BC WRITING
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LARPing Our Way To Armageddon

The intense and present danger of fantasy

a thread

 One of the interesting things about the scifi / fantasy writing community is that it contains many people who have much higher tolerance for fantasy than the norm.

People who can be around fantasy a lot, without losing track of reality.
Counter intuitive perhaps. But people who deal with fantasy at a professional level become expert at recognising its stench.

That's a useful skill in 2021, when the world, and particularly America, is being sucked into a vortex of unreality.
Because human beings do not, as a rule, have good tools for distinguishing fantasy from reality.

This isn't a bug of humankind, it's very much a feature.

Humans are what we are because of our ability to engage in the shared fantasy we call society / culture / civilisation.
Homo Sapiens are the species that LARPs

Which has always brought with it some structural issues

That just got waaaaaaaaaaay more serious
It's a common observation that the Capital mob was like an insurrection LARP

That's not to be used as an excuse. These morons really were mounting an insurrection

while believing the whole thing was a game, fantasy, or LARP
Which is the second tier worrying conclusion from the events of the 6th

Not only are there people who want to pull down democracy.

There are people who have become so untethered from reality that they will participate in the insurrection LARP
And when you look at the reasons why the MAGA LARP was possible.

You start to realise that giant chunks of the population are detaching from reality, like ice bergs drifting into an ocean of fantasy.
Our main guide to "what is real?" isn't reality itself, but what the people around us agree is real.

If everyone in your village believes in Odin, you're gonna believe in Odin.
Humans have to prioritise our shared reality over actual reality so that we can mainstain constructs like tribes, nations, corporatiins, sport teams.

And most people accept the constructs they are given as reality. If we didn't, they wouldn't work.
The latest iterations of the internet perform a worrying short circuit on the human fantasy systems.

YouTube is terrifyingly persusive because it hacks our belef circuits.

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3. Don't waste your time or the editor/press' time. Bring your A game. If you are revising your diss, you need to scrap it to its bare bones starring YOU. You the authority. All that citing needs to fall back to the footnotes LOL. How are you changing/adding to the convo?

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My primary goal when I pitch is TO ENGAGE THE AUDIENCE EMOTIONALLY. Yes, I'm telling the story, but for me storytelling is a vehicle that delivers emotion to an audience. I structure my pitch around emotion.

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Two things I make sure I have in my pitch.

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Sometimes, even though I can't draw, I'll sketch it out just to make *sure* it works. It'll usually revolve around a plot point, but the main goal is to get the audience to stop listening and start SEEING what I'm saying.

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STEEL CROW SAGA.


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Anyway. Plenty more to tease in the coming year. Thanks again to my friends who got me through it, and especially to @dongwon who saw this weird Toonami regurgitation and immediately believed in it. Today is my triumph, but it's also theirs.
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