Discover Top Posts Tagged with #mmari writes

Sucks that in order to get good at something, you have to suck at said thing first.

It's unfair. An attack on me personally. Such bullshit.

@God please patch

#or at least patch it so that the sucking part is more fun #the problem with being a seasoned reader and a novice writer is just how painfully aware you are of just how ass your own writing is #ditto with art #mmari rambles #mmari writes #mmari draws #heck I'll throw in #mmari studies #too #the mortifying ordeal of being known #or rather #the mortifying ordeal of having to confront how low your skill level is #my ocs

Villainess isekai as horror: your identity, your autonomy, your very own body is stolen and puppeteered by some unseen foreign entity. Not only do your loved ones fail to notice the change, they seem to genuinely prefer the copycat over the real you. Your entire existence was overwritten in a matter of seconds, and the worst part is, the world seems objectively better off for it.

#mmari rambles #mmari writes #plot bunnies #writing insp #I'm kind of brainstorming a sort of gothic horror story #told from the perspective of the villainess's sister #aka the only person who notices that their estranged sister was replaced by someone completely different #if I'm allowed to be overambitious I want to tackle themes such as: both modern and victorian era misogyny; what makes one a villainess;#critiques on the more problematic trends and clichés of the genre (misogyny racism colorism classism imperialism etc);#arranged marriages; mental asylums and sanatoriums and medical malpractice #while still staying true to what I think is the emotional core of the genre:#a deeply dissatisfied person who is so desensitized and alienated by their everyday life that they're numb to the fact they're unhappy #escapes the confines of their everyday life #and finds a place and people that they can build genuine human connection ( family; friends; lovers; children) with #my ocs #I mean someone (probably a better writer than me) has most likely already had this idea #but hopefully the hey! two cakes! principle applies here

My pet peeve about Forgotten Realms' Drow lore is that despite being told that Drow Society is this super restrictive, matriarchal society with reversed gender roles, we are rarely shown Drow househusbands. In fact, most of the named male Drow characters are portrayed as either career soldiers or arcane spellcasters. This is explained by saying that drow society, as it revolves around the worship of Lolth, regards arcane spellcasting as far inferior to divine spellcasting of clerics, and that while only women are allowed to have high-ranking positions in their armies like the generals and the lieutenants, the grunts and the footsoldiers are mostly composed of men.

My problem with that is..... One, you can't claim that you're reversing the gender dynamic in your fantasy setting and have what's considered to be "a man's work (derogatory)" in said setting be wizardry and the military, two jobs whose real-world counterparts (academia and the military) are *also* considered "a man's job (complimentary)" and are highly male-dominated fields in the real world, come on.

And two, how has this supposedly super-strict matriarchy sustained itself for so long? We've got this class of abused, oppressed, and very rightfully disgruntled gender, many of whom are a. combat-trained and has to vastly outnumber their female superiors, due to how the whole "military hierarchy" thing works, or b. can shoot fireballs and blow up stuff with their minds. Meanwhile, the Drow women mostly stick to religion and politics and lounging about in boudoirs in fantasy dominatrix gear. So what's stopping the men from staging a rebellion? Not to belittle the power that religion and politics hold in a pseudo-feudalistic medieval pastiche society, but I always assumed the reason the church and the crown was so powerful in medieval Europe was because they controlled the military!*

(*don't quote me on this, I'm not a history major)

Look, I don't mind depictions of fantasy bigotry in fiction (I quite enjoy them actually!), and it's possible to reverse the oppressed and the privileged class in a fictional society so that's opposite from real life in a way that it still poses pertinent questions about real-world oppression in our real-world society (e.g. Egalia's Daughters) , but I don't think Forgotten Realms quite manages to do that. If anything, it's weirdly reminiscent of that "feminists don't *actually* want to work jobs, they just want the men to do all the work for them and for women to reap ALL the benefits" antifeminist rhetoric ☹️

(To be clear, I'm not saying that Ed Greenwood and R.A. Salvatorre are misogynists, just that they either were confused about how sexism actually operates in the real world, or that they had some unexamined biases and hangups surrounding feminism that they perhaps failed to address.)

