hot take: the problem isnt the manic pixie dream girl. its the boring ass moody emotional leech guy she always gets paired with. we need more manic pixie dream characters. just give them partners who are as great as them or let them be happy alone! no more smart, beautiful, optimistic, kind girls getting paired with actual mosquitoes of men!
Also: make some manic pixie dream boys. If I wanna see romance maybe I wanna see a giddy boy full of positive energy who tells you fun facts about the constellations. Stop teaching boys they have to be moody and sad and they have to find salvation in a dream girl, this is how you breed Bad Men.
Here’s what I’m thinking about today which is that soulmate aus are interesting because they’re usually based around a concept that should make it Very Easy to identify and be with the person you are destined for but because of the rules of fiction dictating that Very Easy Tasks make for boring narratives, the best soulmate fics have to complicate their premise. Someone’s rejected their soulmate before every meeting them or someone sees color for the first time but assumes the other person didn’t. Or that they don’t want to see colors. Or that if they lie about being their soulmate because who would want to be bound to them.
It’s this fascinating structure that makes explicit what many romance stories are implicitally based on—there is a Moment that is the End where all parties know This Is Love and the relationship will now enter the phase that we don’t want to read about because all the tension is gone. We want the tension of them getting together and the surety that they got it right. Soulmate aus inherently promise the second part—you can’t get more definitive than the universe being like “THIS IS THE PERSON YOU ARE MEANT FOR. THEIR NAME IS TATTOOED ON YOUR BUTT, YOU’RE WELCOME.” But that surety means that authors have to work all the harder in the tension building section.
It’s like all romance of the “getting together” variety is a rubber band pulled back until just before it’s breaking point and then release, and getting together is the snap. (Your overwhelming emotions about love are the resulting welt against your skin.) Soulmate aus have are like trying to get the same snap from a piece of floss, which is still doable in the capable hands of someone thinking very hard about how they’re going to do this with the material they have at hand.
Every zombie series takes place in an alternate universe for where zombie fiction never existed because that’s the only way to explain why people act as if they haven’t been conditioned by 50 years of movies depicting monsters that operate exactly the same as the creatures they are currently facing.
Unless you’re @seananmcguire and write a universe where they’re not supposed to be called zombies, but everyone does because they’re fricken’ zombies. George Romero is a widely-acclaimed hero. And life goes on, because we’re humans and it does.
Writing Advice: it doesn’t matter if an idea has been done before. It’s never been done by you. So long as you do it well, and in your own way, it’s a wonderful contribution.
*slams fists on table*
THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED
*flips table*
BEST FRIENDS TO LOVERS
*Kicks chair*
ENEMIES TO LOVERS
*throws lamp across room*
HELP I NEED A FAKE BOYFRIEND FOR MY EX’S WEDDING
*rips down the curtains*
THEY’RE FAMOUS AND THEIR FANS SHIP THEM
*clutches wine glass so hard it shatters in my fist*
THEY WERE ROOMMATES
oh my god they were roommates
AND THEY PINED MUTUALLY
YOU’RE FROM THE ROYAL FAMILY AND I AM JUST A SIMPLE SERVANT
THEY BOTH HAVE A SECRET THAT RELATES
THEY ARE ENEMY AGENTS
EVERYONE THINKS THEY’RE ALREADY TOGETHER
THEY DON’T REALIZE THEY’RE SOULMATES
Anyone who wants to write their own take on something that’s been done a million times should DO THE FUCK OUT OF IT.
Comparisons between Detective Pikachu and the Super Mario Bros. movie are really kind of uncharitable. I mean, one’s an Americanised adaptation of a colourful, family-friendly Nintendo game that recasts its source material as a gritty investigative action-adventure piece featuring a pair of emotionally dysfunctional protagonists navigating a noir cyberpunk dystopia populated by grotesque monsters, and the other is… hm.
You’re really funny and original, you know that
The Silence of the Lambs stole its plot from Care Bears: A New Generation.
Consider:
Both stories feature a young woman who excels in her field, but is not taken seriously by her peers (Christy/Agent Starling)
Both protagonists cut a deal with a socially awkward monster (Dark Heart/Hannibal Lecter), who demands an unsettling but seemingly innocuous quid pro quo for his assistance
Both realise too late that the monster’s apparently disinterested aid is actually part of an elaborate scheme to draw out an older mentor who’s been watching over her (True Heart Bear/Jack Crawford)
Both are forced to enter a dangerous situation alone after the monster sends her allies on a wild goose chase (hunting Dark Heart’s shadow to the ends of the earth/investigating Buffalo Bill’s former Illinois residence)
Both plots come to a head with a final confrontation in an underground lair where young people are kept imprisoned for sport (Dark Heart’s pocket dimension/”Jack Gordon’s” basement)
In both cases, the monster walks free at the end, having never truly been called to account for his crimes (self-explanatory)
There’s a post out there that talks about how people nowadays act like being able to identify Story Tropes in a narrative is somehow indicative of that narrative being Bad or Badly Written, and then compares the ridiculousness of that stance to complaining that a wall is made up of Bricks or a boat contains identifiable Wooden Planks.
Well, yes; the second post is an illustration by example of exactly how seriously the first one is meant to be taken.
jinlinli 