Writing Problem: The Conflict Is Inconsequential, Flash-in-the-Pan

Problem: The Conflict Is Inconsequential, Flash-in-the-Pan

Solution: Many authors struggle to contrive meaningful conflict such that it either shapes or speaks critically to the trajectory of the characters it touches. Conflict is not a consequence or a corollary of scheme or impulse; conflict should develop as the story develops and grow as the character dynamics grow.

Explore character through conflict by reinforcing their goals and their perceptions (of reality), as well as the plausibility of maintaining either. Use conflict to reveal blind spots, biases, or fears. Conflict doesn't narrow the possibility of who characters are, or what the story might convey; conflict opens characters (or readers) to new methodologies, new stakes, and possibly new goals, as a result of enduring or overcoming the fracas in question. Conflict adds depth.

Writing Resources:

Conflict Thesaurus (One Stop for Writers)

Need Compelling Conflict? Choose A Variety of Kinds (Writer's Helping Writers)

How to Draw Readers in Through a Character's Choices (Writers Helping Writers)

Exactly How to Create and Control Tone (September C. Fawkes; ahbwrites)

Are Your Conflicts Significant? (September C. Fawkes)

Tension vs. Conflict (Hint: They Aren't the Same Thing) (September C. Fawkes)

How to Write a Dystopian Story: Our Gide (Jericho Writers)

Plot Conflict: Striking True Adversity in Stories (Now Novel)

How to Use Central Conflict and Drama to Drive Your Novel (Now Novel)

❯ ❯ Adapted from the writing masterpost series: 19 Things That Are Wrong With Your Novel (and How to Fix Them)

deeply refreshing to see someone critical of Swift who also like, genuinely likes her. Like i'm neutral to positive on her, but the online discourse has been absolutely rancid. flipping between "Taylor Swift has never done anything wrong ever and she's a fucking genius" and "Taylor Swift is the worst lyricist of all time and also a bad person" is exhausting, so thank you for like. nuance or something lmao

not to make it serious for a sec but i genuinely think that being able to like things that are bad is really important. like I think that it's an important skill to be able to look at something and see what you personally enjoy about it and then take a step back and acknowledge that objectively it's flawed. and to also be able to acknowledge that liking something isn't necessarily an identity or a moral stance. and i think that fandom space in general could really benefit from more people taking the time to learn how to do that. it's okay to like things that are bad

genuinely p4 fandom outside of tumblr makes u feel like ur living in an alternate reality. You say hey I think u can easily read trans subtext and text in Naoto’s story because the game quite literally talks about transition surgery, and people act like you’re the insane one.

i hope all the terfs looking at my blog rn are able to grab me a beer and maybe make me a sandwich perhaps while they’re at it

@sonofshuwu @faye-after-dark @monsterfucking-research-wizard

for the next 6-8 hours @gwynevere-the-wizard is my pet, any ideas what i should make them do?~

i finally played through the galar chapter of the villain arc in pokémas and it was pretty alright, it at least made me feel kinda vindicated about my stance on rose being a redeemable villain. i will say that i think the chapter would've been stronger if (01) bede was present & played a core role in the plot and (02) oleana switched sides to help rose see that he can't save the future if he keeps going down the same path & tries to do it alone.

maybe one day we'll have trans spaces that don't repackage and heavily reinforce the same body standards that make cis people feel like shit about themselves

Harry Potter & shallow worldbuilding

I probably shouldn't wade into these waters, but once again, I am demonstrating that my self-preservation instincts are poor, and that my family refuse to listen to my rants anymore. [TW: Harry Potter and all that entails].

I was a little confused when I saw the trailer for Hogwarts Legacy (source of ire for me, and many many other people).  I had thought that it was supposed to be set in Victorian England, but honestly, it looked a lot like it was still set in the 1990s (or the early 2000s, the films never came down on exact dates).  Perhaps this is because the movies - upon which all subsequent media has based its design - relied heavily on Victorian and early 20th century design elements.  Think Hogwarts' gothic architecture; the ministry's early London Underground tiles; and the entire interior of Grimmauld Place.  This wasn't in any way a bad thing.  Harry Potter, as a story, made good on a sense of whimsy and old British aesthetics.  The wizarding world, having no need of technology, would not modernise its aesthetics at the same rate as the non-magical world.  It was a design choice that was of great consternation to my mother.  We went to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, she whispered to me 'why do they have wheelie suitcases?  I thought this was set in the 1930s?'

