“Themes are for book reports. I’ll just make my characters act at random.”
“So your book is about embracing chaos in defiance of tradition.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
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The creative vision is more important than what the masses think.
And the key is not to die on any hill, the goal is to defend it and kill everyone else that tries to take it, then raise their corpses to shore up your hill’s defenses for the next attack.
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I’ll die on the hill that writing is supposed to be fun & you should enjoy it & the best writing comes from someone who is happy with their story/writing/characters/etc
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I think statements like “People don’t read books because they want a theme, they read because they want a good story,” is like saying “People don’t read books for the characters or plot, they read because they want a good story.”
I agree that people read fiction because they want to experience a good story, but a well-executed theme is as much a part of the story as the characters or plot is.
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Oh, definitely that any story that involves a hero and a prophecy is instantly knocked down a few pegs as far as enjoyment goes. There’s nothing I dislike more than the same sort of story where thing begin, generic white blond/brown-haired lower-class but with a heart of gold male English-intoned hero character stumbles into being named a hero in a prophecy that then subsequently plays out to the very last small detail. This is part of why I tend to not read fantasy novels a lot; too many are the same. There’s a fine line between archetypes/tropes/common story structure and blatantly recycling the same thing hundreds of times.
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addendum:
some writers ought to stop mocking the player for their failures. as in ‘hey, you failed this thing that i designed in a way that would have you fail unless you read my mind, so are so pathetic’.
stop it
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I think that’s one of the things that killed off the old point and click graphic adventure genre back in the 90s. Devs started to feel like it was mandatory to have a narrator who’d mock you for taking dumb decisions. A big turn-off - thanks but no thanks. If I wanted to be mocked for making stupid choices, I’d just phone my mum.
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I loved that narrator such nostalgia
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Ok, that hit harder than I expected 
I think it has more to do with the “sarcastic narrator” trope or something. Like, you want to make your narrator interesting? Make them sarcastic and witty.
No, I want someone who is dumb and considerate. Not someone who’s a wisecracker. It’s getting old.
Mind you, this is just my view.
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Kalynn Bayron recently wrote an excellent post on tor.com called Not Until We Get a Turn: Retellings, Tropes, and Who Gets To Tell Stories. https://www.tor.com/2020/06/08/not-until-we-get-a-turn-retellings-tropes-and-who-gets-to-tell-stories/
In it, she (beautifully) argues that tropes which are traditionally considered “overdone” are still new to creators and audiences who haven’t had the opportunity to explore those tropes through the lens of their own experiences.
I would extend the same idea to games. Chosen one narratives are incredibly common to the point of being boring. At the same time, many of the best depictions of those are inaccessible to a host of people for a host of reason- sexuality, gender, disability, race, etc. I understand why most audiences are tired of those tropes, but since disabled people are rarely able to play those games, and have few opportunities for the kinds of narratives they depict, apparently, the hill I will definitely die on is that those tropes aren’t done until they’re accessible to everyone.
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I would say an equal part of those games dying off was how crazy hard some of the puzzle-based ones were. I really don’t think people today take enough time to appreciate how much better game difficulty is these days.
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I’d agree with that. Often these games seemed much harder than the puzzle games that are around today, and often much harder to get walkthroughs for when they came out, which I imagine got pretty frustrating for a lot of people and lead to their demise. Most of the puzzle type games I’ve played recently have been easy by comparison. It was even worse when some of them really had no logic behind the puzzles leading to rage quits. (Yeah I admit, I got a few retro games through GOG a few months ago so it’s not just faulty memory speaking. While some where just hard, others still had me scratching my head as to how they came up with a solution that wasn’t trial and error when I looked at the answer which is more annoying than anything else.) I don’t think it’s great, but don’t think it’s the end of the world being told off for doing something wrong, except when it’s a logic-less puzzle.
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I’d just say that all around, for all video games, difficulty is handled much better. Easy modes allow for an easy experience, and the harder modes make it extremely hard but without resorting to absurd cheese. I played DAO on casual (lowest) difficulty the other week just to replay the story, and even for a game that came out in 2009, and on casual mode, it still had insane difficulty spikes and areas that took a lot of effort to beat. Don’t even get me started on way back in the day when you had things like the NES Ninja Turtles game.
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Oh man, I love mocking my players for dying through dumb decisions- I even break the fourth wall on ‘you die’ scenes, just to really rub it in. Don’t take this away from me! Us petty sadists have feelings too, you know 
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Just because it’s shocking, doesn’t mean it’s good
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I’ll die on this hill: romance stories involving power plays aren’t hot. What I mean is stories like a student-teacher relationship type of story. Even if the student is the dominant one.
