It’s A Tragedy That Dinotopia Was Adapted As A Weird Gritty Looking Tv Movie With Bad Cgi When It’s,

This has become something of a critical issue for sf/f writers in the past few decades. Way back in the early 2000s, when blogs were still a thing, the British author M. John Harrison caused something of a tempest in the online genre community criticizing the concept of “worldbuilding” as detrimental to the creation of literature. The original posts are long gone, but there is a Reddit post copying Harrison’s final summation of his thoughts on the matter.

Even though I’m not a “proper” writer yet, this is an issue I’ve worried about over the years. While I don’t have the philosophical background of Mr. Harrison, my own objections to the primacy of worldbuilding stem from a key complaint Harrison makes: the idea that worldbuilding “literalizes the act of creation.” The essay talks about Harrison’s interpretation of the matter, but here I’ll quickly over my own.

The problem with believing that worldbuilding is all is that it changes the reader’s relationship to the text. If a reader believes that the mechanics and details of a setting are the most important part of a story, they will end up seeing stories not as stories, ambiguous creatures of metaphor and meaning, but as documentaries of alternate worlds. When this happens, the reader both forgoes the suspension of disbelief required to make any story work and unknowingly imposes their own worldview on the story under the guise of “objective reality.” Rather than developing a symbiotic relationship with the story wherein the story is accepted on its own terms, the reader instead becomes an anthropologist in a duck blind scanning the story from afar, compiling a list of points observed. This is how you end up with situations where people complain that characters don’t act “logically” without considering the thematic reasons for their motivations. Obviously no one will ever be able to suspend their disbelief for every part of every story, but some level of acceptance is always required. Without it, the forest just becomes a big bunch of trees.

This attitude also poses problems for the writer, who is no longer expected to be a storyteller, but a God who dreams up and fashions every aspect of their creation from the wings of an aphid to the greatest supergiant stars. Needless to say, this is an awful attitude to have as a writer. Rather than having the reader accept your story and go along for the ride, the entire burden of creating the world falls on you, and the sad fact of the matter is that most of us aren’t God. A few of us out there are polymaths and Renaissance men that can shoulder the burden, but most of us, myself included, aren’t. What happens with most of us is that we develop the belief that we must understand everything before we can create something, which often leads to writers putting their stories off to research things they don’t really need. I’ve been guilty of this myself with things like starting work on a fantasy novel by working out the layout of the solar system and worrying about getting myself up to speed on introductory economics (so much economics in fiction these days...I’m sick of it). Some of this would have been important thematically, but my problem was that I was doing in first instead of figuring out what I actually wanted to tell a story about. I’m sure many of you have similar stories to share.

In short, if you’re the sort of person who loves creating all this intricate background for their fantasy settings, knock yourself out, but just remember that for the sake of both you and you reader that they can’t be everything.

(As a final note, I have actually seen some people drop traditional narrative entirely and write what are essentially fictional textbooks. It’s something you tend to see in the online alternate history community, where the primary attraction is seeing the raw mechanics of historical change play out over centuries across nations filled with millions upon millions of people, the scale of which the human-focused modern novel has some difficulty capturing. They rarely appear on bookshelves because they don’t fit in with the publishing industry’s classifications of genre, but you sometimes get odd anomalies like Robert Sobel’s 1973 work For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga.)

I think the best writing tip I can give (this is untrue, I can probably give many writing tips, but this is the writing tip foremost in my mind at the moment and I needed a good hook to start this post) is that not everything that is read as Lore needs to be important or explicable to what you’re writing. Often times you need a detail or a character to appear to make another detail or character sound more convincing or to appropriately place it in the world, people will latch on, but maybe that’s not the story you’re telling or what’s actually important to you. For me, for example, it’s not important to detail say, the histories of Nochtish tank design bureaus. It’s enough to know that they exist and what they’re making, but the staff and position of Rescholdt-Kolt are not actually crucial to the story.

I think because of wiki culture and general curiosity we want every capital letter noun to be drawn out to us, but some things just exist solely to be a cool name.

