Recent content by Feo Takahari

Not being an expert, I have zero idea how accurate this is, but it sure is comprehensive. It's got everything you could possibly want to know about all manner of guns, knives, and explosives. The Writer's Guide to Weapons | Benjamin Sobieck

To try to salvage this, what if the society's primary threat comes from monsters that are heavily armored/scaled? If you want to push swords as a popular weapon, monster hide could be difficult to pierce but easier to cut. Otherwise, weaponry might focus on alternative tactics according to...

There might be multiple mindsets involved here. Take the thread in World Building about a society with no bows and arrows. I didn't contribute anything because I don't know much about defensive tactics, but I've also written a society that never invented ranged weaponry, and I had a lot of fun...

Counterpoint: So Game of Thrones won the Emmys | Feminist Fiction

If you don't want to write a straightforward story of someone going from "not grown up" to "grown up," can you reject or subvert the concept? I'm deeply in love with the novel Wringer, which shows a violent, unempathetic model of "manhood" and and stars a hero who refuses to become that...

@Penpilot: I'm reminded of Valkyria Chronicles. The Darcsen are very, very obvious stand-ins for Jews during the Holocaust, and the writers do their best to hammer in the whole "racism is wrong" thing. Every Darcsen character is pure-hearted to the point of near flawlessness, and players...

I'm intrigued. Either character could be painted with various degrees of sympathy for the mistakes, flaws, and/or bad circumstances that land them in this position, and there aren't a lot of bad choices for how to approach them (apart from making the controlling one totally sympathetic and the...

This thread was inspired by an interesting article, which I'll quote in part: I don't write historical settings myself, but I still think this is an interesting question. How would you handle bigotry in an unequal setting?

Three years ago, I linked a video about the three-act structure, and why so many video games use amnesia as an excuse to cut out act one and just have two acts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIQ6yWptvfA At the time, I took it at face value, but now I have to wonder why you need a three-act...

If you can find it, Robert Silverberg's Worlds of Wonder might be a good book to pick up. It's a collection of science fiction stories Silverberg thinks are useful to analyze from a writer's perspective, each with an essay dissecting it. Only the very last story in the anthology is...

If it's a one-off encounter, the MC may not have the opportunity to see more than one side of the character. Consider a waiter at a fancy restaurant--if she encounters a rude customer, she may not have an impression of him beyond "pushy and demanding." With that said, the dimensions of the...

I'd say the snob is someone who judges by only one metric and can't understand others. For instance, if someone is writing in a language that isn't their native tongue, they may have good insight into characters but terrible grammar. The snob may automatically reject a story with bad grammar as...

A bit OT, but this gets right to the heart of the problem I've always faced when trying to write characters who believe things I think are false. It wouldn't feel true to myself and my beliefs if I took, say, a social Darwinist character and wrote the story as if he was right about everything...

Way late for this, but the most positive portrayals of pseudo-Christianity I've seen in non-Christian fantasy have generally been fast and loose. For instance, Lone Wolf has a benevolent god called Kai who's pretty much equivalent to the Christian God, but Christianity is just a starting point...

Inspired by The Serpent and the Rose, but relevant to a lot of different fantasy stories. If a story is generally "fantasy" and is otherwise not connected to any one time and place, is it distracting to have Christianity in the story? Is it better to name it as Christianity, or to give it a...