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I'm reading The Sun Also Rises. What does TV Tropes have to say about it?quote:Jake in particular carries the Symbolism Ball: he sustained an injury in the war that makes him unable to boner  quote:Cohn, on the other hand, still clings to those old values, which is why nobody likes him. Meanwhile, Brett, whose sexually liberated exterior hides a history of Domestic Abuse, furthers the emasculation imagery as a Femme Fatale who uses sex to protect herself... But maybe we're starting to read too much into this. Ask the Hemingway scholars if we are. Yeah, slow down, Harold Bloom. No need to spend more than five seconds thinking about something. Just tell us who's the Tsundre and who's the Woobie and call it a day.
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Feb 5, 2014 16:20
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Darth Walrus posted:No, it's pretty consistent with a troperish surface reading of fiction. Smart people use a more varied vocabulary, so therefore the more long words you add, the smarter your writing becomes. I guess it's sort of like budding fantasy writers aiming for Robert Howard or J. R. R. Tolkein and ending up with The Eye of Argon and stuff like "stygian clouds of charcoal ebony".
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Feb 5, 2014 16:21
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Penny Paper posted:Well, what I do is highlight the crappy/"needs improvement" parts (or color them in something other than black) and save my rough draft as a "read-only" file so it can't be edited. Then I open a new file, and start from there. I just have the original file in a small window in the bottom left of the screen and do my editing in a copy in the bottom right. And then the browser running across the top half and ugh my screen just looks like a jumble of crap (works, though). Metal Loaf posted:I guess it's sort of like budding fantasy writers aiming for Robert Howard or J. R. R. Tolkein and ending up with The Eye of Argon and stuff like "stygian clouds of charcoal ebony". If you ignore the spurting blood and gutted entrails and ice blue eyes smoldering in wrath and every mighty-thewed protagonist being REH himself, Howard actually had a very poetic language (colours, moods, nature, etc). Emulating Lovecraft, though, is a recipe for disaster.
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Feb 5, 2014 17:01
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Darth Walrus posted:No, it's pretty consistent with a troperish surface reading of fiction. Smart people use a more varied vocabulary, so therefore the more long words you add, the smarter your writing becomes. There is also the thing about using an individual voice for every character. If your evil emperor talks the same as a peasant, or if your poet uses the same words to describe a city as your battle-hardened soldier, you are a bad writer. I have no problem with a less educated character using simpler words. Hell, you can do a shitton of characterization with just the way a character talks.
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Feb 5, 2014 17:16
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ArchangeI posted:There is also the thing about using an individual voice for every character. If your evil emperor talks the same as a peasant, or if your poet uses the same words to describe a city as your battle-hardened soldier, you are a bad writer. I have no problem with a less educated character using simpler words. Hell, you can do a shitton of characterization with just the way a character talks. Well yeah, but that requires actual real world experience listening to people talk. Easier just to write everyone like An Anime.
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Feb 5, 2014 17:30
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Incoherence posted:It's like reading off the author's list of personal hangups: women, religion, getting bullied at school... quote:A pity what happened when Gavin Shayde attacked and killed all his friends and gave a badly wounded Justin a sanity destroying reason you suck speech highlighting the fact he consciously tried to copy Matthew, including dying his previously darker hair lighter at the front.
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Feb 5, 2014 18:28
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Cooked Auto posted:There are times I wish word editors had a way to show documents side by side so I could just glance at the old text while rewriting it almost from scratch whenever I'm wholly unsatisfied with the stuff I write.
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Feb 5, 2014 18:36
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Finisher1 posted:Well yeah, but that requires actual real world experience listening to people talk. Easier just to write everyone like An Anime. I don't envy someone who wants to write professionally and has severe social phobias.
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Feb 5, 2014 19:47
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Lovecraft managed. 
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Feb 5, 2014 19:58
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Also Thomas Ligotti. Though in their cases, they made their work largely about their phobias, and while they are praised, the actual quality of their writing is often disputed.
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Feb 5, 2014 20:05
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SodomyGoat101 posted:Lovecraft managed. He was a crap writer, though. There's a reason Tropers like him.
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Feb 5, 2014 20:05
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Penny Paper posted:I thought I was the only one who did that. It's kinda odd at times to just go through an old document and then just idly start making changes to sentences that you suddenly realize sounded way off. Penny Paper posted:Well, what I do is highlight the crappy/"needs improvement" parts (or color them in something other than black) and save my rough draft as a "read-only" file so it can't be edited. Then I open a new file, and start from there. Yeah that's probably a thing I should do. Although in this case with a story I finished this week almost all of it beyond one point would just be in "Redo this" colour.  It should also be noted I am way too critical about the stuff I write. More that necessary really. Sham bam bamina! posted:You can have the old document open in one window and another window for the rewrite. Windows 7 and 8 (and Vista?) even "snap" windows to fill half of the screen when you drag them to the sides, just for stuff like that. Oh. Wasn't aware of that or probably just forgotten about it.
