A Dusty Little Corner

It's, it's just that dragons are the primordial embodiment of avarice wrought into fire and flesh. They are truly, supernaturally good at finding large amounts of valuables, that's why the big mines hire those Dragon Scouts to go sniff out their lairs and mark them on the maps as potential mining ventures. You know, in case someone slays the relevant dragon. Which doesn't happen often because, milord, they are simply not that easily slain.

No I know you've hired many knights, blooded warriors and true. Yes, I was there when you gave the ten most impressive ones their special sashes. Very grand, very high honors, of course. Ehm. It's just, none of them have ever actually faced a dragon. Yes no I know Sir Edbert says he did but Sir Edbert is rather notoriously prone to exaggerated and tragically unverifiable tales---

Well no milord of course I would not doubt the word of a sworn knight. Perhaps his sobriety, but not his word, as such.

The point is that the grand treasury, while surely grand and a very special notion, is just... it is mayhaps not the ideal way of handling the realm's finances? Perhaps a series of smaller vaults, capped well below the dangerous wealth threshold at which gold is known to whet the appetite of colossal winged harbingers of death, in different corners of the realms or...?

No, I, yes well I do realize that will impede anyone's interests in coming into the vault to hurl around the gold coins and go "whee, I'm so rich!" I am aware of its deficiencies as a plan in that regard. No, I see I've misjudged a few things.

Actually, thinking on it, milord, I truly believe what you need is a fresh set of skilled wizards on this job. The court magician and I, we cannot keep up with your visionary thinking. We're too old-fashioned. But the wizards revolutionizing the eldritch academies seem to be more on this sort of level. I hear they've made some truly remarkable choices in terms of outsourcing all of their spellwork to the Ever-Whispering Void, such that it takes mere minutes for them to set up an entire defensive array. That's just the sort of innovative thinking you require.

Could I explain the actual rules of how they’re used? Absolutely not.

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.

Then one year at Easter something went wrong and the chocolate separated and the mousse was weird looking and a bit odd tasting (not inedible, just odd) and my cousin (who was only about 12 to be fair) ate his bowl while loudly proclaiming MY GOD THIS IS NOT GOOD AUNTIE D and WHAT DID YOU DO and THIS IS HORRIBLE and on the one hand we all laughed (inc mum) because it was so unfiltered and rude and he kept eating it even as he proclaimed it an abomination, and 20ish years later we still have a laugh about it.

But mum never made mousse for a family event again and didn’t even want to do it just for us kids or dad. She was really embarrassed and she lost her confidence.

My cousin didn’t need to say it. Mum knew it hadn’t turned out right. She brought it anyway because we’d told her she should and she didn’t want to disappoint anyone because this was so looked forward to by everyone. Maybe he was only 12 and didn’t know how to have any tact.

PLEASE CONSIDER THIS before you provide your ‘feedback’ on fanworks. You could be the reason some poor person never makes anything again, or at least never shares it with the community. Don’t whatabout the people who invite concrit me - just fucking have a think before you comment, okay?

Always ask yourself:

Does it need to be said?

Does it need to be said by me?

Does it need to be said, by me, right now?

I don't have to be a director to criticize films

Roger Ebert didn't create what he criticized

if you don't want critique, then you don't want to improve

then don't put it online

turn off comments

be prepared when I critique the shit out of your crap level "criticism" so that you drag your scorched ass back to the hole you crawled out of.

Everyone who is here is here because they want to read your work, they're happy with what it is, and whatever flaws it has are flaws they don't mind or are comfortable ignoring.

THERE'S A WAY TO BYPASS THE COMMISSION AND PEOPLE ARE ALREADY WORKING ON IT

People seem to be really resonating with this so I'm putting it over here too.

I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.

I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.