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The em-dash thing kind of legit pisses me off, because I've only really just figured out how to use them (they're pretty great) and now this fucking cyber-slop is poisoning the well. I hope AI crashes and burns, and every company and investor and organization that thrust it on us ends up living...

Oh, welcome back. I was just looking up a very short guide you'd written about paragraph structure and for a brief moment I was like, "Damn, they got to her too." Anyway, not that I'm a forum regular or anything, but hope you enjoy your stay (and look out for any stray beams of sunlight, lol).

I feel like it depends on the story. Sometimes one is better than the other. Like, easy example, Lord of The Rings would be markedly worsened by having hard magic, whereas FMA is dependent on being a hard magic system for the story to make sense. Asking which you like better is like asking if...

Don't overthink it. Just literally do a chapter break, and briefly summarize what happened in the preceding twenty years. It could be as simple as, "I grew up." If anything interesting happens in that time, set aside a chapter for it.

I'm going to interpret this as, "Is there a dark fantasy story you liked well enough?" so I answered yes. That said, I can only think of one story I've read that qualifies, and though I liked it well enough, the biggest advantage it had over WN in terms of quality is that it had a conclusion...

How dare you make the joke I thought of but was too cowardly to make!

That also would have been a fun topic. Maybe for the next thread.

"Go ahead and tell us why it is actually good." from the OP

Technically the word would just be "advocate," as in, "Please advocate for a trope you like which many people dislike." Not as punchy, perhaps, but more accurate. Anyway, I'm going to advocate for Fantasy Racism, because it's fallen out of fashion. Not only is it perfectly realistic for...

I'm sure this is pure hubris, but actually I think my prose is just banger after banger. Every time I reread my own work, I'm always catching lines where I'm like, "Damn, what cool, smart, probably very attractive man wrote this? Oh, that's right, this guy." I also have lots of characters who...

Prologue is a bit of narration, set before the main story, often featuring characters which won't come into the story until later, or who didn't survive into the story, but had a big impact. If it sounds like a synopsis, you have a massively bad case of telling and not showing. I haven't read...

It's pretty cool how chinese names carry their meaning openly (it's charmingly autistic, lol). English names have their meaning buried ten layers deep, so most of us never know what our names mean (I'm a light deer, for instance, which is not obvious at all). As for the subject, use the...

?‍♂️ Given that some of the greatest writers in the English language have done so (Charles Dickens in Great Expectations, for instance), I don't think bad is the right word for it. It is certainly out of style, at the moment, but it can be done. That said, I think even he avoids using "you"...

The value of the "Narrator protagonist" is to offer a view at a character who is meant to feel alien/outside the reader. Holmes and Watson being a perfect example. Yes, you aren't an English doctor from the late 1800's, but you are substantially more alike to him than you are to a mystery...

In normal circumstances I would consider it deranged to evaluate whether or not to read a story based on the chapter count, rather than on the appeal of its premise. Even with some allowances for the unique "content grind" model of WN, it is still rather a bit strange. Essentially zero of these...

Even if well done, it might not ever be popular, but you could still have fun writing it. Not everything you do has to be for mass market appeal.

It rather depends. A lot of classic fiction is done from an omniscient pov frame, which is functionally similar to multiple pov in many ways. The more modern standard is third-person limited, but even then the narrative sometimes needs to move away from the MC to show the audience something...

Also a good lesson for writing programs.

This is absolutely not a question to resolved with a survey or some kind of literary rule. Any given story is likely to contain dozens of time skips of all manners of lengths, varying from hours, to hundreds of years, to literally until the end of time (eg. The Last Question).