It makes me wonder now, why doesn't the world in Hogwarts Legacy look much different to its predecessor?  I suppose that they are wearing vaguely Victorian clothes, but shouldn't we be looking at some 1700s aesthetics, or is the wizarding world caught in a perpetual loop of Victoriana?

Truth is, the Harry Potter universe has fallen foul of the problem that irks most fantasy universes once they are analysed for too long.  It isn't logically coherent.  Like the history of Westeros, the history of the wizarding world repeats itself perpetually, never looking or behaving especially differently.  In a series of children's books that were focused on the life of one teen, the cracks didn't show.  Sure, Voldemort was in power twice, and before him there was Grindelwald (for all intents and purposes, Voldemort but European).

J.K. Rowling's world building is fine for what it was in the beginning (again, the life of one teen in Britain), or as fine as it could be.  The world was not greatly expansive, but it didn't need to be.  The best parts of it were whimsical and extensions of the cheerier side of Britain.  There was the Knight bus, a purple routemaster.  The entrance to the Ministry of Magic was inside a red phone box, one of the great symbols of British tourism.  The primary setting was a boarding school.  One of the most popular elements is the house system, which is just a more complicated extension of your average school house system.  It is touted as a categorisation of identity, but it obeys all the rules of school houses.  Siblings going into different houses is rare (to the point that it's only mentioned once) because family groups always go into the same house (unless your school just doesn't care about houses).  The bigotry in the series is also British by design.  It ends up being a simplified version of classism, that features more in subtext than text.  This being said, there isn't a great deal of specificity in the world building.  I still don't know where Hermione's home town is.  I only know that her parents are dentists and they like to ski.  Where does Malfoy live, apart from in a manor that has peacocks in the garden?  These are the kind of flaws you notice when you have analysed the story for as long as I have.

The worldbuilding gets thinner the more expansive it gets.  The students from Beauxbatons are more or less French stereotypes, Fleur especially.  Durmstrang is the same, but Bulgarian.  Much has already been said on Rowling's shallow naming conventions (Cho Chang, Kingsley Shacklebolt, and now Sirona Ryan).  Without the crutch of something being British and vaguely quaint, the world loses all of its charm, and all of its logic.

Fantastic Beasts, for some reason, begins in 1920s New York.  Most of the richness of the setting is achieved by production design rather than the script (incidentally, flashbacks set in Hogwarts still manage to look like it's the early 2000s).  Conflict in the story is wrought from an American government that is more anti-muggle than the British equivalent.  If it is allegorical in any way, I do not understand it.  But let's not pretend Rowling's allegory has ever been any good.  Claims that Lupin's lycanthropy was a metaphor for HIV and AIDs only serve to lessen the character.  At best, it's an allegory for general prejudice.  The assertion that Lupin, at the age of six, was attacked by Greyback with the express intention of passing on AIDs, is well, it's dicey.  Rowling might have intended to create an allegory for stigma around 'blood-borne conditions', but failed to consider the extra baggage that that allegory might entail.  

The same is true for Fantastic Beasts, where the nonsense is turned up to twenty.  There's a group of muggles who somehow know about the existence of magic.  They name themselves after Salem, despite the Salem witch trials being appropriate for neither this setting nor this geographic region.  Any commentary on the nature of the Salem witch trials is hardly a commentary on the nature of America at large, but rather a commentary on a single Puritan colony.  Rowling takes pieces of Native American culture for her lore, with no understanding of the cultural legacy at play.

It gets even weirder in the sequels, which zip through countries so fast there's barely any time for worldbuilding.  There's a circus!  Why!  I don't know.

For no reason at all, there's a deer that chooses the outcome of an election.  In a baffling moment, Grindelwald (as played by font of virtue, Johnny Depp) tells a group of wizards that they have to kill muggles because they are going to start a world war.  He is wizarding Hitler, and that isn't a subtle analogy.  In that same scene, Queenie Goldstein, a character heavily coded as Jewish, joins wizard Hitler because he promises her that she will be able to marry her muggle beau.  The man that just gave a speech about killing muggles, is apparently all for marriage equality!  By all means, it doesn't make any sense.  It’s far from being respectful either.

