Videos About Better Writing

[bulmabriefs144]

Been marathoning short Youtubes about better film and books. So I'm making this thread about videos about making better stories. Mostly from anime and cartoons.

On the "strong" female versus the strong female.

About the kishotenketsu story structure vs the three act structure.

Utopian stories that buck the trend of depicting a hostile world.

How to write likeable and sympathetic villains. And how to make their hero counterparts as beautifully flawed.

 

[TASTYLEADPAINT]

Its amazing how they nailed strong female characters in ATLA but somehow forgot how to do it when making legend of korra. Korra sucks as protagonist

 

[bulmabriefs144]

I think Korra at season 4 sorta is okay. She actually has struggles and regrets, and has to get herself together.

If we're going by the idea that one video said about "if you replace them with a man, and nothing has changed, you're doing it wrong" so who would Korra be as a man? And the answer leads inevitably back to... Gavin from Brent Week's Lightbringer series. For the record, I cannot stand Kip post about book 3 or so, and skip him to read about Teia and Gavin.

Gavin, like Korra, starts out the gate as being strong, confident, and all-powerful. We see some strain while he builds a wall, but we are convinced that the story about the Prism is true. Later, cracks appear in that story, as we realize "That guy who was prisoner? Oh yeah, he's kinda Gavin. Maybe, or his brother Dazen. He's also crazy, so we're not sure." I won't give away how it comes out, but I ultimately liked his ending while I'm sure alot of people were like "Wtf?!?" Anyway, by the end of book one, Gavin is colorblind. And by the second or third book, he's also missing one eye.

Back to Korra. Poisoned by metal, somewhat crazy, shell-shocked by all of her battles, and we start to see that she doesn't write letters back to Mako, who was set up as her boyfriend. We don't see her write to Bolin either. Instead, the person she confides with is Asami. You have to get through alot of her acting more like confident Gavin than broken Gavin, but yeah, that moment comes.

 

[JenniBee]

Its amazing how they nailed strong female characters in ATLA but somehow forgot how to do it when making legend of korra. Korra sucks as protagonist

I like Korra.

I see where the writers were going, making Korra the exact opposite of Aang. She acts before she thinks, which helped her learn three out of four elements as a child. Action related elements come easy to her, but spiritual elements are hard. Whereas Aang took a long time to learn the elements because he was an air nomad. Their element is spiritual, guided by tranquility and meditation. He takes a long time to learn each element because he was raised to take his time and find the spirituality in everything. Korra was raised in the water tribe, so she is all about using her hands whether it is manipulating water, earth, or fire. Her early mastering of three elements make sense in as she is shown to be extremely impulsive, even in her first introduction as a child. This impulsive drive is both a strength and a hinderance.

She had to learn how to be less impulsive throughout the series, and she has a very satisfying arc. Through her story, she begins trusting friends over herself, especially when Bolin learns lava bending. She eventually becomes calm enough she can connect with the spirit realm. That's what makes the final season so impactful. She is completely broken after a battle, and her self worth bottoms out. The boldness of Toph is what she needed to get over herself. She finally learns that she is not the best in the world physically, but connecting with the avatar state spiritually is the most important part about being the avatar.

A lot of people didn't like the loss of contact with past incarnations of the avatar, and it always felt like a backdoor pilot for a sequel. Clearly it was, as we can see with the previews of upcoming Avatar media.

 

[Zagaroth]

Alright, this is about stories, not writing techniques. In that case, I recommend the entire Trope Talks series by Red of Overly Sarcastic Productions.

The point of the series is *NOT* to tell you exactly how to use various tropes, it is to talk about tropes and in what situations the trope helped the story and in which situations it hurt the story. It lets you know how to use tropes in general.

Also, Red and Blue are both very entertaining, and I kind of recommend their entire channel in general. Red does stories and myths, Blue does history and occasionally architecture. That man loves a well made dome or arch. They started in college, graduated, looked at the job market, looked at the income they were getting from their side gig, and said "You know, we could just keep doing this, but *more*, and not have school distracting us."

Let's just say that so far, it has proven to have been the right choice.