Body Types in Fiction

So I've noticed that a lot of people here in the west have gone about changing the way characters look in comic books, artwork, and stories lately and calling it 'realistic'. However, I must stress that a lot of these changes are not actually based on realistic body types for that character but rather they are based on what's currently politically correct. I won't go too much into the politics behind it as I want to tackle the actual body types themselves.

First off let me be the first to say that people are athletic, practicing things like running from rooftop to rooftop, climbing, or serious fighting tend to be very thin. Taking a super hero and making them have average body types is not realistic for the character's profession, it is instead a strange, and perhaps even offensive change to make. I know for a fact when I when I was doing two hour walks every day for a few months I got real skinny, but since I stopped doing that and fell off my diet I put the weight back on. But a lot of the character changes I'm seeing make these super heroes make me look thin. This change is unrealistic but it's also kinda offensive as it takes a lot of work to get into good shape, the work put in is hard, really hard, so it should be celebrated when people are willing to put in that much work. Instead the message becomes, 'no matter how much hard work you put in, you'll be fat' and that's not good.

Another weird choice that is based on politics and not at all realistic. A lot of these fat characters actually lose boob size... I'm sorry, but I'm a dude and I call tell you that when I don't take care of myself I get boobs! Boobs just get bigger when you gain more body fat, that's part of the place that the body fat is stored so that you can stay warm during the winter. It's a strange choice to be sure and far from realistic.

Finally one of the most hilarious choices I've seen is something that was almost right. Someone took the Iron Man suit, as in the robotic suit made of metal and machines and made it have a 'dad bod'. Now as hilarious as this parody art is, in truth it's the closest to a realistic change I've seen yet. The Iron Man suit would be a beautiful muscular or bulky machine, because it's metal and not real. The user of the suit may be over weight though. Tony Stark himself is unlikely to be fat as he does take his physical health very serious, but I could see people with Powered Armor being very out of shape in it as the suit may not actually exercise the body as there is little to no physical strain on the body itself, all the 'muscles' used are from the machine, not the person. So if Tony Stark gave up on his diet, he could very quickly have a 'dad bod' but the suit would look the same.

I want to just end with a note saying that if your writing a bunch of heroic characters who are skinny or have giant boobs, or muscles you should never feel bad or pressured to change their appearance for someone else. Your characters should look the way you want them too, I for one try to look at what a character in this position would really look like, and have had to make some cutting to characters in the past to keep up with realism. I had an overweight hero myself once, but after realizing how hard it would be for her to be a super thief and how she might get stuck climbing through a vent, I decided to cut her out of that role and place her in one that was a lot more fitting, aka she became a very powerful political figure instead. Don't be afraid to have characters that are in shape for you story, especially if it make sense.

As always, thanks for reading.

Review: My Little Pony Season 9 Episodes 1 and 2: The Beginning of the End

Once upon a time I loved this show more than any other, but in recent years I've began to see some issues with the writing, characters, and even the setting. As this is the final season of the show that was one of the largest influences of my art I decided to take a good look at some of the episodes in this season.

Today I start with the first two episodes in this season. A quick summery of the episode is; Twilight Sparkle and friends are tasked becoming Princess Luna and Princess Celestia's replacements as they want to retire out of the blue. Twilight struggles with this sudden task and responsibility as King Sombra returns to take over the world. 

Out of that summery let's first tackle the major issue I saw right away. The only pony upset about this new responsibility is Twilight Sparkle, everyone else was fine with it. Given what we know of the characters Applejack, and Fluttershy, I'd imagine they'd both have major issues with this new role as Applejack has a family to look after and a farm, and Fluttershy never struck me as someone who could take responsibility for a country or deal with politics, in fact she seems to break down when things get too hard socially. Yet only Twilight, and possibly Discord actually had problems with this responsibility being given to the group. It felt a bit forced if you ask me.

