March 2025 Writer Support Thread

Game Development Writing and Content
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To clarify more, while lesbianism and female bisexuality are heavily encouraged by the goddess due to her own “live and let live” empathy (which comes from my own perspective that is basically the same), she doesn’t force it on everyone, hence her benevolence. To elaborate more on her backstory, she decided to become a mortal for a while, fell in love with a human woman, wrote poems for her, then offered her to join her in heaven once she passes on (that tidbit about poems was loosely based on Filipina poet Leona Florentino). Should be safe enough.

To be fair, you’re both right. I still have much to learn about queer identities and how I should naturally integrate them into the backstory. If you’ll encourage me to help me demonstrate the gold standard of empathy, then be my guest. I just laid out my plans so I could check if these would make certain people uncomfortable, and if I offended some of you in the process, I am terribly sorry.

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That’s not benevolence. That barely qualifies as tolerance. If she truly believes in “live and let live,” she shouldn’t be encouraging anyone to be anything.

And please note that once again you’ve created a gay character who’s looking to decrease the number of straight people in the world, even if it’s by persuasion rather than force.

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The fact that you had to ask if this rhetoric might be offensive is in itself concerning. To me it’s blatantly obvious that such an homofobic characterization is gonna rub people the wrong way, especially in a game centering queer people. Unless its satire poking fun at this backwards way of thinking you shouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. Also as an dyslexic person, what has dyslexia to do with him being a villain? The struggle with language is real which can make me frustrated, but that doesn’t make me inclined to nuke half of the population out of existence.

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OK, please suggest what additions and/or clarifications to her backstory are necessary, as it’s at most basic and shouldn’t complicate the stories I will be presenting in the anthology.

To help you, here’s the entirety of her backstory, as presented in Lily Adventuresses! Episode 1.

Book 2: How the Goddess Encourages Love among Women

Book 2: How the Goddess Encourages Love among Women
by Verna Eversole

Always keeping watch over this world, but never meddling in its affairs too much, the Goddess Dawani fully knows of Her own femininity, and was curious about the women of Baihaerun Herself.
And thus, She descended to the surface from heaven, disguising Herself as a woman and assuming the name of Leona Florentina Upton.
While on the surface, She instantly fell in love with a woman named Judith Ayayar, and wrote poems for her.
Because literature was still at its infancy at the time of Her descent, historians agree that She (as Leona) was the first documented poet as well as the “mother of women’s writing and sapphic literature”.
And when Leona later revealed Her true identity to Judith, She vowed to her that once Judith sheds her mortal coil, she would instantly ascend to heaven and join Her.
Emboldened by the Goddess’s resolve, Judith spread the message of women loving women, which first confused the people, but her fellows soon understood the message as a divine sign.
As the civilization of Baihaerun was also still at its infancy, it took several unanimous edicts from the leaders and elders to accept this now-commonplace practice, as long as there are no hints of malice and treachery involved, which are both considered verboten.

As stated before, chapter 4’s antagonist was supposed to be based on a gay Twitter user who is trying to rip the LGBTQ+ community apart by being a queer simp, focusing on his sexuality and nothing else. Here are the replies to his comments, since the user himself privated his account.. Before he locked up his account, I’ve learned that he’s dyslexic, bipolar, and he was trying to force others to “cancel” their moms over petty disagreements.

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My struggles with the English language do make me inclined to nuke half the population out of existence, and I’m not even dyslexic. Just a non-native speaker.

Like, look at the word “excited” for a moment. Nowadays, it implies purely positive feelings such as enthusiasm and eagerness, but older works use it for any kind of emotional stimuli. This makes reading classics like Dracula extra hard, since the characters keep getting “excited” by horrifying stuff and end up looking like complete psychos. And that’s not to mention what people did to the word “literally”… literally figuratively unbearable.

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Virtually is my favourite in the “WTF does this even mean?” regard.

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At one of the cons that I went to, a few years back, there was a panel titled something like “beyond empires and colonies” that was about this very subject. Unfortunately, though I was looking forward to it, and there were some heavy-hitter “names” among the participants, it was quite a disappointment. I’m always interested to see fantasy writers interpret any political system other than absolute monarchy. There is so much drama and intrigue to be mined from things like the power struggle between the throne, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the church (or equivalent).

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I’d suggest that intra-community behaviour of this kind / quislings tends to be most effectively explored by writers from within the community in question - especially if it’s being depicted in such an over-the-top, offensive-trope-heavy way. There are maybe ways in which a gay man writer could write this setup as an effective, outrageous satire. But it can easily come across as outsiders exploiting a dynamic that causes marginalised people a lot of pain and potential harm.

It sounds like you’re rethinking this element which is, I think, a good decision.

