canisaries
still occasionally here
- Joined
- Aug 18, 2016
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I am not sure why you read these two sentences the same. The eight years is a reference to her house being painted. The five years is a reference to the entire city being destroyed. The two are entirely separate from one another.
Yeah, I suppose it could also be my personal fault, being very poor with timelines and having the attention span of a goldfish at times. In the chapter itself, the mention of eight years in particular without further context made me have to kind of guess what was the thing that happened eight years ago, and "literally being born" was the first conclusion my mind jumped to (instead of renovation, moving house, switching rooms, anything like that).
I don't know how you would feel differently having read the blog, but the blog is meant to be read before this. I have never received feedback from someone who hasn't read the blog though, so I will take your thoughts from here into consideration. However, I think it would be impossible to introduce Alaska without addressing the unemployed father in the room, and I am not sure how I would address it otherwise. Her character is defined by her past, and really her reaction to the world around her are her quirks and characteristics.
Oh, apologies. I was somehow under the impression that the blogs were written and meant to be read after the arc or even the whole story. Looking back on it, not sure why, but as the request was on "arc one", I just took the first thing listed on that.
Anyway - it is true that people's personalities are largely shaped by their past and surroundings, but I would not say that's all there is, by far. Besides tragedies like war and a slob father, there are years worth of minor events no author could possibly list all of and calculate coldly just how the person would psychologically turn out. There are playmates, TV shows, parents' beliefs and morals, insults, compliments, nightmares, all that. Then there are also genetic factors. Given this, a character should be so that even if select major events would not have happened, they would still have unique quirks about them.
To put it more bluntly, "I had to grow up in the shambles of war" is not a personality trait. We know this to be true, as millions of people have grown up in crappy environments and lived through conflicts, yet each and every one of them is still unique. If we did create a character based solely on major things they were born with (sex, ethnicity, sexuality) or have gone through, we'd end up with a stereotype - and from a writing perspective, these characters would be unrecognizable if put into different scenarios.
Anyway, I skimmed through Blog One just now, and I can definitely see why it should be gone through first. It's very expositiony, but that is to be expected from a blog, that's just how they are. It also has the personality that was missing from the chapter, and Alaska doesn't do any "my life not the good, pls feel bad 4 me" which I'm glad to see. So those two paragraphs before this: the problem I talk about seems to have largely been avoided, kudos.