📚 writer craft questions meme ✍️|| @ashendivinity || accepting
😩 — which trope do you struggle with even though you love it?
Answered here. But another trope I struggle with the most, even though I love it, is writing Hanzo - Scorpion - as straight-up evil.
I can’t do it. Every time I try, it feels dishonest to who he is.
Hanzo was wronged, manipulated, used. His rage didn’t come from cruelty or ambition; it was forged out of loss and grief, sharpened by people who knew exactly how to weaponize his strengths and his flaws. His tunnel-vision focus, his stubbornness, his unyielding sense of honor - those were never signs of villainy to me. They were the very traits that made him exploitable.
Even as Scorpion, he isn’t evil in my eyes. He’s an anti-hero at his core. He’s brutal, yes. Violent, absolutely. But his violence has direction. It has reason. He doesn’t delight in destruction for its own sake - he acts because he believes he must, because he’s loyal to a fault, because he clings to what little certainty he has left when everything else has been ripped away.
Writing him as a villain flattens him. It ignores the tragedy that defines him. It erases the fact that so much of what he’s done was shaped by lies, manipulation, and the relentless pressure to become a weapon rather than a man.
I love villain tropes. I love moral decay, corruption arcs, the slow slide into darkness. But with Hanzo, I always stop short. I can push him to the edge. I can let him cross lines. I can let him lose control.
What I can’t do is strip him of his humanity and call it evil.
Because to me, Hanzo isn’t a monster - he’s a man who survived one.
💭 — what’s a line or scene you’re secretly very proud of?
I don’t think there’s a single line or scene - it’s the accumulation of all of it. And yes, I’m proud of everything I write as Hanzo. Not because it’s flawless, but because it’s his. I’ve written him far beyond what canon ever bothered to give him, shaped him through moments of tenderness, fury, restraint, and grief until his voice lives in my hands without effort.
At this point, I can place him anywhere - any era, any setting, any quiet domestic moment or violent crossroads - and he still thrives. He still sounds like himself. His honor bends but never breaks; his anger simmers instead of consuming him; his love, when it exists, is devastatingly sincere. That didn’t come from copying canon. It came from listening to him long enough (seven years and ongoing) that he started speaking back.
So no, it doesn’t feel like tooting my own horn. It feels earned. I’m proud that I understand him deeply enough to let him breathe outside the narrow confines he was given. I’m proud that I can trust him in my writing - trust that he will remain Hanzo Hasashi no matter where I throw him.
🧵 — how do you weave emotion into your scenes?
I weave emotion into my scenes by letting it come from two places at once.
Sometimes it’s mine. I borrow from my own memories, my own fears, the moments that still sit heavy in my chest even when I pretend they don’t. I don’t copy them directly - I translate them. The ache becomes tension in a pause. The panic becomes a hand that won’t stop shaking. The grief becomes silence where words should be. Writing lets me say the things I never had language for at the time, and I give those feelings to my characters because they can carry them when I can’t.
Other times, I reach for Hanzo’s canon like a wound that never fully closed. His losses, his rage, his guilt - they’re already there, raw and unresolved. NRS may have rushed past them, but I don’t. I linger. I ask what it cost him to survive. I imagine the nights after the battles, the moments no one witnessed, the control it takes for him not to burn everything down again. When I write him, I’m not inventing pain - I’m listening to what the canon implies and letting it breathe.
Most of the time, the emotion comes from where those two things overlap. My trauma gives me empathy; Hanzo’s history gives me structure. I don’t force it onto the page. I let it seep in through small choices - what he notices, what he avoids, where his thoughts stall. Emotion, for me, isn’t about dramatic speeches. It’s about restraint. It’s about what’s held back until it finally cracks.
That’s how the scenes stay honest. I’m not just writing what happens. I’m writing what it feels like to survive it.
