have most characters be non-minors, around the same age range. this is mostly to minimize underage nonsense.
while family relationships are important, save them as background elements, explored every now and then. focus mainly on the bonds of non-related characters and how their different backgrounds play off each other.
limit the overly edgy tone, where pain and suffering are near-romanticized. try to emphasize wholesomeness, health, and the various ways characters can have good relationships despite their differences. a lot of nintendo franchises are good examples.
avoid creating significant characters who are utterly irredeemable with harmful ethics. (for me personally, i limit elements such as abuse and discrimination for background conflicts while presenting more interesting, morally gray arguments, where either side is right/flawed) if you’re going to have a villain, either make them team rocket goofy or classic disney fun.
just. try not to have characters + relationships rely on racial tropes. if you overly rely on a tough dark-skinned / dainty light-skinned formula, you’re going to see some racist shipping. mix it up. round ‘em out.
same goes for gendered tropes. if a dude is downright violent and irresponsible and a level-headed girl has to put up with his flaws without him facing consequence, that’s a downright unbalanced relationship. and do keep in mind that if two boys utterly despise each other, people will absolutely take that a certain way. again, with #3, try to play off disdain as comedic or with exception rather than constant seething hatred.
obviously these aren’t hard and fast rules, and what/how you create will vary. but it’s how i generally approach my work
I am legitimately amazed that tumblr’s weird obsession with Never Have Anything Unwholesome writing advice has now reached the point of:
– Don’t have children in your work,
– Don’t have families in your work.
– Don’t have any themes or ideas darker than Nintendo, because that’s romanticising suffering.
– Don’t have villains unless they’re in the relatively simplistic, child-friendly mould of Disney or Pokemon, and don’t try to deal with any difficult themes.
– Don’t have characters dislike each other.
The idea that you should build your work – because these are all fundamental aspects of a story – around preventative measures against ‘gross shipping,’ and that coincidentally all those measures boil down to “Have as little nuance, conflict, or difficult and unpleasant things as possible,” is kind of creepy.
‘Next on Writing Stories: Don’t.’
Literally nothing can be done to prevent gross shipping short of never creating anything ever.
Like, here’s an extra rule for you, ‘make sure that this world has no non-human animals in it. It’s the only way to stop bestiality fan works.’
It’s the only way to prevent it.
You admit that dogs, or horses or any kind of monster exists in your world and bam! you have created the environment for bestiality.
And you have to live with that.
Yeah, this is the thing: You can’t stop people being gross. You can’t stop those people reading your work and liking it. And you can’t stop them from then potentially making fanworks on it. Nobody’s asking you to like it, I sure as hell wouldn’t, but that’s not something in your control.
(Case in point: No amount of wholesomeness saved My Little Pony from becoming a rallying point for weird, hentai-obsessed alt-righters. That was not something that anybody on that creative team could have realistically foreseen.)
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a lot of this advice is geared towards “it’s better if you don’t do anything that might introduce doubt or discomfort into your work.” Like ‘don’t write about bigotry or discrimination,’ ‘don’t have serious conflict between characters,’ ‘emphasise wholesomeness.’
It’s quasi-Victorian, quasi-Puritan anxieties about fiction corrupting people, except it’s wearing a fandom hat. It’s Mervyn Griffith-Jones sniffing “Would you wish that your wife or your servants read this novel?” except he’s wearing a Steven Universe t-shirt under his prosecutor’s robe.
JFC, this is getting as crazy as Christian publishing or the comics code.
I never want to read a single story that follows these guidelines
Sammy was a nice white boy born on June 26, 1988. This made him thirty years old. He was kind and always happy. Today he was going to his favorite group activity with his no-conflict friends, circle-hugging. He walked down the sidewalk, careful not to wander into the road where the cars were, though of course cars in his nice town would always stop for a pedestrian.
Once he got to the library, he found his friend Jordan hanging out checking out books. Jordan was smart and one could never catch him without a smile. Jordan was also thirty years old and also born on June 26, 1988 and was also nice and white. The two of them hugged and waited for more friends to arrive, careful to hug in a way that did not block any of the aisles of books.
