So, what's been going on with me

[mythicfox]

First off, in case anyone hasn't noticed, the app that was rebroadcasting my Twitter posts over here conked out and doesn't seem to be coming back. I could switch to another one, but I honestly want to know if anyone cares enough to read them.

Second, the writing's going well more or less. I'm making progress, although to keep from getting into a rut I am bouncing back and forth between a couple of different things (personal projects, mostly) in addition to planning for RPG campaigns and characters and such. I'm not cranking out the sheer output of some other writers I know, but I'm making progress on a regular basis and I'm feeling good about the writing I am doing and don't want to push myself too much harder than that right now.

I'm currently working on a superhero romance story for submission to an anthology, the essay I mentioned previously about MMORPGs teaching players bad habits, and a write-up of one of the homebrew compacts that came up in my Hunter LARP. I've also got a little something I threw together for submission down the road once the magazine in question starts accepting for their next issue, but I'm letting it sit for the moment before giving it another editing pass.

Which brings me to a question, actually...

Is it more considered a bug or a feature that a faction of characters, obviously intended primarily as antagonists (but certainly not unavailable for player characters), are actually relatively easy to portray in a sympathetic light? The compact I'm writing up is motivated by a belief that's understandable but based on some rather shaky evidence (unless, say, someone's running a slightly-tweaked of the WoD where their assumptions are truths). I'm just worried about possibly diluting them too much as antagonists in trying to give them realistic motivations. Of course, as I type this I realize that's one of the classic all-time dangers of fleshing out a 'villain' group, but whatcha gonna do.

Just wondering as to peoples' opinions as to how much is too much when it comes to writing a multi-dimensional antagonist.

Comments

[mafiabass.livejournal.com]

I have Twitter set up to post to Facebook. I think you can do the same with LiveJournal. I like being able to read your tweets on LJ because I rarely remember to log on to Twitter.

[mythicfox.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know there's a way to post Twitter stuff to Livejournal. But I don't think there's a way to do it by default where it collects all of your tweets from a single day (as opposed to hitting people throughout the day). But with Twittinesis down, I'm setting up another service to handle that for me.

[walktwistedroad.livejournal.com]

Definitely interested in reading the essay on MMORPGs inculcating bad habits. As for fleshing out the antagonist faction, I'd say it depends partly on how villainous their actions tend to be versus how flawed their motivations are. If they're doing the right thing for the wrong reasons or the wrong thing for the right reasons, then there's more room for humanizing them and making them sympathetic, whereas its pretty hard to look past doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. You can also spin things a bit in how you portray your sample characters. I think a good example there might be Division Six. The idea of hunting down threats to the fabric of reality, even if not strictly accurate, seems on the surface to be mostly noble in intent. The book portrays most of its members as generally being losers and incompetents on an asshole power trip, though, which I feel helps offset the sympathy factor. Ironically, I feel this also has the effect of making the most likely player candidates for actually wanting to play the compact those who are solely interested in gaining the mechanical benefits of the association, players who would probably end up roleplaying that portrayal surprisingly, if unintentionally, well.