polyocs

[polyocs]

Expanding a thought from a conversation this morning:

In general, I think "Is X out-of-character?" is not a terribly useful question for a writer. It shuts down possibility, and interesting directions you could take a character.

A better question, I believe, is "What would it take for Character to do X?" What extremity would she find herself in, where X starts to look like a good idea? What loyalties or fears leave him with X as his only option? THAT'S where a potentially interesting story lies.

In practice, I find that you can often justify much more from a character than you initially dreamed you could: some of my best stories come from "What might drive Character to do [thing he would never do]?" As long as you make it clear to the reader what the hell pushed your character to this point, you've got the seed of a compelling story on your hands.

[polyocs]

"I could fix him" well I could be the one person he's nice to and soft with, while he remains just as unbelievably awful as ever to everyone else <3

[polyocs]

collection of posts for a very specific dynamic

#inspiration

[polyocs]

romance is lame and overrated i love mentor/mentee relationships in fiction and especially when theyre sort of fucked up

[polyocs]

[polyocs]

stuff I like

- when the person kidnapped by the villain is all ‘no one’s going to come for me’ and 

- someone does, but it’s the person they’d least expect

- EVERYONE COMES because wow, maybe I am depressed because I didn’t think I knew this many people, much less that they liked me

- no one comes and the villain gets pissed on their captive’s behalf and treats them better than their former associates did

- they rescue themselves and everyone’s so impressed but the person yells because I AM CAPABLE AND YOU SHOULD HAVE AT LEAST NOTICED I’D BEEN KIDNAPPED

- they get rescued by a deus ex machina, preferably their dad/mom/grandma/old associate who is exponentially cooler than the heroes 

basically, I like it when people get rescued and get validation

[polyocs]

i know your alien designs aren't very human, but do you have any advice on how design an upright and bipedal insect? or creatures with exoskeletons in general? so far i know that a hunched over posture will be needed to make room for all those arms and vestigial wings. the bipedalism is what is currently throwing me for a loop- both in how it evolved and the leg structure/gait. maybe creating something with a mix of internal and external skeletons would be better for this kind of creature?

Long post, but I couldn’t resist an opportunity to talk about LEGS: how and why?

One reason animals evolve bipedalism is because it’s very energetically efficient. Humans are champs at endurance walking partly because we’re letting gravity do half the work, falling forward with every step. In comparison, an animal like a beetle or a newt with splayed legs has a very stable standing position, but in all parts of their walk cycle, they’re actively pushing their body up against gravity. This is no biggie when you weigh a fraction of an ounce, but once you’re pushing 50 pounds it becomes a chronic problem. In the evolution of land vertebrates, you can see limb attachments starting at the sides of the body (i.e. ancient amphibians) where the fins used to be, but in later animals, the limbs moved underneath the body and became struts to passively support their body weight against gravity. (i.e. a horse)

But why move onto only two legs? Well, feet are also heavy, and in order to walk you have to lift them up. This is the motivation for many animals evolving digitigrade or even unguligrade legs: if there’s less heavy bones and complex joints at the end of your leg, that’s less weight to pull up against gravity, which means you can run slightly faster and walk slightly more efficiently.

And for animals with only two walking legs, that’s even LESS weight that they have to lift around in order to get up and go places... at the price of having fewer backups in case of injury.

So, that’s great. What about arthropods though? Well, I think the main reason we don’t see any bipedal arthropods on our planet right now is because they don’t have any of the evolutionary pressures that cause it. First of all, they aren’t big and heavy-- arthropods are limited by their passive diffusion respiratory systems, and their need to wriggle out of their entire skeleton and be mushy for a while after in order to grow. Second, they’re not being pushed into the long distance walking lifestyle of humans or horses-- arthropods with distance to cover just fly over it, because they weigh nothing, so flying is super easy. But if you muck around and change some of those evolutionary factors, how would the leg structure of (for example) a beetle change to accommodate them?

I’d imagine it would look strangely familiar. Legs straightening out, moving underneath the body, simplifying and strengthening the hinges, we’ve been here before. What’s new is that there’s more leg to work with. For walking efficiency at a larger size, I’d expect one of the pairs may reduce their role in locomotion, somewhat like the forelimbs in mantids or butterflies. If you’re aiming to make a bipedal bug, forelimb specialization is a good excuse to remove four of them from the ground. As for the legs on the ground, another familiar phenomenon may happen over time...

With similar motivation, mass would move away from the foot and towards the body in cursorial species just like for vertebrates. As for structure itself in the exoskeleton, I recommend looking at the larger arthropods of real life... terrestrial crustaceans like coconut crabs come to mind. For a truly huge arthropod, a mix of endoskeleton and exoskeleton and/or a water-dependent molt might be necessary to get away with the high body weight. As for posture, the world is your oyster! Humanoid or not, just make sure your handsome lad has a good center of balance!