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Feb 5, 2014 20:08
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Random Stranger posted:Let's see how far I get with the winner.... Try number five, at first glance it looks a lot...worse. The roads began to darken... posted:The roads began to darken, and lamps on the walkway lit up. The rising moon shone thru the boutique’s windows. The cloths behind them were flashed with the moon’s pale light, and lit even more by the headlights above them. quote:Mannequins of different skin hues and skin body shapes were posed in different ways. quote:Draped on them were different clothes in almost every color from deep black to bright, fiery red. Among the mannequins and their clothes, was a dark red sign in a fancy font, italicized in black ink. “Come, and help us greet summer with some new clothes in our Greeting Summer Sale. From 10:00AM to 10:00PM.” It’s smooth letters imploring customers to take advantage of the stores late-night sale. quote:Lora tightly held on to her money and excitement. She had waited all day for this, eagerly waiting all day to visit the store, using the money she’d saved all year. She walked up the store’s steps, and opened the doors. Slowly walked in, taking in the sight of the large store, with the bright and occasionally dull colors. Many of the “hottest, sexiest” styles were also well on display. Still, nice to see the subject isn't farfetched or bogged down with inane details. This seems a lot more like the writing of someone who is just starting. It gets better as you get further in.
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Feb 5, 2014 22:37
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quote:The rising moon shone thru Are you loving kidding me.
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Feb 5, 2014 22:56
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Still needs some major editing. It did get better as it progressed, but the expository dumps about her appearance and family issues were really out of place.
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Feb 5, 2014 23:01
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Metal Loaf posted:I guess it's sort of like budding fantasy writers aiming for Robert Howard or J. R. R. Tolkein and ending up with The Eye of Argon and stuff like "stygian clouds of charcoal ebony". Some authors, like Clark Ashton Smith or China Mieville, can absolutely pull off a verbose, highly descriptive style and use words like "stygian" or "antediluvian" without sounding like wankers. But it requires that you know exactly how to use those words and what effect you want to have on the reader, rather than just plopping them in there because that's what smart people do.
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Feb 5, 2014 23:47
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Oh hey, what if my new story had, as its villain, one of those FILTHY JOCKS? (remember i've excised like five pages of loving tropes) Name: Marcus Recht Age: 17 Personality: Marcus starts out as a rather simple villain for the fact that, as the RP starts in high school, he is the Jerk Jock Big Brother Bully to his younger brother Galen. Marcus was always peering over his little brother's shoulder, picking on him and his friends, and often gloated about his superior popularity with ladies. The two never really got along - Marcus feels his little brother got special treatment due to being a fraternal twin to their sister, and a lot of appreciation from their parents. Despite his sports achievements, Marcus feels his little brother is treated specially, and is never called out for any of his misdeeds, while Marcus gets told to apologize. This all gets worse once the superpowers enter the equation - Marcus and Galen quickly began antagonizing each other more violently, and they injured Galen's twin sister during a crossfire. Both brothers blamed one another for that. Marcus, feeling that Galen's little "superhero club" was the very height of hypocrisy formed an opposing group of people related to people in Galen's club, mostly people who, similar to him, were bullies before their relatives became powerful. That alone speaks of how Marcus and his allies feel they've been left behind, that they feel alone, vengeful, and forsaken. While Galen's heroism got him a medal, Marcus' importance and relevance in the eyes of his parents and community dwindled, to such an extent he was told "why can't you be more like your brother" by the girl he liked and his parents, both in one day. These people, Marcus decided, are going through what I am - we can get through this together. Due to their high social standing in the school, they decide to take on names that reflect this, purely because Galen's group started using codenames. It did not take long at all for them to start becoming much more conventionally and dangerously villainous. Even though Marcus himself is pretty bad now - he has killed - he still feels very concerned that the group he created is out of control - even he was horrified when Solar King flash fried a police officer for no reason other than "I could, therefore, I did." Even though Marcus is an arrogant individual, it is clear through his actions that this is a defense mechanism designed to protect an uneven self image, and this ties into the above in that even though he acts as one of the leaders, due to being among the Founding Trio, he's not really that sure he's got this whole thing under control. Abilities: His power, like that of his brother, is Shock and Awe, and while his brother is more pin point and precise, Marcus is destructive, powerful and raging. Its hard for him to use an attack that isn't going to cause a lot of damage. He can even create a humongous shield using his powers that functions like an electromagnetic shield. He can even use an EM Pulse to take out technology, or a similar attack to shut down a human brain. Weaknesses: He has utterly poor impulse control, and at one point when trying to stun someone and stop them from shooting an ally, he instead reduced them to a charred, smouldering corpse. His temper and issues tend to take control, and reason leaves the building the moment his sister is brought up. His own minor It's All About Me complex also gets him into trouble, as his first concern is his rivalry with little brother. Goals: Galen, you hurt my little sister, prepare to be beaten up like old school / die / see your group destroyed. Motivation: He feels he was never appreciated, and that despite being very talented in a lot of sports, he was appreciated for that alone, and not for his personality. He feels Lonely at the Top, and the superpower thing and the dire injury inflicted on their sister has exacerbated his issues. He feels that heroes are given carte blanche to do as they please, and its the job of "a villain" such as himself to drag them back down to Earth. Role in the story: Anti-Villain / Anti-Hero. He fluctuated between these with alarming regularity.
