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Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

I only have a cursory knowledge of MLP, and school's just started for me, so I'm wrapped up in a lot of other things. I don't think I could reasonably promise you a full read-through and review. Sorry... ^^;

As for the question you asked about developing side characters, you could either dedicate a chapter exploring who they are (their past, their daily life, how they interact with others), or you could save it for the upcoming side stories you're planning to write. Which one suits you really depends on the way the plot's progressing and how much you want to develop the side characters now, as opposed to in later works of yours.
 
I've already marked TWB as being on hiatus. Right now, I want to focus on other things. I'm starting to enjoy the idea of writing this PR/MLP crossover now because it's a break from what I usually write - it's entirely canon characters, it's from the perspective of a villain, said villain is one of those minor characters with barely any fan content who I project headcanons onto, and it's a comedic oneshot.
 
I've been doing some odd work for a friend lately - worldbuilding commissions. I've been making maps, inventing cultures, even constructing fantasy languages. It's a big job, but it turns out I'm pretty good at a wide range of such things. I've been thinking about advertising my services in this online, doing some freelance worldbuilding. It's exciting, but daunting, to consider.
 
There's a YouTuber who gives Pokémon in the anime dialogue. It's charming, in a Digimon kind of way, but it makes me wonder: if all Pokémon could talk, how would've human society developed?
 
in my tpp stories it's kinda like that - (most) pokémon can achieve sapience and human-level intelligence if they're raised properly during a crucial learning period. however, baby mon in the wild are naturally taken care of by their wild parents, and so turn out wild without human interference. you may be asking right now how the hell nature would ever come around to making something like that, and that's a totally valid question, and my answer is just that i didn't think things through when i started writing pokefic and now it's way too late to change.

i can try to think of some justification, though. maybe humans were the earliest to sapience and occupied the sapient niche of their area with pokemon developing elsewhere. when humans started migrating, they could overpower the pokemon with the help of the ones they brought along and had trained (and with knowledge of type matchups), drastically culling the population. however, a poké-specific mutation started occurring in the sapient pokémon that would leave crucial development at an early age undone without proper stimuli, and once these "feral" mon started appearing, they did better than the sapient ones since humans weren't after them, and so most of the population turned feral. maybe at this point humans also realized some wild mon outside their areas were useful domesticated.

this is stupid and probably full of logic holes but thankfully arceus is canon for me so i can just say he tampered with it for whatever reason. god my world is such a mess and just for the sake of some mon characters. at least it makes for some interesting worldbuilding in how sapient mon can achieve citizenship and essentially human status
 
It depends. If they can speak, does that mean they're sapient? Are they sapient now, even though they can't speak? If they could speak, what would they want? If they could speak, would humans still treat them the way they do? And so on. It's too broad a question.

In DE canon, most pokémon are mildly to moderately sapient and the smart ones lucky enough to be taught it can speak a kind of rudimentary sign language. Certain very intelligent pokémon can communicate in human languages, whether telepathically or otherwise. Pokémon can make it very clear when they aren't interested in doing as a human wants, and most of the time are easily able to simply leave. They do have magical powers, after all. The exceptional pokémon, literate humanoids and the like, still compete in pokémon battles, but they have a different relationship to pokémon training than an ordinary canid, bug, bird, animate object, or stack of rocks. More like a human athlete and their coach.
 
It depends. If they can speak, does that mean they're sapient? Are they sapient now, even though they can't speak?
This is a complicated question since the answer varies by medium. They're clearly sapient in the anime (the subtitled translations in the giant pokemon episode early on clench it but mountains more build up later, like Pokemon refusing orders for moral reasons) and the Mystery Dungeon games, but for the main games I think the answer might actually vary by species--Lapras and Lucario are called out as being able to understand human speech (implying many others cannot), Dragonite is said to match human intelligence, Alakazam are apparently super geniuses. Others seem closer to real-world animals.
Edit: Oh, there's also Dr. Footstep. Depending on how accurate you think he is, he might point towards them being sapient, too.

