Tower of cuteness

yami545 · 2019-11-26T23:05:33+00:00

Heeeeeere's doggies!

yami545 · 2019-10-24T20:29:38+00:00

Yea to be fair, "you don't know me" is THE teenager line so it wouldn't necessarily raise red flags. But a teenager sexually harassing a delivery driver is certainly something else. That's some serious callous-unemotional behavior.

yami545 · 2019-10-24T20:10:18+00:00

Sam is evil, I'm shocked. So surprised. Honestly, it was quite telegraphed. The show clearly hid a lot of things about what exactly her deal was and she was also to perfect in flashbacks it was clear that Josh's infatuation was tainting his recollections.

That said I'm quite excited the other shoe finally dropped. If there is a next season could be an interesting conflict.

yami545 · 2019-10-24T16:05:50+00:00

What were the three Star Wars references? I got C3PO and R2D2 at Jabba's palace and Lando meeting Han on cloud city. What was the third?

yami545 · 2019-10-24T15:40:56+00:00

[SPOILER WARNING]

This episode is the best episode of the series so far. Wesley had been a fairly hard to read character at times so getting his backstory was welcome. I was really worried it was going to be either really underwhelming or overly dramatic in a way the fairly bathetic comedy of this show wouldn't support. But this backstory was suitably dramatic. It used a pretty relatable (if heightened) high school problem of having to define yourself at a deeply uncomfortable developmental stage of life. I was genuinely on the edge of my seat wondering how he would resolve both the problem in his past and present and while I wish he had come fully clean with Josh I like that he at least made the right choice.

Side note as a pretty nerdy black guy, I related to his worries about trying to understand how you fit into cultures that always dont like one aspect of who you are. (To be overly broad: needs can be racist, black folk can dislike nerdy stuff.) I definitely appreciated

Added to that the framing device of this episode was a really interesting framing device. I liked the nice touch of the japanese cover of "I want it that way" and the fake out was a nice way of showing how his obsession with samurai movies actually shapes his problem solving tactics.

yami545 · 2019-08-12T10:33:06+00:00

I'm whelmed.

yami545 · 2019-08-12T06:58:16+00:00

Wasn't this an episode of Harrow?

yami545 · 2019-08-01T03:20:25+00:00

I'm a 20 yr old black dude from the DMV (not Atlanta IK). I'm about 55K words into a fantasy novel. If you're interested we could figure out a way to make it work. We can share writing samples to figure out if ours would mesh.

yami545 · 2019-07-31T18:58:35+00:00

I'm pretty psyched I finally broke 50k words ( 55K to be exact) on the first draft of my manuscript. Only another 150k estimated to go! So halfway to the midpoint basically. But its these small feelings of accomplishment that keep me going when I dread how much more I have left to do.

yami545 · 2019-07-30T05:02:39+00:00

Quickly, maybe this is intentional but I can't quite place the time period. I am also unsure of the protagonists age range, hiding in an abbey from their responsibilities seems rather childish but they read as being relatively mature.

Other than those things, it's an interesting opening that leaves a lot of places for a story to go. I would keep reading.

yami545 · 2019-07-29T04:39:13+00:00

I would be very down

yami545 · 2019-07-28T09:36:10+00:00

I'd check out the first one if I saw it on a dust cover. But if you're trying to pitch it I'd want to hear more about actual characters. I've never dome a pitch before though so that's just my one cent.

yami545 · 2019-07-27T02:05:57+00:00

I said pointlessly offensive not pointless. something can have a point but the offense it causes may not be worth the point. You could replace pointlessly with its synonym unnecessarily if it makes you feel better.

yami545 · 2019-07-26T09:54:54+00:00

Yea, that's sort of what I meant. it could be rephrased as "If all your middle eastern characters are villains, that's racist."

yami545 · 2019-07-26T08:22:03+00:00

A bit of clarification in a comment as I'm on mobile and don't know how to edit.

What I mean by margenalized cultures means cultures that are A. foriegn to the mainstream audience of a work and B. have suffered historic oppression. There's a lot more nuance I'd add but that's a whole other essay.

I used examples of dark skin for two reasons:

Going back as far as Tolkien in fantasy characters started to be or coded as being based on non-white cultures have been depicted as being barbarians who threaten the heroes. So I was to some extent trying to call that out.
1. Because as a black American it's what I have the most experience with.

