So in S8Ep7 – Day Forty-Seven, they had this scene of Kinkade saying goodbye to Seok Jin. And for some reason this scene made me really sad, and I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t actually know the context of this.
Turns out it was a dedication to one of Studio Mir’s storyboard artists who passed away last year. He animated so many amazing moments for this show, that were just phenomenal to watch. This was such a thoughtful tribute, and a really sweet moment to watch.
i am SO SICK of unhappy endings. idk about anyone else but the #1 reason i like fiction is because everything can always work out no matter how bad it is. “what if the good guys lost” shut up. you are so fucking boring. give me happy endings or give me nothing
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
“But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”
I don’t think all stories have to have a happy ending, but there are seriously too many with unhappy endings. A good ratio is a necessity.
My face during the entirety of “Battle Scars”
So…are we going to talk about that portrait or nah
honestly i think the secret to staying happy in fandom is to take no shit, spread no shit, and find your people. don’t get too invested that you can’t laugh at it all sometimes, and don’t seek out negativity. the more you look for a pattern of ugliness in an assortment of people who all happen to like the same thing, the more you’ll find it. if you try to be positive, considerate, and empathetic, fandom will reflect that back at you.
I think the best piece of character design advice I ever received was actually from a band leadership camp I attended in june of 2017.
the speaker there gave lots of advice for leaders—obviously, it was a leadership camp—but his saying about personality flaws struck me as useful for writers too.
he said to us all “your curses are your blessings and your blessings are your curses” and went on to explain how because he was such a great speaker, it made him a terrible listener. he could give speeches for hours on end and inspire thousands of people, but as soon as someone wanted to talk to him one on one or vent to him, he struggled with it.
he had us write down our greatest weakness and relate it to our biggest strength (mine being that I am far too emotional, but I’m gentle with others because I can understand their emotions), and the whole time people are sharing theirs, my mind was running wild with all my characters and their flaws.
previously, I had added flaws as an after thought, as in “this character seems too perfect. how can I make them not-like-that?” but that’s not how people or personalities work. for every human alive, their flaws and their strengths are directly related to each other. you can’t have one without the other.
is your character strong-willed? that can easily turn into stubbornness. is your character compassionate? maybe they give too many chances. are they loyal? then they’ll destroy the world for the people they love.
it works the other way around too: maybe your villain only hates the protagonist’s people because they love their own and just have a twisted sense of how to protect them. maybe your antagonist is arrogant, but they’ll be confident in everything they do.
tl;dr “your curses are your blessings, and your blessings are your curses” there is no such thing as a character flaw, just a strength that has been stretched too far.
This is such a fabulous flip side of what I’ve always known about villians. That their biggest weakness is that they always assume their own motivations are the motives of others.
shoefaced-gemini 