Survival Of The Fittest

Sweet. Been a while.

So, I think it's important first off to distinguish moral/immoral from villain/not. A character can behave profoundly immorally without necessarily being a villain, and I believe a character can potentially be a villain while at least loosely following a moral course of action.

Moral/immoral has some points of debate but my general standpoint is:

1. trying to survive is in itself morally neutral
2. benefiting yourself at the unwilling expense of others is immoral
3. assisting others, especially at cost to yourself, tends to be morally good

This does not change because someone is pointing a gun at your head and telling you to be immoral or they'll shoot. That action of theirs is wildly immoral but the AT doesn't care. Maybe they even keep score of who's the baddest dude!

The problem in SOTF is that pursuing survival often leads characters to victimize others. This remains immoral. There are mitigating factors, and it can be plenty understandable and sympathetic (and most of the best characters do it some and real people do it in tiny ways constantly for lower stakes) but this does not make it moral.

We then segue into the rules of SOTF:

1. You have to be the last alive to win
2. You have to kill at least one person to go home
3. At least one person a day must kill or everyone dies

Even taken at face value, this does not justify murder in 99% of circumstances, and that's putting aside that the AT is almost certainly lying about rules 2 and 3. It's quite possible to coast through the game, score your kill in self-defense or as mercy, and go home by the rules laid out by the AT. This is more or less what a moral game looks like. It's pretty boring.

Villainy is when characters take on antagonistic roles. This can be small-scale (targeting one specific person) but in general to be a villain in SOTF you take an antagonistic stance towards a significant chunk of the class. It doesn't have to be everyone, but a villain is usually someone you may well think "Uh oh" about if they roll into your thread.

To cross the line into being a villain instead of just doing bad things, I think a character needs to on balance do villainous stuff a good proportion of their time. Having a villainous "edit" also helps. So if you take, say, Parker from V7, I think there's a good argument he's a villain (and immoral!) because he repeatedly tried to turn events to his advantage, worked every angle he could, and did so with no concern about how it'd hurt others. He didn't screw over other people because he enjoyed doing it (mostly ) but because it helped his chances in various ways. But if he turned up, and you weren't someone who in some way mattered to him, he'd probably take you for all he could get. That's villainy.

Ace, by contrast, has done some wildly immoral things lately, like murdering Connor. He has an even wider number of, let us say, jerk moves (running off and leaving Sakurako). That said, the only point I'd lean on as him being villainous would be when he antagonized Myles and tried to force his way into the group. This is a rather petty evil, but it's a more calculated and personal one and was the work of more considered bad stuff. Also, when Ace turns up in a thread, it's rare that I expect him to cause trouble. He escalates situations but until recently at least for most of the class he wouldn't be too likely to mess with them unprovoked.

Where this falls with mid-range killers is hard to say, but I think you can be a villain and also relatable, sympathetic, human, and someone the reader cheers on. Does that need its own category? TVTropes used to have one I think, but I dunno that I need to draw a line. I have a whole other screed on vilalins but I think part of what makes allegations of villainy so contentious is people read that as shorthand for being irredeemable, unsympathetic, or purely vile... when in fact, to me at least it's no such thing. Furthermore, being labelled a villain is not a negative critique and doesn't restrain a writer's choices. It's not a bad thing. I think the site forgets that at times.

Quick off-the-cuff stuff here—more thoughts later maybe.

I've talked with this in a couple one-on-one PMs with people, but I functionally write characters on three axes.

-Those who accept the premise of the game (whether they disagree with it, embrace it, or merely try to survive it).
-Those who defy the premise of the game (archetype Liz Polanski: those who try to escape, those who try to work around the rules, those who try to break cameras or hack collars).
-Those who try to play their own game (archetype Mizore Soryu: those who understand there's nothing they can do about the game itself, so they try to go their own way).

For me, villains can exist on any of those three axes (or all three at once), and each can be unique in their own way. Typically I find that the best villains on this site tend to have some mixture of Type 1 and Type 3: Maxwell Lomardi, for instance, was mostly a Type 1 villain with maybe a streak of Type 3 sensibility (embraced the game but wanted to pretend it made him larger than life), Quinn Abert was equal parts Type 1 and 3 (embraced the nature of the game but also integrated it into her own sense of self); my own Alex Tarquin was heavy on Type 3 with a streak of Type 1 (tried to make his own bargain about being a "villain" as a way of coping with his fear and trauma, didn't change that he was still "participating).