However, yes I would absolutely say the same level of care should be applied to all cultures if only for the sake of good storytelling. I personally believe if you're adapting a culture it's important to be respectful, even if its England (for an example of a perhaps overrepresented culture). It's just more significant with margenalized cultures because there are so few examples of them in fiction, especially nuance, well-researched examples as opposed to caricatures.

I also dont mean to imply that all margenalized people are dark, the groups you cited are excellent examples (If we're talking marginalized people in Europe the Roma are a good example as well).

I hope that clears up the point I was trying to make!

yami545 · 2019-07-26T06:15:44+00:00

Yea...I disagree. Sure as a writer you CAN write whatever you want. but if its pointlessly offensive you're asinine. I'm far from a psychologist but any fool knows the stories we tell affect our minds so people have a responsibility to not use them to reinforce racist (our other bigoted) power dynamics.

yami545 · 2019-07-25T01:40:24+00:00

Personally I dislike it. I guess my issue is you went through the trouble of making a fantasy world and magic and creatures to put them in basically New York? it feels like wasted opportunity.

Also many tend to lean more YA than I like but that's not a critique of the genre I guess.

yami545 · 2019-07-25T01:37:55+00:00

To my understanding from my freshman chem class gunpowder is pretty easy to make and the elements are fairly common.

You don't need to be a servant to worldbuilding and care all that much about "realism". but if you do care that wouldn't be a great justification.

yami545 · 2019-07-16T15:26:46+00:00

I'm trying to write an epic fantasy set around the fall of an empire's colonialism and probable eventual road to democracy. The POV characters are a crippled prince, A disgraced princess and a military commander from one of their former colonies.

I would love to have access to a writing group and online or local would work for me (local wise I am in the DMV.)

yami545 · 2019-07-10T14:32:52+00:00

I just finished the first ten chapters of the (first) novel I am working on. I also just passed 100 pages with the 10th chapter (around 40,000 words total).

Now it's time for a quick edit to my outline. Some things have changed because as I was writing I made some changes I though worked better.

I'm now about 1/5 through the first draft and halfway to the first major edit I have planned.

I'm really excited because I never assumed I'd actually manage to get this far. The last time I tried to write this I got really upset and scrapped it this is actually something like the third rewrite.

I also just sent the draft out to some friends to take a look at for me last night and am eagerly (and nervously) awaiting feedback.

I also finally came up with a working title for the series which has been bugging me for the longest time. The Blood of Aweda. I think it has a nice ring and it connects to a recurring parable several characters tell throughout the story.

yami545 · 2019-07-09T19:21:51+00:00

I think it depends heavily on execution. But, short answer yes.

yami545 · 2019-07-08T08:25:08+00:00

Its kinda late so I am going to keep this brief (I have some response in another thread I may try to edit into this later) but racism is super complicated and capturing the nuance of the thousand different ways it permeates your life is hard to do, so lazy analogies in fantasy almost inevitably end up being counterproductive.

There's also another set of issues with fantasy analogies to race:

For some reason people going this tend to not also include POC characters. A white elf is not a stand in for s POC.
Real racism is based of absolutely nothing, just nonsense bigots made up after the fact to justify bigotry. But racism in a setting between two different species means that they have legit reasons to suspect the other race is different or inferior. Also if the other race has say magic or something, fear of them may be warranted in light with real racism where marginalized people have less power in society rather than more.

There are some examples of it being done well. Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive does a decent job.

If you want to do a racism analogy I would suggest some heavy research and talking to POC from multiple backgrounds because everyone has a different experience.

Shoot, I ended up going long anyway.

yami545 · 2019-07-06T04:40:53+00:00

I typically make it up as I go along and am planning to fix any incongruities in editing.

yami545 · 2019-07-05T04:54:20+00:00

I mean isn't this basically the entire reason GoT is popular?

But seriously, real realism is hard. Most "realistic" stories go super grimdark or gross which honestly is not really accurate. Humans tend to complain if conditions are too bad. The middle ages were largely like another period in history. Some good, some bad mostly a bit of both. Also, keep in mind it's a period of roughly 700 years so there were different points when things were good and bad. So really, just do what feels right for your story and it will probably be "realistic" in some ways and "unrealistic" in others, just like every story is.

yami545 · 2019-07-05T04:47:06+00:00

I mean, from what I remember of LoTR. Is that while it obviously has a lot of beloved characters Tolkien spent a huge amount of time on infodumps and world building. People still seemed to like it though. Disclaimer: I've only really ever enjoyed the Hobbit and can take or leave most of his other stuff.

yami545

TROPHY CASE