I don't mind fantasy bigotry in my fiction, but I want my fantasy bigotry to be realistic or at least believable, y'know?

#I could be totally off the mark in my analysis here #because again I'm not a history major #and the required learning on history for STEM students for Korean students in my year was in shambles #(seriously I don't think I've taken a single history class in high school)#and also it's been a while since I've read the Drizzt books #so I could be misremembering. feel free to correct me!#but just...#I think that most of the ''default evil races'' in forgotten realms and just D&D in general #sorely needs an overhaul and prefer to homebrew them in my games #in the drow's case I either skip the matriarchy part and make them a strict caste-based militaristic society #or keep the matriarchy but keep the military and the spellcasting as a ''woman's job''#and relegate the drow men to a mostly domestic/reproductive role #(in the upper classes at least; in drow peasantry the men also has to work #just as in real life working class women have always had to work even outside of domestic labor)#mmari rambles #mmari writes #d&d #tabletop #ttrpg #fantasy #drow society #drow culture #forgotten realms

Yeah yeah yeah yeah self-shipping and oc-insert shipping are valid and all but I don't think enough people realize the joy and the sheer untapped potential in pitting your OCs against your fictional blorbos and both of them immediately deciding the other's vibes are rancid

#oc insert shipping? tired #making your oc instant enemies with light yagami or whatever? endless hours of fun. fun for all ages.#anyway Micah my d&d necromancer would hate the snatcher ahit and percy de rolo criticalrole so much #and them vice versa #they would be constantly pushing each other's trigger points just by existing I would bet #anyway enough about your fictional soulmates #tell me about fictional characters you'd fistfight #mmari rambles #mmari writes #my ocs

There should be writing classes on how to recognize when trying to fix plot holes creates more problems in the pacing and the narrative itself in general, and therefore it's better to just slap on a sticker that says "it's just the genre convention 🤷‍♀️" and let it be.

#as a chronic overthinker / worldbuilding-lover / backstory-maker #I am so so so so very very very bad at this #sometimes it creates fun new ideas I can explore #other times it just bogs down or worse completely collapses the narrative #mmari rambles #mmari writes #my ocs #writing

Being a bilingual writer is like...

When someone congratulates you on a particularly creative metaphor, and you're just sitting there sweating, bc that wasn't a metaphor at all, just a really common figure of speech in another language you speak, and you were too tired and/or lazy to remember the equivalent of it in the language you were writing in, so you just used the direct literal translation of it.

#mmari rambles #mmari writes #okay to rb

First Line Tag

I was tagged by the lovely @souliloquyyy . Thanks for tagging me!

Rules: share the first line! of anything! a chapter, a scene, a conversation, a paragraph! just! the first line! then tag a few folks and pass on the fun!

I’m lazy and lately all I’ve been able to write down has been snippets and conversations, so here, have a conversation between the characters PH and JY from Hyperion, also known as the book that I swear I’ll write someday, just, not right now, you know?

“You built an AI with the potential to choose to kill?”

“Well, the same thing applies to babies, technically speaking, and that doesn’t stop people from having them!”

Tagging @agnesmontague for this ask. And if anyone else want to do this, just go ahead and say I tagged you! Chances are, I probably wanted to tag you but was too shy to do so, anyway.

#mmari writes #mmari rambles #tag #jy #ph #team superscience #hyperion #my ocs

I reblogged that PHM post about how most intelligent species probably call their own species "people" and their planet some variant of "land" or "ground",

But then I thought, what about aquatic species? Or terrestrial species that are extremophiles?

And after giving some thought about it, now I'm obsessed with the idea of an alien species from a desert planet naming said planet their language's equivalent of "Water", because they happen to be an aquatic species and their linguistic shorthand for "habitable surface that we live on" refers to the pockets of water that exist on a planet that's like 70% dry land by surface area.

Basically the inverse of what happened with Earth, lol

#mmari rambles #mmari writes #worldbuilding #sci fi #science fiction #aliens #speculative anthropology