I can see the “appeal” it may have, but it’s just not…good for me. It’s just basically romanticizing and fetishizing it. It’s a cringefest, not “quirky” or “against all odds”.
Sidehill: Oxford comma is god tier writing.
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The Oxford comma is my living dogma; I also love to use semicolons. I’m really not sure that I vibe with your point on power plays in romance, though, as it seems like that’s more of a personal preference than anything even semi-objective.
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I didn’t even know people treated the Oxford comma as optional/different across English dialects until this thread. I thought it was just considered “universal,” (for as universal as things like this can get.)
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Fair enough. I just find it weird. I guess it’s more of how media portrays it making it very toxic, gaslighting-fest, and taking advantage of the power they have on the individual.
Right? It still fills me with unnecessary petty rage whenever I see someone not use it lmao.
This might be a little controversial due to the subject matter but oh well, im dying on a hill anyway due to my rambling, ranting, poorly punctuated wall of text. Personally and not in relation to COG but modern writing in general, diversity for the sake of itself is often counter productive as instead of anything of substance we often just get some labels of what they are as a person and a vague characterization that overall is nothing but generic, giving the impression what labels they prefer to be called as a person are more important than who they are as a person making the current diversity measures no different from tokenism in many cases. What I mean by this is that it’s more than acceptable to include diversity, it’s often celebrated as its own achievement these days, but please make sure that it is organic to the setting and story you are creating and doesn’t seem like you’re just trying to tick quota boxes. Since I’m stream of thought writing here, I thought of a decent way to phrase my point as I was in the middle of writing an overly convoluted example that was abandoned, if you want something that would normally conflict with your setting it needs to be addressed in a reasonable and realistic way in relation to what you’re trying to accomplish. A better example then my original one that you didn’t read would be if you attempt a blatantly asian style fantasy kingdom having explicitly mentioned high numbers of what would be uncommon ethnicities living there in a historical Asian country would be to justify it by mentioning the empire expanding to overtake a large region with diverse geographical conditions or set it up sort of like elder scrolls where you have the wide variety of peoples with their own cultures and whatnot but due to the entirety of the known world essentially being on one continent, combined with how the empire imposes itself to unite that known world, it’s far easier to believe the amount of integration especially since there are often still tensions between the races caused by that forced unity, though elder scrolls has the unfair advantage of having been around for years and having entire writing teams dedicated to fleshing out the world in that way. As a side note, pet-peeve: I can’t stand when in European type fantasy all kingdoms, separate countries, have essentially the exact same culture because in historical Europe, no matter how similar the countries got culturally there were still clear differences, even in the few situations where all it came down to was the language, that made them dehumanize the other for being different. I understand with something like fantasy you can literally make the world how you want it, but if there is no logical through line for why their culture has the differences it does from those of the real world, aside from happening to be in a world with magic in it, then the world itself seems manufactured instead of a place where real people could live which I think greatly cheapens the setting. That being said, things modern or sci-fi based don’t have that problem to nearly the same extent because they are often, to some extent or other, based off of the world author lives in so will reflect what we know about the world today, as opposed to our ancestors who were all, to some to degree or other, xenophobic. so if you’re making fantasy I truly believe that the world should reflect this to some degree or other just as a more advanced and civilized society would generally be more accepting and willing to be unified. I also believe there’s something to be said about how fantasy is typically based on history where as sci-fi technically has no basis in the real world on what to expect so has more freedom in that regard but I’ve spent 2 hours trying to word this whole thing correctly, as to not be misunderstood or misconstrued, (though that’s likely to happen anyway as I didn’t elaborate as much as I should have In some places and I probably phrased some things too poorly) so I’m just rushing to be done At this point. Thank you to any willing to read my unindented wall of text to try and understand my perspective on this and now for the final 1/5 of a reason I wanted to make this rant, to share the perfect acting role for Shaquille O’Neal. It started when I began wanting to make a historically accurate, at least where aesthetics, combat, and cultures of the the party is concerned, fantasy movie about a band of mercenaries (essentially a d&d party) going to Camelot to find work where shaq would be a good natured barbarian trope character who barely speaks the common tongue but shares a language with the Arab member of the party, that way we get shaq’s massive physique and goofy demeanor but we also minimize his lack of straight forward acting prowess as his line delivery, from I could remember, was never that good so we let him ham up the lines he does have combined with halfway decent direction for him when he’s doing anything on screen, if combined with a competent script, I believe it could’ve made shaq’s whole acting career. Unfortunately, for me and Shaq, I don’t make movies
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