The Stonewall Inn
Claire Keane
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TMBGareOK. The Official They Might Be Giants tumblr
Sweet Seals For You, Always
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One Nice Bug Per Day
Kiana Khansmith
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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shark vs the universe
YOU ARE THE REASON
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Mike Driver
The Bowery Presents
Keni
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#my art - Art I've made. It's not much atm but I'm looking to post more of it here soon :D
#my post - Non art related posts I've made. I do a bit of rambling here
#top posts - Posts I've made that have garnered over 100 notes
eevee doodling
Under the Sea, c.1914-8 by Glyn Philpot (English, 1884--1937)
2025-08-27
Maybe lean out
魔女の宅急便 / Kiki’s Delivery Service 1989, dir. Hayao Miyazaki
it bothers me when someone brings up misogyny in shounen anime and people shrug it off with "its designed for teenage boys, what can you expect." like well. idk i think its actually pretty important that shows for teenage boys are normal about women. i mean i think all media should be normal about women but teenagers are impressionable i think we could put a little bit of feminism in the teenage boy shows. it might do some good. you never know.
and this isnt just about shounen i just mean like. if you're excusing misogynistic writing with "well it wasn't written for girls" then i'm seriously questioning your approach to all this.
Tomateto and Hatsune leeku chibs yay
how were so many of the things that were basic writing/plotting advice in Every Single craft book when I was a teenager just completely straight up wrong
the biggest and worst offender I think was plotting advice that encouraged me to build my plot around my characters "desires" or "goals"
protagonists were kind of forced into a flat dichotomy of 'active' (takes actions to further their own goals, thus driving the story) and 'passive' (is acted upon by events beyond their control, moving them through the plot) with 'active' being considered good and passive being considered bad
I think this framework is very locked within a certain cultural viewpoint... specifically of a 20th century western white male. For one thing it assumes a "protagonist" will have a certain level of agency, to have goals and pursue them, overcoming obstacles in the way. It is not very inclusive of characters that don't have much agency.
It also assumes that desire/want = orienting toward or pursuing.
As far as I am concerned, characters don't have goals. They CAN, but these goals aren't actually the functional gears of the plot, and are instead their conscious rationalizations of what's really running the show.
Rather, characters have instincts and drives. I don't like to say "desires" because desire suggests something that is explicit, a thing that the character can attribute their feelings to.
I realized when reading Shakespeare's Othello that interesting characters often can't be understood in terms of "goals" or "desires" because they don't understand what they want or why they want that and they constantly act in ways that are contradictory to what they want or think they want. What a character consciously thinks is a whole layer on top of their actual instincts and feelings, which are primal and buried in traumas and needs and other aspects of creaturehood, and often is a fiction to resolve contradictions and dissonance in the demands of the creature-self. some characters can reflect upon their own thought processes and some cannot.
real humans don't often act rationally to pursue goals, they just do stuff based upon a seethe of inner instinct and the reasons why are post-hoc rationalizations. i like writing characters that reflect this and exploring the ways they do and don't understand themselves, the fictions they use to understand what's going on in there
Love this post because it gets at something I've vaguely felt, which is that often the most interesting characters have some core inconsistency to them (sometimes entirely unexplained). That contradiction feels instinctively real, maybe because it's forcing you to either solve the contradictions yourself, putting more life into the character, or give up and acknowledge the unknowable aspects of other people's minds. (imo Hamlet is like this.)
Whereas a character with perfectly coherent motivations and traits is almost more like a stylization, excellent as a side character or for a particular narrative purpose but not as chewable.
I'm always being reminded of the Hugh MacLennan quote from The Watch that Ends the Night:
“But that night as I drove back from Montreal, I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.” (274)
And I think that's a really great point about storytelling as well, and tragedy, that characters are also stuck with the consequences of things they can't take back but never really understood. They've become the kind of person who does [action] and they have to contend with that.
Exactly I agree fully!!
That's why when I write characters I like to split "goals" into Aspirations and Needs!! They may or may not have aspirations, but everyone has their own emotional needs that can drive their character arc (whether they know it or not).
I'm writing a character write now who has aspirations of becoming a great mage, but she's not working towards that goal daily. That's not what drives her.
She has an emotional need to feel accepted by others (and herself). That's the main driver for her actions in the story. She doesn't know that. When she finally accepts herself as she is, I'll consider her character arced!!
This is obviously still a simplification, but I think of it as a good marriage between characters who serve the plot and characters who act like real people :]
This is Tie, she is going to eat all of the notes
reblog to feed her notes
How is she doing this
everything you see on tumblr is biased towards the perspectives of the types of people who post a lot on tumblr. this is essential to remember
duuuuuude you have GOT to come out tonight we're enacting cruelty upon those who have transgressed so badly that we can justify any act against them... and you KNOW we're interpreting our delight as moral righteousness... Yeah it's fucking crazyyyyyyy get an Uber
what's your "if I won the lottery I wouldn't tell anyone but there would be signs" thing? mine is getting a fully green kitchen
Pichu Bros. (2021) Illustrator: Saya Tsuruta
