Define "Well Adjusted"

Like, cows produce so much milk that it often hurts them if they aren't milked, dairy cows were specifically bred to produce vastly more milk than their calves can drink, so we can use it.

I got a great anonymous ask last week from someone who wanted to know how to identify weak spots in their writing. One of the things that comes with time and experience is finding the language to identify, discuss, and address the feeling that something isn’t quite right or that a story is “missing something.” Not knowing them or their writing, of course I couldn’t help them figure out what specifically the problem was. But I did share with them a list of things I’ve done over the years to be able to identify weak spots and improve my writing. 

1. Analyze your favorite writers.

Figure out why you like the writing that you like. Ask yourself: What are they doing here? What are they doing that I’m not doing? Why do I love their writing so much? Take notes on their stories. Plot them. Write in the margins. Read them slowly. Read their reviews—both good and bad. Did that writer you love once write something you hated? Great, even better. Figure out why that particular book was different from the others.

2. Analyze your own writing.

Do you have an older story you wrote that you love? Figure out why. What did you do differently in that story that you’re not doing in the current story you’re writing? Make notes. Draw maps. Reverse engineer everything.

3. Develop a language to talk and think about writing.

Read craft books, blogs, anything you can get your hands on. Learn about point of view, conflict, character development, dialogue, story structure, syntax, metaphors. Get your advice from good sources, and don’t believe everything you read. If something doesn’t sit right with you, throw it out. But be open to everything.

4. Journal and write about your writing.

Over time, you will identify consistent weaknesses that you have. Then, in the future, when you feel like “something is missing” from your writing, you can reference your notes and remember, for example, that you often have difficulty with your protagonist’s motivation, with theme, with dialogue, etc., and you’ll have a better idea about where to go looking.

5. Share your writing with someone you trust, ideally a more experienced writer than you or an editor or mentor.

Be very careful about who you share your writing with. Friends and family are not always the best choice. You don’t want someone who’s just going to throw around their uneducated opinion about your work, who has a big ego, or who won’t be honest with you. Remember: “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it” are useless pieces of feedback. You want someone who can read your work and say, “Your protagonist’s passion for music made them really likeable to me. I was dying to know whether they would get into the conservatory or not!” or “My attention wandered on page two, when you described the couch upholstery for three paragraphs.”

6. Analyze the areas of your writing which are commonly problematic for new writers (and writers in general).

In my experience as an editor, the most likely culprits are unclear character motivation and lack of conflict. There are a lot of good resources (books and blogs) about this. Try a Google search for “most common mistakes beginning writers make.”

7. Trust your intuition.

Do you keep coming back to the same page or scene in your story, feeling like it isn’t right? You’re probably onto something.

8. Take time away from your writing.

San Francisco: 44,500 empty units with a homeless population of 20,000

Seattle: 22,600 empty units with a homeless population of 12,000

San Jose: 14,000 empty units with a homeless population of 7,000

Oakland: 10,000 empty units with a homeless population of 10,000

I loathe this shit with all my fucking being. The sheer ENTITLEMENT of these words, acting as though your wants and desires for a piece of media are what is right for it. I hate it so fucking much.

Person B defines the potential of the series as being a thematic series all about determination.

Person C defines the potential of the series as being a character driven series all about character interactions alone.

You cannot do all three- their premise makes them exclusive. So which one is the true potential?

Trick question- None. They all just have different preference they like to call better than the others. 

But to the direct point; obviously it does bother you because why else would you dedicate any time to the thought? Both with the original post and your now multiple replies? ‘I loathe this shit with all my fucking being.’ being your exact words in the original post.

It’s not like I’m actively doing anything about it anyway.

I think when people referred to missed potential has to do with a premise. So, often times people will hear a cool premise and be like “that sounds so cool” and then when they see it, there is a feeling that the premise was not explored sufficiently enough. I don’t think most people on into a Transformers movie and go “oh, this had the potential to be an epic love story for the ages.” It is more to do with people seeing a concept and that piece of media does or does not explore what it has to offer.

What does it mean to “fully explore a premise”? That is really hard to say. I think that the most iconic media tends to maximize its premise. So, for example, the idea of a magic school was not created with Harry Potter but people felt like it had reached its potential for the premise. I think if Harry Potter was advertise as it was but Harry spent two pages at Hogwarts and then fucked off to go explore the forest grounds–there would be a sense that the potential was not reached. This can also be the case for characters, so an example of missed potential that people often cite is Finn from the Sequel Trilogy. You have a defecting Stormtropper and that just inspires the imagination but he’s…screaming Rey’s name.