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Feb 5, 2014 23:50
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"Alarming regularity" is one of those phrases that I see tropers use so much, I don't think I could see it anywhere else any more without being reminded of it.
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Feb 5, 2014 23:53
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How can regularity be alarming? That's a total oxymoron.
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Feb 6, 2014 00:17
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Kaiser Mazoku posted:How can regularity be alarming? That's a total oxymoron. Isn't alarming regularity the plot of Groundhog Day?
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Feb 6, 2014 00:20
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Kaiser Mazoku posted:How can regularity be alarming? That's a total oxymoron. When something bad starts happening too often, or happens so often it starts to be bad? It's overused, sure, and Tropers are bad at everything, but it makes sense. "The smell of burnt flesh from the neighbors' house wafted over with alarming regularity."
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Feb 6, 2014 00:37
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Some loving Troper posted:the RP starts in high school So we've got walls of text, high school, and roleplaying. Now we just need to find a shoehorned anime reference or two and it'll be like a microcosm for TvTropes.
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Feb 6, 2014 01:26
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Prepare to be beaten up! Or, y'know, killed. Whichever really.
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Feb 6, 2014 04:58
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Oh boy, TVTropes does episodes recaps:quote:Recap: Adventure Time S 5 E 24 Another Five Short Graybles Yes, yes, this will definitely help me hone my skills as a writer.
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Feb 6, 2014 08:07
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Kaiser Mazoku posted:How can regularity be alarming? That's a total oxymoron. The alarming bit is that it happens so regularly. Like, "Her kids get hit with alarming regularity," means that her kids get hit so often that its alarming. Tropers overuse it because tropers overuse everything, but its a valid phrase. Content: Some guy posted a thread in worldbuilding about a 'Genre-Savvy Empire'. I can't be assed reading the whole thing, but on the whole its not a completely awful setting for a story (provided the writer has an actual story in mind for this rather than just masturbating to his 'genre savvy Empire.' I can dream.). The first comment though? quote:After skimming what you've written (TL;DR, sorry) I'd say it's not so much "genre savvy" as it is "Exploited Tropes." I continue to be amazed that people look at the Evil Overlord List and, rather than chuckling and saying "Ha hah, movie villains do do that a lot, yeah." thinks "This is good writing material!" How do you write
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Feb 6, 2014 08:48
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crowfeathers posted:Oh hey, what if my new story had, as its villain, one of those FILTHY JOCKS? (remember i've excised like five pages of loving tropes) Maybe one of the writer goons here can enlighten me. To me it always seemed like a bad idea to simply point and say "He's the villain." (obligatory tvtropes link) The moment you point someone at someone at the start of the story and say that he's the villain you'll want to write him as the bad guy which will always lead to a black and white good vs evil tale. Or am I oversimplifying here? --- edit: MinistryofLard posted:The alarming bit is that it happens so regularly. Like, "Her kids get hit with alarming regularity," means that her kids get hit so often that its alarming. So that guy says it's to tropery and then points to a list of tropes that stereotype overlords/villains keep using? 
Darth TNT fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Feb 6, 2014 |
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Feb 6, 2014 08:49
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Darth TNT posted:Maybe one of the writer goons here can enlighten me.
