The Title says it all.
I am looking for a Discord server (Or any other group) that solely focus on novel writing and that doesn't have any inclination towards any ideologies. ( I mean I just got called a misogynist for killing off my MC's wife and children at the beginning of my story.) I just want to focus on brainstorming my novel (Also improve my writing skills) and avoid getting involved in this ideological war that is going on in the West.
I mean I have no problem with a constructive criticism (If it helps me improve my writing, I am all for it). But how does me killing a character makes me a misogynist.
Also the reason I killed them off (Not even on screen, But in distant past) was to make a tragic past for the Main Character and Also to justify his hatred for the creature that killed them.
And it wasn't even a full story. It just a little write up, For writing practice.
I mean I have no problem with a constructive criticism (If it helps me improve my writing, I am all for it). But how does me killing a character makes me a misogynist.
Also the reason I killed them off (Not even on screen, But in distant past) was to make a tragic past for the Main Character and Also to justify his hatred for the creature that killed them.
And it wasn't even a full story. It just a little write up, For writing practice.
If killing a wife character and children is misogyny, then what should I do with the rape, infants genocide, miscarriage, and forced impregnation I am planning for my fem protag?
If killing a wife character and children is misogyny, then what should I do with the rape, infants genocide, miscarriage, and forced impregnation I am planning for my fem protag?
Does it have malepreg? P*nis birth? Boys with multiple v*gin@s? Mermaid sashimi? The wishing testicl*s? Giant space spermatozoas that invade the Earth? Mechs that assimilate human an#ses to capitalise on their feces bending and create the excretion gatling and brandish the crapcalibur?
Does it have malepreg? P*nis birth? Boys with multiple v*gin@s? Mermaid sashimi? The wishing testicl*s? Giant space spermatozoas that invade the Earth? Mechs that assimilate human an#ses to capitalise on their feces bending and create the excretion gatling and brandish the crapcalibur?
Anything that’s public will eventually get to the point of ideological warfare.
I think you’re better off making your own discord channel and inviting likeminded people. Personally I think the tragic backstory is overused to the point it’s lost it’s impact, but to be called misogynistic for it is kind of funny.
I suppose I should call people misandrists for not dating males. Lol.
Anything that’s public will eventually get to the point of ideological warfare.
I think you’re better off making your own discord channel and inviting likeminded people. Personally I think the tragic backstory is overused to the point it’s lost it’s impact, but to be called misogynistic for it is kind of funny.
I suppose I should call people misandrists for not dating males. Lol.
Hmm ?, You are right about tragic backstory being overused. Guess I will have to think about torturing my MC in other ways, Huh.
Anyways thanks for the input.
Hmm ?, You are right about tragic backstory being overused. Guess I will have to think about torturing my MC in other ways, Huh.
Anyways thanks for the input.
How about his best friend weakened a tree branch as a prank. He climbed up and fell, damaging his nuts which affected his puberty. He stayed short, petite, hairless, and not breaking his voice. :3
This had a huge impact since he wanted to grow up masculine, resulted in him often having less temperance when someone mentioned his body or voice, being reckless in proving his strength while unacquainted thought he was a tomboy girl playing man.
His best friend regretted his action and decided to take responsibility by accompanying him in his crazy adventure.
I'm making one right now, but that's a work in progress. Regardless, I'm willing to hear you out and help where I can if you do want to chat. And when it comes to ideology, I honestly don't care what you make.
I mean I have no problem with a constructive criticism (If it helps me improve my writing, I am all for it). But how does me killing a character makes me a misogynist.
Also the reason I killed them off (Not even on screen, But in distant past) was to make a tragic past for the Main Character and Also to justify his hatred for the creature that killed them.
And it wasn't even a full story. It just a little write up, For writing practice.
It's not just a tragic backstory. It's the fact that it leaves the reader with the impression that the woman in his life was holding him back from a great adventure. It's OK to kill a women later in the story once you've developed her character more, but killing her in the very beginning doesn't respect her existence as a person who might want to take adventures as well. Keep in mind the lady I learned this from was bitter over a divorce from a man who allegedly claimed that his wife and child were holding him back from his career when all he really wanted was a younger woman. The divorced woman went on to work for Blizzard, and now she's working in France.
If killing a wife character and children is misogyny, then what should I do with the rape, infants genocide, miscarriage, and forced impregnation I am planning for my fem protag?
That's an entirely different story if you're doing it from the right standpoint, though that's very tricky. I'm not interested in the genocide and miscarriage stuff, but I do seek out rape and forced impregnation hentai when I want a quick orgasm. Note that I'm not asking to get raped or impregnated (again) IRL, but it provides a fantasy that releases me from the responsibilities of day-to-day life. It's pointless to worry about stuff when I'm tied up as a sacrifice for a horny tentacle creature.