Now, this is not necessarily without subjectivity and I think the lines are blurred when it comes to a piece of media not fully exploring it’s premise with “I wanted something and it didn’t happen.” I guess an example for me is in Shadow and Bone, there is a love triangle of sorts and it is between the dark, brooding, possibly manipulative, possibly bad guy and the sweet, childhood friend. And I sit here going “wouldn’t it be cool if the manipulative bad guy wasn’t actually bad and he’s just misunderstood and the girls gets with him instead of the boring best friend?” And the show says no, he’s an asshole and I’m sad. Is that missed potential or is that just me not getting what I want? I don’t really know.

I gave the three examples above because they are all examples I have seen in regards to the same piece of media. They are all aspects of that media but people will insist that the “potential” is being wasted because they aren’t getting what they want. I have also seen rewrites of this same piece of media claim that they are doing a better job than the original and it’s…just different. Like having more LGBT focus, or having more straight couples, or having it be darker, or having it be lighter. All while constantly removing the original’s themes and message, the stuff that actually make up a piece of media’s substance. 

This even applies to the characters as well. In the same piece of media, it’s argued that one character had his ‘potential’ wasted by becoming a villain. But the character had done multiple bad things, never once showed an unambiguous moral side and never once showed regret. In order to fulfill said character’s ‘potential’, you would need to rewrite all but their first appearance which was effectively just an outline of a character. 

If all of this counts as ‘wasted potential’, why define anything about the media you make in the first place? Remove the subjective biases and that’s what they are saying. “Do not define your art at all.” After all, what has more potential than a blank sheet of paper?

A work losing potential because the creator got screwed over by an executive suit.

Up until recently, ‘political messages’ in fiction were meant to give you a new perspective on real world issues. Now, political messages use real world issues as shorthand for the message they’re already delivering.

I’m going to give you about the most obvious example I can think of for the former.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is hardly Star Trek’s most subtle hour, but it’s still a thought experiment. You’re invited to take the position of a third party and observe black-white race relations through the perspective of an alien being. And in a world of Gorn lizard people and energy beings and that one talking baby, it’s ridiculous that two people who are nearly identical can’t get along because of (ba dum tssh) the color of their skin. 

You’re not meant to look at these Star Trek characters and go “oh, this is like black people and white people”–you’re meant to look at black people and white people and go “oh, this is like the characters who had a race war over petty differences on Star Trek. How’d that work out for them?”

In contrast, let’s look at the more recent The Falcon And The Winter Soldier.

The villain and the general plot are meant as a metaphor for the refugee crisis, but it’s really poorly established and constructed and executed, in just about every way. You basically have to have a working knowledge of the refugee crisis to even understand what they’re getting at. But the idea is… and I don’t think they spelled this out until episode four or so, well into the plot, so you just could not understand the fundamentals of the conflict or what anyone’s motivations were and anything… 

but anyway, the idea was that after the Thanos Snap, half the population of Earth disappeared, so the developed world welcomed immigrants from the third world to help rebuild society in the wake of all that. But, five years later, when the Snap was undone, everyone came back, so they just kicked out all the immigrants and I guess gave all their property and land and money over to the people who’d come back to life while putting the immigrants in camps. And the bad guy decided to fix that by blowing people up.

Now, I think that could’ve worked as a metaphor, but they didn’t put any effort into it beyond “get it, these people are like refugees”. It didn’t work as an analogy, it didn’t work as a thought experiment, it didn’t work as a parallel. 

And they could’ve used the situation to make you identify with the Flag Smashers, to put you in their shoes and ask you to emphasize with them–but they never did. We never saw what they’d been through, what was motivating them, what they were hoping to accomplish. 

They just had Sam Wilson deliver a cringe-as-hell speech about how the people we’d seen being terrorists for six hours shouldn’t be called terrorists and the best way to prevent them from being terrorists was to give into all their demands.

The writers went at the story from the position that their audience already agreed with them (or, worse, that their audience was dumb and just needed a strong talking-to to get them to agree) and so they would just present the political message of their story and get happy nods. No effort to educate, no effort to inform, no effort to convince. The whole thing is more of an exploitation movie centered around the refugee crisis than an attempt to address it through fiction.

And that’s the problem with a lot of writing these days. Instead of using a fictional character to explain why something Donald Trump does is bad, they invent a fictional character, say “look, it’s Trump!”, thus he’s bad and they fight him. And it used to be they would have main characters–noble, heroic, sympathetic characters–representing the political positions that they were criticizing!

