tf_talk | continued Thatfucker discussion

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continued Thatfucker discussion

Since we've been kicked off FFA for the week, please feel free to continue the anon discussion here. Apologies if this is a big flop - I've never made a DW community before!

The rules are vaguely the same as they are over on FFA. Please refrain from being too much of an asshole, making personal attacks, posting identifying information or engaging in transfail.

ETA: If there's information you'd like to see archived (journal/blog posts related to Andy, etc.), please dump it here and link to it from the main post for discussing.

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I don't think he realizes that by the time his readers get to that last line, their reaction is more likely going to be a horrified, "Oh, thank FUCK you're in therapy!" than a pitying, "Oh you poor thing, it must be so hard to be you."

Eh, if I didn't have the prior knowledge that he does view real people as fictional characters, my reaction would be "You don't need therapy, you pretentious tool, you need some fucking writing lessons." How many of us who write don't occasionally break our characters down just to see what they're made of? It's only even bad writing if it's the only trick you have.

Of course, knowing what I do about him, I'm thinking more, "There is no amount of therapy that can fix you."

[different anon]

It's more that the emphasis is off. As AYRT says, the ONE time he should have spewed over-the-top word salad and DIDN'T...

That, and most writers don't tear out their characters' hearts to figure out how their own heart works. That's just... such an odd line. And his belief that intimacy can only be attained through tearing people apart? WTF? He doesn't seem to distinguish between people-watching and people-ruining. I watch people and learn to know them pretty well. That's not equivalent to "causing such things to happen to them".

It's that he condescends so thoroughly to people who want happy things and brags so much about taking characters apart. I admit that I would think he was pretentiously stupid if I didn't know, but the twee "it's not ok" would strike me as seriously off even without context.

It's not ok? REALLY? You dump all that other melodramatic bullshit on us, Thanfiction, and when it comes to explaining your understanding of WHY it's wrong to take people apart in real life for shits and giggles... you can only come up with "it's not ok"?

AYRT

Yes, you're right that my bias in knowing it was Andy who wrote that post must have influenced my reading of those lines.

Still, though... I think what bothers me is that I feel no *love* for the characters in his words. I'm definitely one of those writers who love to hurt their favorite characters (I describe my fics as "pushing my favorites into different kinds of Hell and watching them come back from it - or sometimes not"), and I even have a friend who loves to *kill* her favorites, so I'm no stranger to the appeal of hurting a character. But the difference is that even when I'm torturing them, or when my friend is killing them, you can tell that we love them to bits.

Andy's words in this post, on the other hand, sound like some sadistic scientist watching what happens when you cut the legs off a mouse without anesthesia. There's no love, just a cruel and very detached fascination with the process and the results. The mouse itself doesn't matter, only the experiment. I find that part seriously scary, and I think I would find it scary even coming from someone I know nothing about.

Considering Andy's actually killed a mouse, this is very apt.

AYRT

... Right. I'd already forgotten about that poor mouse (mental self-defense, I suppose), but it appears my unconscious hadn't.

AYRT

Oh, that's a good point. It does read very differently from, say, that popular tumblr post about breaking your characters like geodes, despite superficially having the same general thrust. The insides of geodes are all sparkly and stuff! There's something kind of overly literal about the vivisection analogy. Like, he's physically taking characters apart... to see how they work physically? I mean, what sort of beauty or emotional significance are you hoping to get out of a lump of flesh?

Plus, yeah, he's pretty much got the process backwards. Soul-searching and psychological insight are inputs of good character writing, not outputs. A fictional characters' not gonna have a heart you can take out and examine unless you put one in them in the first place.

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