It's not just a tragic backstory. It's the fact that it leaves the reader with the impression that the woman in his life was holding him back from a great adventure.
That's my point, who would even think that way. I mean the death of loved ones is probably the most tragic moments in their life. And 95% of the people would be sadned rather than being relieved with the death of his/her family. I don't know how they will get the impression that his family was holding him back, And MC is going on adventure after their deaths. (He is a miserable existence from the start.)
I'm making one right now, but that's a work in progress. Regardless, I'm willing to hear you out and help where I can if you do want to chat. And when it comes to ideology, I honestly don't care what you make.
That's my point, who would even think that way. I mean the death of loved ones is probably the most tragic moments in their life. And 95% of the people would be sadned rather than being relieved with the death of his/her family. I don't know how they will get the impression that his family was holding him back, And MC is going on adventure after their deaths. (He is a miserable existence from the start.)
So there is a practice of novice or uncaring writers creating what some sarcastic tropers call a Sexy Lamp (probably based on that one lamp in I wanna say A Christmas Carol), disguise it as a character, then "kill" (break) the "character" (lamp) as a means to drive a different character to action.
If I were going to make a misogyny argument, it would be on the grounds that the author drastically devalued the sacrificed character narratively. Especially if you have the Women In Refrigerators trope. And it's really hard to value a character less than to say "This person, whom you as a reader will NEVER hear about, used to exist, now doesn't, which motivates the main character to start their journey, and she will never come up again."
It's common enough that people will knee-jerk this reaction, but there are several ways to counter it.
0) in the case of "wife dies at the beginning", delay when the wife dies. You can't exactly do this however if her death is the inciting event of the plot. Just make sure to give her some characterisation before she dies, and definitely give more than stock traits)
1) Start the journey as something the MC is coerced or forced into by circumstance. You can't say a woman was Holding Him Back from great adventure if that great adventure was literally never going to be on the cards until shite hit the fan. Take Simo Häyhä. Legendary Sniper, had an EPIC adventure sniping all sorts of bad guys, right? Yeah, guaran-fucking-tee you he never wanted that adventure because it was World War Fucking Two.
This won't be enough to save you long term if you do nothing else, right? But it should stave things off for a chapter or two. Next:
2) Have MC think about wife/kids and often. If your MC suddenly (without mind-whammies or similar) stops acting/talking as if he'd been married long enough to have kids, then YOU as the author are sending a very clear message that they were never important. People who lose important people mourn and howl and rage and storm. I suspect you're already doing this, but make your character go through the emotions, or timeskip a good year or three, but if you timeskip, make sure to bring them up whenever it'd make sense. They're still GONE, you just are functional again.
And if you really wanna get spicy:
3) Tell the story of the wife (and possibly kids, but definitely wife) through her relations to other characters. I checked your SH Main account wanting to know what story you were writing, but didn't find anything. So let me compose an example in the fantasy genre since that's what I write:
MC starts their Prologue losing his wife and kids. He is DEVASTATED, VITRIOLIC, and WANTS TO KILL THOSE ANONYMOUS BANDITS (I'm making it an Important Detail that the bandits be anonymous or not-very-famous, basically thugs.) He goes and chases after them, and fails. They got away.
Nothing else matters. He's going to see justice for THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE AND HIS KIDS. (I will shorthand this to mainly the wife, because presumably the kids are relatively local to the two of them, and local community and family. But if he mourns over his wife, include their kids.)
Chapter 1 he sets off, heavy heart. Make sure you have him ruminating over all sorts of memories about the people he just lost. This lets you develop them post-mortem. He's gathering up, he doesn't want to do this. He's pretty sure his Wife would rather him stay and keep their Family Business going, but he doesn't have the heart to continue without her.
Next however many chapters, he visits new places, asks for rumours, and here's the fun part. People ask him what his Wife's name is. He says DW (As a placeholder, kinda like how I call MC MC). They straight up do not believe him. No Fucking Way did random anon mooks wipe out DW. MC is angry, comes to blows, and hopefully the miscommunication settles.
MC starts hearing of crazy epic things DW did in her pre-marriage life. She was a badass. She uplifted villages, drove out crime syndicates, healed the sick, left everywhere better. And so many people wanted her but she said no. MC is, very impressed and touched, but he remembers all DW ever saying was she visited a few places, and helped out here and there.
YEAH NO SHITE! HOLY FUCK!
