What happened to grit?

We stopped being 13 and serious about it.

Isn't writing to market the holy grail for a lot of people? Isn't this just the market saying a hale and hearty 'NO'?

Maybe writers need to start thinking more responsibly about what they're actually producing instead of acting entitled to just treat every subject like some toy to play with. 'Free Speech' only applies to the government. Consumers can still deal you five across the eyes for being a boor.

Step 1: Spend 150+ pages building up a really cool, strong character and making the reader like them.

Step 2: Hang at least three subplots and a romance on them.

Step 3: Have a half-assed second string villain kill them in a humiliating way after they abandoned their love interest to fight them in an equally humiliating way.

Step 4: Ignore those subplots and turn the love interest into a boring sack of sadness.

Step 5: Justify yourself 'because real life'. THIS IS A FANTASY, SKEEZIKS! REAL LIFE NEED NOT APPLY, ESPECIALLY NOT TO JUSTIFY RUINING YOUR OWN WORK!

My gaming group just had a discussion about the whole 'endangering loved ones as motivation' and something super-interesting emerged:

How much would John McClain be an even better, more bad*ss and moral character in Die Hard if Holly wasn't in the Nakatomi building? Then he would have every reason to want to just get out alive and every opportunity since the bad guys didn't know he was there. But he chooses not to because other people--total strangers--need him.

If a 'hero' needs someone fridged to prompt them to do something that is right and in their power... doens't that make them less heroic?

Imagine if Captain America was totally okay with not being able to go to WWII and punch Hitler until one of the millions of people who were being killed horrifically just happened to be someone he knew.

How are we ever going to discuss awful tropes without calling them awful?

Is this not the same community that constantly whines about 'scammers' and actively pushes for their banning and loss of profit because they're doing something bad? Can we get a list of the bad things we CAN discourage and the ones we have to coddle?

This is why this toxic trope hasn't died like blackface or yellow peril.

Wow. Just...wow. I can't believe this post hasn't been modded to hell and back. That's a ridiculous comment.

Given the context, keep in mind that the objectification is NOT being treated like a sex object, but as a disposable emotion dump who DIES.

Ladies, do you enjoy dying?

Linkara has a good rule for this: Are there still good stories you can tell with this character? If you kill them, will you just replace them with a flatter knockoff version? Did you develop this character for absolutely no reason than to sucker punch the audience or provide motivation that is already readily present? Will killing this character leave subplots unresolvable? Are they honestly the only character in the story you actually bothered to develop (again for the suckpunch)? Is this character the only villain you made that's worth a damn?

If you answered yes to any of these, reconsider killing that character. It can likely only make your work stronger.

Um... 'Mary Sue' has nothing to do with how original a character is, but how the universe in the story treats them as awesome in an unearned fashion.

It only should be over. It still occasionally creeps out to haunt us. It is not so very long ago that a queer love interest NEVER survived.

Fridging is just a cheap fix for establishing motivation.

The weird thing is that a lot of modern writers are so inured to death as literally the only source of drama that they use this when THERE IS EXISTING MOTIVATION.

A bad*ss monster hunter born and raised to protect the innocent from the things that go bump in the night suddenly can't just want to kill the monsters because they threaten the innocent. No, it has to kill his girlfriend, usually in a vaguely sexualized or overly cruel way so that 'this time it's personal'. Only we never even saw the other times to even know what that's supposed to mean.

A cop can't be concerned with catching a serial killer because HE KEEPS KILLING PEOPLE, so we have to have his wife or kid die. Because cops don't pursue criminals for any other reason than revenge.

It goes even deeper than that though. It's done to get the protagonist lethally motivated. Because in movies evil must be punished and the only punishment some writers know is, again, death.

Death death death death death.

Death is boring.

People try to excuse running it into the ground as it being 'realistic' or artistic or something, but let's face it: the 80's and 90's killed it. It's boring. LRN2DRAMA. God.

Whenever someone scoffs at the idea that most CEOs are sociopaths, one steps up to the plate and proves it.

Your emphatic declaration doesn't magically turn speculation into fact, especially in the absence of data.

Absence of data as in literally exactly how Amazon has told us it works since KU started?

They expressly said that they would add or subtract from the Global Fund at their own discretion. That's been there the whole time. People just keep ignoring it.

Pretty much everyone was baying for scammer blood on the premise that they were 'stealing' their piece of the pie.

Now that it's clear that the scammers were just a stalking horse of little to no consequence to writers, well of course no one at all really believed it. We were all just joshing. We all knew the emperor had no clothes, we were just making sure everyone else knew.

So are we finally ready to admit that the payout fluctuations are a conscious choice on the part of Amazon?