That’s all folks!

PATREON | STORE  

[polyocs]

no offense but I heard the evil scientist say he likes studying me better than you

#inspiration

[polyocs]

We’re only finding out recently that a lot of animals have colors and patterns that we cannot see because they’re outside of our visual range. It calls to attention how much of the world we can’t experience because our senses are limited. When we shine UV lights on them, they glow pink or blue, but these are the colors that we CAN see…. they could be a bunch of different colors, which we SEE as all pink. It’s also interesting to consider that most of these animals are not aware of having glowing patches on their bodies…. isn’t it also possible that we have skin or hair patterns that were not aware of? . . (There is actually some research out there to support the idea that our own skin fluoresces as well and that there are gender differences in the pattern and glow.) Other places to see my posts: INSTAGRAM / FACEBOOK / ETSY / KICKSTARTER    

[polyocs]

“You’re such a complete disaster.” groans the villain, scooping the unconscious hero off the sidewalk “Like, holy hell, how does anyone let you out of their sight. Stop picking fights with people you aren’t ready for.”

[polyocs]

1. Freedom vs Safety

ex: Minority Report 

2. Success vs Selflessness

ex: Mad Max: Fury Road

3. Progress vs Preservation

ex: Toy Story 3

4. Individuality vs Community

ex: Snowpiercer

5. Privacy vs Transparency

ex: The 100

[polyocs]

There is a specific and terrifying difference between “never were” monsters and “are not anymore” monsters

“The thing that was not a deer” implies a creature which mimics a deer but imperfectly and the details which are wrong are what makes it terrifying

“The thing that was not a deer anymore” on the other hand implies a thing that USED to be a deer before it was somehow mutated, possessed, parasitically controlled or reanimated improperly and what makes THAT terrifying is the details that are still right and recognizable poking out of all the wrong and horrible malformations.

[polyocs]

Things that should happen in a Sci-Fi story with a Universal Translator

One character who constantly makes bad puns … except the UT totally fails to translate them.  “I guess you could say he … had a bad time”, “Well, I don’t think they’ll be … visiting again any time soon”.  There’s some other aliens of the same species who groan every time

A group of aliens who share a common language get into a discussion about grammar … but the UT translates the word they’re arguing about the same way every time.  “It looks like they left in a hurry … or is it ‘left’?” “You’re expressing uncertainty, so you have to use the subjunctive form ‘left’” “No, you don’t use the subjunctive here, you’re expressing a deduction based on evidence, so you have to use the deductive form ‘left’” “Wait, you say ‘left’ for the deductive?  Are you from the Southern Continent?” “Yes, I am.  Wait, what’s it in your dialect?” “We say ‘left’ where I’m from”

A character unexpectedly becomes angry at another character.  At the end of the episode you find out that the first character had switched verb forms to a more affectionate form when speaking to the second character and was mad that they were ignoring the obvious indication of their feelings

The captain nearly derails tense diplomatic negotiations because of a UT slip up, inadvertently implying a definite claim to a particular planet, as opposed to a tentative claim subject to negotiation

The crew is visited by a group of aliens whose UT is a few centuries out of date, so they’re greeted with Early Modern English

An alien recites the equivalent of Jabberwocky and the UT just completely gives us “’Twas something and the something something did something and something in the something …”

[polyocs]

Concept: the chosen heroes failed to read the room and got slaughtered in a battle they were supposed to run away from. Now saving the world falls to the emergency backup party:

The mysterious itinerant shopkeeper who has no combat skills of their own, but is kitted out in all the grossly overpowered endgame equipment the heroes never got around to buying from them

The withered old monk who sealed themselves away in a deathless sleep of centuries in order to bestow a secret power upon the chosen ones when the time finally came; they have fuckoff ridiculous battle techniques, but are so old they can’t safely use any of them

The duplicitous-yet-vaguely-honourable rival whose life has lost all meaning because their whole identity was founded on being a moral object lesson for the “real” heroes

The comic-relief fuzzy animal sidekick and sole survivor of the ill-fated battle; they’re grappling with severe PTSD and a whole load of survivor’s guilt, and the resulting preoccupation with vengeance seems like it should be funny, but it’s really, really not

The perpetually befuddled shrine attendant who’s inexplicably never treated as a big deal in spite of the fact they can literally raise the dead

The formerly kidnapped childhood-friend-slash-love-interest whose captivity was supposed to serve as the party leader’s primary motivation, but then everybody died horribly and – having no further use for them – the baddies simply let them go