Next we have the issue of King Sombra's actual return. In the comics they spent a lot of time giving him backstory so you could understand why he hated ponies, and especially the Crystal Empire. You could understand and relate to him, so his journey there was really emotional. In these two episodes he's one of the most flat villains I've ever seen. I know this series has had a real problem with badly written villains but they already had a wonderful resource to draw from, the comics, and they chose to yet again completely ignore the good writing in favor of flat writing. His goals are boring, and his defeat wasn't even predictable, it was poorly handled. He was defeated by Twilight and friends when they were told why they were good enough to defeat him, they didn't discover why they could win, but were told very directly by Discord of all characters. It took away the emotional triumph that should have been there. 

But at least they pulled a dragon ball z style death for Sombra, that was something.

Speaking of telling and not showing, there were quite a few instances in these two episodes of the characters telling us how they felt, or why they were doing something instead of showing us. To call back to Sombra's defeat here, it was a poor mirror to the first two episodes in the series where the mane six discovered they represented the elements of harmony through trials that tested them and realized it only at the end without anyone giving them the answers. Show don't tell has never been more important.

Other elements that don't exactly make sense, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna just wanting to quit without properly teaching the characters anything. Sure Twilight and friends can beat up the bad guys, but other than Twilight none of them know much about politics at all. Twilight on the other hand has consistently almost started wars, destroyed the country or gotten everyone in deep trouble with her lack of understanding some basic things. It's like giving a very flammable object to a pyromaniac and saying, "I know you won't light this on fire because I am too lazy to take care of it myself."

The animation on the other hand was pretty decent as far as My Little Pony goes. The super cute and brightly colored visuals were actually really nicely balanced against the dark colors used with regards to the bad guy, unfortunately it also made it look a lot like what Discord did to Ponyville back in season 2, only... not as cool or emotional. 

One good point I can add to this is sadly bittersweet. Discord actually seems to have grown into a real good guy, and was there as a supportive role for Twilight helping her and the others grow into their new responsibilities. Unfortunately this is bittersweet as it does go against what Discord stood for, and who he is as a person. His character was shafted to fit this role of support character when just about anyone really could have fit here.

Another issue was something that has been an ongoing problem for a long time, but with the series coming closer to an end, it is more important now than ever before to get this right. The characters have special abilities and are competent in unique ways. For example there were perfect opportunities for Rarity's ability to sense gems, aka Sombra's big deal, Rainbow Dash's sonic rainboom, Pinkie's Pinkie Sense, and Fluttershy's Stare. None of which were used when the characters were trying to use their own power to take back their home. I'm giving the writers the benefit of the doubt here only because I hope they will cover this at the end of the season, but at this point I think the writers have forgotten what made the characters so special in the beginning. 

In all honesty unlike Adventure Time's amazing but short ending, or the Diamond Days special from Steven Universe, I hold very little hope for this final season of MLP to be good. The magic that made the series good was in the early days, when the characters having unique abilities were key to the stories which all served to cause good drama and conflict. Now the stories are very liner, too obvious, and the unique character attributes are all but gone completely.

I can only hope that the series can end with a rainboom, and not a dying whimper.

Restriction Breeds Creativity

So recently I've been forcing myself to work with some restrictions. Specifically every one of my latest rough drafts have been short side stories and I've been forcing myself to use only nine chapters (ten with a prologue) for each of these rough drafts. It has put my stories into tiny little boxes that I can easily deal with and decide what is or isn't important for the story in question.

Its been an experiment for me to test out a new method of writing I call module writing, I'll get more into that at a later date. For now I just wanted to say that it is essentially the idea of squeezing the story into a box or series of boxes. If it doesn't fit in the box it might need cut, but the point is the story becomes more concise, and more focused. So far it's been really improving my creativity and spurring on a lot of interesting ideas.

It is still a big restriction though. The last rough draft I finished for example had a lot of creative ideas but it was a real struggle to go through writing it. I'm hoping more than expecting it to come out good, but even if I end up having to revise a lot of it, or worse yet, cut said story out, I still learned some valuable things from it. I don't think I would have come up with some of these ideas had I not forced myself to use these restrictions.

