#just for you first anon I answered three asks on this specifically [clicks fingerguns]

[ganymedesclock]

Rule of 3, perhaps?

Not too terribly much to say about this one; timing and meaningful repetition are tried, tested, and proven to time. Threes are a satisfying number, along with fives and sevens- I can't really say why. They lack the symmetry of twos, fours, and sixes but there's something about those low odd numbers, especially threes.

There's even a form of micro rule-of-three, which I just did now if you're looking- tried tested and proven to time. a repetition of "t" sounds, with the third beat held off a bit. It makes a pleasing sense of rhythm in prose.

Anonymous asked: Fate worse than death if that's not too broad

Consequences are a big part of any story! It's not too exhaustive to say that, so I think there's two major caveats to the Fate Worse Than Death as a concept.

If you feel like you have to invent a form of hyperdeath because you've been a little too liberal with the death-defiance, that might be worth looking into in your story format itself; I haven't found a lot of Fates Worse Than Death that actually hit as hard as a well-written character death.

Be a little careful what you're saying about living with pain or torment or in an uncooperative body. Your fantastic "worst fate" curse might actually just be another person's normal lived experience, and suggesting death would be better than that is a bad look.

Anonymous asked: Crouching moron, hidden badass for the trope ask thing?

Like anything, it depends widely on execution. On the one hand, I don't particularly care for the insinuation that a character has to pay for you caring about them by doing something really flashy and cool- on the other hand, I am often much more fond of / look towards this trope when it's in the case of that a character holding a position of power or significance probably earned it somehow.

If you design your world to be a challenge to navigate for a rowdy, superpowered unit of special boys (e.g. the standard RPG world), then there should be some sense that the other people who live here can leave their homes and turn out okay. And this can be both funny and a way of following my previously-established rule ("no one person needs to be important but people are important, as a category- it matters that someone's alive and real and has experiences") and spicing things up by making competent people not all preemptively flatter you by how cool they look.

A hypothetical example of this: your heroes might interact with a foppish nobleman who never seems to have any idea that he's in danger and swans through situations with at best cheerful disdain. This is assumed to be because he's an airhead, but an astute audience will pick out that he never actually seems confused about what's going on, nor delivering inaccurate assessments if he's confronted. At great length, the nobleman is cornered, and, bright-eyed, seizes the largely ornamental rapier he's carrying, and starts spouting very predictable dated "have at thee"s!

...and then it turns out he's a champion duelist and half the reason he hasn't been concerned before now is that he didn't think any of these prior issues were worth his time. It may not necessarily endear him to our haggard heroes at that point to know he could've helped out at any point, but it makes sense- if we're depicting a clearly 'old school' noble, dueling was an aristocratic preoccupation quite a bit, and the man could have even gotten himself into trouble specifically because he's too scary to be taken down a peg in the traditional manner, and too irreverent and bloodthirsty for people to like his company.

#send me a trope #readmore #just for you first anon I answered three asks on this specifically [clicks fingerguns]