Weird Rat Writes

Writing Things and Stuff Since... a While Ago.

[thelunaticfeather]

Dolly Jean Venture would be a he/him lesbian and Rusty would not get it but still push super science on them because "Well, girls can super science too and somebody needs to continue the Venture legacy" and then Dolly Jean would take her wife's name because of course she would.

[weirdratwrites]

Honestly, the premise of the Hidden feels like it should be more common than it actually is? Like, it's something I noticed when I started reading The Game at Carousel, but there's a lot of premises that, when I think of them, feel more present than what they actually are?

The Hidden Premise: Unethical scientists do human testing to develop some sort of super soldier or otherwise next-step in human evolution. A lot of death happens in the process because "building a better human" requires a lot of experimentation. The closes thing to a success they get is insane, murderous, and cannibalistic. It escapes, and the game itself is a team of human players acting as a special forces security squad (ala an MTF from SCP) versus an agile, nearly invisible target with a one-hit kill ability.

And, like, the human experimentation bit is pretty common, I think. But I feel like it more often than not is used as the premise of the horror than the things they're working on getting the run of the joint.

"Person uncovers unethical human experiments and must escape detection or join in on the experiment." feels a lot more common than "Unethical human experimentation results in an apex that proceeds to hunt down its creators."

Like, the closest thing I can think of to the latter is Hollow Man. Otherwise, it's Jurassic Park all the way down.

And it's a shame, because The Hidden would be a great horror movie, IMO.

[weirdratwrites]

Need me a Christmas movie where there's a character who says they hate Christmas (for reasons that are never given, but is pretty clearly the result of a dysfunctional childhood) that doesn't ever stop hating Christmas.

And they can't be one of those characters that makes it everyone else's problem that they hate Christmas, either.

Like, they have to be perfectly willing to go along with all the Christmas bullshit because the people they love want to do it. It's just that they, personally, dislike the holiday and would probably just be watching movies and jerking off in an undecorated apartment if it weren't for having people around them that loves the holiday. And they'd be content with that.

They're not bringing the mood down, or being cartoonishly antagonistic about it, they just wouldn't fucking bother if not for the people around them. And it drives the people in their life ducking mad for some reason. Like, it's pretty clear that, if other people didn't keep commenting on it, or trying to rope them into it, it wouldn't even really be brought up. It'd just... come to pass.

The story follows the typical urban fantasy plot of, like, having to help Santa save Christmas. That character does help, does have fun, does experience wonder throughout the movie, and successfully saves Christmas - maybe is even instrumental to it being saved.

Then it's near the end of the movie, and Santa asks that character if they still hate Christmas, and that character just goes, "Oh, yeah. Fuck this holiday." And gets a small, sad smile in return, and a little box with a little gift inside.

Then, when everyone is freaking out again about how that character can still hate the holiday, and how they did so much for something they hate, Santa steps in and corrects those fuckers for once. Like, "Hey, you all were very lucky to have great Christmases as you grew up. Not everyone does. Making a big deal out of it, especially when someone isn't being rude about it, says more about your character than theirs."

Then Santa and that character make out or some shit. I dunno.

[too-many-blorbos]

Soulmates as a horror concept.

You WILL love this person. It doesn't matter who you loved before; any feelings you had, any promises you made, they will become inconsequential as soon as you lock eyes with the stranger Fate has picked for you.

There's no way to stop it.

There's no way to say "no."

You will meet someone and with a single glance, both of you will become someone new, someone who's now bound to this stranger whether you like it or not, want it or not.

Trapped in a dance together until the day you die.

[weirdratwrites]

Imagining a Mechsploitation setting where there’s effectively 3 or 4 kinds of pilots (depends on how you want to count them). Not treading any new ground here, I don’t think, but I like what I’m cooking.

Basically everyone starts out as a plucky Shonen Mecha Pilot while they’re in training. Then you graduate to being a Grade 1 or Grade 2 pilot. Grade 1s can also be promoted to Grade 2, but that’s rare and it makes for some interesting dichotomies between the two kinds of graduates.

