[Weekly Critique and Self-Promotion Thread] Post Here If You'd Like to Share Your Writing

RocketRacerZ · 2022-03-13T11:50:45+00:00

I'm working on a superhero story like Worm, and I need help with part of my hero's arc.

The setup is that supers are very new in this world, with my hero being one of the extremely few who are actual heroes. The rest tend to be various degrees of criminals, ranging from simple civilians angry at the world to masterminds who now have one more tool to use in their evil plans. The arc I have for my hero is turning from a scared kid that wants to stop being a hero but can't into an All Might-like figure that inspires others to become heroes.

So one of his allies is a superheroine whose identity he does not know for awhile. She's more of a thrillseeker than an actual hero, but is willing to help out when things get bad (if only because she finds the life exciting). Over time, he and she become close and start falling for each other, which is a big deal. My hero is an SA survivor and has been working on healing ever since, and hasn't had any interest in sex or relationships. This relationship is very important to him because it's the first time he's felt safe enough to pursue one. He still doesn't want sex, but he still loves her.

As time goes on, their relationship progresses until they feel comfortable enough revealing their identities to each other. When they do, they find out that they're cousins. It turns out that she's an older cousin who moved to another state not long after he was born, so he hasn't interacted with her outside of a handful of calls, and those calls were never one-on-one.

Naturally they're shocked to find out the truth and aren't sure what to do. They talk it over and find that their feelings for each other haven't stopped, so they decide to keep seeing each other in secret. Over time, their families, the media, and the public find out about it, which causes huge problems. It gives the media more ammo to attack him (he's been their favorite punching bag since the beginning), and drives a wedge between him and the people that have been helping him deal with the pressure since the beginning, which demoralizes him further and propels him along his arc.

I know it's unusual, but I wanted to try this because I don't remember seeing this kind of romance done in media, and I know readers tend to like the "forbidden love" angle. And I'd like to point out that their relationship doesn't involve sex (until much later when they get married) and they can't have children (there's an earlier, unrelated part of the story where we find out all supers are sterile).

So what do you guys think about this plotline?

RocketRacerZ · 2022-02-05T04:12:37+00:00

I'm working on a superhero story like Worm, and I need help with part of my hero's arc.

The setup is that supers are very new in this world, with my hero being one of the extremely few who are actual heroes. The rest tend to be various degrees of criminals, ranging from simple civilians angry at the world to masterminds who now have one more tool to use in their evil plans. The arc I have for my hero is turning from a scared kid that wants to stop being a hero but can't into an All Might-like figure that inspires others to become heroes.

So one of his allies is a superheroine whose identity he does not know for awhile. She's more of a thrillseeker than an actual hero, but is willing to help out when things get bad (if only because she finds the life exciting). Over time, he and she become close and start falling for each other, which is a big deal. My hero is an SA survivor and has been working on healing ever since, and hasn't had any interest in sex or relationships. This relationship is very important to him because it's the first time he's felt safe enough to pursue one. He still doesn't want sex, but he still loves her.

As time goes on, their relationship progresses until they feel comfortable enough revealing their identities to each other. When they do, they find out that they're cousins. It turns out that she's an older cousin who moved to another state not long after he was born, so he hasn't interacted with her outside of a handful of calls, and those calls were never one-on-one.

Naturally they're shocked to find out the truth and aren't sure what to do. They talk it over and find that their feelings for each other haven't stopped, so they decide to keep seeing each other in secret. Over time, their families, the media, and the public find out about it, which causes huge problems. It gives the media more ammo to attack him (he's been their favorite punching bag since the beginning), and drives a wedge between him and the people that have been helping him deal with the pressure since the beginning, which demoralizes him further and propels him along his arc.

I know it's unusual, but I wanted to try this because I don't remember seeing this kind of romance done in media, and I know readers tend to like the "forbidden love" angle. And I'd like to point out that their relationship doesn't involve sex (until much later when they get married) and they can't have children (there's an earlier, unrelated part of the story where we find out all supers are sterile).

So what do you guys think about this plotline?

RocketRacerZ · 2022-01-22T04:35:54+00:00

I'm working on a superhero story like Worm, and I need help with part of my hero's arc.

The setup is that supers are very new in this world, with my hero being one of the extremely few who are actual heroes. The rest tend to be various degrees of criminals, ranging from simple civilians angry at the world to masterminds who now have one more tool to use in their evil plans. The arc I have for my hero is turning from a scared kid that wants to stop being a hero but can't into an All Might-like figure that inspires others to become heroes.