It does has draw backs, for example I'm not sure yet how well this method of writing will work for longer fiction. Writing from multiple view points, or about a larger cast of characters would be a challenge. Since it's still a new method I'm sure I'll find more issues as I go. Still even with these challenges it actually makes me want to write more and harder.

These are just a few thoughts on how restrictions have been helping to cultivate my creativity. Anyone else have any experiences or thoughts to share on how restrictions can help creativity grow?

Book Review: Halo: Cole Protocol

Welcome to my review section something that I am hoping can go to add a bit of extra learning and interest in the blog. For this review I'm choosing the most recent book I read; Halo: The Cole Protocol. I'll go over a few points and talk about my general experience reading it and some personal thoughts about the work.

The Halo series is probably my favorite video game universe to date. The lore, the characters and the setting just managed to hit a very special place in my heart at a very young age for me and has stuck with me ever since. So getting the chance to go through and finish off the books I missed reading of the Halo universe has been an interesting experience to be sure. I must admit my thoughts going into this particular book was one of the more unique ones in the series to be sure and that had me both worried and excited.

The Plot: The Cole Protocol is one part the story of Lieutenant Keys as he gets back into the military and his rise to becoming the Commander we all know and love, in the other part it is the story of a young Delgado and his investigation through the asteroid colony known as The Rubble. While Lieutenant Keys seems to be there to show us more of the setting and the world through his journey across space enforcing the new 'Cole Protocol' a new law that means any ship under attack by the alien Covenant forces must delete their nav databases before losing, Delgado is on a mission to find out who is trying to steal and sell the very same information to the Covenant in his home colony. One story is filled with more guns a blazing and the other more political intrigue, neither is focused on enough to really bring out the best of either unfortunately and this may be a result of the third character I hadn't talked about yet.

Thel is an alien Elite and the leader of his keep. His journey across space to find out who is selling weapons to the humans illegally and to bring them and the humans involved to ultimate justice with intense plasma fire. His journey is filled with as much intrigue and gun shooting as either of the others and seems to be a sort of middle ground between the two feelings in the book. His story I would argue is probably the most emotionally rewarding and perhaps the most interesting of the three, which was a pleasant surprise.

The Structure: How well is the story written? Well maybe it was just my digital copy of it, but I continued to find editing mistakes, typos, and incorrect words all over the place. It got so heavy in some places that it kicked my butt right out of the story. Many a Facebook post was made in protest to this. Where there isn't typos, however, I can say that the narrator and the voice of the story were on point.

The Characters: There are three 'main' characters in this story that really matter. Keys, Delgado, and Thel. The three of them all have personal ideas and views on the war, the people in it, and how things all work. Each one of them goes through a journey and start having their views and ideas disillusioned as they realize that things are not what they believed. Keys, as much as I love him as a character in the Halo series as a whole is the weakest of the trio in terms of personal story, not really being more than a tool to explain the setting for most of his story. Delgado is a much more active character but his path to investigation is far too straight forward with few red herrings if any. Thel on the other hand actually has a journey which goes to show us how the Covenant's religious views and Elite honor affect their culture, laws, and actions Thel's personal journey to learning that things are far more complicated in politics than he could have imagined, and worse yet the leaders of his civilization, The Prophets can actually make mistakes changes him into a much different person than he started out as.

Setting: The setting is arguably the most interesting part of any Halo novel in my opinion. There is just something special about this universe that I have always loved. This novel goes deeper into the politics behind warfare, and shows some interesting ways humanity has survived in the face of an impossible alien threat hellbent on their extinction. The Rubble being a colony made out of different asteroids stuck together was insanely interesting, and seeing all the political madness was also interesting. They could have spent a bit more time on showcasing each of the unique settings in my opinion though. For example I'd have liked to see more of Thel's home other than having it described as a 'castle'.