Hunter (just his name, he was not into anything involving guns), Michael, Grant, Bill, Terry, Steve, and Martin arrived. All of them were also born on June 26, 1988, making them thirty-year-old full grown adults. They were all white too, so that none of them could take advantage of each other’s race. They were even all of English (specifically London middle class and having moved to America in 1826) heritage so they couldn’t take advantage of any ethnic squabbles within Europe.
“Oh boy,” said Sammy. He was happy all his friends were here. None of them had any other commitments. “Let’s get hugging!”
The nine of them formed a small circle and put their arms around each other and squeezed firmly but not too firmly, their arms staying up high on each other’s chests. This activity gave all of them a sensible amount of happiness.
Terry peered outside. “Wow, another sunny day.”
“Sure is. Sunshine makes me happy,” said Martin. The circle of huggers rotated so all of them could see a window and the nice sunshine outside.
“I like sunshine,” said Sammy.
“Sunshine is almost as good as being around all my good friends here who I enjoy spending time with,” said Bill. They all nodded at Bill’s insight and gave a little squeeze in their hugs.
“You are so right, Bill,” said Hunter, “being friends with all of you is great.”
The conversation continued in that vein for the next four hours before they all had to go back to their houses where they all lived alone. They all put on sunscreen before they left so that the glorious sun wouldn’t hurt them. It was another great day.
Werewolves are stereotyped as ravenous monsters because the transformations burn so many calories that they’re essentially starving afterwords. The more “controlled” werewolves are just the ones who figured this out and loaded up on calories beforehand, whereas the “wild” ones assume it’s part of their wolfish nature to hunt and eat whatever’s nearby.
The transformation back burns calories too, but by that point they’re exhausted from running around in the woods all night, not to mention the physical strain of two transformations. And filthy people showing up at Denny’s in the early morning are assumed to be hungover, so the ravenous beast idea is applied only to the wolf half.
are you suggesting people who eat at denny’s are essentially werewolves
i am SO SICK of unhappy endings. idk about anyone else but the #1 reason i like fiction is because everything can always work out no matter how bad it is. “what if the good guys lost” shut up. you are so fucking boring. give me happy endings or give me nothing
not that y’all have to reblog this version but i wrote this post because i was frustrated that people claim that happy endings are “unrealistic” and “disrespectful to real people” but i feel like that misses the point of Fiction, i.e. Not Real, and like. who’s to say happy endings Aren’t realistic? of course there’s more than one way to tell a story and process experiences etc etc but maybe i spent too long being abused and wanting to die to accept that Everyone is Destined for a Sad Ending. isn’t it reassuring to read about characters who, against all odds, triumph and find happiness? doesn’t that give you a shred of hope for your life?
This post got a lot of hostile responses and passionate rebuttals in the notes. This actually came across my dash with some snarky “gee OP maybe some people like to feel something other than happiness” response as if that was a legendarily hot take. Disappointed by the person who reblogged that one, to be honest.
I get that people are attached to their sadness porn, and get defensive at the idea that some may find constant suffering boring, but a lot tumblr took this one person’s preference for happy endings way too personally… like OP was gonna come into their homes and take their angst fic away from them.
So. This reminds me of when I was like 19 or so, and I was all about angst and unhappy endings. Like, I still kind of am an angst writer, but one thing really made me rethink my stance that unhappy endings were somehow better and more true and authentic than happy ones.
I made a friend over the internet who hated sad endings and said “no thanks” to any media I recommended to her that didn’t have a happy ending. At first I thought that is was childish and immature of her, even though she was around 30 and I was just about to turn 20.
But I was definitely the one being childish.
She had had a much, much harder life than me. Yeah, I had struggles, and I was depressed. But she had gone through A Lot. Death of family, chronic sickness, estrangement from family, homelessness, failed relationships that left her so broken-hearted she had sworn off dating and self-isolated to protect herself from more disappointment. In the time I knew her, she would often go AWOL for weeks or months because she was homeless due to being unable to work because of her chronic illness, and so she couldn’t access the internet, and I would worry that she was dead. I had no way of knowing.
