Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

[Nitro Indigo]

I was specifically thinking of Lucy's Psyduck, and the Espurr memes from 2013.

 

[Daren]

Has anyone else noticed how pokémon with barely-contained power are extremely prevalent? Golurk is another one - if the seal breaks, it goes berserk and levels the place, iirc.

Also Machoke's "if it loses it's belt it's power goes crazy" dex entries.

well, goes with the theme of pokemon being absurdly powerful for their size and shape in general

I recall someone once noting that even the Pokémon without crazy entries have to be ridiculously tough to be able to compare with the ones that do.
For instance, Yellow's dex says Machamp can move mountains, and you have Pokémon taking hits from it and getting up.
If you take the combo of dex and gameplay seriously than you could probably shoot a high level Raichu with a tank and the shell would crumple up against it's body like a beer can against a drunken frat boy's forehead.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

I just saw a post on Pillowfort saying that commissioning fanfic is illegal in the US... but by that reasoning, shouldn't commissioning fanart be illegal as well?

 

[kintsugi]

Can't say I agree there.

Has anyone else noticed how pokémon with barely-contained power are extremely prevalent? Golurk is another one - if the seal breaks, it goes berserk and levels the place, iirc.

I actually like it as a running theme -- humans are the odd ones out in the Pokemon universe. They can't attack and they're incredibly fragile. So of course your normal human constructs like buildings and bullets aren't going to do much; they're limited by the fact that humans are on the bottom of the powerscale. And most narratives (my own included) end up making this into a grim, macabre nightmare survival scenario, but Pokemon somehow makes it into a cutesy wholesome story about friendship even when your friends could level a city as an accident.

There's a really tiny but similar bit of worldbuilding in Undertale about how for monsters, the bullet-hell projectiles are actually how monsters express themselves and communicate to one another; they just happen to be deadly to humans. Undertale also has it easier with the internal consistency of incredibly powerful monsters and incredibly squishy people because there's no training dynamic, so the friendship bit actually works a lot better.

 

[Beth Pavell]

Ok, that's concerning. Click on a video about the Battle of Towton, get an ad insisting I support Hong Kong's freedom that looks rather like it came from a 1984 reboot

Anyhow, the whole "Pokémon is on the brink of exploding" thing falls into the same old conceptual traps. I mean, if this common little cat could potentially, accidentally, level a city block, then either we're saying all the other pokémon can survive it, or they get vapourised just the same

 

[BackSet]

I always chalk up all the lore inconsistencies to gameplay and story segregation.

Then I remove the gameplay element and redefine the whole thing.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

I've created a fanfic that I've mentioned in this thread once and in a Fimfiction group twice (several days apart, once before it was published), yet no-one's responded, and that group is pretty active. I want to get feedback on my fanfics because I know I can improve, but I'm not sure how. Years ago, I wrote a fanfic and someone kept telling me it was perfect, even though I didn't think so. I worry that this habit of mine is annoying.

There's also the fact that Archive of Our Own is so lonely. It's easier to get noticed on Fimfiction with four listings on the front page and groups, but AO3 is just a white void. Should I crosspost my fanfics here? Because I'm not sure if the episodic style of New Order would suit this site.

 

[kintsugi]

I've created a fanfic that I've mentioned in this thread once and in a Fimfiction group twice (several days apart, once before it was published), yet no-one's responded, and that group is pretty active. I want to get feedback on my fanfics because I know I can improve, but I'm not sure how. Years ago, I wrote a fanfic and someone kept telling me it was perfect, even though I didn't think so. I worry that this habit of mine is annoying.

There's also the fact that Archive of Our Own is so lonely. It's easier to get noticed on Fimfiction with four listings on the front page and groups, but AO3 is just a white void. Should I crosspost my fanfics here? Because I'm not sure if the episodic style of New Order would suit this site.

I can’t speak to AO3 and FIM, but what drives me to read/review on other forums/sites pretty much boils down to if I see them reviewing other things. Doesn’t have to be reviews for my own work (and often isn’t); I just find it valuable to understand what their desired level of feedback is as well as their level of engagement with the rest of the community. Similarly, the best way I’ve found to be noticed on big sites is to review other people’s work; on the obvious level it gets your name out there as someone who can coherently understand a story, but it also ends up exposing you to writing that you can learn from.

When I started out writing a v long time ago I wanted to be one of the big-wigs with a trillion reviews, and I never saw them reviewing because they were just so busy focusing on their amazing writing that they didn’t have time to read pleb work. This was convenient for me because i didn’t want to read pleb work (read: anyone that wasn’t me), so if that was true, all I would need to do was post and people would recognize my genius and come flocking in. This was ultimately not the case—reviewers didn’t flock in, big wigs did review tons of stuff for other people, but the bigger thing was that ultimately for me I found that that mindset was preventing me from engaging with other people’s works in a meaningful way, because I was expecting a transactional return (reviews for writing). Not to say that this is what you’re doing here; just sharing an experience I had that led me to the mentality above about how I end up reviewing which stories.