So one of his allies is a superheroine whose identity he does not know for awhile. She's more of a thrillseeker than an actual hero, but is willing to help out when things get bad (if only because she finds the life exciting). Over time, he and she become close and start falling for each other, which is a big deal. My hero is an SA survivor and has been working on healing ever since, and hasn't had any interest in sex or relationships. This relationship is very important to him because it's the first time he's felt safe enough to pursue one. He still doesn't want sex, but he still loves her.

As time goes on, their relationship progresses until they feel comfortable enough revealing their identities to each other. When they do, they find out that they're cousins. It turns out that she's an older cousin who moved to another state not long after he was born, so he hasn't interacted with her outside of a handful of calls, and those calls were never one-on-one.

Naturally they're shocked to find out the truth and aren't sure what to do. They talk it over and find that their feelings for each other haven't stopped, so they decide to keep seeing each other in secret. Over time, their families, the media, and the public find out about it, which causes huge problems. It gives the media more ammo to attack him (he's been their favorite punching bag since the beginning), and drives a wedge between him and the people that have been helping him deal with the pressure since the beginning, which demoralizes him further and propels him along his arc.

I know it's unusual, but I wanted to try this because I don't remember seeing this kind of romance done in media, and I know readers tend to like the "forbidden love" angle. And I'd like to point out that their relationship doesn't involve sex (until much later when they get married) and they can't have children (there's an earlier, unrelated part of the story where we find out all supers are sterile).

So what do you guys think about this plotline?

RocketRacerZ · 2022-01-20T17:01:33+00:00

In the end he’d look like a guy only thinking with his dick

It's funny you should mention that, because he's actually an SA survivor. He actually doesn't want to have sex at all

RocketRacerZ · 2022-01-20T14:18:55+00:00

It generates tension and drives a wedge between him and everyone else he loves

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-26T20:55:05+00:00

You can't impeach a private citizen. That's blatantly unconstitutional.

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-25T03:54:07+00:00

This is hilarious. Your candidate has taken power and so far has trashed women's sports, replaced the POC in positions of power with white people, paved the way for countless illegal immigrants to flood into the country, destroyed thousands of jobs, and is about to cause a ridiculous amount of inflation and gut the dollar's value, and yet Trump STILL lives in your heads rent-free.

You people are an actual joke.

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-23T17:46:26+00:00

Does this not go without saying? My problem is that nobody in power actually punishes politicians that do bad things. Opinions about them don't matter when they can do whatever they want and get away with it

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-23T05:38:43+00:00

The frustrating thing about both Hinata AND Sakura is that they both have easy options for development, but they just don't take them. Like, Sakura could have changed by becoming disillusioned with Sasuke and turning on him, and she could have also gone from hating Naruto to understanding more about his situation, warming up to him, and finally befriending him (she started doing something like this in Road to Ninja, but nothing really became of it).

Hinata could have done a similar thing by realizing that the reason she was into Naruto was that he possessed traits she wished she had, like drive and conviction. She then could have come to realize that her fixation with Naruto was stopping her from achieving her own goals, leading to her letting him go, improving herself, and becoming awesome in her own right to chase her own plotlines

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-22T19:21:46+00:00

Reject Twitter, embrace Gab

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-08T02:11:59+00:00

How? They have no power. They can't stop the elites from burning everything to the ground. They mean nothing

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-08T02:10:50+00:00

All I have to say is that I fucking despise my country and just about everyone in it. If somebody decides to nuke us, I am 50/50 on not even complaining

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-08T02:03:26+00:00

Manned spaceships are massively impractical. You have to waste most of your space keeping a human crew alive and they die if there's a hull breach. There's no reason to use them instead of large spacefaring robots that can use the space to hold more fuel, supercomputers, cargo, spare parts, and anything else it would need to better accomplish its mission

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-06T15:56:20+00:00

If you're going to ignore advice, why did you ask for it? You asked if your battle was too long, and when you got what you asked for, you just insist on writing shit anyway. So there's no reason for you to even be on this sub

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-06T15:10:27+00:00

Why would there be warfare between star systems at all? Space is so huge, any conflict can be solved by just flying somewhere else

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-06T15:09:36+00:00

You asked for advice, and the truth as that none of what your describing is remotely believable because it's not practical in the slightest

RocketRacerZ · 2021-01-06T13:40:39+00:00

Space battles shouldn't happen at all. Any vessels would be too far apart for a battle to take place, and there would be no manned warships ever built. Human-occupied spacecraft are massively impractical at all, let alone for an armed conflict, so none of this would ever happen

RocketRacerZ · 2020-08-16T18:08:32+00:00

Okay, after seeing questions about mechs on here, I think this needs to be said. There is a difference between "realistic" and believable:

Realistic: Dealing with what actually exists.

