Show & Tell
One Nice Bug Per Day
Peter Solarz
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Product Placement
@theartofmadeline
Cosimo Galluzzi
Keni
AnasAbdin
Origami Around
Three Goblin Art
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
d e v o n
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JVL
Stranger Things
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Love Begins
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@spoofio
wow I love to sit crosslegged without moving for several hours straight!
okay time to straighten my legs man I'm so excited
I f eel like a suit of armour that was attacked by a welder
I am nineteen years old
I am so sorry I just turned 20 I hope you can forgive me
. yeah okay true I did do that
Neverseen pisses me off for a ton of reasons, but perhaps the most jarring issue is how Keefe-centric it all is... and how this page time Keefe got sucked in on all the potential character arcs of the fantastic five. Because Everblaze's plot was one of the very few which could've had lasting consequences.
Instead of Keefe's mommy issues, we could've had:
-> Sophie's guilt arc. Like, a PROPER one. And the stakes would've been high unlike any other person's guilt arc, because Sophie cannot be brought back if her mind shatters. Let her blame herself for being the trigger-cause of the plague. Let the plague be awful and have casualties and let her live with that.
-> Dex's anti-Technopathy arc. I am still appalled to this day that he immediately went back to chilling with his ability when he just created a hyper-traumatic weapon that the Council FORCED him to put on Sophie's head. Why does Tinker get the anti-weapon arc?? Dex should never have spoken "proudly" of the Sucker Punch or any other weapon. Neverseen could've been the book where he refuses to use his ability, focusing on alchemy or any other hard skills he got. Could've also paralleled Linh's arc and given ground for a deeper friendship between the two of them.
-> Fitz's jealousy arc. Yes Dex is jealous of Fitz, but Fitz has been jealous of Sophie since Exile, it's shown through various scenes that she makes him insecure, not just as the Moonlark but as a Telepath too. Granite saying he sucks should've eaten him alive. And he could've emerged from this whole book more humble, more confident, and more skilled in something unique (i.e., recovering washed memories or learning how to wash memories).
-> Biana's prejudice arc. Biana was the sheltered girl with a ton of false ideas about the world, and Neverseen was the book where she finally stepped outside of her comfort zone. Why is her only "arc" in this book to get over her crush on Keefe and learn how to vanish from the gnomes' eyes? I would've much preferred if Biana was incredibly prejudiced against the gnomes, seeing them as servants beneath her, and the Alluveterre gnomes put her in her place and she learned to put herself in their shoes and see the world from their perspective (leading nicely to her being able to see other Vanishers, just like the gnomes do).
-> Della's anti-Exilium arc. Like mother, like daughter, because Della is also incredibly prejudiced, but against another group: waywards. Have her little speech about Exilium actively represent her entire belief system, and have those beliefs challenged a first time as her own children are banished, a second time as she meets Tam and Linh, then entirely shattered when Sophie confronts her about all seven of them being the rule, not exceptions.
-> Tam and Linh's characters as a whole. I've already talked enough about faceless Tam's introduction and how his character seemed far more interesting before he revealed he was Asian and Shannon got weird about it. But same goes for Linh to an even larger extent. Linh had enormous potential as a character, yet for a girl whose ability gets tremendously stronger with emotion, she's surprisingly... emotionless? She should've been a mirror for Fitz and Dex, arguably for Keefe as well.
And of course, if we weren't so focused on Sokeefe all the damn time, we could've had more interactions between the rest of the crew. Develop the weaker links in the group:
Biana-Keefe.
Dex-Fitz.
Dex-Keefe.
Biana-Dex.
Biana-Sophie.
Della-everyone.
Tam-everyone.
Linh-everyone.
Aaaand we could've developed more gnomes than just Calla. Given the species a little more variety.
the concept and idea of “you can always start trying to be a better person” is extremely important to me both in media and irl and i continue to be deeply deeply disturbed by the trend on this site pushing that these ideas in media are bad writing or even morally reprehensible
because theyd rather someone stay terrible or just straight up die than become a better person
from a compassionate point of view it’s deeply distressing and from a pragmatic point of view it’s outright frustrating
it’s fucked up.
What is the most important step a man can take?
The next.
I think part of the pushback about this is the idea that, to “redeem” bad people, their victims must first forgive them for unforgivable acts.
This is false. No one is obligated to forgive you. You can learn from your mistakes and become the best, kindest person on earth, and the people you’ve hurt still won’t forgive you, and you’ll have to accept that. And that doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to grow. Because we aren’t just “pure” or “sinful”, we’re complex.
Kotlc Pinterest, hate on me all you want but you will never stop me from loving Fitz Vacker
Neverseen-Fitz and Lodestar-Fitz would kill Legacy-Fitz with a hammer for acting like that.
I find it funny how quickly Shannon had to desperately make Sophitz toxic so Sokeefe could come on top
sophitz confession scene from fitz’s pov save me sophitz confession scene from fitz’s pov save me sophitz confession scene from fitz’s pov
Happy belated 1 year anniversary to this post
saw this meme a while back and saved it, well i FINALLY FOUND IT AGAIN
MARELLA REDECK FANART YAYAYAYAY
fuck, marry, kill: the wound that won’t heal, the past you can’t undo, the ghost that keeps returning
There used to be a lot of activities that took place around a populated area like a village or town, which you would encounter before you reached the town itself. Most of those crafts have either been eliminated in the developed world or now take place out of view on private land, and so modern authors don't think of them when creating fantasy worlds or writing historical fiction. I think that sprinkling those in could both enrich the worlds you're writing in and, potentially, add useful plot devices.
For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.
Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.
They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.
Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.
If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.
If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).
There are so many things that preindustrial people did and would find familiar that we just don't know about now. So much of life was lived out in the open for anyone to see. Make your world busy and loud and colorful!
This is a big reason that I have always loved the Brother Cadfael novels, set in the mid 1100s. Written by Ellis Peters, each book has such a vivid sense of the place and the time period. Many different settings around Shrewsbury are described, along with the people and their various jobs.
I love that kind of world building and would add that many resources were tightly regulated that we don't consider nowadays. Examples are the right to herd your pigs in an oak forest belonging to a specific monastery (saw an example where an altar piece had a carved pig to make sure the claim was known and advertised) or down to which farmers had the right to tree leaves in the fall (shortage of other animal bedding in certain Swiss valleys). The idea of a wilderness in a medieval setting is not what we think.
Great points! Thank you.
Forever recommending A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry as an introductory resource for this! The author is a historian of the ancient mediterranean and he has a lengthy two-part blog post on "lonely cities": how fictional cities tend to look in pseudomedieval fantasy versus how real cities actually worked, specifically how they reshaped the land use for many miles around. Part I, part II, or available read aloud on YouTube here.
If a fantasy world has an ancient tree of wisdom, that means it must also have young trees that are dumb as shit. Just giving terrible advice like, "the evil wizard is kinda hot"'
Motherhood in the Cretaceous Period
Trying to find positive Fitz content on other apps is so hard. Like there’s too many tweens hate dominating the fandom an beyond😭😭