If Star Trek: Discovery had a good-natured character who was making a good-faith argument about why immigration should be restricted, and other characters opposed him, I don’t think anyone would mind. But they don’t do that. They take a character, he’s Space Hitler, he’s a straw-man for all the politics that the writers don’t like, and they blow him up. Oh, and he’s a straight white man, natch.

As captain of the U.S.S. Discovery, Lorca did everything he could to aid in the efforts against the Klingons. While Lorca had moral complications, he looked past what made others outcasts. Lorca's leadership managed to make a ship full of jackasses and made it a well-oiled machine.

Lorca even risked his life even when it wasn't in his personal best interest.Lorca cares about the best attributes of people, regardless of background. This is the reason the "Lorca is a Terran" twist worked, and the "Lorca is evil" didn't.  The irony is that fans who deduced Lorca's identity did so because of his positive qualities. Where the potential of the story lies with Discovery’s depiction of the Mirror Universe.

Enterprise was first time the Terran Empire got depicted as an anti-Federation.This depiction came from the mirror NX-01 crew being the worst sides of the Prime Universe counterparts. Mirror Archer's C.O. is an otherwise reasonable man, as is the crew of their rival ship. The events in "A Mirror, Darkly" (episodes 4x18-19) that planted the seeds for the anti-Federation in Discovery.

Look at the Mirror Universe in the Original Series' Episode "Mirror, Mirror" (episode 2x04). The Terran Empire is not the opposite of the Federation, but rather a dark reflection. While a totalitarian ethnostate, the idea of value based on usefulness played a huge role.You can't be a good crewman and keep the ship running, then you go to the agony booth or you die. You are a bad captain who can't look after your crew, you go to the agony booth or die.

As Discovery takes place a decade before TOS, Lorca could reform the Terran Empire into the one seen in TOS. It isn't perfect, yet it allowed Vulcans like Spock to serve aboard the Enterprise as officers.Had Lorca stayed consistent, he would have been the man who would begin the reformation of the Terran Empire for the better.

Well. It’s like this.

For most people, sports and video games and movies and books are escapism. There might be some political elements TO them, god knows original Star Trek went about sensitive topics and all.

But when people watch shows or sports events, it’s to get AWAY from the real world and actual politics. So that’s the first point against it, it’s hard to get into escapism when the escapism wants to make itself a reminder of the real world.

The SECOND problem is that for the most part, the way they add in politics is very... unsubtle. In a very preachy way. They can’t just accept the old style ‘You stand one step removed, unable to act as you watch this tragedy and perhaps see how things could have gone better’ way that fiction often tells things, where you’re at a state removed still, or that it’s something that built up over a period. No, it’s often ‘very special episodes’ like...

Well, like Picard. They made a big point of these Romulan refugees. And how terrible it is for these refugees and how everyone had ignored these refugees and how they’d been treated terribly because they’re refugees and how they could have been self-sufficient because they had a flourishing culture before they were refugees...

Except the huge problem is that yes, they were part of the FUCKING HUGE ROMULAN SPACE EMPIRE, why are these people from Romulus all seated on some fucking backwater planet? They had plenty of colonies and a vast fucking fleet what the hell is the logic of it? Oh it’s there to talk about the politics of refugees but it literally doesn’t fit the setting because they shouldn’t have needed to BE THERE.

SPACE EMPIRE.

Well. It’s like this.

For most people, sports and video games and movies and books are escapism. There might be some political elements TO them, god knows original Star Trek went about sensitive topics and all.

But when people watch shows or sports events, it’s to get AWAY from the real world and actual politics. So that’s the first point against it, it’s hard to get into escapism when the escapism wants to make itself a reminder of the real world.

The SECOND problem is that for the most part, the way they add in politics is very... unsubtle. In a very preachy way. They can’t just accept the old style ‘You stand one step removed, unable to act as you watch this tragedy and perhaps see how things could have gone better’ way that fiction often tells things, where you’re at a state removed still, or that it’s something that built up over a period. No, it’s often ‘very special episodes’ like...

Well, like Picard. They made a big point of these Romulan refugees. And how terrible it is for these refugees and how everyone had ignored these refugees and how they’d been treated terribly because they’re refugees and how they could have been self-sufficient because they had a flourishing culture before they were refugees...

Except the huge problem is that yes, they were part of the FUCKING HUGE ROMULAN SPACE EMPIRE, why are these people from Romulus all seated on some fucking backwater planet? They had plenty of colonies and a vast fucking fleet what the hell is the logic of it? Oh it’s there to talk about the politics of refugees but it literally doesn’t fit the setting because they shouldn’t have needed to BE THERE.

