Cassiopeia the time turtle

I'm convinced mama dragons carry their babies around in their mouth for protection, like how crocodiles do...

A corpse… should be left well alone

"It is hard, isn't it, Good Hunter, to accept the true burden of the Hunt? But I beg of you, do not give up. Do not give in to the despair."

--

It doesn't end with Gascoigne, Micolash, Lawrence, Gerhman, Maria. There's always something more, something otherworldly. You can kill every last Scholar of Menses and it won't free baby Mergo. There's something more. Something ancient and powerful and strange. Mergo's Wet Nurse, The Moon Presence, The Orphan of Kos. Because it was always bigger than just one hunter, or a thousand. The Healing Church is so much more than that.

The end of Bloodborne is not an old man with a sword. It's an Orphan child, crying out for a mother that will never hear her. Consumed by grief and rage. The ultimate embodiment of all the evil that was done here, suffering incarnate. It doesn't end with the men who did it, the act itself eclipses them, outlives them.

Bloodborne is a game that starts with a child asking you to find her parents. You find the corpse of one, and kill the other yourself so that he doesn't kill you. You don't have a choice. Bloodborne is a game where you can't stop the horror, it's happened, it's BEEN happening. Bloodborne is a game about horrors bigger than you. Bloodborne is a game where you cannot save everyone, because they are already dead. Bloodborne is game about an orphan you can't save. Bloodborne is a game where the only way to put an end to this nightmare is kill it and let something new take its place, without knowing what it will be, if it will be good enough. A game where Evils greater than their own perpetrators are committed.

This type was used mostly by the Sámi, the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula. They’re mostly nomadic, and would build these storehouses (Áittit) up off the ground so that bears and wolves couldn’t get into them while they were elsewhere.

The girls are introduced to the concept of magical girls as a noble calling- fighting evil witches, and protecting the innocent from harm. Magical girling is a vocation, a noble sacrifice made by these girls for the greater good. They're actively encouraged, by kyubey, by how society socialises girls, by their own generally upright morals and values, to see this thankless sacrifice made by them as ultimately worth it. The girls are ultimately all good people, with good intentions, which is why they take on the task.

However magical girl life is gruelling. It's thankless, dangerous, and never ending. Once you commit you can never stop. You're forced to give up parts of your normal day to day life, like spending time with friends in order to kill witches to sustain yourself. If you became a magical girl for a selfless reason, such as to protect others, your moral compass likely won't let you take the day off. The witches will still be hurting people, and it'll be your fault for not doing your job.

In the series, the advice we DO hear given about what to wish for is basically 'get your money's worth.' Mami and Kyouko have been living this miserable lifestyle, and thats why they understand that the best way to survive it is to make a wish that you can accept and live with, even when youre miserable.

If anything, 'selfishness' is the cudgel being used to beat the girls with. We see Sayaka twisting herself in knots over the morality of her wish, over whether she's selfish for regretting becoming a magical girl, because she's reasonably upset shes been tricked into irreversible body alterations she never consented to. Her desire to live up to a perfectly selfless magical girl ideal causes her to punish herself for being upset that her horrible sacrifice goes unacknowledged by anyone.

Treating selfishness or selflessness as an all-or-nothing binary IS what's hurting her. The fear of selfishness is specifically exploited and weaponised against these well-intentioned kids, especially Sayaka and Madoka, in order to make them feel guilty for wanting happiness or safety for themselves. By harping on about whether or not a wish aligns into this binary of selfishness or selflessness, we play into the exact same rhetoric Kyubey uses to guilt these girls into disregarding their own wellbeing.

I mean we see it in real life all the time- humans are literally not capable of 24/7 selfless all-giving charity work. The people who try it are the ones who will burn themselves out the quickest. You need to put on your own oxygen mask first before anyone elses. However since society glorifies selflessness above all else, it cultivates an ideal of 100% all or nothing moral purity all the time, that people feel pressured to live up to, or else they are morally 'impure.'

If you only read fanfiction, you will not be able to write original stories well.

Reading books does not have to be expensive. It can be completely free. Project Gutenberg exists. So does the Internet Archive's lending library.

If you want to write a novel, you are kept to a pretty strict word range--generally 70-120k words, though that varies a bit up or down depending on the genre. Some genres have fairly strict structural and plot expectations, as well.

A romance novel is a specific thing. A mystery novel is a specific thing. Being able to write a shippy fanfic, even one of the correct length to count as a romance novel, does not necessarily mean that you know how to write a romance novel--because there are different expectations between them.

