rebellum:madgastronomer:frustratedasatruar: light-up-the-night: brood-mother:toomanyfeelings:sun
rebellum:madgastronomer:frustratedasatruar: light-up-the-night: brood-mother: toomanyfeelings: sunderlorn: FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT. ALL OF IT. ALL AT ONCE. (Thank you @fallingawkwardly for bringing this to my attention.) Brandon Taylor is great. while brandon taylor is p cool, actually stopping to address like half of these would bog your story down in some of the most fantastically pointless, reader unfriendly, and unnecessary detailing ever written since the silmarillion was slapped down on the intake desk at george allen & unwin, and amounts to little more than pedantic nerd-flexing, “how did they agree on a systematised measure of time”? are you KIDDING ME?? more like how the fuck could you possible convince your read that yes, it matters, please don’t go, just another 500 words on my in-universe ‘mathematics in the context of social sciences’ textbook that my illiterate character happened to be thumbing through. it’s important to work on your world building, obviously, but there is a pretty hard limit to what you need to show your reader, and when you cross that line, unless you happen to be the reincarnated soul of terry pratchett, it becomes flabby, boring, and distracting from the actual story. YES to getting rid of senseless misogynistic tropes and putting more effort into crafting your story, NO to including the fucking ancestral migrations of horses. Like it’s great to address a lot of these, but honestly, unless it’s a key part of explaining major plot points, it belongs in like your unseen Bible of Your World™ or as fridge logic for the reader. Sometimes, suspension of disbelief is the way to go so as to get on with the fucking story. Yeah, @brood-mother mentions the Silmarillion, but critically Tolkien did not publish the Silmarillion (his son published it after his death). Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion for him, and then drew from its lore when he was writing the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Which is the right way to do it, if you want your Lore to get that granular. YOU have the master copy of the all the background shit, and you can have one of your characters bust out singing part of the Song of Beren and Lúthien if it becomes relevant. But not if it gets in the way of the story being told.And if people DO get that invested in your lore later, then that’s still a different book. And some of those are not good points, thanks. There’s a reason for feminist stories about women disguising themselves as men to be warriors. It’s fucking historical fact that women did that. For millenia. Do we also need stories in which women just get to be warriors? Yes. But FFS, a story is not automatically antifeminist for using that trope. And as long as male specfic fans keep saying that women can’t do things like pass as male warriors, we will continue to need both factual stories and fictional ones about women doing those things. Also, peasants can have a few high-quality goddamn sheep and make their own few outfits. Not that any fantasy novel I’ve ever read says anything about everyone having high quality wool. Thick oak forests can grow in places with cold winters as long as they have warmer (but not necessarily very warm) summers, and continue to exist because they are fucking vast and nobody’s had time to cut them all down, and sometimes when they’re less vast because they’re protected by the crown and nobody’s allowed to cut them down. The same soil that makes for good forest doesn’t necessarily make for good farmland, especially right after it’s been forest. Some of these things have good story reasons. Some of them are based on things that have good historical or physical reasons. Not saying he has no good points. He does. But some of this list is bullshit. And, as has been pointed out, you can’t actually include most of this shit. “Who domesticated the wheat” who fucking cares. You think medieval peasants knew who did it and brought it up in casual conversation? It’s not relevant! -- source link