SPACE EMPIRE.

Basically, after Hobus, the Empire falls into a civil war between the Tal Shiar and the remnants of the civil government, and a lot of people get displaced during that scuffle. The Federation tries to help, but Starfleet's hands are tied by the isolationist policies of the Federation Council. And the Klingons are having yet another internecine struggle so they're pretty much ignoring what's going on outside their borders.

The executives screwed up the canon continuity so they could force latter. They literally told a writer to take out a mention of the Dominion War so they could push an agenda. The official statement is “It will alienate the fans people who didn’t see DS9.” I call bs because of the TNG callbacks and Voyager content.

It takes a four-sentence set-up to accommodate canon:

The Dominion War ended 12 years before the supernova detailed in Deep Space Nine. The Dominion fucked up 15% of the galaxy in that war, the Federation wasn't in the best shape to help anybody.

But the Federation did try to help the Romulans, but the rescue ships got destroyed in the Mars attack. The supernova happened two years later, and even Spock's anti-apocalypse plan failed.

* body language masterlist

* a translator that doesn’t eat ass like google translate does

* a reverse dictionary for when ur brain freezes

* 550 words to say instead of fuckin said

* 638 character traits for when ur brain freezes again

* some more body language help

Neither of the new series has Trek's historical diversity or inclusive messages. Classic Trek was a universal message about coming together to solve problems. The idea behind new Trek is a "with us or against us" narrative with the intention of being divisive.

Discovery has token characters that get few moments to shine unless the plot demands it. It's the main reason Burnham gets the hate; she's a prick who hogs the spotlight. I'm positive that her speeches came from Lorca's fortune cookies.

Picard's 4th episode opener sums it up when he beams down to a Romulan colony. Aside from a colonizer's panama suit, he tells an adoring crowd of Romulans he is their only hope. Picard in this series is an escapist character for wannabe white saviors.

Shark skin feels exactly like sandpaper. It is made up of tiny teeth-like structures called placoid scales, also known as dermal denticles. These scales point towards the tail and help to reduce friction from surrounding water when the shark swims. … In the opposite direction, it feels very rough like sandpaper.

My ADHD marine-loving ass is now resisting the horrible impulse to drive to the nearest ocean, swim until I find a shark, capture it with my bare hands and no equipment but a fish-size aquarium box, violate all quarantine rules by flying to this dude’s house and breaking in, and the rub the shark all over his face  screaming “Is it still smooth now, fucker?!” until we determine whether it is smooth or not (if it is smooth the face will not bleed and I will be arrested for assault with shark. If it is not smooth there will be yelling and I will be arrested for violating social distancing rules.) (Note: shark will be taken good care of during all of this except the actual experiment and will be returned to its natural habitat as soon as I break out of police station/ it will be returned by a local marine human.)

I’m sure that eventually I would realize that someone playing dumb like this is probably just be fucking with me. But I’m honestly not sure how long it would take me to realize it, because I don’t like to assume the worst of people.

And we’ll also ignore that marine biologists have to constantly put up with slews of false “facts” about their field, sharks especially, so yeah, it could only have to do with their ego and not them having a literal mental disability that makes it hard to not only let wrong information slide but also read someone’s hidden motives or, you know, them just wanting to share information about something they spent their lives studying because they think sharing information is fun. Nope, you’re just so clever and humble for “tricking” those kinds of people. And what a clever and humble person you are for it.

But let me guess: you’re going to make some snarky one liner “comeback” to this because, shocks of shocks, I’m right and you’ve already attached your ego so thoroughly to this “joke” and laughing at autistic people and actual majors in a field that you are absolutely terrified of letting it go lest you lose your source of fame and entertainment. But luckily I don’t give a shit, because unlike you I don’t have the compulsive need to go constantly checking the replies to something I’ve wrote or made so I can constantly go “lol but I’m right you wrong haha look how foolish you are for thinking I’m stupid!” and you sharing this with your “comeback” is going to just be more preaching to the choir of bullies who don’t care about who they catch in their crossfire, because, as an autistic, I learned long ago that people only “care” about me as long as I don’t “act” autistic by infodumping, correcting information, and failing to read a room. Oh look, all three things that you claim make me “egotistical and need to be the smartest person in the room”. What a shock, the bully acts like a bully. But hopefully a small handful will actually read these replies, realize what shallow pathetic “comedy” this is, and how it all but directly targets autistic people and allistic people who want to teach others for bullying, and leave.