There are of course attempts to make the wizarding world more diverse in Fantastic Beasts, but without any attempt to make these characters more genuine.  There's an Asian woman, but she's Voldemort's snake and she's going to be beheaded by Neville in a few decades.  The second film has Zoe Kravitz!  Yay!  But she's part of a needlessly convoluted tale in which a powerful white man hypnotises a black woman to be his wife, and then she dies?  I don't know what to make of that.  It's not good representation, and by gum it isn't good storytelling!  The Fantastic Beasts trilogy has all the perspective of Emily in Paris.

Hogwarts Legacy can hardly improve upon this worldbuilding, because it comes from an unstable foundation.  I might have been more understanding had the game been set in say, not Hogwarts, or even a Hogwarts that was fundamentally different from the Hogwarts that we already know.  The worldbuilding remains as shallow as it ever was, and with all the bigotry retained.  Of course, the main story is based on a piece of anti-semitic folklore, expanded upon in the books, and even more so in the game.  The problem being that Hogwarts Legacy can only make sales based on nostalgia.  It can't be that different from the world of the novels, because no one is bold enough to alter the world and alienate people who want nothing more than to experience their childhoods all over again.  As such, the shallow worldbuilding is laid bare over and over again, to the point that it is no longer a setting in service of a series of novels.  It now has to be a real, coherent world, which it fails at.  We have to examine the nature of Hogwarts houses, and the mechanics of time turners (thank you Cursed Child), and the reasons why house elves don't want their freedom.  

They'll never get freedom anyhow, because Hermione's attempts at activism are used for comedy.  The world at the end of Deathly Hallows is not greatly different to the world at the beginning.  Voldemort is dead, but we are not assured of any big changes.  The world returns to what it was.  For all that The Legend of Korra may not have lived up to its predecessor, it made an effective attempt at showing that the world had been altered by the actions of our heroes.  In the Cursed Child, nothing is different.  The story spends all of its time looking to the past and imagining increasingly unlikely alternate timelines (Cedric turns evil?  Ron marries Padma Patil?).  Hogwarts Legacy does not set up the world of Harry Potter, nor does it fundamentally alter it.  The status quo is preserved.  Like Westeros, it cannot change. The new game does nothing with the world, and acts in its detriment.  Anyhow, it’s not a good work of fantasy.  J.K. Rowling loves the status quo.   That much is evident.  Don’t buy this game!  Support trans people instead.

i think abt shinpei in 23/24 so often. the contrast between the childish behaviour and the literal murder attempt is so insane. it lives in my brain rent free. he literally acts like a child trying to justify a loophole to a parent. but the loophole is abt drugging and murder.

good fucking lord i hate men. i omitted the subsequent asks i got from that anon because they included some graphic information that is not my fucking business to know. don't ever try to use me as your makeshift internet therapist i will laugh in your fucking face

chun tao and leonid crazy situationship yaoi btw. if anyone cares

Do you ever wonder how exactly there came to be such a transphobia problem in British feminism?

Not really. Pretty straightforward IMO.

Britain is highly patriarchal and pretty much just an oligarchy at this point, given the majority of people in charge were born rich and went to one of a handful of private schools. Fair amount of them are also journalists to some degree, or work with journalists on the regular, so when those pesky feminists wanted to dismantle their little boy's club, they stoked up a culture war to give them a new target.

A great example is the NHS. There's been issues lately with supply of oestrogen. I have a former classmate who is a raging transphobe and in her fifties. She's constantly on twitter talking about how the reason she can't get her hormone replacement therapy for her menopause is that trans women are taking all the oestrogen. Her source? A right wing newspaper linked to half of the current PM's cabinet. The real issue? The Tories have been systematically gutting and selling off the NHS since they came into power, which is causing shortages now, because the Tories want the NHS to fail so they can say 'see? NHS doesn't work. Time to privatise the whole thing' and make a mint doing it.

So basically, the minority we should actually be worried about - the 1%ers who have had everything handed to them on a silver platter all their lives, including some of the highest powers this land has to give, and are using that power to take our country apart for profit in the houses of parliament - have convinced a decent portion of feminists that a minority with basically no power is the root of all evil.

