Tag Archives: Fiction

Benioff, Weiss, and the Illusion of Writing

Nothing in a work of fiction happens because “that’s the character’s personality” or “that’s the way the world works” or “it’s just logical”, it happens because the writer chose for it to happen. The writer’s trick is disguising this. In presenting a story that is seamless enough that the truth is not realized or does not matter. This illusion is verisimilitude and it requires significant investment to maintain.

George RR Martin was a master of it. Ned’s death, the Red Wedding, the ever more racist narrative of Essos all clearly fit in the world. Plot developments might surprise but are clear results of the actions and motivations of the characters. Regardless of what you thought of the content, the events seem to be the clear consequences of actions taken rather than Martin just deciding what was going to happen next.

Benioff and Weiss (Occasionally called D&D) are not. And that gap in their skillset torpedoed the final season of Game of Thrones. It disappointed millions and ruined the reputation of a series previously considered the height of prestige TV.

But for us, that failure is a great learning opportunity. One that’ll involve spoilers, but if that bothers you, consider this your warning. Read the rest of this entry

Incident Eliph at Kianid: Arc One

So we’re through that first stage of Incident Eliph, and with it the first stage of this new run at writing. To mark the occasion I wanted to take a moment, look at the project as a whole, and talk about why Eliph is shaping up as it did. What influenced it, some of the worldbuilding and the decisions that went into designing it.

Incident Eliph is a Quest, a type of interactive fiction that evolved from text-based adventure games, 4chan, and Andrew Hussie in no particular order. A better summation of its history than I could hope to provide is here, but for our purposes you need to know the following: Quests are stories where the writer (Or Quest Master) gets input from the players on the actions of characters or things going on inside of the narrative. I’ve been writing them for something close to seven years.

The story itself is a Fantasy/Horror quest set in an alternate Ottoman Empire. It takes inspiration from the Leviathan series Scott Westerfeld, The Thing, the art of Keith Thompson, Triumff by Dan Abnett, and City of Brass by SA Chakraborty; aiming for an aesthetic that marries bizarre mechanical advances and the prominence of Djinn with grotesque biological horror. At the character level we follow Yousuf Oziri, an officer in the Ottoman Empire, recovering with his platoon on the island of Kianida after a disastrous offensive in Russia.

This is not the largest or the most popular project I’ve undertaken in the field, but it is the first one I’m really actively marketing to people and the first one I’m trying to treat as a professional product. It’s the public facing part of the writing push I outlined in November and the only content currently linked to my Ko-Fi account. As such it is disproportionately personally important, a test of if I can really commit to a schedule and if people might be willing to buy into a patreon or other self-published offerings. Of my skill as a pseudo-professional instead of a hobbyist.

Below the cut are spoilers for the first eight updates (About twelve thousand words) of Incident Eliph. So if this has you interested and you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend reading the story here before continuing.

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Please Look After This Bear

My dad read me Paddington books when I was young. Tales of a young bear in a strange land with a love for marmalade as he went through a series of basically harmless adventures. They were fun, adorable, and something I rather enjoyed in that age range they were meant for. When I heard there was going to be a movie I was…less than thrilled, especially because the trailers looked like the standard fare for Hollywood deciding to go ahead and slaughter another batch of precious childhood memories with a badly written silver screen adaptation.

I am wondrously happy to say that I was oh so very, very wrong. Paddington the movie is as adorable and fun as it was when I was about six, and it comes with pro-immigration and anti-colonial messages that are great to see on the big screen as well as a truly excellent sense of narrative economy.

https://i0.wp.com/cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/paddington-movie-poster.jpeg

The most progressive bear to ever hit the silver screen

Read the rest of this entry

Disclaimer: I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

So it’s been, like, a full year since I made this thing, and I figured, hey, I might as well start using it now.

The Plan:

I’m hoping to write an entry once a week for the foreseeable future. It will ideally be coming out every Thursday or Friday, and I’ll try to inform you all if there’s a change in schedule. There’ll be a one week break in early December due to finals and a two week break in mid December because I’m going on a roadtrip with my family. If I’m particularly productive or bored, or if the first article was very easy to write, you may get a double update. (Don’t count on it)

The current topics I plan to write about are:

  • Gundam. I recently started watching the series, and after a godawful amount of time spent on various gundam works I’ve got quite a bit to say. I probably will not be going in chronological order on this one, as I haven’t watched all of them. Zeta, 0079, War in the Pocket, Unicorn, and Gundam Build Fighters are liable to get their own posts. 08th MS Team, F91, Char’s Counterattack, and what little I’ve watched of other works are liable to be folded into posts on something else, or else be part of a post compiling multiple short articles.
  • Unmosqued, a documentary on internal issues in the muslim community. I watched it recently, found it interesting, and plan to write about it in a series of posts which will require a witty title. For those of you looking for a criticism of Islam as a religion, go somewhere else. I’m a proud muslim, and this series is primarily going to be about A) what I think the community in America should do, B) my thoughts on the documentary, and C) Analyzing mosques I’ve been to and interacted with based on the documentary. I was originally gonna call the series of posts ‘The New Model Mosque’, but after realizing what happened to the New Model Army I decided that that was…unwise.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition. I plan to get the game on/just after release and write a series of articles on the game and my thoughts on how it plays as I go through it. As I plan to get it on the XBox this is liable to be purely text, though possibly supplemented with image macros.
  • Tabletop Roleplaying and GMing in general. This is only liable to be one or two articles. I’ve been playing or DMing tabletop RPGs for the better part of a decade now, and so I figure I may as well chip in my two cents on the subject. It’s also a pretty easy subject for me to write about, so it’s liable to be filler if I’m having a hard time with the week’s content.
  • Triumff! It’s a Dan Abnett novel, and a pretty fun one at that. Imma give it an article since I feel like it deserves one.

My Qualifications:

Literally nothing. I’m not a professional writer, game reviewer, or even someone particularly influential in the muslim community. My major’s in psychology instead of literary theory, political science, or anything remotely along those lines. I’m merely a questionably intelligent Muslim dude mostly flying by the seat of my pants.

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