These horrific, sexist, racist paragraphs – screenshotted and shared for posterity by James Smythe, to whom we are all indebted – are the work of one Liam O’Flynn, a writer and English teacher. Evidently, they come from his book Writing With Stardust: the Ultimate Descriptive Guide for students, parents, teachers, and lovers of English, and are intended as examples of good writing.
UM.
Dear white male writers: DO NOT DO THIS SHIT. IT IS SUPER GROSS AND FETISHISTIC AND ALSO TERRIBLE WRITING. THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.
Like I just. “Her virility-brown eyes -” WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN? How can you have an “Amazonian figure”ON a “wafer-thin body” when “figure” is a word that describe’s a body’s shape, and Amazonian means pretty much the DIRECT FUCKING OPPOSITE of “wafer-thin” in the first place?
What the shitting fuck does ANY of this mean, apart from “I am only nebulously familiar with the concept of women and completely at a loss if I can’t compare their various bodyparts to jewels, animals and footstuffs”?
STOP
GO TO WRITING JAIL
GO DIRECTLY TO WRITING JAIL, DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200
tag yourself i’m the two beryl-green jewels in the snow
if her ears frame her nose do they like, grow directly beside her nose? how does she see from them?
*facepalm*
“
Writing With Stardust: the Ultimate Descriptive Guide for students, parents, teachers, and lovers of English
“
lovers of english
oh my goddddddd
i can’t get over this fucking post
“I loved her nebulous, eden-green eyes which were a-sparkle with the ‘joie de vivre’. They were like two beryl-green jewels melted onto snow.”
1. what the fuck is joie de vivre
2. melted jewels?
3. beryl green
eden green:
WHICH ONE IS ITTTTTTTTT
@laughlikesomethingbroken “Joie de vivre” is a French phrase that literally translates to “joy of living”, while it IS one of those phrases that gets used in English in this context it is SO EXTRA AND UNNECESSARY OH MY GOD. Don’t use French to make yourself sound sophisticated when you’re NOT
I don’t know where to even START. Curvilinear waist? Sugar candy-sweet? What the FUCK are seraph’s ears? Voguish clothes? What the everloving fuck is “constellation blue” supposed to mean??? Like forget the objectification, this writing is horrifying enough before we even get to the embedded sexism
seraph’s ears are ears that you can’t see bc they’re hidden behind her 6 wings
Oyster white teeth?
holy purple prose batman
Female writers do this too. Have you read a Mills and Boon novel? Have you read high school girls’ yaoi fanfics?
Uh oh, we were focusing too much on how a grown man is selling this shit and not enough shitting on teenage girls. Egalitarians here to put an end to that shit.
Guess what? I’ve read A LOT of Harlequin novels and a LOT of fanfic and I have never ever seen anything this horrible at description.
Also, none of those stories were trying to hold themselves up as high examples of the craft
You guys here is the description of the book on Amazon.
If this is the description I cannot think how bad the inside is.
I never ever want to hear anyone make fun of fanfic writers again
NEVER EVER
Lord god almighty. I’ve been feeling really down about my writing lately, but this is a confidence boost. 8I
As well as the sexism, racism, purple prose, and general nonsense… “The moons delicate light”? At least learn to use apostrophes correctly before setting yourself up as a writing expert, good lord.
“You will find that this book will transform the way you think about descriptive writing.”
Well it sure did that…
Gosh
I really want to know what a “decanter shaped waist” is. Which one of these matches her waistline? The most common version is “upper part is lightly flared at the top, and then it swells out to triple the upper width.” So… measurements like 34-26-56? On her wafer-thin Amazonian body?
Definitely #4, but it’s a totally unrealistic standard for women.
Uh… Nougat isn’t brown… If it is, it better be fucking chocolate mate or you’ve really fucked it up.
Can I talk for a moment about visual storytelling, cause, I feel like it’s something that a lot of adaptations forget about in lieu of trying to replicate their source material.
It’s a problem you see most often in anime derived from manga or light novels, but it’s also present in movies based on YA novels, and you gotta know what I’m talking about, start on black, opening narration, fade in as the main character explains the world and environment. This works in a book since the reader can’t see anything, they need the specifics of the world explained, but it feels like the movies are just like “well it worked for the book, it’ll work for us right?
I’d say it’s worse in anime, where characters will go on long internal soliloquies trying to explain their thought processes and complex emotions, which again, works for the manga, in a manga movement is very expensive, every single motion requires it’s own panel, which takes up the artist’s time, printed space, and a moment in the narrative, so it’s important to only show what absolutely needs to be shown. But animation is different, it’s all movement and the details are what sells it more than the dialogue.