And so, using their institutional power (being the law-making elites) and their influential power (clickbait articles they've usually written themselves), they've convinced a portion of feminists that the upper-class, born-rich, bred for rule, blue-blooded bullies who thrive off the patriarchy aren't the problem, trans people are, and so the sect of feminists they've successfully turned against trans people are now fighting to uphold the patriarchy on behalf of the Conservatives and calling it feminism.

.

Did you earn a gold star today? Now there's going to be a new way to prove it to yourself with this gold star pin #kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gold-stars23/adulting-gold-star-pins

Dex is awesome, and I would love it if we could make this project of the heart come to life.

broken record. (it's your fault)

You will find solstice in the stories of people which lives much worse than your own,

Knowing that despite your efforts you will never have a reason.

You are flawed,

and clumsy,

you are the problem.

And you are unable to find a cause.

Because you, are the cause.

Icarus chose to fly towards the sun, and so did you.

Had our 3rd agility class (technically the 4th) and it was it actually good!

Did a pre class hike with Forte again and I feel like that's definitely the right move.

There were only 3 of us instead of 6 this week so we each got more time to actually train. The instructor was far less snappish. I think having more one on one time allowed them see each student is listening/applying feedback. I could be totally wrong but that's what it seemed like to me.

We crated the dogs in between turns and I think I'm the only student who liked this. Forte is very familiar with the crate in general but he's also super used to being in the crate while watching other dogs do things. For him it's a chill out cue and I think watching the other dogs perviously was loading him and contributed to him much more quickly tipping over threshold arousal wise. I wasn't initially pleased because it meant I wouldn't be able to train through that. But since it ultimately helped Forte keep his brains mostly in his head I'm for it.

On a side note, I think it gained me some favor with the instructor. It was very apparent that Forte is comfortable in the crate. At one point another dog was right at his door barking at him and Forte looked at me, I told him good boy, and he remained laying down. The instructor seemed impressed with how at ease he was and told me every Belgian they know would have blown up at that.

We did two jumps in a row in the ring to start and Forte did not zoom off at all. In fact I only had to recall him once because he automatically returned to me every other time. The one time he didn't he went to the instructor to get some love. They indulged him a little and said "he's really just a big, sweet baby" which is facts. I recalled him and he pranced over to me no issue.

Next we worked on the teeter and I think this is where Forte really stood out in a good way. He pivoted up onto the contact perfectly each time. The instructor adjusted how far down they were holding the end and after three reps let it be all the way up. Forte never hesitated when it moved underneath him nor was he bothered by the sound of it banging down. Also it made me really happy to hear the instructor tell the other two students that it's fine to take the teeter slow because it is a scary obstacle for most dogs. (I was first in the cue.)

Last we introduced weaves. Honestly I struggled more than any other dog or person. The instructor kept telling me to stand in the channel but the way the weaves (2 sets of 2 by 2s) were positioned it wasn't clear to me what that meant. The instructor ended up physically moving me to the right place. They did say "sorry, but you weren't getting it" and I responded "no, I wasn't so thank you for being more direct in showing me". I find vague directions, especially literal (like stand there then turn right etc) directions really hard to follow unless someone makes it clear where exactly I stand, when I turn, etc. I think they thought I'd be offended and were surprised when I wasn't.

At the end of class the instructor told me Forte is special and it's not just because they have a bias in favor of Belgians. They noted that he's very much a teenager but he has good foundations and that it's clear he's starting to understand what being here means.

Some notes I don't know where else to fit in:

I doubled down in my self appointed role as class cheerleader. I made it a point to compliment both my classmates on something specific after each of their turns. They didn't reciprocate but one did say thanks and that I made them feel better. So I'm definitely sticking with this.

For the teeter the instructor had me help the other two. I stood at the end of the teeter and rewarded the dogs for being fully on the contact and then led them off. It was a two person job for their dogs because both of them were nervous and needed help side loading on it and then being brought off in controlled way. The instructor mentioned that I was good at being an assistant.

I'm still not really enjoying this instructor's teaching style. But I do think the more we practice in this environment the more Forte is keeping his head. Also I'm not sure he actually enjoys agility just yet. But he does like learning new things and doing a team thing with me so I'm counting it as a win.