Grade 1s are pretty much every Real Robot Military Fic you’ve ever read, with Hard Men doing Hard Things, typically While Hard. They’re all riding around in highly conforming mechs that die in droves compared to Grade 2s - effectively, mobile steel coffins. You get broken down by the grind until you die or are retired for one reason or another. Basically, either the Mobile Workers from IBO, or the generic Knightmare Frames from Code Geass (both, actually, these guys get different mechs for different purposes cause they aren’t special enough to get good all-rounders).

Grade 2s, meanwhile, get the Good Shit. They get highly customized mecha in any shape or size they can want, and enough armor around their cockpit that it’s a long line of extremely bad luck that’ll see them dead. Gimmicky robots - giant dogs, giant ballerinas, magical girls, and so much more and so much weirder. They can customize their uniforms, their suits, their branding. They’re the fucking NBA superstars of warfare. As long as they stay out of enemy hands? They’re living in the lap of luxury as, effectively, high-performance athletes.

Until they wind up in enemy hands. Then, that special… something that made them so appealing as Grade 2s? It comes to bite them in the ass. It’d be a waste to let them rot in a PoW camp until whatever the current conflict is is over, or to kill them outright.

Better to Turn them. Hand them off to some high-functioning sociopath in the Special Warfare Division and not think too hard about what you’re subjecting another human being to. Try not to stare too much the next time you see them, either broken beyond recognition or so disturbingly devoted to their “Handler” it makes you shudder.

You’ve read up on what treatments need to go into decommissioning someone that’s Turned. At the minimum? A temporary lobotomy while they pick through the MMI’s memory banks to figure out as much as they can about the enemy, then months of intense gene therapies to re-write the brain to as close to a pre-Turned state as possible, and then months more of psychotherapy to help them cope with what they remember, and what might’ve changed about them in the time they were… “away”.

[weirdratwrites]

They should make Scrubs, but for an old folks home, and then have a "here's what night shift's up to" episode.

And, the entire show, the daylight staffer MC keeps trying to connect with a midnight staffer, or something, and cracking jokes at them that they just huff at.

And it's, like, 20 minutes of people pissing around at the duty station. Not even entertaining pissing around, like, doing CE's and filling reports.

Then the last two minutes are a Full Code resident with dementia - who you've come to adore over several scenes - having the singularly most gut wretching passing in the entirety of the show.

Then, the daylight staffer who's the MC comes in all chipper and shit and cracks a really bad joke that the midnight staffer just rolls their eyes at, like always.

[weirdratwrites]

Digging the idea of a pair of immortals in a constant-and-incredibly-toxic cycle of getting together for a few years or decades before divorcing for a few decades or centuries.

And I'm not talking "Well, we're immortal. So us separating for a bit doesn't matter that much."

I'm talking a messy fucking divorce. The kind of divorce that would wind up on a true crime podcast in any other circumstance.

Like, centuries or millennia old issues that can't be resolved properly, and resentment built up over dozens of long-term relationships, occasionally interspersed with trysts that turn into hot-and-fast situationships and dating. Shit that happened in Pompeii and Crete being brought up in an argument over dishes in the 1910s and boiling over into being the cause of WW1, then a series of flings throughout the proxy wars over communism.

And not in the "we're supposed to be enemies, and keep running into each other on opposite sides of conflicts, but I honestly find you rather endearing" way that you'd find in Good Omens.

[weirdratwrites]

This is a Pro-Filler household. If you can't get behind seeing the principal cast go furniture shopping, or swimming at the beach with watermelon a eating contest, or having an episode that's a faux-D&D session, then I'm afraid you're not welcome.

And if you think content that was in the original work but involved character interaction or explanations on key systems in the world, but didn't necessarily advance the central plot, counts as Filler... Well, we're a good, ROB-fearing family, and that just won't be tolerated.