The reason I wanted to make this post is because of one scene in One Punch Man that perfectly exemplifies how to translate a written thought process into visual storytelling. After getting punched to the moon (err, spoilers), Saitama has this thought process
and it’d be easy to translate that entirely literally in the anime, Saitama crouches, has an internal monologue as he tries to figure out how much force he needs to put into his jump, and then he launches. Instead though, the scene is done completely silently, to sell the fact that he’s in space, but the thought process isn’t removed, it’s just show visually.
He throws a bit of moon rock to gauge the moon’s gravity, then launches, it’s a much more thoughtful approach to the scene and the audience’s ability to interpret visual information.
I just, really wish more adaptations realized the inherent strength of the visual medium instead of relying entirely on the source material’s structure and reliance on its own medium.
Most commonly, this is exemplified with the Sassy Gay Best Friend. The Sassy Gay Best Friend has no queer friends, inexplicably content to surround himself exclusively with heterosexual, cisgender women and listen to them vent about what pugnacious assholes their boyfriends are.
The Sassy Gay Best Friend exhausts me just by thinking about him. The closest friends of every other queer person I know are composed predominantly of other queer people, myself included, and it’s with other queer people that we tend to best connect.
Dealing with large groups of straight people tends to exhaust and upset me, and I cannot imagine voluntarily opting into half the amount of heterosexual melodrama as the Sassy Gay Best Friend.
Especially to forward the development of straight people, which it usually is.
The Bury Your Gays trope is thought to have originated with the strict censorship laws of the twentieth century, which dictated that queer characters and relationships could only be portrayed if they atoned for their sins and “turned straight” by the end of the story, or – drumroll please – died.
In other words, the only thing burying your gays accomplishes is contributing to an ugly cycle. So if you have the option not to kill off queer characters, don’t.
This phenomenon, commonly known as queerbaiting, originated with clever creators finding loopholes in the aforementioned censorship laws of the nineteenth and twentieth century, by weaving romantic and/or erotic relationships between same gender-characters in between the lines.
One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is 1950s film Some Like It Hot, a surprisingly tender and thoughtful examination of gender identity, femininity, and sexual orientation. Concisely put, the two male leads are circumstantially compelled to disguise themselves as women and travel with an all-female band, during which one of the men captures the affection of a (male) millionaire, who asks for his hand in marriage. He says yes, and the film ends with this exchange:
Okay, this isn’t exactly subtext, which is why the film was produced without the approval of the Motion Picture Production Code. But you get the idea: this is as blatant as queer identities could be in 1950s America.
The key difference? It is no longer the 1950s, and what was revolutionary for the time period is not revolutionary now. Don’t repeat JK Rowling’s fallacy and expect to squeak by with subtextual or offscreen representation.
Far too often, queer rep in the media showcases dysfunctional relationships, usually short-term, sex-based, and/or with a reasonably severe power imbalance (looking at you, Call Me By Your Name.) This is worrisome, because it conveys an unhealthy message to queer youth about what normality looks like, and perpetrates a pervasive stereotype that queer people are more likely to be deviant and unhealthy than their straight peers.
So allow your work to reflect this! Portray loving, supportive, and affectionate queer couples who encourage one another’s success and quality of life. Think Nomi and Amanita from Sense8, or Holt and Kevin from Brooklyn 99.
To countermand this, try to portray queer love as sweet, pure, and wholesome whenever possible. Depict puppy love and crushes and adorable dates between same gender couples. Expunge the idea that queer sexuality is inherently profane.
This doesn’t mean the couples can’t be interesting or complex, mind you – books such as Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe are excellent examples of tenderly portrayed first love, while painting intriguing portraits of complex feelings and characters.
If you’re a straight person who hasn’t interacted much with the queer community, I’m going to personally recommend that you stay away from stereotypes. Promiscuous bisexuals, flamboyant gay men, butch lesbians, et cetera.
These people exist and deserve to be depicted – I’ve even depicted two out of the aforementioned three examples in me my most recent novel – but I’m inclined that it takes a member of the queer community to portray them with authenticity and respect.
So where do you start? Casual representation, that’s where.
Give me trans men relaxing in their binders at the end of the day, casual mention of same-gender crushes or past partners, a same-gender partner that the hero is fighting to get home to. Sometimes the best form of representation is to depict queer people as simply existing and living their lives.
Disclaimer:
These are all based off of my personal pet peeves and opinions as a queer woman, and you don’t have to follow any of them. Though I firmly believe we need better representation from up-and-coming authors, I’m profusely anti-censorship, and I believe everyone deserves to write their story the way they want to.