I think Type 2 villains are theoretically possible (I had a vague plan to do it with my v5 Karen, having her capture people and forcing them to do various sadistic-seeming activities that were secretly her experimenting with ways to escape) but a bit difficult under the current rules, since being merely involved in an escape attempt carries such a heavy penalty now. If anyone has an example of one, let me know.

Grim Wolf wrote: ↑Tue Jul 14, 2020 3:44 amIf anyone has an example of one, let me know.

While I don't personally hold with the idea, there is an argument that Liz herself falls into this category.

After all, once she locked into her war on Danya, she more or less accepted the idea that anything bad that happened was to a large degree his fault and was thus willing to use whatever means were most efficient to prove her point. This included breaking cameras even after the consequences (someone's collar getting popped) were made clear. I think she explicitly goes "I'm not going to stop and if that means you kill everyone else in the game and declare me the winner that's fine by me." Obviously the AT blinked first, but it's a stance that is definitely not pure clean good guy and one which caught her some heat from other kids at the time (as I'm sure you remember).

Ooh, I forgot about that! For me, that would fall under you own description of "character taking immoral actions" versus "villain" (sacrificing your fellow hostages isn't a good thing, but on the other hand she's not the one who took them hostage in the first place), but I can see the case for it. I imagine that I will be getting a chance to do a more thorough IC investigation of that idea soon enough.

Throwing another question in here.

What is your guys' idea of a good profile? Not asking about profiles as, like, passable under mod critiques or whatever, but profiles you've read over the years that you guys consider enjoyable reads and stories and stuff. Specifically tagging anyone who's been a mod and MS since I know they like profiles a lot, but anyone's free to answer.

I think ideally a profile at its best gives a quick idea of what your kid is and what to expect from them and dangles hooks to interact with them. It suggests the messes they may get into and how they'll get out of them, and tells you more or less how they act so you can figure out how your character would view them (since they've been interacting in class for 4-12 years by now) even if you've never threaded together. I want to get a feel for, like, how your character lives in the normal world, what their ground situation is, etc. The starting point. And I want—need if I'm doing a critique—to see nuance and that your character is more than one mood and a few narrow hobbies. Oh, and they should be really clear on any important stuff you're gonna cryptically reference without explicitly calling back to/putting in scene.

As to profiles that are enjoyable reads in their own rights? Honestly, I've read parts of some interesting works of fiction that use a format vaguely akin to SOTF profiles, but profiles themselves rarely do much for me and some of my favorites would never get through critiques nowadays. And I think that's okay; profiles are a piece of the process, and an important one, but they're like cliff notes or a cheat sheet. If you can blow it out of the park with that, wonderful and more power to you! But what's truly important is the story itself.

I've written this post to almost halfway and then started over from scratch several times now, so I'm just gonna do a bulleted list of opinions that I'm not going to qualify or explain very well. I woke up, saw I was pinged, and started vomiting words. I managed to clean up some of the undigested food chunks, but I'm not perfect, so there might be some bile still in places hard to clean. Gross.

What I will state outside of the spoiler is that good profiles do not automatically equal good characters. Most of SOTF takes place outside of the profile, and while the role of the profile can be incredibly important in setting expectations, it's usually a small percentage of a character's overall text, and usually some of the least memorable or important. I'll also say that my perspective discards, for the most part, critique standards.