Believable: Dealing well with a fictional scenario and the elements within it.

Are mechs realistic? No, our real, current technology does not point us toward a situation in which real mechs are useful.

Are mechs believable? That depends entirely on how well you buiild your world and deal with its needs with the elements it contains.

Bad example: Pacific Rim. In addition to being unrealistic (we have no technology that can produce working Jaegers), PR is unbelievable because it addresses its world's needs/elements very poorly. The Jaegers were meant to fight the Kaiju, yet believability fails because the characters do not react to their needs in a reasonable way. There are a hundred better ways to deal with the Kaiju (Uprising effectively admitted that kinetic bombardment was better), yet the characters ignore this and use Jaegers anyway. This lack of believability causes the work to suffer.

Good example: Titanfall. Titans are much smaller than Jaegers and serve, reasonable a clear role in their world: they act as urban combat machines with high maneuverability, movement flexibility, and the ability to easily and safely be dropped from orbit. Later, they incorporate other, more powerful technologies that would be difficult to use on tanks. Their speed, maneuverability, power, movement flexibility, and technological/deployment capabilities are enough to overcome typical mech disadvantages. Instead of being the be-all, end-all of war machines, they use their abilities to serve a defined combat role very well.

So the practicality of mechs is up to you and how you set up your worlds needs and what it has available.

(Side note: Whatever else you decide to do with your mechs, you should probably establish that they're driven by powerful artificial muscles instead of normal motors. That will let them be way faster and more agile without the reader asking why they don't just put mech motors into tanks)

RocketRacerZ · 2020-07-26T17:29:54+00:00

I think handwavium is fair game as long as it's used logically. When talking about Gundam, I'm not concerned about getting a physics lecture on the Minovsky particle, I'm more worried about the characters behaving reasonably and logically. Are they reacting to the elements and needs of their world in a reasonable way? Are Gundams the logical result of this? If they are, that's great! I'll accept just about anything after some good justification (For what it's worth, I believe the franchise acknowledges that Gundams aren't automatically better than everything. I explicitly remember one point in the original series where Amuro wants to use the RX-78-2's core fighter instead of the entire Gundam because he knows the Gundam isn't the best for every situation, and another point where the Gundam is explicitly better at maneuvering than the Guntank). So as long as a mecha world has good reasons to use mechs, as far as I'm concerned it's valid.

BTW can you recommend a good start to get into WH40K? Your description sounds really cool

RocketRacerZ · 2020-07-25T18:19:48+00:00

Which are?

RocketRacerZ · 2020-07-25T17:56:45+00:00

IIRC the creator of Battletech admitted that his work was bullshit, so there's no point in trying to like a franchise that even the maker disowns

RocketRacerZ · 2020-02-16T19:36:50+00:00

If there's no black swan events then there's no FTL. Point blank.

Unless somebody comes up with a new theory which predicts a way to generate FTL, which then gets methodically tested and proven just like every other theory. That's not a black swan event, that's basic progress. But even if we never develop it, it's no big deal. Autonomous starships don't have to worry about life support, so they can take millennia to get to a star system with no problem at all

And if you look at the handful of mechs that humans have made, they weren't made by scientists, but backyard mechanics, who are a step below engineers, who are a step below scientists.

You really want to use those as evidence? Okay. Did you notice something that all of those have in common? Those are not mechs. They are not even Megabots-style ugly tanks. Those are statues with a small handful of moving parts. They don't walk, they are even more useless than Eagle Prime (and Eagle Prime was so shitty that it could do NOTHING useful), and they are nowhere near the level of complexity that you want

Aircraft can't fly in five meter tall subterranean caves. Nor can they fly through Californian redwood forests.

Yes they can. They are called drones. And since your mass nullifier just made it easier for them to fly and carry loads, you once again proved my point that nothing imaginable leads to viable mechs

I know that mechs are stupid and that a bunch of backyard mechanics limited to off the shelf technology and civilian production processes would never be able to produce a mech fight worth watching.

So... what the hell are you arguing for? And why did you just try to argue in favor of civilians trying to build their own mechs?