#inspiration

[polyocs]

AU List A-Z

Made a list of all the AU’s I could think of. Used to help me when I have no ideas, decided it could help others and I should post it. It took a few weeks to fill it out this extensively and I have no more interest in adding to it, so please don’t bother suggesting anything （；￣д￣）

A

Accidental Marriage AU

Actor AU

Alien AU

Amnesia AU

Android AU

Angel/Demon AU

Animal AU

Apocalypse AU

Arranged Marriage AU

Artist AU

Art Student AU

Assassin AU

Athlete AU

Author AU

Avian (Bird People) AU

B

Babysitter AU

Bakery AU

Ballet AU

Band AU

Bartender/Bar AU

Beach AU

Blind AU

Blind Date AU

Bodyguard AU

Book Store AU

Bounty Hunter AU

Brothel AU

C

Caterer AU

Camp Counselor AU

Camping AU

Carnival AU

Castaway AU

Celebrity AU

CEO/Boss AU

Chef AU

Child AU

Choir AU

Circus AU

Clothing Shop AU

Club AU

Coffee Shop AU

College AU

Conductor AU

Choreographer AU

Coworker AU

Criminal AU

Cult AU

Cyborg AU

D

Dancer AU

Dead/Death AU

Deaf AU

Demigod AU

Demon Hunter AU

Detective AU

Dimension Hoping AU

DJ AU

Doctor AU

Domestic AU

Dragon AU

Drama Class AU

E

Enemies AU

Ex AU

F

Fairy AU

Fake Dating/Engagement/Marriage AU

Fashion/Fashion Designer AU

Fire Fighter AU

Forbidden Love AU

Fugitive AU

G

Gang AU

Gardener/Gardening AU

Ghost AU

H

Hairstylist AU

Haunted House AU

Hero/Villain AU

High School AU

High School Reunion AU

Historical AU

Horror AU

Hospital AU

Hunger Games AU

I

Immortal AU

J

Judge AU

Jury Duty AU

K

Kidnapper/Kidnapped AU

L

Lawyer AU

Library AU

Lifeguard AU

M

Mafia AU

Maid AU

Magician AU

Magic AU

Marriage AU

Mechanic AU

Medieval AU

Mermaid AU

Military AU

Model AU

Modern AU

Monster/Monster Hunter/Monster Tamer AU

Murder Mystery AU

Musical AU

Musician AU

N

Neighbor AU

Ninja AU

Nurse AU

O

Office AU

Officer (Police) AU

O/B/A AU

P

Parallel Universe AU

Parametric AU

Paranormal Investigator AU

Parent AU

Pen Pal AU

Pet Store AU

Photographer AU

Pirate AU

Podcast AU

Porn Star AU

Prisoner AU

Prank War AU

Prostitute AU

Q

—

R

Reality TV Show AU

Reporter AU

Restaurant AU

Resurrection AU

Road Trip AU

Roll Reversal AU

Room Mate AU

Rival AU

Royalty AU

S

Scientist AU

Serial Killer AU

Servant AU

Sick AU

Social Media AU

Soulmate AU

Space AU

Spy AU

Stalker AU

Stranger AU

Street Racing AU

Stripper AU

Student AU

Survival AU

T

Tattoo Shop AU

Teacher AU

Theater AU

Thief AU

Time Travel AU

U

Undead AU

Undercover Cop AU

V

Vacation AU

Vampire/Vampire Hunter AU

Veterinarian AU

W

Waiter AU

War AU

Wedding Planner AU

Werewolf AU

Wild West AU

Witch AU

Wizard AU

X

—

Y

Yandere AU

Youtuber AU

Z

Zookeeper AU

Zombie AU

[polyocs]

Fiction love: villains who quasi-reform, but never actually turn nice. That sadistic manipulator who used to crawl inside your head and make you doubt your own worth and sanity is now the asshole on the team who snarks at everyone and likes exactly two (2) people, and refuses to grovel for anyone’s forgiveness but just keeps… quietly saving everyone. Because the people worth their time will notice.

They leave weird little gifts for the people they don’t hate. Nice(ish) gifts, not Jared Leto gifts. But, like, the most cheerful person on the team gets this soap. Attempts to confront them on the fact that they’re doing nice things for people will be ruthlessly mocked.

But they just. Keep helping these people they don’t even like that much.

#inspiration

[polyocs]

The hero shows up at the villain’s doorstep one night. They’re shivering, bleeding, scared. There’s also a slightly dazed look in their eyes– they were drugged. They look like they were assaulted. Looking up at the villain, swaying slightly as they’re close to passing out, they mumble “…didn’t know where else to go…” then collapse into the villain’s arms.