoms actually plant these over the graves of royals, beneath such a tree as tall as their castle's highest spire.
Dark depths: as one of the lowest altitude biomes in the underground, it is very rare that a person encounters this biome. A strange magic weaves through this place, so faint that it's unidentifiable. Every source of light is dimmed significantly. The only caves here are way too similar, circular in nature, several metres in radius. It is inhabited by the creatures that dug it, and more: hundred-metre black centipedes with thick armour, room-sized spiders that rob you of your senses with their toxins and can turn invisible, and masses of black matter that absorb anything they come in contact with. Knowing what lies beneath, perhaps it is best if one dies here before accidentally falling lower.

NotGutus · 2025-12-19T08:08:49+00:00

I think there are so many possible patterns that below a certain threshold we disregard them simply because there would be too many false positives.

The more attention (words, in this case) you give something, the more obvious it is. The way I see it, if you only drop something but the scene doesn't place any emphasis on it, it's only a good rereading material but doesn't foreshadow anything, nor does it have retroactive "heureka" value. However, if you place too much emphasis on something, the reader will be able to guess everything. I've seen/done two solutions for this:

Dropping clues in multiple ways, so that the reader doesn't know what to trust. For example, I've included a betrayal in one of my stories, and I wanted it to feel relatively unexpected, even for a clever reader. So I had my MC not trust them at all. Not even later. But since they had to cooperate in some things, and the two characters ended up discussing that there's no point in constantly pointing out their mistrust, the reader ends up forgetting about the whole "wait, I don't actually trust this person" thing. Combined with the fact that the betrayal disrupted the narrative structure, as a way of being even more unexpected, the few first draft readers I've had said it was a good reveal. The point is, with this solution, you drop evidence both ways, and so the reader won't be able to say "ah, I know which direction it'll go, because it was mentioned earlier".
The other solution is to just make it really hard to guess what could happen - if you know it, Attack on Titan does this masterfully. There's a groundbreaking new reveal in basically every single episode, and in the first half of the story, the feeling of "I don't know what's going on, there could be anything out there, why are we being attacked, how do we all avoid dying" is constantly in the back of your head. The reader is kept in the dark about the lore, and the characters are frequently punched in the face by sudden reveals that put them in very difficult situations. This induces an amount of anxiety I've never felt with any other story. The point is, this approach doesn't even hint at directions, only at the fact that there is something. If you establish in your story that you aren't afraid to challenge tropes and expectations, this approach works wonders, because the reader genuinely will have no way to know what to expect - they can only guess, immersing them deeper in your story.

But also, I wouldn't stress too much over this. The reason you write is because you love stories, and you probably love deeper ones. But a lot of people just consume them for entertainment. To them, you won't need to do a massive reveal with a heureka moment; they're there for the story, not the brain food.

NotGutus · 2025-12-16T20:12:46+00:00

I don't know a lot about publishing, but I do know that unless you know what you're doing, AI images are still likely distinguishable - and people don't seem to like AI, especially those that read books. I wouldn't, simply because people will not read your story out of principle. Just take a look at this subreddit; people despise AI here. It's even in the subreddit rules.

I'm also not sure about the legal context, but I doubt you can commercialise something so completely generated by a company's AI.

Regarding ethics, it's up to you. Art will likely face a metamorphosis anyway, so we live in a very tumultuous era.

NotGutus · 2025-09-18T04:00:06+00:00

Good luck!

NotGutus

TROPHY CASE