I’m partway through The Saint of Bright Doors at the moment and am really enjoying it! The setting is a modern-feel theocratic, bureaucratic… something and the writing is brilliant.

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Straight man here. A gay character trying to get rid of straight people sounds really bad, but I like to play devil’s advocate so I’d like to approach this discussion with a different perspective.

Often in story telling the antagonist is a representation of the lesson to learn within the story. So there is something about the villain you don’t want to have be it an ideology, attitude, or viewpoint.

So, what if we keep this scenario but every other representation of gay characters in the story are well represented and there is a lot of other representations of it? At face value, I’d think this would help balance it. At first I actually did think this would help solve it, but the more I thought about it, the more it falls apart.

So from here I took that same set up but reversed it. If there is a straight person trying to get rid of LGB, but there are a lot of other characters who are straight but are not homophobic, wouldn’t that give a message that the villain’s viewpoint is wrong, but not that being straight is wrong, right? I’d say, yes.

However, these two are not the same since LGBTIA has negative stigmas within some cultures and being straight does not. So I think showing a broad range of good representation would help fight the negative representation of the villain (that’s kind of the point of the four point opposition in the video I shared), but it would be better to avoid that negative representation.

What I’d do instead is recommend is to analyze the role of your antagonist, @MoonlightBomber. If you need a set up where someone is trying to get rid of straight people, can you do it with a straight person? Do you just want a villain who is gay? Then could you have them being gay have nothing to do with their villainy? Is is actually about having a villain who is genocidal and you’re looking for a different genocide than is normally talked about? Then is there a different type of genocide you could do instead? Like gynocide which is rarely talked about.

In the end, what is the point of the antagonist you are looking to write? What aspect of their character is important for the story you want to tell? Then try to figure out different approaches or directions of those same aspects.

So to try to make it easier try to fill in the blank of the following sentence (and keep it to a single sentence).

This antagonist is in my story because I need a character who ______________.

If you put “is gay and is trying to kill all straight people” then you have a big uphill fight on a hill you are creating when it comes to fighting the negative stereotype.

If you put “is gay” then that tells you the character doesn’t need the negative stereotype.

If you put “is trying to kill off straight people” then you should find a way to do it without the negative stereotype.

If it is none of these, then you can easily avoid this.

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If this goddess is a real entity… why does she have a human sexuality at all? If she is a true divine, why is it the case that she has seemingly made a world of heterosexuality as default before… changing her mind? It seems an odd character to give to what should, assuming I understand correctly, be a divine creator figure.

To be very frank, starting from a place of “I’m basing my main villain on a Twitter user I don’t like, down to his disabilities” is bad for so many reasons beyond just the queer angle that I recommend scrapping the concept entirely. There’s nothing healthy to be found down that road.

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I’m not sure if either of these approaches would help, though… only because there ARE reasons why someone might justify the necessity of this villain being gay. Hypocrisy, internalized hatred, misogyny, yadda yadda. Justifications I could find compelling within (as mentioned) over the top Pahlahniuk-y satires written by gay men, but would cringe back from if they were written by anyone else. I just can’t imagine hitting the nail without the life experience to back it up.

And having additional positive gay dude representation probably can’t help, because then you’d have to shove a million guys without plot relevance into a WIP about lesbians just to offset a single homophobic caricature.

Making the antagonist a misogynistic, straight frat guy might be the only way to salvage it. Maybe. Everything in the world comes down to intent and execution, after all.

‘Focusing on his sexuality and nothing else’ this statement is homophobic rhetoric… I understand basing characters on people you’ve seen and know – it happens, our experiences define who we are and what we write – but I can’t imagine linking directly to someone’s twitter account and using him as your cornerstone for characterization is a good idea. There… are some ethical issues here :-[

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Is it really such a radical concept that a person might not care what anyone else’s sexual orientation is? Can’t she just celebrate love in whatever form it comes and encourage everyone to “live and let live,” rather than encouraging “women loving women” as if it were fundamentally superior to other kinds of love?

The idea that LGBTIA people are trying to “recruit” is a very common, active stereotype that harms real human beings. In fact, most of us would be the first to say that no one should ever be pressured to have a particular kind of sex or a particular kind of relationship. My lesbian cousin shouldn’t be “encouraged” to have sex with men, and neither should a straight guy like you. As an asexual woman, I’ve had men I wasn’t attracted to try to cajole me out of my clothes, and it felt icky. I’ve also had women I wasn’t attracted to try to cajole me out of my clothes, and it felt equally icky. I had a girlfriend for a few months because I was scared to lose a close friendship if I told her I didn’t share her feelings. After she dumped me I met the man I’ve now been married to for over 13 years. My moms (yes, plural) were at my wedding, not sulking because they’d lost me to the other team, but overjoyed that I had found someone to spend my life with, just as they had.

