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PICKLEPLUM

@pickle-plum / pickle-plum.tumblr.com

A Work in Progress

@distracting-shiny A SEWER DRAGON (aka, crocodile with wings and noxious vapour breath)

These dragons came about from people who took baby dragons when they were small and cute, only to abandon them in the sewer systems when they got big enough to set the drapes on fire. Over time, these abandoned dragons have evolved to fit their putrid environment. They lurk in the foul water and feast on anything that floats too close to the powerful jaws, living and non-living things alike. Whatever it eats that can’t be consumed for nutrients is gradually broken down by the dragon’s digestive system and is regurgitated back up into their distended fire glands, mixing into a super-heated, poisonous breath.

this is…. actuallly really cool? like, this is probably the shortest number notation in existence and yeah, it’s tricky to use and absolute hell for doing math with, but the ability to denote a 4-digit decimal number into a single character is just really cool as an engineer and it probably had a ton of uses back then like denoting quantities or maybe even secret code you can probably draw this on a combination lock to remember the password and people would be none the wiser

in movies, when a scientist is held hostage and is forced to make a bomb or virus, like my guy, those villains don’t know shit about science. just make a gumball machine, my dude

eighth grade science fair volcano, but fancy looking

 i just want once where the villain is like, you are too late, i detonated the device and instead of doom and gloom it is just confetti sparklers with abba’s waterloo playing and the scientist is like, bitch you thought 

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every time a scientist gets kidnapped to build a terrible weapon, they think about just bullshitting it, but then a tiny voice in the back of their mind says, but don’t you want to see if you can? don’t you want to laugh madly as you show them all? don’t you want to just go feral?

Honestly when’s the next time you’ll get this kind of grant funding?

“Subverting Expectations” used to be a good thing, referring to writers who would break the mold and rise above the tropes of their story/genre/medium to write something better than expected.

Now the term is associated with hack writers who write incomplete story arcs and disappointing nonsensical endings on purpose. All of that in order to “surprise” the audience and punish anyone who put any thought into the story at all.

I suggest we come up with a new term for the latter, so “subverting expectations” can be reserved for the former.

The term I came up with is “plotjacking” since they jack the story away from its course at the last moment. And also because it’s the figurative literary equivalence to the author masturbating their ego onto the page.

FUCKING COSIGNED

Plotjacking: the act of planned interruptions of your own plot with no other intention than to deny delivering on story beats

(credit goes to OP charlesoberonn)

Shocktwist: a specific moment of plotjacking

(first heard the term used by Red from OverlySarcasticProductions on her PlotTwists TropeTalk video on youtube)