![]() ![]() How many times have you looked at a landscape painting and been sure you knew the painter’s gender? Sounds silly, right? And yet, fiction is full of plots where one character can guess another’s gender simply by looking at their work. Magically Determining Gender Look at those diagrams. Draw on those, and your readers will have no doubts about why there should never be a “balance” of evil. There’s plenty of evil in the real world, from bigoted demagogues to misogynistic serial killers. To avoid the cliches of a black-and-white world, focus on how to make your evil realistic. There are countless dualities you can use instead of good and evil, as long as both sides have positive and negative attributes.Īlternatively, your story can simply be about vanquishing evil or an evil that’s too strong to defeat all at once, so it’s always present no matter now many victories the good guys win. Instead, your story could be about striking a balance between technological progress and preservation of nature, or the value of youthful enthusiasm versus aged wisdom. Of course, your world doesn’t have to focus on elemental nations. When one nation becomes too dominant, it throws off the balance and everyone suffers. In that universe, the four elemental nations and their ideologies must live in balance, because each has its own unique contributions. If a balance between different factors is important to your story, look to the Avatar series. While that’s very realistic, it makes the good and evil labels look silly. So really, the Dragonlance series is a battle between people who are really evil and people who are only a little evil. The idea is that without evil to oppose it, good will become oppressive and intolerant.Įxcept that oppression and intolerance are not good things. At one point in the series, good triumphs, but then the good side’s leaders become tyrannical and power hungry. The Dragonlance books have a similar dichotomy between the D&D alignments of good and evil. The Star Wars prequels are particularly egregious, with the silly prophecy and the numerically superior Jedi not understanding what “balance” means, but Lucas is hardly the only author to make this mistake. The galaxy far far away would be a better place if they were completely gone. They do nothing except cause harm and destruction because they enjoy it. There is no moral reason to keep Sith lords around in the Star Wars universe. ![]() Saying the world needs a balance between evil and good is like saying a person needs a balance between cancer and non-cancer. Without evil to balance out the good, something bad might happen. It would be passe to simply have a world in which good destroys evil, so authors surprise you with a twist: the world requires a balance between the forces of good and the forces of evil! The heroes of the Star Wars prequels can’t just destroy the dark side they must bring balance to the Force. “Balance” Between Good and Evil Pictured: Balance in the Force? ![]() Fortunately, once you’re able to identify them, they won’t trouble you again.ġ. These tropes will make your story worse for their inclusion, but they can be deceptively attractive all the same. Instead, we’ll focus on tropes that are bad to begin with but continue to be used for various reasons. That is not what we’re talking about today. The exception to this is when they happen to stumble upon real food - and look how excited they get whenever they do, eating like they don't know where their next meal is coming from, because they genuinely don't.Sometimes a trope starts off fine but is overused until it eventually becomes a cliche. Shaggy can't afford food for himself and his dog, so they both subsist almost entirely on biscuits.A large number of the nefarious schemes have the goal of acquiring money, but the villains themselves are often scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs or generally intelligent people who would have no trouble getting a stable and legal well paid job in a functioning society.It's always a run down hotel, an abandoned theme park, an unused airfield, etc etc. All the places the gang go to are in some way broken.The theory suggests that the gang is living in a post-apocalyptic world following a collapse in the economy as, A theory posted by a user named Randomd0g on Reddit suggests that the world that the Mystery Inc Gang drives around in and investigates is not the same one as ours, rather, several years into a dystopian future. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |