im 100% of the opinion that once your service or product becomes something you cannot reasonably go through life without, it should be free.
if you have to make people work, and they need a computer and a cellphone with internet to even get a job, then those should be free and it shouldn’t be shitty ones either.
people have to have shelter. housing, heat, water, and electricity are all needed for daily life here, it should be fucking free because there’s no reason to have people die to exposure in a ‘developed’ country.
food should be free. why do we not provide food to the hungry? we throw out hundreds of thousands of pounds of it every year.
This applies to the unique needs of disabled people as well.
If you need glasses, or a wheelchair, or medication, or therapy for mental health, or support from a caregiver, or renovations to make your home accessible, or any other number of things that you as a disabled person need to function, they should be free, no questions asked.
Some fictional characters are relatable in a Gender way not because they’re nonconforming, but because they’re so incredibly into performing their assigned gender that it somehow wraps all the way around. Like, some sort of gender overflow error.
OMG! I thought it was going to be a message about perseverance or it never being too late to follow your dreams, but nooooooo. This is excellent storytelling.
I’m fine. I’m fine I am not at all emotionally wrecked by this.
If you introduce a named character with a relationship to a protagonist, their character arc must be resolved in a way that feels reasonable and satisfying
Which is to say: they can’t just dissappear when they’re no longer a convenient plot device
Thor’s Mum rule – If you’re going to kill a character who’s carried any part of the plot, take a bit to reimagine the plot as if she were the main character, and the story ends when she dies. If it’s unsatisfying, rewrite either her plot points, or her death, to make both more meaningful.
Which is to say – don’t treat side characters as ammo with which to hurt your main guy. ESPECIALLY if they’re women.
I’m reblogging because this second part is the best explanation of how I distinguish between fridged characters and other characters who just die.
And yes, it is intrinsically a bit subjective and that’s okay.
unironic number one most important and useful writing tip I can give you is to make your women weirder. If your female characters are feeling flat or one dimensional give them a odd lil obsession or hobby. ESPECIALLY the sexy characters add a little “strange and offputting” spice in there and I’ll 1000% guarantee they’ll become better. Listen to me. Listen to ME it’ll work or your money back let the femme fatale give live newts to people as thanks and she’s become a more engaging and realized person.
Every original character, if I start out assuming they’re cishet, white, male, christian, American, abled, whatever, I ask, “Why?”
Every once in a while it makes sense for a character to be all of those things. But only once in a while. Usually they improve as soon as any of those initial assumptions are challenged.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it a thousand more times: No piece of dystopian fiction has ever been a prediction of the future. They are observations and criticisms of the present.
“Wooow! How did Orwell predict the surveillance state so well in 1984??”
He didn’t. He was making an observation of the surveillance state that already existed in his present, and exaggerated it to make the metaphor obvious.
Learning and discussing these works in terms of them being predictions and having test questions like “do you think his prediction came true?” is not only pointless, but actively counterintuitive. When you frame these works as being ‘people from the past knew that the future would be terrible’ you shift the entire perspective to one of some kind of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist.
These author’s aren’t oracles. They’re satirists. Their predictions ‘come true’ because they were already true when they wrote them.
