#ink posts

Or "I watched my clone die an entirely avoidable death because he was convinced everyone was plotting against him, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to trust my instincts again.”

Or "My alternate universe self is intensely horny and also evil. Does that mean if I get unusually horny I'm going to turn evil?"

Or "I am literally a religious icon with prophecies about me. How do I avoid letting that interfere with my work-life balance?"

Or "...Okay I see why you think I might be suffering from paranoia, but I need you to understand the station's tailor actually IS a spy. Also don't breathe a word of this, please."

I wish we'd seen more of that with Troi, but I also realize that would've messed with TNG's tone a bit - honestly, it would've fit really well in DS9. I'm actually tempted to write a fic about this. If I posted it here, would people want to read it?

Offerings to Ares, oil and cannabis. A sit down conversation about anger and relationships and the past — and a pretty clear answer.

5 of Pentacles, The Fool and 5 of Swords

An irrational decision is great when your story is driven by your character’s personal flaws and struggles, and for crafting situations where your audience knows that these decisions are unavoidable because they are perfectly in character. Having your characters be perfectly able to solve their problems if they weren’t, y’know, themselves, is so very hard-hitting, and can be a fantastic part of a narrative.

The downfall with irrational decisions is that it can make situations seem less dire or make your antagonists seem less dangerous. If your characters are falling over themselves and their own personal issues, then it’s hard to show how the external problems in your story pose a serious threat, because you can’t demonstrate how they’re hard to deal with if your characters aren’t making solidly competent attempts in the first place.

Rational decisions are great for stories where most of your problems are external, like your characters trying to build a spaceship or infiltrate the bad guy’s lair. It’s also key to any horror writing, where you need your characters to be competent in order for your danger to be credible; if your audience spends the entire time wondering why your protagonists aren’t doing very obvious things to solve their problems, it’ll be a lot harder to get a properly spooky atmosphere going. But if your characters are only ever making the most optimal, logical choices without ever struggling, they won’t be very compelling, so just like with irrational decision-making, there’s a time and a place for this.

Ideally, you want some combination of both rational and irrational character choices. And maybe even more importantly, whatever choice a character’s making needs to be one that makes sense for them given everything you’ve already shown in the narrative so far. If the decision feels forced or contrived, then it doesn’t matter if it’s rational or not, because it’s not a choice that fits with the rest of the story.