I hope this helps, and happy writing! ❤
Or just write how you want and ignore virtue signaling bs. Characters are characters. Sexuality is an afterthought
A) Read the end of this post, where I clearly said I support everyone’s prerogative to write how they want.
B) It’s hypocritical to accuse me of virtue signaling when this response is clearly a contrived attempt to appear edgy without actually improving your writing.
C) Sexuality isn’t an afterthought in the seventy-four countries where homosexuality is still illegal, the ten countries where it’s punishable by death, or the forty-one states where forced conversion therapy is still permitted, but you do you, buddy.
the most fun thing about being a fic author is when you know what’s supposed to happen but when you go to write it you realise that, for the event to be plausible, you need to add another 2k of development and establish like six extra things before you can even get to the scene you need to write, and by ‘most fun’ I mean fuck everything someone take this fucking story away from me I’m on strike
YES. This whole thread is the best thing and betterbemeta’s tags (above) are on point. I would love actual ‘realistic ancient battles’ where like ten actual fighters and whatever serfs they can persuade to accompany them posture and try to intimidate each other, or have an Official Scrum on a mutually beneficial day. That and just…cattle raiding.
I guess in post-collapse terms it’s theoretically different because your whole raider gang exists to nick other people’s shit so doesn’t need to cultivate or craft much except perhaps to make them more self-sufficient in weaponry, armaments, and other logistical things that’ll enable them to raid harder and more often. That’s exactly why, on the other side of things, as many citizen’s as possible in your vulnerable good-guy farming commune might need to be militia members to protect themselves from people who can dedicate their full-time everyday energy to Being Raiders.
I say in theory because, even if you’re nicking other people’s shit, why not treat that as a bonus? Why not look to history’s peoples who placed a particular import on raiding as a way of life, and notice that none of them were just straight-up predators. They had enough agricultural or pastoral or pescatoral (is that a word?) infrastructure to subsist, and then the luxury, the surplus, came from attacking other people part-time, very occasionally. Look at norse folks going viking; look at the invasive pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe. Just in terms of the caloric requirements and risks inherent in combat, you’re not gonna want to do that full-time. Training to do it well will take more calories and they need to come from somewhere. You pick your battles. You take without fighting at all where you can – so intimidation and making enemies surrender without having to fight is important here; c.f. pirates of the Golden Age – and you fight rarely and only when you know you can a) win, b) benefit hugely from it.
THANK YOU
i think this post has changed my world. literally.
if you ever doubt your writing, be it your themes, or the reason behind it, remember that h.g wells wrote war of the worlds both as a commentary on colonialism and the horrors it brings, and because he fucking hated his neighbours and his 13 hour job, and wanted to write about the town in which he lived getting blasted to the fucking ground by lasers into an irreparable heap and all of the townspeople dying painfully
you, too, can channel your hatred for that guy that lives down the hall and blasts music at 4am into the one of the most influential science fiction stories ever written! fuck it! i believe in you!!
This is one of the most inspirational things I’ve ever seen
I wish i had a context for this. But I really dont.
I was all ready to “um, actually” this, but, um, actually there’s about 3-4 grams of iron in a person, which x400 is 1.2-1.6kg, which is a smallish but not unreasonable sword. So. Math checks out.
How would you extract the iron, though? The more practical solution would be to kill a mere hundred men, then mix 1 part blood with 3 parts standard molten iron, imo. Cheaper and faster, while still retaining the edge that only evil magic can give you.
Or, you could just make the sword of iron, and then use the blood to temper the blade.
1.2 to 1.6 kilograms is a perfectly reasonable large sword. Your average longsword was 1.1–1.8 kg and I don’t even remember if that’s including the weight of the hilt, guard, and pommel or just the blade. Your more classic “knight sword” was a mere 1.1 kilograms on average; the blood of 400 men is more than enough.
This is using the comparatively crappy metallurgy of medieval Europe and their meh iron swords. Move east to, say, contemporary Iran and make a scimitar using high carbon steel (~2%) for a .75 kilogram blade and you only need the blood of about 225 men.
So putting my thoughts in on this… because how could I not.
So you’ve exsanguinated your 400 guys to get the iron for your sword. Cool. But now you have 400 bodies lying around.
Why not put those to good use and cremate them. Use the carbon from those 400 bodies (you won’t need all of them) and now you can make a nice mid-high carbon steel sword.
Now you have a sword forged with the blood of your enemies AND strengthened with their bones.
“high fantasy math” – the tag I should have expected to write some day.
wupacing 