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Feb 6, 2014 08:51
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Darth TNT posted:Maybe one of the writer goons here can enlighten me. It really depends on what you're aiming for. Calling a character a villain at the beginning of the story could be a setup to subvert the audience's expectations later on. For example, the "villain" might not be a villain at all. Calling them a villain puts the audience into a black/white frame of mind, which would highlight morality's shades of gray when the book reaches its climax. It's all a matter of constructing your story in a way that highlights what you want it to. Unfortunately, tropers don't realize this. Let's say writing is like building something. A craftsman can see a pile of scrap wood and turn it into something beautiful, because they have the experience to tell good wood from rotten and the skill to arrange the pieces into what they're trying to make. Tropers, on the other hand, see a pile of wood, grab pieces that look appealing to them, and just nail them together in a way that is neither sturdy nor artful. Even if they were to look up instructions on how to build things, they simply follow the guidelines, not bothering to learn why they're doing a particular thing. So even if they're gaining experience with the mechanical act of writing, they fail to see where the room for artistic expression comes into play. Instead, they give up and start cataloging the types of wood that other craftsmen use and where they were used. Never why they were used. They just assume the craftsman used them because they looked cool, not because the craftsman was using them for a specific purpose. EDIT: More importantly, they don't have the capacity to think about why the craftsman didn't use a specific piece of wood. To a troper, wood is wood, so it must all be good to build something with. Venusian Weasel fucked around with this message at 09:58 on Feb 6, 2014 |
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Feb 6, 2014 09:50
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This genre-savvy crap reminds me of someone in my high school creative writing class who, for an exercise in comedy writing, re-wrote the Wizard of Oz if no one made any mistakes. It was like two pages of a boring plot, and was written as an obvious parody. Way to go, nerdy high school kid, for understanding storytelling way better than any of these thousand or so people who spend their free time cataloging pop culture.
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Feb 6, 2014 11:45
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Sailor Viy posted:Some authors, like Clark Ashton Smith or China Mieville, can absolutely pull off a verbose, highly descriptive style and use words like "stygian" or "antediluvian" without sounding like wankers. But it requires that you know exactly how to use those words and what effect you want to have on the reader, rather than just plopping them in there because that's what smart people do. Seriously, read Perdido Street Station. Page upon page of some of the finest world-building I've ever read. It makes the setting feel like a real, living place with all its mysteries and culture and threats. What does the trope page focus on? The main character's an overweight badass nerd who can fight off the local secret police with SCIENCE!, he's banging a girl with a beetle for a head and one of the main characters is a lesbian, despite it having zero impact on the plot. Also, the way they make it sound, Elder Gods stride through the city square so often you can set your watch by them.
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Feb 6, 2014 13:04
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Darth TNT posted:Maybe one of the writer goons here can enlighten me. It's a bit of an oversimplification, I'd say. You can have a conflict of right versus wrong without having a conflict of good versus evil: a person can be a 'villian' while being portrayed with complexity and humanity. It depends how you define the term, of course. 'Villain' is often used to imply a fairly straightforward, pantomime sense of morality, and if you're using it in that sense, then yes, that suggests good versus evil - but on the other hand, if you do that well, you can still have a good story. Even a subtle one, if you write with enough psychological insight. The thing is, though, it's all about content and specifics. A good writer probably isn't going to start the story by thinking 'This character is going to be a VILLAIN!', they'll start it thinking, say, 'This character is going to be so nasty that she isn't just out to get Dorothy, she's out to get her little dog too.' Until there are specifics, it's not a character, it's just a structural device. And once you have actual character content, whether it's a villain or an antagonist or something else is really not the point any more: you just have a character to write. Actually that link is making a good point about a real problem: some writers do fail to progress past the structural need for a villain to the point of real character writing, so you get someone who you're supposed to root against for no particular reason. The 'trope' isn't a bad concept, except it's not actually a trope, it's just a failure of the writing process. The real problem with that page is that pretty much all their examples are stupid because they don't have the analytical skills to apply the concept with any kind of understanding. So we get stuff like this: quote:Javert embodies this trope in Les Misérables. He is at best an incorruptible cop and even at his very worse he's only a Well-Intentioned Extremist who is devoted to the law. ...which is why, troper, Javert is not a villain at all, never set up as one, never presented as one and never intended to be one. He's a typical Hugo antagonist, someone who's virtuous according to his lights but limited in vision. You know, a 'character'. quote:Ellen in Miss Saigon is often perceived as this by fans of the show, as she is seen as the obstacle to Kim and Chris reuniting. ...because overheated fan hate is the same thing as bad writing, obviously. quote:In Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea, it is revealed that Bertha went insane due to Rochester's mistreatment of her, including everything from obviously disliking her during the duration of their marriage to having sex with one of their servants. Bertha's mom, on the other hand, went insane after the servant of her new English husband abandoned her infant son during a fire started by the angry townsfolk. This led to the child dying of smoke inhalation. Their madness is not hereditary, but rather a result of the English men who came into their lives and messed everything up. Troper, 'revealed' means 'uncovering the truth.' It does not mean 'writing a fictional riposte.' Wide Sargasso Sea doesn't change Jane Eyre, it just engages with it from a post-colonialist perspective. Put down the book, it is too heavy for you. ...And I'm going to stop including examples because I can feel myself getting stupider. But you get the idea. 'A designated villain whose villainy is more a question of fiat than of storytelling' is a useful concept. They just don't know how to come up with examples of it.
