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Arts,random stuff, closed-room murders and puzzles

@fanofeverythingmargo

Just normal blog with fandom stuff with bad English,gentlemen,lawyers,detectives &knuckles From Russia with love
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fanofeverythingmargo
kopawz
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idkhowtopickausername

I hate when you love a character who’s like a kid or a teenager and they so perfectly capture the flaws and struggles of being that age and not understanding everything fully yet or necessarily making the best choices especially when they’re in a very painful or complex situation and they feel so real and human because of it and then you go online and there’s someone who’s like “they’re DUMB and EVIL and SELFISH because of [important moment in their character arc when they messed up and learned from it or broke under pressure or didn’t have the courage to do an incredibly difficult thing or responded realistically to their truly horrifying circumstances]”

fanofeverythingmargo
kopawz
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headspace-hotel

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

  • basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
  • like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
  • here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
  • TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
  • Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
  • all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that
  • I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
  • But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
  • In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
  • On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
  • like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not
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headspace-hotel

An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful

fanofeverythingmargo
kopawz
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astriline

I was playing apollo justice and I just noticed that when Baby Trucy pulls out Mr. Hat she jumps up to make her hat fly up enough for Mr. Hat to catch it and that is cutest shit I have ever seen

fanofeverythingmargo
endoplasmian
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silima

oh yea just throwing it out there but. if u are a beginning digital artist PLEASE i am BEGGING you to experiment with different methods of making your drawings because i see so many of yall suffering for no reason using what you’re taught because you don’t know to try a different way. like SO MANY PEOPLE people make jokes about how much worse their lineart looks from their sketch and how much of a pain it is to do lineart… if that’s you, then, don’t do lineart! just clean up your sketch a bit, or keep the bits from the sketch that you like the most and only do a separate layer for the things that really need fixing, or just paint right onto it!! endless possibilities. if u keep having troubles trouble with layers? u don’t need them, just merge them and keep going. better at sketching traditionally than digitally? take a picture of ur sketch and draw on top of it. there is no One Right Way to do anything in art except what’s fun and satisfying for you. be free