Actually, the last bit isn’t dumb, the key line being: “The fear that no one will resonate with your strange ideas can be what makes your game not very interesting.” The point is that you should write honestly and not let fear of embarrassment or losing your audience hinder your creativity. I agree with that part. What I fail to see is how that follows at all from all the babble about pandering to fanfic writers, in some disingenuous mutation of knowing your audience. That’s the exact opposite of writing honestly.
Tell me, if I’m writing a story that is honest, personal, and true to my own beliefs and experiences, why would I EVER start by going to fan fiction sites to see what ships are popular with tweens lately?
The pivot here doesn’t make any sense to me. The most generous interpretation I can think of (especially given the Polygon-esque title) is “it took incredible unrestrained creative power to bring us woobie, and fans love woobie. Don’t you want to make the next woobie?” But honestly it reads more like “don’t be afraid to write what we just told you to write.”
Maybe it makes more sense if you watch the talk, but I don’t want to.
But after 40 or so years of great narrative games, a lot of the classic tropes have been well-worn out and we all get a bit exhausted when a narrative director pulls out his copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey again.
I may be inferring too much here, but it’s wild to imply that fandom kids invented the “meow-meow” and “woobie” and that writers using these tropes are really bringing something new to the table, and superseding the stodgy old narratives of the past. Brother, nothing is new under the sun. There are morally ambiguous characters and tormented heroes in Sumerian tablets. Novelty of archetypes and tropes is a completely silly thing to advocate for because it’s impossible to achieve.
And speaking of writing, this article is a terrible work of prose. “There is one side effect … that has a nasty side effect.” Who edited this shit?
That does seem to be what they are suggesting, even as far as to say “These words all describe a new genre of character tropes defined by fans.” If not outright saying that they were invented by fic writers, then at least that they codified and categorized them.
Which is, as you pointed out, stupid. The author complains of character tropes going stale after decades when their lives have been measured in centuries if not millennia, and when the new and improved ones he lists out are no fresher. To be fair, some tropes are better off discarded, but this article isn’t about that.
Looking closely, some of these “tropes” are not driven primarily by author characterization, but by audience reaction, which makes them extremely subjective and largely out of the writer’s hands. For example, “a woobie refers to a more heroic character you might want to just give a big hug.” I don’t want to hug Luigi. WTF are they talking about? And is Luigi only just now a woobie, or has he been a woobie for 40 years? Which, as we know from the article, is the cutoff point for trope validity?
Minus points especially for naming “himbo” as a fresh new concept in fandom when it’s just as old and dusty as anything else they could name. Even the word that names it is probably older than the author or speaker, but this one gets a pass because slash writers like it.
Incidentally, the “babygirl” that the article opens up with reminds me an awful lot of Carth Onassi, a somewhat divisive character written (if I’m not mistaken) around fandom feedback… over twenty years ago.
a lot of this article kind of talks down to the fans/players ability to … identify these things on their own without handholding. i think it also vastly misrepresents a fan writers ability to take a character literally whatever direction they want. the more ‘character moments’ that exist in the story beats the better folks will be able intuit how those characters might react to different scenarios. I feel like the advice of having to pick some archetype is probably not so great for novice writers because having those goals in mind implicitly leads to a lot more telling than showing anyways
like i feel this should go without saying that trying to appeal to fanfiction communities is aimless - they create fanfictions because they are fans of a work that they already like, not because you grant them some magic opportunity to do so through signaling