ME When I See Wasted Character Arc Potential

First Eric and Hannibal mocked him with ominous threats, then he met his real father, then this...man, Questlove had a rough day.

I really like this design, even if it’s just the basic patrol escort hull profile kitbashed with TOS components. It’s a good design for a little putt-putt ship that does all the dirty work.

Pioneer-class, Star Trek: Online

I’m a big boring nerd who likes uniforms, so I was always Templar. 'Course I do have a soft spot for both the Kingdom (mummy gangsters!) and the former Red Hand (communist magic!).

Time for the hard question: Templar, Lumie, or Dragon?

Illuminati, real meme hours.

Isn’t this the final level of Hitman: Codename 47? Is there a mass grave full of dead bald guys in suits in back of this place?

GOOD EVENING

i just found the most fucked up property currently for sale in austria

THIS LOOKS NICE RIGHT JUST A BIG OLD HALL

CUTE RIGHT? NO. FUCK NO

I FEEL SO MUCH DREAD SEEING THIS HALLWAY

YOU WON`T LEAVE THIS ALIVE

IT HAS AN INDUSTRIAL KITCHEN AND BATHROOM IDK FOR WHAT BUT I HATE IT

THIS CUBE IS WHERE YOU GO TO DIE

like this is advertised as just a curious amazing thing with no explaination to what the fuck is going on or what THE ACTUAL FUCK HAPPENED IN THERE

but you can buy it for 99,000€. you might die looking at it but like. you can fucking try to get this

here is a link to the listing i guess. i hate this so much https://www.immowelt.at/expose/2b46g4c

The unnamed battlefield medic who shows up to evac downed units also made her debut in Skies of Arcadia as Fina, though according to her ingame bio she’s actually three people in VC1: the triplets Fina, Mina, and Gina Sellers.

Watching you play Valkyria Chronicles I saw some familiar faces - Vyse and Aika are main characters from Skies of Arcadia. Vyse is kind of a tool but Aika's my homegirl. In said game they fight against the Empress of Valua, and I noticed there's also a city called Valua mentioned in passing during your video.

Oh I thought I’d seen those characters somewhere! I think one of the main dudes behind ValCro had a hand in Skies of Arcadia (it was also published by Sega too if I remember correctly). That’s a neat little thing. Thank you!

Kuvira thinking about crushing you like a bug

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.

Eeeeeee I love it!:D

I've got another sketch idea for you: Kuvira as Captain Kirk, and Bataar as Spock! (It's a bit of an in-joke; Todd Haberkorn, Bataar's VA, also played Spock in the online fan series "Star Trek Continues".)

Daily Kuvira #30 - NEEEEEEEERRRRRDs

You can tell this was Baatar’s idea.

Also bonus from my fav podcast:

Mind you, Trek isn’t quite as bad as Star Wars in this regard. I can still type the name of, say, Jenna D’Sora or Susanna Leijtin into Memory Beta and discover that they’ve never appeared in any of the novels since their appearances on TNG.

star trek character who appears for 3 lines of dialogue: hello, my name is Blek’tho, i’m a Zeeyopian dishwasher repairman

star trek beta canon: Blek’tho, the secret prince who had newly become king of all zeeyop,

Good to see this post making the rounds again. I forgot to include that link in my first response, so here it is again for good measure. It digs a bit more into the matter and makes a point that Kuvira may be more of an modernizing authoritarian than an out-and-out fascist. (A very fine point, yes, but an important one to keep in mind.) Come to think of it, I’ve been wondering for the longest time if Amon may have been the actual Nazi. Certainly when you look at Book 1 of Korra as a whole, it’s not hard to make a case that for all the talk of equality and the downtrodden nonbender, Amon’s ultimate goal was the elimination or expulsion of all benders from the United Republic, and his first act upon seizing control of Republic City was to round up the benders and strip them of their powers by force. While I don’t know the correct word to describe benders as a subset of all humans in the universe of Avatar, I don’t think anyone could disagree that Amon’s plan for all benders was essentially ethnic cleansing.

A piece I did for avatarfanzine - Children of the Earth zine, which if you pre-ordered it, should be getting it real soon. I wished Kuvira would’ve had a longer season to shine a lot more. She genuinely saw herself as the hero of the people.