[+] Bad Takes About Good Profiles

• Good profiles have hooks for engagement: I'm in agreement with MW here for the most part. I like to read characters in full when they're done, so when I thread with somebody I look at the profile first, and I'm looking for this stuff. What does this look like? It depends. This is a bit more important for pregame, I'd say, and getting characters off the ground. But when it comes to the middle and late phases of a character's story, the profile doesn't stop being useful. How? Well,
• Good profiles are written with potential themes in mind: You don't need to know what your character is going to be "about" at the start. Your character shouldn't read as being "about" a specific thing anyway, but that's why the length expectations for profiles can work in your favor. You get a lot of space to play in before things get super duper tiring to read. Plus, if you can retroactively reread your own writing and connect your themes to stuff in the profile, there's a good chance you might also be able to trick people into thinking you didn't just do that. Nobody will know by the time you're gone anyway. More on this later.
• Good profiles aren't super long: If I was a reader who liked not knowing things, I would hate profiles. Like, for real, instead of learning about characters organically through how they interact with the world, I'm expected to read all this just telling me what's their deal?! What the fuck! Thankfully I'm not that kind of reader, but I am a reader who reads a lot, and mostly stuff that isn't here. It should be alright to withhold some details. I don't need to know from the profile what your character likes to eat for breakfast every day. I also don't need to learn about their bad middle school relationships from the profile, but that's just me. Some aspects of a character's past are best expressed by them.
• Good profiles aren't super short: I do need to know some things, of course. This isn't really a problem with profiles these days. Staff is a lot better at telling people to elaborate than at telling people to trim, and I think that's honestly pretty good. If you want a word length ballpark for the longest you can make one of these without somebody tapping out I'd say the 2,000 word range is a good place to check in with yourself about what you're doing.
• Good profiles do explaining that you won't always be around to do: People do leave this site. It might be you some day. I can't ping Riserugu in chat and ask about Hawley's fifth birthday party. I have to imagine that myself. But usually profiles aren't written with big gaping holes in them, and if they are, then they aren't accepted into the version, so this isn't a big deal.
• Good profiles do explaining that you don't want the reader to have to do for themselves: If you're into Death of the Author, profiles are perfect. To be more specific, it's writerly suicide we're committing when we write these. The facts—just the facts—about a character's life. Nothing here is up for debate, which is perfect if you want everything else to be. Profiles have just one reading IC—they're true. They have to be, on some level. The rest of the text of a character should encourage as many readings as possible, but that's not the point of the profile. Anything you don't want debate about goes here. Set your affairs in order in the profile—and then cast your authorial ego from the nearest cliff. Beyond this point, writerly intent means very little.
• Good profiles don't do all the work: There are some conclusions about content usually covered in profiles that the reader ought to be the one making, not you. It's alright to leave some stuff out on purpose. It's imperative that you do, actually, if you're going to use the profile effectively. Make the reader wonder. They won't have to for very long before they click into your narrative.
• Good profiles foreshadow: Good characters in general foreshadow, but if you can put on your Chekhov costume for a bit and leave some guns laying about, this isn't a bad spot. Profiles are what the first person doing a full reading of your character will see most of the time. Profiles only become narrative in retrospect anyway.
• Good profiles aren't good characters, and know nothing of characters: Characters shouldn't click in the profile. The narrative is where these people become characters, more than the sum of their lives. It is in the profile that the humanity, the stark facts, of one's life are laid bare. Numbered. Placed next to everyone else. As the author dies in the text, the character is unborn in the profile. "Writing site" my ass. If the most important thing you do here is write just do a novel already. There are no characters in profiles, only people.
• Good profiles don't always have to show up in the profile section: The profile is something that readers of this site come to expect in a very specific context, in a very specific style, and at very specific times. If you're a writer who likes fucking with people's expectations, you can put them literally anywhere else if you want. You can write profiles for side characters in your meanwhiles. You can have your characters make IC profiles of other characters in their head. You can have oneshots where characters make their own profiles, in their own words. You can also fuck with any of the above points too. To be honest I wish the formulaic expectations that readers have of profiles should be messed with more often in general. There's more text in V7's profiles, taken together, than in a lot of its characters. If you've read a format screwy SCP file you know all the fun stuff they do with that. Write a character who hits their head on a rock the first day, loses their memory, and pieces together who they are in the form of a profile. Put your profile in different fonts. The profile has a lot of utility as an exercise, as something the reader never sees. These readers do. These writers do. Show them something they've never seen before.
  
  In summary,
• Good profiles are not too long, but not too short. They lay down the facts, in broad strokes, about a character's life, and from these facts they foreshadow the person a character is going to become, but only indirectly. They often turn up where you least expect them. They are pre-characterized versions of fictional people, described, but undepicted. They give the brain something to snack on. They prompt interesting questions, and also some mundane ones. They're future proof. And they're one of the only things that you as a handler can largely be considered mostly responsible for.

This is an interesting question because I never really approach profiles as a "story" per se, either as a reader or critiquer. Most really memorable profiles are the ones that are kind of wacky and out of tone (see why back around I think V5ish, the staff stopped feeding trollfiles and instead just permadenied and hid them, because people had started submitting them just for attention and it was taking up space and staff attention in the queue while people with actual submissions were waiting on critiques).

Honestly, I don't want someone to pull out all the stops with their writing skill in a profile; it's not a format that showcases anyone's best, in my opinion, unless they're very good at writing up dry reports. The main thing I want in a profile as a critiquer is a well-organized biography that shows nuance in the person and offers up some important relationships and potential connections with other characters; I want to see that the handler has a good idea of who this character is supposed to be and why they are that person, even if they haven't been fully developed in IC writing yet. And also I don't want to be six paragraphs deep and suddenly blindsided with "And that was the day Jim Bob decided to murder his entire family".

hi im kermit and i wrote this tedtalk in april but it was in discord, which is generally a bad place to put tedtalks if they're important so im putting it here too hehe with some edits


I think, like, narratives should be layered (like an o n i o n). Internal vs External & Implicit vs Explicit & Unreliable vs Reliable narratives etc

Like, there's an external layer (e.g. the character's place in the world / their impact on others), which IMO generally should be like, mostly inferred stuff. Have it be implicit / osmosed from the narratives of other characters.