The Theme: Finally we have the themes of the book. Here is where I struggled unfortunately. With having at least half a dozen view points through the story, with only three characters truly being important, and a bit of jumpiness to the story as a whole it was hard to pinpoint any particular theme. Hard but not impossible. I believe the theme of this book would be something like, 'discovering that the world doesn't work the way you think it does.' Each character goes through a sort of 'revelation' moment where they seem to find out that what they knew was false and the truth usually sucked. I won't go into exactly what they learn as that would ruin the climax of the story, but I feel for Thel's journey it was not only the strongest, but had some real weight behind it.

Final Conclusion: I personally enjoyed this novel. As a fan of Halo I would suggest this to anyone else looking to get deeper into the Halo lore. For people who either haven't played the game or wouldn't want to, I can't strongly recommend this tittle unfortunately. I enjoyed it, but it's my love for the setting, universe, and games that really helped me with that. There were lots of nice parts of the book, but the entire whole of the novel feels somewhat flawed or shallow due to lack of time to go indepth with any of the ideas shared in here.

My rating would be 3 alien smiley faces out of 5

The Deadpool Character Archetype.

So I'm gonna be honest and just say that the Deadpool character archtype is one of of my favorite villian/anti hero archtypes. What do I mean by the Deadpool character archtype? Let me start with just a few examples I know of. Obviously we have Deadpool, the most fourth wall breaking of them all possibly, then we have Handsome Jack, the most villainous of the three... maybe, finally I will activate my Alucard... bad pun, not sorry, yes Alucard (From the abridged series specifically) is the last example of this I can easily think of. What is it that makes these three characters so fun, funny, badass, and most importantly entertaining?

well let's take a look at what these characters actually 'do' in order to achieve some of these things. First of all their funny, almost universally in this sort of 'better than thou' arrogant and sarcastic way. The humor is on par with characters like Harry Dresden who constantly acts better than his opponent berating them and feigning anger at some of the silliest things on rare occasion. But then why is Mr. Dresden not on this list. That is because of reason number two that makes them so awesome. They have the skills, power, and expertise to backup their sassy mouths. They generally have power on the level of any good old fashion Marry sue. Of course unlike the timed honored Marry Sue, everyone usually hates these guys. Especially the good guys. How many good guys really like Deadpool or Alucard? Not many, if any (other than Japanese Pinkie Pie of course, she loves deadpool XP) And as for entertaining we can't go wrong in talking about how much fun it is to say, watch Alucard enjoying a good episode of Adventure Time, have his TV destroyed and then go on a vampire hunting fit of rage because it was a 70 inch flat screen plasma TV that the vampires just so happened to destroy. Not because you know, the vampires are killing people, not they hurt his tv, so they must die. Or Handsome Jack naming his diamond pony Butt Stallion after you, the player. These are entertaining, selfish, and usually very hilarious feats.

So I covered some of the things that make this character archetype work, now how to implement it? Really it takes a lot of work, and I'd imagine mostly in learning how to tell a good joke. Even in the middle of an epic combat scene, learning how to set up a good punch line and follow it through with both physical action and word play is important to crafting such a character. Red vs Blue has some of the best examples of doing this in combat, sometimes foreshadowing the joke early in a season only to pay off at the very end of the season.

Now there is one other aspect of this that can usually go forgotten and it is that some part of these characters are often times relatable. Almost always they have a dark origin story that makes you understand why they are so careless about killing if not outright loving it. A story that shows you that these characters don't respect the world for good reasons. This last part can be the real challenge, because how does one go about creating a dark, sad, and often times twisted background story without hurting the humor of the present day? This tight rope balancing act truly is one of the hardest to achieve, but if you can manage it, you've got a goldmine on your hands.

As Always thanks for reading. XD

If your interested in some of my free original fiction click HERE.

Character Spotlight: What Makes Hit Such an Interesting and Fun Character?

So I recently began watching the anime Dragon Ball Super in earnest a few months ago. The first couple of story arcs replicated the movies for a less than stellar performance. Of course the first unique story arc I got to was the tournament arc with universe 7 fighting universe 6. The stakes weren't about death, they were about what would happen if the battle was lost. So tensions were more about winning the fight then killing the opponent, something I think has a lot more emotional weight to it then merely dying in the Dragon Ball series.

