Part of me wants to shift the entirety of Magical Fantasy Adventure Land into the normal world instead of splitting it into a separate realm.
Part of me is still annoyed that this fucker still doesn’t have a proper title. Or at least something that sounds better as a place holder.
it’s called Mafalia. that’s your world’s name. ‘MAH-FAR-lee-uh’.
That actually sounds really good as a world name. I’m curious to know where that came from?
it’s the acronym. “Magical Fantasy Adventure Land”-ia becomes MaFAL-ia: Mafalia.
i always find if you need a placeholder name for something, write it out and make up an acronym, adding and removing letters or vowels if need be.
for example:
“The House Where Clio Fell in Love With Him”
“The HouseWhereClioFellinLoveWithHim”
“THoWeCliFiLWH”
“ThrowecliFiLWH”
“ThrowecliffiLWH”
“ThrowecliffiLWH”
“Throwecliffe”
“Thrawecliffe”
hence ‘the house where Clio fell in love with him’ becomes ‘Thrawecliffe House’. what’s a ‘thraw’? i don’t know. is it on a cliff? maybe; that’s an author’s preogative.
suddenly the name of the house itself throws up new questions which an author in answering goes off down a rabbit hole of worldbuilding.
Holy fuck. That is absolutely amazing advice.
Thank you so much!!!!!
As someone who regularly smashes words together for humorous purposes, I’m appalled I’ve never thought to use it in my writing. Bless you.
good advice
My favourite example of this is Dragon Age. The setting is called Thedas, which comes from calling it “the Dragon Age setting” in development! TheDragon Age Setting The DAS Thedas
i dont know how these things will pan out but im keeping my eye on list – noelle might be important – gaster doesn’t know the names of darkners – susie and ralsei’s roles as foils to one another – lancer is either a younger sans or is a purposeful red herring with all the callbacks both visually and aligned evidence – king spade paralleled asgore, so the “queen” will most likely parallel toriel (whether she’s related to the king spade and lancer or not) – roulxs+lancer relationship post-chapter 1 – how ralsei’s opinion on the duty of darkners will influence lancer – the ralsei plushie theory + confirmation – ralsei as someone who was ‘born for this purpose’ and the mysteries surrounding both his personhood and similarities to asriel – seam’s talk about a time that was previously more chaotic than this but that we don’t need to know about – the recurrent theme of purpose being related to others (themes of codependency?). (ex. king spade’s purpose being directed at his knight, ralsei’s at susie and kris, seam talking about how his life would have more purpose with jevil) – how the strong themes of a christian approximate might be related to ralsei and his own preaching. you can’t be happy without serving the lord / you can’t be happy without serving darkners – recurrent theme of blood. ‘the skin and the blood’ of the doughnut, lancer’s bucket of blood, darkners seeming to have blood whereas monsters don’t, church juice being symbolic of blood, ‘does it hurt to be made of blood?’ (monsters still clearly don’t have blood in this world and it’s emphasized) – don’t forget, and the mystery of the ‘big three’ – kris’ combined traits from both frisk and chara that make them seem to not be quite either. the mysterious absence of other humans in the world. – the mysterious event that split apart the dreemurr family in this world – assumption here seems to be that the monsters never went underground, but i wonder if the war was won much earlier. events were set in motion that made gerson die earlier (won at the cost of certain people?)
See, this kills me because it’s a pretty fucking fundamental driving force in Eliot Spencer’s character – “you can’t make that promise to more than one person.” And yet he ends the series doing exactly that.
The evil writerly part of my brain wants to know what happens when he can’t be there for Parker and Hardison both at the same moment. Whether it’s a heist gone wrong and he has to choose who to protect, or they’re in conflict with each other and he can’t avoid taking sides – what happens?
Hardison. (At least for the job gone wrong, and assuming nothing in the job fundamentally supercedes it by putting other’s lives in danger.) Parker would tell him to get Hardison out and he’d do it, because that’s what makes them…them.
And when Hardison demands why, Eliot tells him, “she said to say, there’s never a plan M.”
As a personal project I designed my own versions of the covers for the Society of Gentlemen books by KJ Charles! These have been in the works for a very long time so I’m excited to finally share them. Thank you KJ for this wonderful series and its characters!
If you’re into LGBT+ historical fiction based around real events, definitely check this series out.
Charlie's Blog 