Then there's the way the character presents themselves, which is kinda... the narrative they themselves are trying to portray to the rest of the IC world. Can be reliable or unreliable. Doesn't even necessarily have to be relevant to the rest of the narrative layers I guess if your character is a lame nerd who's honest about stuff.

Then there's a character's explicit, tell-y internal narrative, which is tied to their PoV and inherently, like, an unreliable narrator. It's the story a character sells to themselves IC; how they perceive their reality. Have it be kinda the meat of a post, but like, make sure it's not just telling, but telling as a means to show.

THEN there's a character's implicit internal narrative (kind of like the internal internal narrative). The real meat of characterization. Not just what a character says/thinks/does, but how/when/in-reaction-to-what. A character's subconscious psychology. The reason ~why~ they are who they are and do what they do. Between-the-lines stuff. Subtle changes in character. I get very grumpy when people disregard this layer in their writing (and their reading too i guess) because it's arguably the most important narrative layer in a character study kind of writing thing like SOTF. It should be the focus. Actually probably I focus on this layer too much in my writing whoops sorry yall anyways consistent characterization is important reeeeeeeeeeeeeee

AND THEN TAKING ALL THESE INTERLINKED LAYERS TOGETHER INTO CONSIDERATION YOU GET THE SUPERLAYER, THE ~overarching narrative~. Like, the story you end up telling (more like showing!!!) when all is said and done. Given the nature of SOTF, it ain't usually the one you first plan on. also if you fuck up any of the layers bad enough it can be completely different than the story you're trying to tell. Generally my advice is focus on this the least while a story is underway because if you focus on it too much it becomes you, the author, telling people what to think and that's bad dont do it (hehe i just did it right there ergo showing you it's bad teehee) ok thanks for coming to my tedtalk. Secretly I have had "a few" IC v7 posts regarding my writing philosophy (with both frog & val (except val doesnt like me (secretly im yelling at myself in Val's bit about Damien Hirst......)) and this whole layer thing is one of the most common topics other than Showing vs Telling ANYWAYS I DIGRESS.

oh also theme vs arc is a false dichotomy and when you combine themes & motifs & callbacks & imagery & all them literary devices you usually get an arc. dont fuckin overplan! let the arc be organic! this is sotf and you dont get to choose when your story ends (unless ur a nerd who kills ur kids unrolled) so like keep your options open always! It's 12 AM and my thoughts are disorganized! FUCK YOU DONT BEAT THE READER OVER THE HEAD CONSTANTLY IS MY POINT LET THEM FIGURE STUFF OUT ON THEIR OWN SO THEY CAN ACTUALLY ENGAGE WITH THE NARRATIVE

RULES WERE MADE TO BE TASTEFULLY SUBVERTED BUT NOT NECESSARILY BROKEN

I LIKE IT WHEN EVERYTHING IN AN IC POST MEANS SOMETHING

LEAVE THINGS OPEN FOR INTERPRETATION


IM GOING TO BED

OK BYE

Good stuff.

I find the theme vs. arc discussion intriguing and would like to maybe dig into it sometime—I have an X vs. Arc theory I'll write up one of these days, but it's "Scene" instead of "Theme" and it's not positing mutual exclusivity.

Another thing that I think bears mentioning is, like... if you're writing to make sure everyone understands every post perfectly, whether or not they're paying attention, have read the rest of your character, etc., then you're going to end up with a hideous mess because you'll be replaying basic core beats nonstop ad nauseam, usually to the detriment of everything else. Trust your readers some!

On the other hand, if you never stop and recap or explain you whittle down your audience and probably alienate readers. It's totally a fair choice (I do it sometimes) but then you don't get to whine about being misunderstood since you're being deliberately difficult to understand. Also don't do this if your goal is for your stuff to be understood. This should go without saying but surprisingly doesn't seem to.

I generally don't post here because I find discussion about sotf theory pretty stressful, but I have strong opinions about this.

It does not matter what "the kids these days" are into if you want to make a believable teenager. Sure, different generations have different drives, but teens today and teens back in "your day" are not magically different creatures.

Trying to make an authentic teen character with just what "the kids these days" are into will not produce a believable teen. It will produce a hollow imitation, what an adult thinks teens are like. And more often than not, it'll come across as coated in disdain.