Now, if every Pokemon could talk human...I think training would be very different. If nothing else the easier communication would make certain elements much easier. I also suspect capturing Pokemon would be illegal in a lot of places, at least in a modern era, and people would need to use persuasion to get a Pokemon partner.
 
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I don't know if anyone here posts their stories here and also somewhere like AO3 or FF.net, but a thought occurred to me as I was updating In the Face of Adversity. For those of y'all that do crosspost, how do y'all do your formatting? Mainly thinking of things like italics or bolded text.
Manually as god intended

I don't crosspost anymore, but when I used to, I used to maintain three different documents per chapter: Bulbagarden's version which was the "purest" and had all of the bbcode tags intact, a censored version for places like Serebii which don't allow icky no good swear THINK OF THE CHILDREN (bbcode still intact on those too) and when I was uploading to ff.net, I tried to maintain a separate document with actual italics and bold and centering so I wouldn't have to cut those out manually. Eventually I got sick of that and stopped uploading there.

I think what really helped make it easy to do it manually was an old forum I used to visit. In the last few years of its life, the buttons for inserting code into posts broke, so we all got along inserting them manually. Putting in an [i-] is almost second nature muscle memory to me now.

I literally do not know how the forums work and I refuse to learn
[i-] for italics, [b-] for bold, [u-] for underline, [s-] for strikethrough, [center-] for obvious. Wrap each of those with a matching [/x] and hey presto, you know how the forums work. I don't know how the forums work though, because when I initially made this post, it looked like it went through a bbcode blender

Now, if every Pokemon could talk human...I think training would be very different. If nothing else the easier communication would make certain elements much easier. I also suspect capturing Pokemon would be illegal in a lot of places, at least in a modern era, and people would need to use persuasion to get a Pokemon partner.
"Hey Pikachu, got some candy over here."
 
Manually as god intended

I don't crosspost anymore, but when I used to, I used to maintain three different documents per chapter: Bulbagarden's version which was the "purest" and had all of the bbcode tags intact, a censored version for places like Serebii which don't allow icky no good swear THINK OF THE CHILDREN (bbcode still intact on those too) and when I was uploading to ff.net, I tried to maintain a separate document with actual italics and bold and centering so I wouldn't have to cut those out manually. Eventually I got sick of that and stopped uploading there.

I actually considered having two separate documents when I first posed that question, but I kinda wanted to see what others did to see if there was an easier alternative. I really like the way kintsugi mentioned; I'd forgotten that was a thing I could do on XenForo, haha. I've been keeping it all in one document and just editing the BBcode out when I go to post on FF.net, but I feel like I just miss stuff when I go back to remove the BBcode, and then I feel like I have to reupload the document and repost it and it's a whole process that I'd rather just not deal with, haha.
 
What are the Pros and cons of keeping a character's age ambiguous?
Pros: Helps readers to put themselves in the character's shoes.
Cons: Depending on how ambiguous you want to be it kind of rules out certain personality traits that would help narrow the age down.
 
@Greninjaman

Keeping their age ambiguous how and for what reason? It depends on context, like everything in writing. Is it ambiguous because they're hiding their identity, or is it ambiguous because you're just not telling the audience any relevant information? If the former, that sounds liek a plot point that matters on its own. If the latter, well - if you're not writing anything the reader could interpret as showing youth or age, then you have to deliberately avoid writing them as having speech patterns or activities or thoughts that indicate that. Which wouldn't be any different from just not writing very much character into the character.

Why don't you tell us more about why you're asking the question?
 
@Greninjaman

Keeping their age ambiguous how and for what reason? It depends on context, like everything in writing. Is it ambiguous because they're hiding their identity, or is it ambiguous because you're just not telling the audience any relevant information? If the former, that sounds liek a plot point that matters on its own. If the latter, well - if you're not writing anything the reader could interpret as showing youth or age, then you have to deliberately avoid writing them as having speech patterns or activities or thoughts that indicate that. Which wouldn't be any different from just not writing very much character into the character.