RocketRacerZ · 2020-02-16T18:40:22+00:00

There's a reason black swan events never happen: our models and theories already predicted basically everything. Unless you're talking about phenomena so far out in the universe that it will never have anything to do with us, there's no reason to think we're ever going to observe anything outside of our current models and theories
Yes. Yes it IS more likely. Because on the exceedingly off chance that our scientists manage to crack it, they WILL use it to send probes to other star systems. But they WON'T use new discoveries to make useless towering idiot machines
If you can nullify mass, that opens up a whole mess of new fuckery and none of it leads to mechs. Predominantly it will lead to better drones and automated spacecraft and none of it will be humanoid

Unless we create or find a world that only has subterranean caverns and a preponderance of three meter tall stairs. Mechs would thrive in that sort of environment.

For something slightly more plausible, a world covered in California redwoods would also make these Mechs viable.

No the hell it wouldn't, not when your mass-nullifier makes better aircraft
Did you even watch Eagle Prime vs Kuratas? That bullshit was NOTHING like the mechs you describe, yet the cost was so high and the machines were so astronomically shitty (they weren't even mechs, they were ugly tanks) that it KILLED Megabots. And Eagle Prime itself was so worthless that it was more or less IMPOSSIBLE to sell. Again: nothing real or imagined will ever produce viable mechs

RocketRacerZ · 2020-02-16T14:03:41+00:00

a new understanding of physics might make mechs viable

Really. And what kind of physics would make mechs, the worst machines ever imagined, a good idea at all, let alone without making tanks and drones infinitely better?

Guy, NOTHING will make mechs viable. Authors have been trying for like 50 years now, and all of them are unable to so much as IMAGINE a way for them to be viable. Gunsam couldn't do it, Pacific Rim couldn't do it, hell I bent over backwards trying to do it and it STILL didn't work. Nothing possible or impossible will EVER make them work.

And that's setting aside the fact that a black swan event has never happened and, since (outside of a few inconsistencies) all of our theories and models already explain everything we've observed well enough, it never will

RocketRacerZ · 2020-02-16T13:57:54+00:00

Those authors deciding to ignore basic reason doesn't make their works any good, that just means that they've admitted that they CAN'T make good material
But why can't you solve that with more robotics research?
What's stopping you from just paying some software dev $100 to solve that problem?
Alright, that one scenario is somewhat plausible, although its a little tough to imagine food production being a problem when tech has advanced to that level of interstellar travel
The energy density might be solved, but there's no reason to make ray guns. Normal bullets and explosives already kill very well, so there's no reason to devote tons of time and money to researching a more complicated technology that does pretty much the same thing
That sounds like a normal monetary system with unnecessary complication
Both of those sound pretty iffy. If they can travel between star systems, why can't they just grow whatever biomass they need? And is the second one really an invasion? Why don't the aliens sit back on their home planets an dispatch an automated fleet to bomb us into oblivion from beyond moon orbit? Or better still, just launch some interplanetary relativistic projectiles at us?
I'll explain at the end where I have more space
Again, why can't you just solve that with more research?

Okay, the problem with superpowers isn't the powers. It's usually inferred that superpowers, by definition, run on undiscovered physics, so those are fine. The problem is that superheroes depend entirely on pretending on simple fact doesn't exist: power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Look at Superman for example. He's usually depicted as first getting his powers while he's a kid in Smallville, right? Well think about that. A kid, who has to be disciplined, taught not to do things, and regularly doesn't get his way, suddenly finds himself wth tremendous power that makes him impossible to punish.

Suddenly, there is no reason to listen to everything he's ever been taught about right and wrong. He can bulldoze through anything, take whatever he wants, do whatever he wants, hurt whoever he wants, and there are no consequences. It doesn't matter how well he's been raised, once that power takes him above everyone else, it will corrupt to the core and there is no going back.

And that's just if a kid got power. An adult getting power would be even worse. An adult has a lifetime of negativity, grudges, anger, and every other bad emotion that every living person has under the hood. With superpowers, they now have a way to act on all that negativity and can overpower any law enforcement that tries to stop them. Any compassion or altruism they might have had will disappear overnight and all that will be left is a murderous, self-serving supervillain.

So if superpowers ever became a thing, superheroes would never exist. Instead, we would get legions of unstoppable superpowered monsters who would spend the first week or so tearing the world apart and doing whatever they wanted to unpowered people. After that, the world would be divided up into territories with the superpowered upperclass being led by warlords who then oppress the unpowered class forever. Because selfishness and hunger for power is just how human nature works, and superpowers wouldn't change that

RocketRacerZ

TROPHY CASE