This happens for a while longer, with hints that DW was this crazy badass, until a major reveal happens:
Magic Is Real. Mages have used it to make and break Kingdoms. And DW was a walking legend. The New Emperor In Town, who has all the riches and goonies and whatever, right? He wanted her dead because DW would have fought him and won.
But he couldn't send Imperial Goonies or Notorious Pirates. No. He had to make his hitmen look AS UNASSUMING AS POSSIBLE. This is because, well, Magic is secret, so DW won't use it unless she has to. If Important Looking People started stacking up on her house, DW would have started casting, rules be damned.
Those Random Bandits were a sadistically clever sting operation of disguises and ruses.
This all retraumatises the guy again, and he noticed that while it was happening, he did feel something strange, after he heard the agonized cry of DW. This'll be important later.
But yeah now he wants to topple that Evil Emperor. TARGET ACQUIRED, BITCH!
Problem: he needs to learn Magic. So he spends some chapters figuring that out.
Eventually he figures it out and starts throwing down some Heavy Arms Sorcery that is like really powerful.
The teacher or whoever says that they haven't seen that style of spellcasting since DW was alive.
Turns out, bandits came in, DW was sassy cause she thought they were normal. They tag her, but had Super Magic Poison Shite. DW is done for, no way in fuck is she surviving, and they're getting the kids too, because they were HER Kids and were presumably also being secretly trained in Magic plus there's this thing about children inheriting the abilities of the parent or something idk.
She was done. But she knew there was one person who would walk to the ends of Hell and back to overthrow that jackass Empire: MC. She would have wanted MC to just do Family Business without her, but she knew him enough to have kids with him, twice, if not thrice. She ain't stupid. She KNOWS he'll throw himself at the problem because she has felt the full extent of his love firsthand. So if you can't stop the love of your life from waging a war against Emperor Douchebag, you may as well give him the means to wage that war.
So in a last-ditch gamble, she performed a spell to transfer her magic talent to him, which he thought was just a weird fuzzy feeling. And JUST IN CASE, she made it a delayed timer, so even IF Imperial Hitmen inspect him, he'd just be a normal guy. And since they were playing the role of Anonymous Bandits, they let him live to he can spread word of their (fake) reputation. Because Bandits Do That Sometimes.
You don't have to make the wife or kids outright badasses in their own right, but MC is not the only one suffering for the loss. There will be others, and they can mourn and reminisce and bond over the loss.
You know, just like humans do.
So yeah, writing tropes that are commonly misused is like a chess game: Know the problem lines, and develop a sturdy defence against falling into them.
I hope any of this helps. (And it sounds like you're doing a lot of this already, I just made a textwall writing advice in case anyone else came in with similar worries and wanted some insights on how to proceed.)
So there is a practice of novice or uncaring writers creating what some sarcastic tropers call a Sexy Lamp (probably based on that one lamp in I wanna say A Christmas Carol), disguise it as a character, then "kill" (break) the "character" (lamp) as a means to drive a different character to action.
If I were going to make a misogyny argument, it would be on the grounds that the author drastically devalued the sacrificed character narratively. Especially if you have the Women In Refrigerators trope. And it's really hard to value a character less than to say "This person, whom you as a reader will NEVER hear about, used to exist, now doesn't, which motivates the main character to start their journey, and she will never come up again."
It's common enough that people will knee-jerk this reaction, but there are several ways to counter it.
0) in the case of "wife dies at the beginning", delay when the wife dies. You can't exactly do this however if her death is the inciting event of the plot. Just make sure to give her some characrerisation before she dies, and definitely give more than stock traits)
1) Start the journey as something the MC is coerced or forced into by circumstance. You can't say a woman was Holding Him Back from great adventure if that great adventure was literally never going to be on the cards until shite hit the fan. Take Simo Häyhä. Legendary Sniper, had an EPIC adventure sniping all sorts of bad guys, right? Yeah, guaran-fucking-tee you he never wanted that adventure because it was World War Fucking Two.
This won't be enough to save you long term if you do nothing else, right? But it should stave things off for a chapter or two. Next:
2) Have MC think about wife/kids and often. If your MC suddenly (without mind-whammies or similar) stops acting/talking as if he'd been married long enough to have kids, then YOU as the author are sending a very clear message that they were never important. People who lose important people mourn and howl and rage and storm. I suspect you're already doing this, but make your character go through the emotions, or timeskip a good year or three, but if you timeskip, make sure to bring them up whenever it'd make sense. They're still GONE, you just are functional again.