Every adult here was a teen once, and some of you have your teen experiences archived on this very site. In terms of the very basic mindset of teens, nothing's changed. A lack of identity, a drive for acceptance, independence, and a place in the world are universal across generations, regardless of what's hip and trendy among teens these days. So is the toxicity those drives can spawn. Peer pressure, chuuni syndrome, the likes.

I get that when most people ask about that sort of thing they're memeing. But seriously.

Today's Chat Topic

So, I saw some people on chat discussing the femininity and/or masculinity of prose, and.......I'm not entirely sure what that means? Or how to quantify that? Like, I understand that your gender informs your experiences in life and therefore your worldview and how you react to things, as well as the different roles people of certain genders are expected to play in Society(tm), but I'm not sure how this translates to prose as opposed to character, so I wanted to hear about it from you guys.

I understand that it's a hard topic to quantify, but I do want to see examples just so I can get a sense.

Like, what are examples of characters in SOTF with masculine or feminine prose, for example?

I may be a bad person to ask (but am chiming in anyways!) because mostly to me the only place it hops out is if someone's writing the opposite gender and makes them sound like aliens from Sirius instead of other humans, which is thankfully less common nowadays than it used to be.

I think there are lots of stereotypes like girls are more emotional, more introspective, more soft, and guys are harder and more guarded and more direct, but meh, in my experience that's not very accurate to real life and when people lean into it in fiction it often feels reductive to me. Really the biggest things are that characters will be socialized differently and treated differently by the world based on gender, which may inform their views, experiences, etc., but all of that stuff is content more than prose. I guess to me, prose tells more about personality and that can certainly be a function of that socialization and those experiences characters face due to their genders, but is by no means necessarily so.

In short, I dunno. I guess some characters I write I feel the voice wouldn't translate if I flipped their genders, but that tends to speak more to a character's gender being important to who they are as a person (and the voice being a function of that personality) than any core prose-based whatever.

IMO I thought it wasn’t about just the prose as much as it’s also about the male and female experience? Or I wasn’t there for that part of the convo.

But, like, regarding prose… Idk what that exactly is but some kids grew up w/ really gendered language/expectations and that might have a bit of an effect on prose? Growing up I was taught that contractions, cursing, and “informal” language is more masculine and that's still something I need to shake off. And I guess a lot of times prose is integrated into a character’s personality, and gender roles affect personality to a certain degree.

And speaking of gender in writing! From snippets of what I participated in, I sort of had a thought of, like… about portraying characters in a way that is “inaccurate” to their gender or not having a certain consideration to their gender while writing. Like, for instance, by making female characters that lack feminine traits in a way that’s beyond being a tomboy, you know? And not “feminine traits” like makeup, feminine traits like being scared of men while walking at night and being affected by gender roles in a toxic way. Toxic femininity and toxic masculinity and gender roles is woven so clearly into our lives it's hard to not include it. As a girl, sometimes when ppl write girls, it’s like, I can’t really get the *female experience* in it, in a way? I’m sorry idk how to put it but like you just can’t write a girl who walks alone at night with no worries and then not explain why.

And also, like, I get if you want to write someone who challenges gender roles, and you don’t *have* to constantly remind us that oh, this kid is a girl or a boy or non-binary but there’s a point where you just *have* to acknowledge the difference between genders and the way society treats them and expects of them. Growing up being somewhat tomboyish, I was often told that my hobbies aren’t feminine enough, that I need to cross my legs and sit properly, to start wearing makeup, etc, and these things can weigh down on someone. And it shows up in the little details! Smaller jean pockets, spending longer times for makeup/skincare being normalized, etc.

Being female shaped my personality a lot, esp now that I think about it while writing this. My long-term goals for life do not include having a family, and my parents always neg me about it. For a long time I thought I was special for not being like the *other* girls because society encourages women to compete against and compare themselves to each other. Maybe I’m just too conscious about this sort of stuff, and am overthinking it, but women written by people who don’t know what it’s like to grow up as a girl sometimes just… doesn’t mirror my experience. Every time I sit with my legs wide open, I still think about my parents telling me to be a proper lady. Every time I change in the mornings, I’m still scared that my clothes would be *too* tight, *too* short, *too* easy for others to sexualize.

I’m not even going to get to race unless you want me to type a huge essay on chinese-american culture and how it left me mentally fucked up.

Hey, I'm trying to return to SOTF because I want to partake in TV3 and create profiles for that. But if anyone has V7 characters left up for adoption, hmu