She could write some pretty angsty fiction, too, mind you. We were friends because of loving each others’ writing. But she wanted happy endings. She challenged me to end my stories in less tragic ways than I had planned. To try to figure out happiness even when I thought it would be easier just to end it sad. She wanted the suffering to be worth something, in the end. And how could anyone in their right mind begrudge her that? To argue against that? To tell her that her stories should end badly? Should I have told her that her sadness defined her more than her hope for joy? Is that more respectful?
So yeah, if you’re gonna be on tumblr talking about how happiness is trite and boring, all I can say is that you don’t fucking know the life stories of people who only want happy endings, who reject sad, tragic endings, or who are tired of entertainment that is chiefly derived from death and trauma and loneliness and hopelessness. Maybe it’s fun for you to vicariously experience struggle because your life has been easy and that bores you. Or maybe it’s cathartic for you precisely because you have suffered… but if that’s the case I’d think you’d all have more empathy. Hey, maybe you just really like to feel emotion when you consume fiction and watching other people be happy doesn’t elicit any emotional response in you, and you cannot fathom why it is comforting for some people to see things work out well. Who knows.
That relatable (older) Gen Z memory: when all the projectors and white boards got replaced by Smart Boards™ around like fifth grade and none of the teachers knew how to use them but they Had To Use them otherwise the school just wasted a bunch of money and it was a rlly weird transition
an addition: when they calibrated the board by pressing the dots and everyone in class lost their minds
Also when teachers seemed to battle over who got the laptop cart
God I really wish carrying stuffed animals around with you was socially acceptable
I don’t mean to take over a post, but I actually did a project on this for my sociology of deviance class in college!
I carried a large stuffed rabbit whenever I went in public for about a week to observe the reaction of others. The point of the project was to do something harmless yet unusual to see if the action would be considered deviant, in which case someone had to try to correct or shame the behavior.
Long story short, nobody tried to correct my behavior. I was asked about it casually, had a few lingering stares thrown my way and when I was with my boyfriend, shop employees would direct questions to him instead of me. However, nobody refused to assist me when I was alone in a store, nobody said anything about the rabbit besides “oh, thats a cute bunny!” and I attended college classes without even a teacher questioning it.
In conclusion, it is socially acceptable to carry a stuffed animal, its just not a societal norm. ^^
My friend gave me a stuffed monkey plushy when I was struggling with uni, and I took him everywhere for like four years, usually velcrod to my backpack. No one said a damn thing, except my renaissance professor who saw it one day in the hallway and cracked the fuck up because I had a literal monkey on my back and he just looked at me like, “oh god, me too”. I used to leave him on desks during classes and exams (the monkey, not my prof). It was my reminder that someone cared if I was coping. But more than that it was soothing to have something to fidget with that wasn’t a pen. I used to ping those fucking things across the room I was so agitated. Harder to hurt people with a projectile stuffed monkey.
I got what I thought was a normal screen cleaning kit for my computer while I was in college. Much to my delight, instead of a little washcloth or whatever, the kit came with a tiny stuffed pig.
So I carried this pig in my backpack all through college, periodically taking it out, spraying my screen, and using the pig to wipe it off.
Now, I kept the pig in the side pocket of my bag where he was completely visible.
Then one day in screenwriting class I pulled him out to wipe my screen.
One of the guys sitting next to me looked appalled. “You’re wiping it off with your little stuffed animal??”
I explained what the pig was.
Turns out, the guy had noticed it and just thought it was adorable I carried a stuffed animal with me every day. He’d never mentioned it before.
Honestly, people do not care, and will not say anything. No matter the reason for your little stuffed animal friend.
And if you’re still really nervous about it keep a stuffed animal keychain on your bag. I have a cute little frog that stays on my backpack so when work gets stressful I can squeeze it.
Gay Hell 