pirate_lord

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i've been having a very shit week so maybe some reorganizing will do me good

pirate_lord

trigger warning for mentions of r*pe, slavery, domestic terrorism, drug & alcohol abuse including cocaine & the opioid crisis, and the mistreatment of lgbt+ characters/identities.
          
          on the crescent city excerpt:
          
          1) the amount of focus put on sex and on whether the characters had it/we're good at it or not was truly disturbing. i don't understand why the sex prowess of bryce's bf was stressed over so much. sex is not the entirety of a relationship. also i wonder if sjmaas even knows asexual people exist beyond "aliens who don't feel LOVE or smth like that". newsflash, sex is not necessarily a marker of love or romantic feelings. also i did not need to read the words "blowjob red [lipstick]". at least it's adult and not ya tho.
          
          2) the worldbuilding was ridiculous and overstuffed. it was largely infodumped into the story at in opportune times and large amounts of it weren't applicable to what was going on in the story at all. keeping things relevant is important to a snappy pace. when it comes to the substance of the worldbuilding, sjmaas went way over her capabilities. she included everything from nøkks (norse water creatures) to kelpies (scottish water spirits) to angels (you know what they are). sjmaas has done nothing to make them match, despite them coming from hugely different cultural contexts that need to be reconciled to work properly in a story. not to mention reconciling these mostly folk culture-esque interpretations with the extremely modern tropes sjmaas uses to write her werewolves. there is no concrete magic system or hierarchy of creatures, which is ABSOLUTELY necessary as one of the selling points of this series is that there is supposed to be a big, complicated hierarchy of magical creatures and humans. sjmaas just likes to throw paragraphs of proper nouns at the reader and pretend it qualifies as good worldbuilding.
          
          [1/?]

pirate_lord

6) the drug use. or should i say drug ABUSE. because the way these characters are going they should be addicted to alcohol or any of the multiple types of drugs they use in the story. weed and cocaine are given different fantasy names and treated as the same thing despite cocaine being infinitely more harmful than weed irl. sjmaas's treatment of drugs betrays a lack of knowledge of how drugs/drug culture works and a lack of sensitivity towards how terribly drugs can affect people. the opioid crisis is a HUGE catastrophe in the united states yet she throws cocaine use around like there's no tomorrow. does she not know of it or does she just not care? 
            
            thank you for your time.
            [6/6]
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pirate_lord

5 part 2) despite this being a basically dystopian nightmare for humans, the only named character fighting for the rights of humans, philip briggs, is a violent domestic terrorist who planned to blow up a night club. but, humans are still extremely oppressed. danika, the in-world equivalent of a cop or am fbi agent, cracks down on the only named group fighting for the rights of humans and works for a regime that is extremely oppressive towards humans, despite being close friends with (or being gay for, depending on your views ) someone who is half-human. and bryce, herself a half human, supports danika's work for this oppressive government and ignores all oppression until it results in herself being called slurs or objectified due to her human heritage. she slutshames half-human prostitutes who have no other work option and are often murdered in the job, and excuses danika's support for an oppressive government with all the times that danika beat someone up for calling her a slur. this, however, is only an example of someone defending a friend, while the oppression in this world is systemic and danika supports the system. no matter how many people danika beats up for bryce, danika is a complicit supporter of this oppression and does more harm than good. tldr: sjmaas portrays humans fighting oppression as domestic terrorists who want to cause innocent bloodshed just for the sake of it and should stop writing oppression because she obviously doesn't understand it.
            
            [5/6]
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pirate_lord

5) the other offensive stuff. i'm going to state it straight up, sjmaas cannot write oppression. sjmaas cannot write discrimination. sjmaas cannot write class conflict. in the world of crescent city, humans are oppressed. for all of history since magical creatures arrived in this world, they have been slaves, food, lesser beings to r*pe and then discard. now, humans are fighting back, and yet these rebelling humans are talked abt by our half-human main character as violent extremists set on causing destruction. in crescent city, otherwise known as lunathion, humans are not enslaved. however, they're not too much better off. they have only a fourth the opportunity magical creatures do, they're concentrated on the poorer section of the city, human rights activists are detained and investigated without a warrant by police, and they have no government representative while every other magical district does. 
            