I must confess that one of the things I’ve always found interesting about Kuvira is how she expresses her gender identity within her role as the head of a revolutionary nationalist army. After all, modern military hierarchies tend to be drenched in masculinity even when they attempt to be egalitarian. At the same time, while revolutions offer the possibility of dissolving old roles and limits on behavior, they also tend to keep a few and develop some of their own. (There’s also the whole issue of how right-wing movements tend to describe the order they are rebelling against as “decadent” and effeminate, while their own movements offer a “healthy” masculine alternative. Of course, Korra never dug too deeply into the gender dynamics of Kuvira’s army, so any speculation would on this would essentially be building castles in the sky. What I can say, though, is that I’ve always felt Kuvira’s character design was harkening to this idea of what you could call “the soldier as woman.” She dresses and presents herself in such a way as to show that she and her army are one, even to the point where the only major difference between her and her soldiers is her collar and the armor on her upper back. At the same time, she isn’t trying to erase her gender and appear masculine/androgynous. She even keeps her hair long and tied up in a bun rather than shaving it off or going for the army-standard undercut. I think all this is what people have been getting at with this “butch/femme” discussion, but I don’t think that’s the best way to look at this particular issue. All that said, I’m not exactly a fan of this outfit from the upcoming comic.

I’ve always seen Kuvira as a woman with a rather austere sense of dress. As I pointed out above, instead of wearing a uniform with gold braid, sheets of medals and ribbon, or a cape and pauldron with elaborate armored segments like in her concept art, she wears a uniform that’s basically the same as every other one in her military. While this outfit isn’t too flossy or “femmy,” the tailoring, color coordination, and that big belt buckle feel a little too...well, bourgeois for Kuvira. It’s simple, yes, but it’s still an outfit you have to put together when you get up in the morning. Personally (and this is just my inner dirty socialist talking), I could easily see Kuvira rocking the zhongshan (”Mao”) suit, or something more akin to the military tunics Stalin wore in the 1920s and 1930s. (Hmm...Jenros, I think I have a Kuvira picture I’d like to pitch to you...)

Question: Why do people call Kuvira butch? Because she has muscle and doesn’t wear dresses or some shit? Are all women with muscle a butch?

Cause really when I think of butch I think of women who are suuuper big and muscular (rocking that T) like Zarya and Scorpia. Kuvira is more or less just a well built/toned female who looks classy as hell in anything she wears. She’s not super duper feminine but she’s not really butch either. She’s more or less in the middle.

Just to jump on the bandwagon, “thot” is actual title used by the Breen, but it’s not certain if it’s a military rank or a political title. In DS9′s defense, they came up with it in 1999, long before thots were ever a thing. The Breen also dress in Leia’s Ubese bounty hunter disguise from RotJ, and their speech is an electronic riff on Metal Machine Music. They’re the weirdos of Trek.

one of my favorite tropes of all time is when the author tries to replace curse words with a more ‘family friendly’ alternative or invent new words for worldbuilding purposes but they use existing words that make the whole thing unintentionally hilarious out of context

Daily Kuvira #46 - memes never end

When you can’t remember if you locked your giant killer robot.

Me too, Madiha, me too.

i feel like my tastes are so bizarre and inhuman that i can never share things with anyone or be part of a fandom without feeling like the biggest weirdo

today Meatball abruptly realized that there are refugee office plants in the kitchen (they have been there for weeks) and has decided his singular purpose in life is to eat them 

Honestly, you’re actually one of the most interesting people I know, and I’m glad I got to know you.

i know im not very interesting but i try so hard that you should all humor me

I love it! Thank you so much (and that is a very dignified chapeau of high revolutionary pedigree)!!!

For your daily sketch, could you draw Kuvira in a Soviet Red Army uniform from the Russian Civil War (pointy hat at your discretion)?

Daily Kuvira #9

I hope I was accurate. I’m not the best when it comes to historical fashion. hhhhh

You can’t fool me, Madiha, you’re clearly a Belarusian bot, here to tempt us with pro-tractor propaganda.

we did it guys we caught all of them. mission accomplished. now nobody can call me a russian bot. we have a list theyre all there