And if you really wanna get spicy:
3) Tell the story of the wife (and possibly kids, but definitely wife) through her relations to other characters. I checked your SH Main account wanting to know what story you were writing, but didn't find anything. So let me compose an example in the fantasy genre since that's what I write:
MC starts their Prologue losing his wife and kids. He is DEVASTATED, VITROLIC, and WANTS TO KILL THOSE ANONYMOUS BANDITS (I'm making it an Important Detail that the bandits be anonymous or not-very-famous, basically thugs.) He goes and chases after them, and fails. They got away.
Nothing else matters. He's going to see justice for THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE AND HIS KIDS. (I will shorthand this to mainly the wife, because presumably the kids are relatively local to the two of them, and local community and family. But if he mourns over his wife, include their kids.)
Chapter 1 he sets off, heavy heart. Make sure you have him ruminating over all sorts of memories about the people he just lost. This lets you develop them post-mortem. He's gathering up, he doesn't want to do this. He's pretty sure his Wife would rather him stay and keep their Family Business going, but he doesn't have the heart to continue without her.
Next however many chapters, he visits new places, asks for rumours, and here's the fun part. People ask him what his Wife's name is. He says DW. They straight up do not believe him. No Fucking Way did random anon mooks wipe out DW. MC is angry, comes to blows, and hopefully the miscommunication settles.
MC starts hearing of crazy epic things DW did in her pre-marriage life. She was a badass. She uplifted villages, drove out crime syndicates, healed the sick, left everywhere better. And so many people wanted her but she said no. MC is, very impressed and touched, but he remembers all DW ever saying was she visited a few places, and helped out here and there.
YEAH NO SHITE! HOLY FUCK!
This happens for a while longer, with hints that DW was this crazy badass, until a major reveal happens:
Magic Is Real. Mages have used it to make and break Kingdoms. And DW was a walking legend. The New Emperor In Town, who has all the riches and goonies and whatever, right? He wanted her dead because DW would have fought him and won.
But he couldn't send Imperial Goonies or Notorious Pirates. No. He had to make his hitmen look AS UNASSUMING AS POSSIBLE. This is because, well, Magic is secret, so DW won't use it unless she has to. If Important Looking People started stacking up on her house, DW would have started casting, rules be damned.
Those Random Bandits were a sadistically clever sting operation of disguises and ruses.
This all retraumatises the guy again, and he noticed that while it was happening, he did feel something strange, after he heard the agonized cry of DW. This'll be important later.
But yeah now he wants to topple that Evil Emperor. TARGET ACQUIRED, BITCH!
Problem: he needs to learn Magic. So he spends some chapters figuring that out.
Eventually he figures it out and starts throwing down some Heavy Arms Sorcery that is like really powerful.
The teacher or whoever says that they haven't seen that style of spellcasting since DW was alive.
Turns out, bandits came in, DW was sassy cause she thought they were normal. They tag her, but had Super Magic Poison Shite. DW is done for, no way in fuck is she surviving, and they're getting the kids too, because they were HER Kids and also magical.
She was done. But she knew there was one person who would walk to the ends of Hell and back to overthrow that jackass Empire: MC. She would have wanted MC to just do Family Business without her, but she knew him enough to have kids with him, twice, if not thrice. She ain't stupid. She KNOWS he'll throw himself at the problem because she has felt the full extent of his love firsthand. So if you can't stop the love of your life from waging a war against Emperor Douchebag, you may as well give him the means to wage that war.
So in a last-ditch gamble, she performed a spell to transfer her magic talent to him, which he thought was just a weird fuzzy feeling. And JUST IN CASE, she made it a delayed timer, so even IF Imperial Hitmen inspect him, he'd just be a normal guy. And since they were playing the role of Anonymous Bandits, they let him live to he can spread word of their (fake) reputation. Because Bandits Do That Sometimes.
You don't have to make the wife or kids outright badasses in their own right, but MC is not the only one suffering for the loss. There will be others, and they can mourn and reminisce and bond over the loss.
You know, just like humans do.
So yeah, writing tropes that are commonly misused is like a chess game: Know the problem lines, and develop a sturdy defence against falling into them.
I hope any of this helps. (And it sounds like you're doing a lot of this already, I just made a textwall writing advice in case anyone else came in with similar worries and wanted some insights on how to proceed.)
Tks for the advice.
Also in my write up, MC was a wanted fugitive who got blamed for their deaths, And the cherry on top, The one leading the bounty hunt was his father in law who already hated him. (I was probably going to setup the Father In Law as one of the major leaders of a church or an organisation similar to White Council (In Dresden Files). )
I have scratched that idea for a while and is working on another project.
If killing a wife character and children is misogyny, then what should I do with the rape, infants genocide, miscarriage, and forced impregnation I am planning for my fem protag?
