HOME | DD

Description
-RANT IMPENDING, RANT IMPENDING, DANGER WILL ROBINSON-

So I've been feeling stuck and plotless for a long time with Wanderlanders and everything related to it. Trying to shove Sanzell into an OCT doesn't help.

Consequently, I've been thinking. About a lot of things. About what I want to accomplish with these funny-looking cat people and their story.

People tend to sugarcoat things in writing. And by 'people', I mean 'me', though I've seen it in a few other places. There's this whole genre of innocent fantasy violence, where the hero strikes the villain with a fist that can level mountains, he goes crashing through a wall, and no mention is ever given again to villain or wall, or the numerous messy ways he would have died from that kind of concussive force. And the hero is not an unrepentant killer because we never see what happened to his adversary, or he turns up mysteriously okay, or he disappears in a puff of purple smoke because he was a monster all along so it's okay.

There's also this idea of sticking fuzzy ears and a tail on someone and calling them animal people, or, even more egregiously, 'half-animal'. Yet they never exhibit any behavior that isn't funny or endearing. Cat people meow, and purr, and play with yarn, and lap milk up with their tongue. They don't sink their claws in your leg when you tick them off, or hiss and spit at you because they don't like you, or shred the furniture, or vomit wads of hair.

This is not me saying these things need to be abolished and die in a fire. This is not me jumping on a soapbox and shouting about them. They're not bad things. Just things that have been clattering around in the great vacant spaces of my mind for most of this week.

Every time I try to think about what drives Wanderlanders, and the things that I think might happen in the story, I end up thinking that it's a story about people. People in a tough world, a world where there's not enough to go around. People are starving. Some are hurt. There's no big frame of society for people to fit in and some of the lucky ones can huddle together around the same fire, and find people to make families with. And I haven't really been addressing that, or thinking about it. Or if I have, it's only in the safe ways, looking at how the lucky people -do- get by, the happiness they manage to find, and being pretty unfair to the people who don't have such friendly stories.

Miril is aggressive, self-destructive, and fights everything if only to feel just that more important. She lives alone in the wastes and only comes back to Rush because she can't bring herself to leave the only person she really cares about, but doesn't want to drag him down with her. I've been picturing her as a sort of spunky loner who is rude and abrasive but despite that just a perfect saint once you put up with her griping for about ten seconds.

And that's what I've been thinking about.

Title is from Propane Nightmares by Pendulum

Description
-RANT IMPENDING, RANT IMPENDING, DANGER WILL ROBINSON-

So I've been feeling stuck and plotless for a long time with Wanderlanders and everything related to it. Trying to shove Sanzell into an OCT doesn't help.

Consequently, I've been thinking. About a lot of things. About what I want to accomplish with these funny-looking cat people and their story.

People tend to sugarcoat things in writing. And by 'people', I mean 'me', though I've seen it in a few other places. There's this whole genre of innocent fantasy violence, where the hero strikes the villain with a fist that can level mountains, he goes crashing through a wall, and no mention is ever given again to villain or wall, or the numerous messy ways he would have died from that kind of concussive force. And the hero is not an unrepentant killer because we never see what happened to his adversary, or he turns up mysteriously okay, or he disappears in a puff of purple smoke because he was a monster all along so it's okay.

There's also this idea of sticking fuzzy ears and a tail on someone and calling them animal people, or, even more egregiously, 'half-animal'. Yet they never exhibit any behavior that isn't funny or endearing. Cat people meow, and purr, and play with yarn, and lap milk up with their tongue. They don't sink their claws in your leg when you tick them off, or hiss and spit at you because they don't like you, or shred the furniture, or vomit wads of hair.

This is not me saying these things need to be abolished and die in a fire. This is not me jumping on a soapbox and shouting about them. They're not bad things. Just things that have been clattering around in the great vacant spaces of my mind for most of this week.

Every time I try to think about what drives Wanderlanders, and the things that I think might happen in the story, I end up thinking that it's a story about people. People in a tough world, a world where there's not enough to go around. People are starving. Some are hurt. There's no big frame of society for people to fit in and some of the lucky ones can huddle together around the same fire, and find people to make families with. And I haven't really been addressing that, or thinking about it. Or if I have, it's only in the safe ways, looking at how the lucky people -do- get by, the happiness they manage to find, and being pretty unfair to the people who don't have such friendly stories.

Miril is aggressive, self-destructive, and fights everything if only to feel just that more important. She lives alone in the wastes and only comes back to Rush because she can't bring herself to leave the only person she really cares about, but doesn't want to drag him down with her. I've been picturing her as a sort of spunky loner who is rude and abrasive but despite that just a perfect saint once you put up with her griping for about ten seconds.

And that's what I've been thinking about.

Title is from Propane Nightmares by Pendulum