[weirdratwrites]

Wanna write a slasher horror story set in the trenches of WW1, with the villain being a werewolf that represents the unending hunger of the war machine, as well as war's indiscriminate nature.

Need at least one scene where hungry soldiers (ideally, young men so as to symbolize nationalism) pillage some sheep, and one scene set in both regular fog as well as the fog of a chemical weapon attack. The latter will, obviously, be purely suspense, while the former is a scene with a death in it.

[prokopetz]

The thing I love about the "why so serious?" line is that it works for every iteration of the Joker, but each of them would mean something different by it. I want you to picture Batman (1966) Joker delivering the line with that exaggerated "buh" expression Romero likes to put on as though he's genuinely shocked at Batman's reaction to his antics, versus Batman: The Animated Series (1992) Joker dropping a "why so serious, Batsy?" with Hamill's smug, almost sensual sneer.

[lonewolf23k]

1989's Tim Burton Joker would say the line in a casual, dismissive manner when confronted with Batman.

[prokopetz]

Nicholson was a master of that faintly exasperated affect that makes it seem like you're the one imposing upon him, no matter what fuckshit his character is getting up to, and he would 100% deploy it for that line.

[weaver-z]

Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival 

[thatbassistbitch]

please elaborate

[weaver-z]

Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.

[roach-works]

one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong. 

but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.

there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today. 

[jackawful]

This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.

You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.

There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.

[yellbug]

hey when you make posts, i just want you to know, thou/thee/thy/thine/ye are like he/you(object)/your/yours/you(subject) okay? "thou art wearing shoes," "i will wear shoes for thee," okay?

you say thine if the next word starts with a vowel and thy if the next word starts with a consonant and they both mean "your" so "thine own shoes," "thy shoes," okay?

and ye means you and refers to the subject of a sentence, "ye members of the brotherhood of shoes," okay? you need this information to create better knight yaoi. i'm personally more interested in nun yuri but we are a community

[romanceyourdemons]

i love when settings have a place called Evil City or something and the citizens are all campy villains in flamboyant little outfits. and it’s just a functional city with a mayor and taxes and cafes, it’s just your barista has a giant spider on her head and you’re unsure if it’s a decoration or a pet or if it’s mind controlling her and this very nice cappuccino was made by a telepathic spider

[prokopetz]

Self-insert prompt: our heroes have journeyed to a derelict space station or underwater research base in order to retrieve an object, substance or piece of data that’s needed to avert a world-ending catastrophe. In spite of the facility ostensibly having been abandoned for decades, when the airlock finally cycles open you’re there to greet them. What the fuck are you doing there, and how does it relate to their mission?

[weirdratwrites]

New favorite robot girl design concept just dropped. Almost reminds me of a gag out of Nichijou or OPM:

Credit to @Kichii on pixiv because we don't support Twitter in this house. Link in alt-text.

[weirdratwrites]

New favorite genre is non-SI, non-Isekai fiction where the main character is aware of the genre or story concept they're a part of.

The main examples I've found so far - again, barring stories where it's like "i got sucked into this game I'm playing/story I'm reading and know all the best decisions for a good-end" - are:

I’m the Protagonist of a Harem Manga, but I’m Gay So Every Day Is Hell

A World Where Everything Definitely Becomes BL vs. the Man Who Definitely Doesn’t Want to Be in a BL

; and,

All of Humanity Is Yuri Except Me.

[weirdratwrites]

Moral imperative to turn things made by shitty people into allegories of the things they hate.

Danny Phantom? His clone is biologically female. He's male. Pick which direction they're going. He transforms into something his parents hate and want to vivisect, and who exists in secret as an entire culture.

Timantha Turner? I've met an NB trans-femme that legally changed their name to Puppy. Timantha can have her name and her t4t relationship with Troy Tang.

Harriet Potter? Just go read A Skirt's Not So Bad After All. Fuck Joan.