AO3 is pretty much a void for non-smut pokefic except for a tiny handful, btw.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

Yesterday, I realised that I don't engage with people much on AO3, and most of the fanfics I read on there aren't about Pokémon. (They're mainly Power Rangers and Fullmetal Alchemist.) I wish there were more fanfic sites with forums like Fimfiction. New Order was inspired by the kind of stuff I read on that site, but it can't be posted there for obvious reasons. The owner of Fimfiction said he wanted to make an extension of the site for all kinds of fanfics, but he could have changed his mind.

 

[Beth Pavell]

I prefer to think of reviewing in terms of community. I've been active here for, well, many years now, and one persistent pattern is that we're authors reviewing other authors. Reviewers who don't write are vanishingly rare. If we don't review each other, we don't get reviewed.

Lest anyone think I'm preaching, we've all fallen into the usual excuses. I haven't got the time. I can't find anything I like. I've forgotten how to review, etc. Time was I used to review pretty much every new story here, and though I did have twice as much time back then, fact was more than once I found myself surprised by how much I enjoyed a story I didn't think I would. I haven't reviewed as much as I really want to, moderator or no.

This doesn't create miracles, it has to be said. Even when I was doing so much reviewing, few authors would reciprocate with a review of one of my stories. It's disappointing, and as a moderator I'd love to see more people reviewing even in a small way, because small contributions add up. But there it is.

 

[kintsugi]

Oh, absolutely. Reviewing to get reviews in return is sort of like the plastic straw ban of the writing world—it will absolutely not be the panacea for your problem, but doing it is just one step down the road of a million things that you’ll need to do to eventually maybe somehow fix your problem, you’ll probably piss off a million people along the way, and not doing it will probably make your problem worse.

 

[Beth Pavell]

Speaking of reviews, a heads-up that the Review League bonus for reviewing a fic in the Review Game has increased to +6

 

[Greninjaman]

I feel like I know the answer myself, but I just want confirmation: Does Light Magic always have to be not evil while Dark Magic always have to be evil when it comes to fantasy stories? Or can I do the other way around (evil Light Magic; non-evil Dark Magic)?

 

[Daren]

I feel like I know the answer myself, but I just want confirmation: Does Light Magic always have to be not evil while Dark Magic always have to be evil when it comes to fantasy stories? Or can I do the other way around (evil Light Magic; non-evil Dark Magic)?

If it's your own setting you can do whatever you want. There's non-evil dark magic users in a number of fantasy settings (Fire Emblem has a good number, for instance).

 

[Greninjaman]

If it's your own setting you can do whatever you want. There's non-evil dark magic users in a number of fantasy settings (Fire Emblem has a good number, for instance).

Thanks. That's what I figured. I'm sure there are Light magic users that are evil.

 

[Misfit Angel]

You could go with the rule that light magic is always true and pure, but its users can twist it in the form of zealotry and inquisition. I don't see that happen very often.

 

[Greninjaman]

You could go with the rule that light magic is always true and pure, but its users can twist it in the form of zealotry and inquisition. I don't see that happen very often.

There could also be dark spells that are ok to use because they don't corrupt the person, but there are forbidden artifacts of pure darkness that DOES corrupt the person using it.

 

[UselessBytes]

Definitely not. Heck, the concepts of light and dark themselves arent set in stone. Plenty of media turns it around. Hollow knight is a good example of both being pretty ambiguous, and there's too many examples of "actually light is bad" to count (and far too many of them are too edgy for their own good)

 

[Greninjaman]

Definitely not. Heck, the concepts of light and dark themselves arent set in stone. Plenty of media turns it around. Hollow knight is a good example of both being pretty ambiguous, and there's too many examples of "actually light is bad" to count (and far too many of them are too edgy for their own good)

If they are not set in stone, then how is it a problem?

 

[Lord Kyuubi]

Depends how you define your terms. 'Dark magic' is a popular term for magic that is sinister in nature, or sometimes just magic that's forbidden, so if you're taking this definition, it will most likely be inherently evil to some extent. But you could equally interpret it as magic relating to literal darkness, in which case it has plenty of room for morally-neutral use, so long as you can think what powers specifically those would be. Off the top of my head, you could use darkness to hide someone or something, or create a nice, relaxing place for someone to sleep, but I'm sure there's plenty more you could do.

When light magic is good, usual I tend to see it depicted as such just for being an opposite to dark, rather than anything inherently good about light. If you think of it about literal light, it's not difficult to think of evil uses for it, such as blinding people and so on.