Fanfiction is often in conversation with other fanfiction, and published fiction is often to varying degrees in conversation with other published fiction--but despite what a lot of people seem to think, published fiction is often not actually in conversation with fanfiction, even if fanfiction is in conversation with published fiction.

One thing that you tend to see with people writing original fiction for publication who don't really read much published fiction in that genre is that they will sometimes approach it with the attitude that they are writing something that nobody has ever thought of before. It is a new, different, groundbreaking approach, with new, different, groundbreaking ideas that nobody else has done and nothing can compare to--

And that simply is not usually the case. Finding comps can be hard, it's one of the worst parts about querying, etc., etc., but in many genres, you are not inventing something totally new. You are not the first person to think, what if this romance novel doesn't need to have a happy ending (spoiler alert: it's not a romance novel). You are not the first person to write queer polyamorous urban fantasy. You are not the first person to write a book with queer characters or disabled characters or non-white characters or non-Christian characters. Your groundbreaking new idea for a sci fi thing that you repurposed from a fanfic, that just feels dated and derivative, because it is, and anyone who knows the genre would know that.

That arrogance and that dismissal of existing publishing history and norms shows in people's writing.

think of it as adding genetic diversity to a population. Someone who has only read a specific genre only has what is already in the genre to draw from. This often results in very trope heavy and stock standard genre pieces, which isn't bad per se, but when the vast majority of the genre also has those same tropes, it's hard to distinguish it from the hoard of similar books

a friend of mine calls it "creative inbreeding" which is a whole discussion to have a couple drinks into a conversation

a bit on my read outside

of your genre stance

Lead characters with copy/paste personalities. A love interest that hits all the popular tropes, even if the relationship doesn't really work within the story structure. A narrative arc that hits all the key stops along the way, like it's following a map. The same types of descriptions of food, clothing, towns, etc. I set the book down when I'm done and can't even remember who the author was without flipping back to that nicely illustrated cover.

I don't mean to criticize the authors, because obviously they're working hard, and it's amazing that they got their books out into the world. I'm just...tired of reading so many of the same stories, with different hats.

Part of it, I'm sure, is that people are writing what they think sells - and agents and publishing houses are probably picking up specific stories for the same reason. It's like Disney doing endless remakes of stories that were originally something creative and inspiring.

But you can tell when you're reading something that's sort of just...cobbled together from all the other books that person has encountered from within the same exact genre. They're assembling bits of everyone else's voices instead of developing their own. It might be readable, but it's not terribly memorable.

In one of my college lit classes, our final exam was to read excerpts from various literary works and write a short essay response identifying the authors and explaining our reasons. It wasn't a test to check whether we'd read and memorized everything by these authors - it was to see how closely we'd been paying attention to the ones we had read and discussed in class.

For instance, the Jack London excerpt wasn't from White Fang or The Call of the Wild - it was a paragraph from a short story we hadn't read, where you could pick up on setting, style, themes, tone, etc to say hey...I think this was probably written by him.

I still remember that exam because it was a pretty cool exercise that showed how distinct an author's voice can be, even for ones that carry over into different genres. (Jack London is a little bit of a cheat if you go "oh it's set in Alaska.") It's like hearing a song you've never listened to before and recognizing their voice, or identifying a painting without having to look at the signature.

And yes, you can see this in fanfiction, too: I used to enjoy trying to identify authors in fandom exchange festivals, before the anon switch flipped off and they were revealed. Sometimes I was wrong. Sometimes I got it right, and it was so fun!

My favorite fic authors do often have a distinct tone and style that they carry through their writing, even while drawing from canonical sources and keeping it "in character." Just like the paintings from two artists sitting next to each other in front of a bowl of fruit will depict the "same" subject on the canvas, but with their point of view and personality in the brushstrokes.

Which is all just to say that I agree, so strongly, with the need to not only read if you're going to write...but to read widely and across genres. Across time periods and languages, too: I very much recommend reading stories from other cultures and other countries, to develop a wider view of the world.

If you only read modern YA fantasy written by US-based authors, your stories are...going to sound a lot like theirs, even if you don't intend them to.

If you read a ton of fic, you'll probably learn how to write something that aligns well with what everyone seems to like and gravitate towards in fandom. Maybe that's the goal. But even if you don't have the drive or the energy to write or try to publish original works, all the advice from earlier in this thread will help you in fandom.

If you want to write a story that isn't an entirely unique concept but IS your unique voice, you have to develop that voice through wider experience.

I've seen fanfic authors brag about how they never read at all, fic or otherwise...and quite frankly, it shows. You can only improve through practice, and some of that practice includes studying and learning from others, which can really be as simple as just sitting down with a cup of tea and a stack of books.