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Feb 6, 2014 13:39
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Maybe it's me, but it feels like yet another case of TV Tropes appropriating a term from other people and not really understanding it. It's been years since I browsed tropes but I remember in a lot of categories that the majority of the examples given weren't actually examples of the concept (let's not use "trope" for this since they've kind of poisoned that term). A "designated villain" to anyone other than tropers is when there's a character who objectively isn't a "bad guy" and sometimes isn't even an antagonist of the main character, but the plot paints them as a monster who must be stopped at all costs. Often the original boyfriend in bad romantic comedies gets this role; they're perfectly reasonable, nice guys who are the villains because they dared to get upset at the main character being a jackass. If you can take a set back from the plot and say, "Wait, why is this person the bad guy?" then you're dealing with a designated villain (and yes, "bad guy" is the appropriate word here; well-structured characters aren't going to be "designated villains").
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Feb 6, 2014 15:03
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MinistryofLard posted:The alarming bit is that it happens so regularly. Like, "Her kids get hit with alarming regularity," means that her kids get hit so often that its alarming. Sooooo you could say tropers use "alarming regularity" with alarming regularity?
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Feb 7, 2014 00:28
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The Iron Rose posted:Sooooo you could say tropers use "alarming regularity" with alarming regularity? "Depressing consistency" might be more accurate, if less pithy.
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Feb 7, 2014 02:40
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Analysis: Role-Playing Game posted:Analysis: Role-Playing Game "Analysis" means taking three thousand words to say "RPGs often have loot, shops, random monsters, XP, bosses, and party members", right? Analysis: Cupcakes posted:Cupcakes occupies an interesting space in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic lexicon, in that despite its reportedly 'written on a whim' status, it can justifiably be called the most infamous fan fiction of the Friendship Is Magic fandom (Or simply, brony community), or even of all time. It has become so ingrained in the considerably vast FIM fandom that one will miss a boatload of references and jokes throughout the fandom if they have not, themselves, taken the plunge and read Cupcakes. My ponymurderrapefic is basically Waiting For Godot except more culturally relevant. And if you think about it, the children's cartoon was just as dark all along. In conclusion, really this fanfic is this fanfic, and if your mind hasn't been blown by now then maybe you're not enlightened enough to appreciate torture porn.
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Feb 7, 2014 05:53
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Analysis: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 posted:Black Ops II as a Reconstruction of the military shooter. ...and the page ends there.
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Feb 7, 2014 06:06
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I'm more amazed they found anything to "analyze" in a Call of Duty game.
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Feb 7, 2014 06:23
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Did that military shooter "analysis" even say anything besides "some things are different than other things, even if they're also similar"? Jesus, tropers can't write anything unless it's a list, and most of the time they even gently caress that up.
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Feb 7, 2014 06:29
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Lottery of Babylon posted:My ponymurderrapefic is basically Waiting For Godot except more culturally relevant. And if you think about it, the children's cartoon was just as dark all along. In conclusion, really this fanfic is this fanfic, and if your mind hasn't been blown by now then maybe you're not enlightened enough to appreciate torture porn. Hey, at least this analysis openly admits that this torture porn has become "so ingrained in the Friendship Is Magic fandom" that it is "such a decisively piercing part of the Brony subculture" instead of throwing their hands up and saying "rule 34" as if it's some kind of excuse.
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Feb 7, 2014 06:36
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Gen. Ripper posted:I'm more amazed they found anything to "analyze" in a Call of Duty game. Apparently they didn't. Alpacalips Now posted:Did that military shooter "analysis" even say anything besides "some things are different than other things, even if they're also similar"? Jesus, tropers can't write anything unless it's a list, and most of the time they even gently caress that up. It said "Call of Duty 2013 is actually a really deep game that revolutionizes the genre and refutes any criticism anyone could possibly level at the franchise, and I now will present you with a great analysis that will make you appreciate it: [file not found]".
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Feb 7, 2014 06:39
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