What really impressed me though was the character Hit. Introduced as the guy who'd have to fight Goku he was quiet and mysterious at first, and then once he did begin fighting he was much more terrifying than I thought he could be. Terrifying and fun. What made him such a stand out villain in the series though? That's what I am to try and uncover today.

The first thing about Hit was that he appeared to be on a completely different level of power from even the main heroes. An opponent they couldn't even think about touching. I know this has been done to death before in the Dragon Ball series but Hit went above and beyond with the fact that they couldn't even touch him. It made you wonder what his power was, if he was just that much stronger or if it was a trick?

The next thing I noticed was how he fought. Unlike most bad guys throughout the Dragon Ball series he didn't just throw some punches and kicks that looked vaguely martial arts like. He actually had his own combat style which stood out as almost alien to what we were used to. To top it all off, unlike every villain since Dragon Ball Z, Hit didn't throw any magical looking Ki attacks at his opponents. He used pure martial arts, and his unique power in combination to defeat his opponents. This was kind of amazing considering it meant we would not see a giant Ki clash where two energy beams met and pushed against each other until someone won. We would see brutal and hard combat based on skill rather then power.

Another thing, his power itself. The way he seemed to attack people without touching them, and the way he seemed to be unable to be hit. These two things created a mystery for us the viewer to be confused by. Goku was also confused, but intrigued by it as well. Part of the battle wasn't just trying to defeat the enemy but understand him.

Finally a breath of fresh air for Dragon Ball villains. Hit actually loved the combat, the act of fighting made his blood run, just as much as it did Goku's. He wasn't a bad guy that needed to be killed, he was one that we wanted to see get powered up and excited to fight Goku. He continued to grow stronger in the fight making it to the point where he actually won the fight after Goku pushed himself past his limits. This cemented Hit as not just another bad guy, but a likable character who was perhaps morally corrupt, but one we would like to see time and time again.

So to round it all up the things I noticed about him that stood out were;

1. He was a far superior enemy to Goku or Vegeta. Who didn't hold his punches.
2. He had a unique fighting style and special ability, and did not use the same tactics everyone else did.
3. His power was played as a mystery to uncover, rather than a simple wall to overcome or break through.
4. His attitude and personality made him likable and less of a bad guy, but more of a an interesting and fun character that would make us want him to live, not die.

These are just some thoughts about Hit as a character and what make shim work so well. Do you have anything to add? Maybe I missed something, please let me know how you feel about Hit down in the comments below.

As always thanks for reading.

If you want to read some of my free original fiction please click here.

Welcome to the New Blog!

So a quick mission statement to keep things simple and understood.

This is a safe haven for writers to learn, to discuss, to study.

Free thoughts and opinions, no judgement.

Political Agendas kept to a bare minimum.

Now you might find yourself asking, "Why would there be a need for a politically free blog about writing tips and tricks?" To which I'd have to explain that when I first started to get deep into writing about five years ago I studied like mad, like crazy. Back then people were a lot more open minded about different opinions and beliefs. Much to my dismay this has changed over the years. A lot of the authors I used to idealize started to get into political agendas, usually spewing them at their fans like vomit after a Christmas eve party gone wrong, horribly wrong. Some of these authors I used to like have actually gone out of their way to harm people, their lively hoods, and by extension their fans. We seem to be in an era where people just can't feel safe being who they are if it's not part of the 'correct' values and opinions.

While I can't single handedly change the world. I can create a place where people can be free of these things. Now there might be discussion on occasion of political views, but only so far as it relates to the story or topic at hand. I would never want to shove any sort of bad advice, or agenda down peoples throats. So here I am, one lone dude, like a cowboy in the old west facing a dangerous scary world, and trying to make a place that is safe for people to just exist.

So if your interested in following, disusing, or just staying around for a quick minute, your welcome No mater your background, no mater your beliefs, no mater your politics. Your welcome to come here so long as your a peaceable open minded person looking to learn, discuss, theorize, or just have fun.

This has been TheCrimsonDm, thanks for reading, and I look forward to what the future holds.