That’s not benevolence, that’s doing the bare minimum not to be an actual sexual predator.

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You’re right, my apologies. The main point I was trying to get to was, “what’s the purpose of the character”? I guess me breaking things down for follow up questions may have come off different than my intent.

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Nah nah, you’re cool, I hope I didn’t sound like I was shutting you down, I was just trying to build off what you were saying. Asking not only ‘what’s the purpose’, but also ‘why is that the purpose’ and ‘what would be the consequence of writing a character like this, with this purpose, in this particular story’ and ‘who would that hurt’, and all that jazz.

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In attempt to shift the subject toward something slighly less uncomfortable, let me answer the question from the opening post.

Most fantasy governments are literally just a monarch (usually a king) plus some vaguely defined, vaguely important, vaguely organized nobles in the background. Your typical fantasy writer likely can’t tell the difference between a feudal and palatial government, because it doesn’t terribly matter to the action-focused story they’re trying to tell.

Right now, I’m something of an exception, since I’m writing a game that basically revolves around politics and governance. To maximize the potential for drama, I designed a political system where the entire nation is one huge crab bucket of people manipulating, betraying and assassinating one another in an endless war for absolute power. Nobody trusts anybody, everyone is corrupt and rules exists only to be broken. As a result, nearly everyone in this society is depressed and only goes on thanks to the power of hatred.

I think it’s gonna be a fun game. Or at least one fun for me to write.

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It’s definitely been one of my main focuses with Shattered Eagle, where I’ve used the late roman empire as inspiration, but I haven’t let that constrain me either. There’s a monarch, like most fantasy settings, but despite that the monarch is still constrained by institutions and interest groups which force the regime to either appeal to them or work to remove their power.

Even in autocratic governance, the autocrat (or monarch in fantasy) can’t act solely based on fiat without consideration for the groups which support their rule. Or at least, they could but this leads to dissent and potentially even rebellion/treason against their rule.

I think that’s an important lesson for fantasy worldbuilding to consider, the various interest groups involved which compete for influence and resources beneath the ruler themselves. Considering what those interests are and how they conflict or work with one another may help you detail how your fictional society operates.

Hope it goes well, it sounds really fascinating!

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…huh, it is actually pretty weird that I haven’t thought about fantasy governments that much, given that my fantasy story (which I stopped writing years ago, but still) is pretty much about finding the rightful king, but then again, I wasn’t very old when I started it.

I seem to have been more interested in figuring out different kingdoms and weird laws.

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I quite like what Derek Landy did with his Skulduggery Pleasant series. I found his magic government working alongside a mortal one interesting.

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Absolutely one of my favorite aspects of worldbuilding, and funnily enough, it wasn’t until I got VERY into Vampire: The Masquerade that I cared. It’s the human aspect that appeals to me. Who designed this structure, why did they design it that way, who does it benefit? Who does it hurt? Who dislikes it and why, who likes it and why?

VTM makes a show of having everyone in the Camarilla (the Vampire Government) having their own agendas, their own neuroses, their own desires – everything, down to how a structure was initially designed and down to how (why) its kept in place now – were all influenced by people, and people are fickle and nasty and kind and self-serving and so on, so forth. THAT’S the part I like working out. The who, not the what.

I hope I’m doing the political/governmental/religious systems in my WIP justice, because I’m having a blast writing them.

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First, that fantasy doesn’t have to involve governmental structures.

I enjoy a good political fantasy as much as anyone – it’s why I’m writing one, and I also really liked Saint of Bright Doors, a terrific political-religious fantasy that deserved its Nebula win. When it comes to some authors, notably China Mieville, I love how even their eldritch horrors have politics.

But great fantasy/sci-fi can be written about things that transcend governance. Mieville handles it well, but I’ve definitely felt disappointed by some books where powers supposedly beyond or close to the edge of mortal ken are depicted as preoccupied with an all-too-recognizable politics. Mythopoeic fantasy doesn’t need to go there.

When fantasy worlds do aim for a more “realistic,” less mythic register, I like it when the magic systems clearly interact with the political system. It always hits my suspension of disbelief when a world where magic is widespread and can accomplish many of the things high tech does in our world still has a bog-standard medieval late-feudal political economy. If magic hasn’t created an industrial revolution or regimes that look more like our world’s modernity: why?

As for March goals, it’s just to write as much as I can. That’ll probably be less than I got done in Feb, given that I’m single-dadding it for the next few days and will then be taking the boys out trekking for the last couple weeks of the month. But I’ll keep pushing to get to the next update-worthy point.

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