Sci-Fi Author | Executive Showrunner of The Last Human Audio Series | Catholic | 24 | Collected Works: https://t.co/0RJjOQaTjC
We have to get at the fundamental way the sexes think to understand how they relate to art. Women (on average) see art as interior self-expression. Men see art as subcreation. Hence the example why girls want to put Batman in a dress and boys conceptualize Batman as an ideal. /2 
The story follows the brothers Ed and Al. Prodigal scientists (or alchemists in the story's fantasy setting), they set out to resurrect their dead mother. They are struck down for their hubris by the setting's God, and they go on a spiritual journey to redeem themselves. /2 
If they were to tell stories like they teach in public schools, the message would be: humanity is an accident, we aren’t going anywhere, if we do it doesn’t matter, and you’re all going to die someday. Also you’re monkey spawn. 
I've found most modern authors are led by tropes rather than using tropes to craft a coherent vision. For example, they dump dragons and elves and even a cool thieves' guild in the setting with really intricate lore without first thinking *why* those things should be there. 2/ 
The sword hanging over nearly every episode is either our protagonist Mulder breaking the news to the public or the monster getting out. In either case, American normalcy dies. The world of consumerism is traded for a plunge into reality. No one wants this to happen but... /2 
Last year, the entire Conservative movement was subjected to The Acolyte, an awful show designed to humiliate SW fans and RW'ers. 
The Post-WW2 consensus, the foundation of all of America’s current political woes, sold white Americans on a narrative that the worst sin was racism and that this country was held back from the secular liberal utopia by the irrational bigotry and hatred of white Americans. /2 
What separates the amateurs from the masters is to be able to do three or four things at once with the same scene. Action should usually be accompanied by an insight, an idea to underscore, or a new aspect of a character. This is why the fights in FMAB are immaculate. 2/ 
Here’s a cover I whipped up with AI until I can commission a proper one from an artist. It’s decent and it gets the proper vibe across. 
This leads to rampant homogenization where every setting has elves and dwarves and a thousand kinds of dragon, but without anything really being said through the setting. You have authors writing 150 page histories, and it all feels the same. 2/ 
of a story I quite like that falls in this category. But the whole hero stops being a hero and handing the city to the villain only makes sense where tropes exist independently of their bearing in reality. It only makes sense when heroes and villains are morally immaterial. /2 
The brilliance of Indiana Jones has always been the acknowledgement that the past has real power, and this creates a contradictory tug and pull as Indiana regularly encounters the supernatural, only to see it stuffed away at the final moment. 
But that’s not how any of this works. You break something when you sin, and just because you “repent”, that doesn’t mean you’ll get it back. A man can’t undo an adultery anymore than a woman can’t reclaim her virginity. Thinking otherwise is pure cope, and frankly, immoral. /2
He’s calm, capable, self-assured. He believes in what he’s doing, and he knows exactly what he wants out of life. 
We invent slang. We create short term words with a rapid half-life. Usually vulgar, these words are exclusively used in lowbrow contexts such as memes or the general online discourse. While they often slip out into conversation, they’re frequently used self ironically. /2 
Now I'm usually the first to decry Tradpub and the last to criticize indie, but there is no denying the old power of institutional backing. At the end of the day, culture is mass production, and Tradpub controls many of the levers that make that possible. 2/ 
the more basic point that fiction is about belief. 
The woke is nothing more than a reaction to the failed promises of liberalism. It's a manifestation of a brittle belief system lashing out because it is worried about being called out as hollow--which it is. It has no more teleological promises it can offer. /2 
Up until fairly recently, first contact has been the wet dream of atheists and rationalists everywhere. The idea of finding evidence for alien (sentient) life is another psuedo-religious impulse, a search for meaning in the cosmos. /2 
Deliberate design is a completely pseudo-scientific concept (according to atheists). There’s no evidence for it, and the mainstream consensus is that life was a cosmic accident. But you can’t say anything about a cosmic accident. You can only shrug your shoulders at it. /2 
Now Atheism is a really boring ideology for storytelling. There’s no God, no morality, and no meaning. Everything is an accident, and we can take only the most superficial material interpretations possible. 