Why don't you tell us more about why you're asking the question?

Well, I am giving the anime rewrite another go (though it's more of a reimagining). I figured that having the age be ambiguous would help. I want to keep it ambiguous to keep Ash from getting too old (though I guess I could always have time move slower than in really life).
 
@Greninjaman

A character's age is an important influence on their personality and experience, and on the way people treat them. Even the difference between a ten year old kid and a fourteen year old kid is massive in terms of maturity and what people expect of them. Leaving it ambiguous will just lead to readers making an assumption about the character's age based on how you write them.

I also frankly don't see the problem that an ambiguous age would help with. If you don't want Ash to get "too old" then just keep him young. If you're bothered about the plausibility of a 10yo kid competing in a dozen tournaments within a year, then have short travel times or something. Or just accept that the anime is internally inconsistent because it's not meant to make sense, it's meant to be a marketing tool. Refusing to state your character's age or having "time move slower" are pretty contrived ways to avoid writing something that makes sense OR accepting that you're dealing with content that doesn't make sense in this regard. The bottom line is, making the anime more realistic means making Ash grow older, and you can't escape that.

I feel I should mention, this is the latest of several times you've attempted an "anime rewrite". I have to wonder why you want to write such a thing. I really do recommend that you try writing something of a much smaller scope first to see if you can complete a written story. Nevertheless, if you're only keen to rewrite the anime, I think you should at least have a clear vision of what you hope to achieve, first.
 
@Greninjaman

A character's age is an important influence on their personality and experience, and on the way people treat them. Even the difference between a ten year old kid and a fourteen year old kid is massive in terms of maturity and what people expect of them. Leaving it ambiguous will just lead to readers making an assumption about the character's age based on how you write them.

I also frankly don't see the problem that an ambiguous age would help with. If you don't want Ash to get "too old" then just keep him young. If you're bothered about the plausibility of a 10yo kid competing in a dozen tournaments within a year, then have short travel times or something. Or just accept that the anime is internally inconsistent because it's not meant to make sense, it's meant to be a marketing tool. Refusing to state your character's age or having "time move slower" are pretty contrived ways to avoid writing something that makes sense OR accepting that you're dealing with content that doesn't make sense in this regard. The bottom line is, making the anime more realistic means making Ash grow older, and you can't escape that.

I feel I should mention, this is the latest of several times you've attempted an "anime rewrite". I have to wonder why you want to write such a thing. I really do recommend that you try writing something of a much smaller scope first to see if you can complete a written story. Nevertheless, if you're only keen to rewrite the anime, I think you should at least have a clear vision of what you hope to achieve, first.
You know what dude? You're right. I do have another story in the works. I should focus on that. I do have a story that I completed here.
I don't know why my mind is so fixated on the Pokemon anime thing.
 
hunter, haunted is two years old today! (at least in terms of this forum but i realized too late that i probably uploaded it to reddit before that and already made a whole stink about the birthday being today so shh)

to celebrate i drew the gang

125231
 
hunter, haunted is two years old today! (at least in terms of this forum but i realized too late that i probably uploaded it to reddit before that and already made a whole stink about the birthday being today so shh)
Congrats on two years on your fic Cani!! Also that pink-haired girl looks like she's seen some serious s***.

Reminds me that one year will pass soon since releasing Orre: The Desert, too bad that I can't even get Chapter 4 out.

Welp, now time to get back to the pain that is university homework.
 
Does anyone have any info on old medieval knights' practice yards? I'm working on a Final Fantasy fic and the first scene takes place in one, but I can't find any good info or images on them.
 
There's not much to really say about them. If they were practicing their joust they might ride at a quintain (Should be easy to find a picture, but essentially it's a target on a pivot to aim lance strikes at). If they were practicing at their weapon drill there might be servants hanging around with practice weapons. Conceivably someone nearby might have ale on hand, and given that knights at practice would certainly be wearing armour there would be squires to help them in and out of it.
 
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