reflection sword saint isshin was always too intimidating to retry cause holy moly isshin did not form happy memories lmao

i also never beat the demon of hatred

i think some people get confused about what pretentious means

legitimate emotional depth is one thing

reliving a pow's trauma from vietnam by shooting a bunch of goo-spitting bug enemies is certainly another

so i guess the genre is like

submainstream literary fantasy fiction

also my honorable mentions are tolkien and howard andrew jones, both out of spite

the time war duo: put em both up there. el-mohtar and gladstone's this is how you lose the time war--

on top of having the most badass aesthetic of any time travel story i've read--

has the ONLY fictional romance i have ever cared about or had an opinion on whether it should succeed or fail

jeff vandermeer: i think there is not a truer piece of cosmic horror that exists, even in the catalogue of lovecraft himself, than annihilation.

the cosmic horror was you, the literary-minded person reading and analyzing this text, all along.

jorge luis borges: borges is my "you will never be him."

tlon, uqbar, orbis tertius is a unique piece of meta fiction that is not easily described and i cannot in good faith spoil the experience.

he's not trying to do that, of course. that's just how he writes and what he prioritizes, and his laws of magic just inherit his worldview.

not normal enough to get out of bed

this is a really good tonal shift, i think. after the magic of her apprenticeship is shattered by her grandfather's betrayal, she falls back to the mundane grit she learned from her life before, with the arcane experience she gained through act 2.

you give me too much credit 😅 like i said you were already there.

an example from one of my wips:

the mc is at the place his father died and still rots, to lay a keepsake to rest. but he can't tell his father's body from the other corpses.

it's a pinch point close to the plot, but gives me some room to go back and talk about his life with his adoptive family.

seems like you're already doing what i'd advise lol. if the setup is boring, then start farther ahead.

i like starting at a point of emotional tension, cause then i can linger there and elaborate on the backstory while the tension hangs in the air. the party idea is a good example of that.

btw reading these posts has really intrigued me. it's been a while since i've written something with a real plot like that. might try to do it sometime soon.

i've gotten good at writing act 1s but i've grown to hate them lol. probably a sore point from so many projects that died there.

i love the party idea, i think that could work really well. a character trying to get what they want while semi-undercover really interests me.

I see the flowers of death, blooming in a place where tragedy is soon to strike. A moment like a Greek chorus, hinting at impending misery.

to be treated dismissively by people you are clearly much cooler than is a weird kind of place to be in