            [4/5]
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pirate_lord

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i'm currently taking ap human geography & ap environment science in school and i honestly just,,,, am so fucking thankful my school offers them. they (mainly ap human geo but occasionally ap enviro science) help me so much with my worldbuilding. they've introduced me to so many new concepts that i had a vague idea of but no proper language or concrete definitions of to put into use. istg, i look back on some of my old worldbuilding and  it's literally just me taking irl countries and messing with them however i want, but now? having a more concrete idea of what causes societies to form in the ways they do? my worldbuilding skills have flourished with this knowledge. the units on culture, religion, migration, ethnic conflict, & political geography in particular have done wonders for me.
          
          i'm just really happy with this now, y'know?

pirate_lord

y'all remember that time when aelin from tog considered becoming a conquerer to "bring music and books and culture" (as if the places she would be invading don't have music,,,, and books,,,, and culture) and yet she's still supposed to be the hero???
          yeah, bad times.

pirate_lord

you know i love* how the first thing she thinks about when contemplating invading other countries is putting up statues of herself everywhere. that's not vain at all
            
            *hate
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pirate_lord

"give them as many as the stars" pfft imagine trying to make replacing an entire culture w your own sound romantic
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pirate_lord

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anyways fuck aelin. in any story with 1/3 of a moral compass she would be a villain. "bringing culture to [insert ppl here]" has been a legitimate excuse for atrocity after atrocity and the fact that sjm (who has presumably taken at least one (1) history class in her life) can type that out and stick it in a supposed hero's mouth is horrifying.
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pirate_lord

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anyone here who wants to do a rp with like,,,, Big Intensive worldbuilding? like a lot a lot of worldbuilding? like get real life human geography concepts involved worldbuilding? bc i would fucking LOVE that

pirate_lord

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hot take: some "literate roleplays" are shit. requiring heaps and heaps of words in ridiculous and counterproductive to developing good prose & pacing. sometimes there are just so many ways you can state something before you start going overboard. long flowery prose isn't always all it's cracked up to be and honestly ppl should start realizing that. i have seen so many people's prose & basic grammar suffer bc they focus more on wracking up wordcounts than good writing. literate doesn't mean "2000+ words with longwinded descriptions" y'know. long + stuffed with description does NOT = good. 
          
          tbh, the older i get the more i value conciseness. and become less tolerant of the fact that my main roleplaying anxiety is whether my replies are "literate enough" to be valid. i cannot tell you how many hours i've spent trying to match my reply lengths to that of my roleplay partner's and i cannot tell you how hard it is to come up with something good and "literate" when your rp partner only stuffs like 2 lines of actual substance in among paragraphs of descriptions and a Sharp Sarcastic Sassy Inner Monologue. conveying characters' personalities through actions isn't that hard.
          
          i'm not trying to target anyone in particular with this (though i am in the mood to take someone's knees off after today), it's just something that i've seen going on for a while and thought was weird. maybe it's just a me thing, like my opinion on worldbuilding, but i just???? insert a very loud sigh here, please.
          
          anyways, pm me for a very long and annoyed ramble on why i wish worldbuilding was focused more on.

pirate_lord

@spardella
            haha, i don't know how long that'll take, but i'll be sure to remember that for when it's finished!
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ElByHerself

You as well, I’m sure you will be an amazing author one day. I’ll want a signed copy one of these days. Someday, I’d like to travel and be a journalist for the war effort, at least that’s the plan for now.
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pirate_lord

@spardella
            i'm so glad to hear that this really isn't just a me thing. i used to idolize those kinds of replies too and i remember going back to count how many lines of text i had and to pad my replies with whatever i could to extend them and make them "better". seeing my replies side-by-side with some of the longer one's other people wrote was absolutely humiliating for me. the biggest step in my writing journey so far has been to give myself permission to write shorter, less-purple-prosey stuff and acknowledge that it's just as good as those super long essay replies.
            i hope everything goes well for you in the realm of writing! stuff like this is incredibly discouraging but coming out the other side of it is definitely one of the most triumphant feelings i can think of!
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