things i am going to teach my children later: the “pick one favourite” syndrome embedded in our culture is stupid and useless
it starts at fucking pre-school, in those little get-to-know-me books, and it never ends. favourite colour? mother tongue? favourite character? best friend? favourite sport? song? movie? book? series? band? toy? no you can only pick one
and i am deeply convinced that this is intrinsically linked to one of the things that annoys me the most, which is that in our society, it’s considered a sign of maturity to prioritise one thing, and often specifically one person, above everything else. i mean, priorities are definitely important, but you are also absolutely allowed to equally enjoy/love/feel connected to different things without constructing some kind of hierarchy where one of them always wins out
“you can only like one gender, you can only be one (of the two “biological” – ha) genders, you can only have one partner, you must have one best friend, you must have one favourite activity (preferably your job, bc that makes you a functional member of society) because clearly if you love multiple things, you must love them less than if you spent all that love on one thing”
this rhetoric creates so much guilt and jealousy – as if love is a finite concept.
(incidentally it is also possible to genuinely love something without it being one of the things you love the most, and that doesn’t make that love any less valid, but that’s another discussion)
it’s come to my attention that cats can’t really detect sweetness and melon has some of the same amino acids in meat, so it smells similar, so she thinks melon is meat :•)))
I think the best piece of character design advice I ever received was actually from a band leadership camp I attended in june of 2017.
the speaker there gave lots of advice for leaders—obviously, it was a leadership camp—but his saying about personality flaws struck me as useful for writers too.
he said to us all “your curses are your blessings and your blessings are your curses” and went on to explain how because he was such a great speaker, it made him a terrible listener. he could give speeches for hours on end and inspire thousands of people, but as soon as someone wanted to talk to him one on one or vent to him, he struggled with it.
he had us write down our greatest weakness and relate it to our biggest strength (mine being that I am far too emotional, but I’m gentle with others because I can understand their emotions), and the whole time people are sharing theirs, my mind was running wild with all my characters and their flaws.
previously, I had added flaws as an after thought, as in “this character seems too perfect. how can I make them not-like-that?” but that’s not how people or personalities work. for every human alive, their flaws and their strengths are directly related to each other. you can’t have one without the other.
is your character strong-willed? that can easily turn into stubbornness. is your character compassionate? maybe they give too many chances. are they loyal? then they’ll destroy the world for the people they love.
it works the other way around too: maybe your villain only hates the protagonist’s people because they love their own and just have a twisted sense of how to protect them. maybe your antagonist is arrogant, but they’ll be confident in everything they do.
tl;dr “your curses are your blessings, and your blessings are your curses” there is no such thing as a character flaw, just a strength that has been stretched too far.
This is such a fabulous flip side of what I’ve always known about villians. That their biggest weakness is that they always assume their own motivations are the motives of others.
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