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Giant animatronic dinosaur outside bbc hq! Wow! Credits: BBC

Something I wrote ages ago about villains and motivation from the Super Mario Games. More a meditation than a straight-up essay.

On Villains and Motivation

Since Cleanup Crew obviously isn’t written in the gag-a-day format like many if not most other webcomics, it’s given me a lot of opportunity to think about storytelling. And since I realized I have a ready-made blog for the comic here, I figured I’d file some of my thoughts here as they occur to me.

Having played every Mario Bros. RPG through Bowser’s Inside Story, I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the big flaws of these games is the villains.

More specifically, their lack of motivation.

Now, we can talk entertainment and characterization until the cows come home, about how much fun they are to watch, but the simple fact of the matter is that a villain needs a WHY, and no amount of plans or goals, the how and the what, will make up for the fact that there’s literally no reason for any of these villains to do what they do. This failure of characterization steals context and meaning from their actions.

Take Grodus, of The Thousand Year Door. As impressive as his organization is, as clever as the plot and storytelling are (that game does such tricks with the fourth wall that the couple of times it breaks it directly just barely limp along), it’s really hard to get invested in the villains because Grodus simply has no -drive- to accomplish his goals, no reason to do what he does. Given the fact that he’s a robot with a noble title and a pretend magic staff, his lack of even a token backstory is rather jarring.

On the other hand there’s Count Bleck of Super Paper Mario (which we will pretend is an RPG for conversation’s sake), who suffers from a broken heart and intends to solve that problem by committing a rather exagerrated form of suicide. THAT is a motivation, something Grodus is severely lacking. In fact, Super Paper Mario gives a lot of character to its villains, judging from what you can dig up about O'Chunks and Nastasia. Now, Dimentio hasn’t got any stated motivation, but this is deliberately done to emphasize his mystery – the game very obviously knows what it’s doing as far as the villains are concerned. (On a side note, the only real problems I have with Super Paper Mario are that it’s just a little too impressed with itself – to start with, the story is addicted to waxing melodramatic – and that it’s not actually a Mario story. It’s really about the game’s original characters – Mario has literally nothing to do with anything, Peach and Bowser are involved only for the sake of a joke, and Luigi has more involvement with the plot than all three combined, only because he’s the villains’ patsy).

But the rest of them, Cackletta and Fawful and the Shroobs (we’ve already discussed Grodus, and you could say the same about the Shadow Sirens) are devoid of motivation. You can see this in how they’re remembered less for their stories and more for their gimmicks. Cackletta is remembered primarily for being 50% of Boobser Bowletta rather than her desire to screw around with the all-powerful Beanstar; Fawful is bonkers and has a speech impediment, and “crazy narcissist” is not a decent motivation any more than “evil” is one, and then there’s the fact that the guy has no real plan except to set himself up as the local bigshot until he decides to destroy absolutely everything just for the heck of it. The Shroobs almost have a motivation that you can reverse-engineer by studying their actions (do they *need* to prey on the Mushroom Kingdom?), but putting the burden on the audience like that is bad writing for lazy authors.

This failure to motivate the villains is especially notable in Smithy, who argues with the heroes as if Super Mario RPG had an Honest to God *theme*. Smithy’s got enough going on that you can almost piece together the motivation that should be there. He wants to take over the Mushroom Kingdom as a stepping stone to ridding the world of wishes (which suggests that it’s no accident that Exor broke the Star Road on the way in, nevermind the fact that his minions have all been collecting the pieces), but why? Well, for most of the game, all the information on Smithy is at best second hand, suggesting he’s taking a leaf out of Orcus’ book, but when we get to finally meet him face to face, we realize he’s been busy the whole time. Smithy has been building his army piece by piece, by hand, and then delegating responsibility so he can keep building. Smithy is a craftsman, achieving his goals through the work of his hands, definitely -not- making wishes to get what he wants the easy way. All this together suggests that Smithy has some kind of enmity with the stars and their habit of granting wishes, a hatred so strong that he’s willing to conquer entire planets to get a shot at completely shutting them down. But after that, everything else would be pure speculation.

Now, I admit that this sort of thing’s not easy. Bowser’s generally easier to write than coming up with new villains wholecloth, insofar as he comes with the motivations built-in, like “FINALLY succeeding where he’s failed so many times before” and “sticking it to Mario once and for all”. I generally tend to ignore the “romantic interest in Princess Peach” motivation that he’s occasionally saddled with, because the implications are creepy in ways that make “Asmodeus covets Sarah” look Appropriate for All Audiences. I’m generally more favorable to the idea that Bowser takes an interest in the Mushroom Kingdom because he’s spent his whole miserable life a corner of Hell and the Mushroom Kingdom is a place of beauty and plenty and Her Highness may figure in his eyes as an emblem of all things beautiful, hence his fascination with her, since he only knows ugly things. You could get some serious mileage if someone spent five minutes figuring out a halfway decent motivation for the King of Awesome.

Something like, say, “somebody invaded his castle and stole something from the treasury, so now he’s driven to get it back and punish whoever had the gall to penetrate his fortress security and make a goon of him and his forces”.

And now I have spent entirely too much time writing about Mario characters.

Mad bombers, matchmaking, magic spells—what’s a butler to do?

Meet Bostwick von Dogsbody, a sardonic door-to-door magician, and his white rabbit, Emmaline, who just happens to be a cursed human princess. The two are traveling through the goblin-run continent of Ataxia in search of the legendary Domino of Nonpareil—a mask that allows the wearer to become anything he desires—in order to return Emmaline to normal. Their journey has finally led them to Styx Castle, where they meet Millicent, a human maid who wound up in Styx due to mysterious (and embarrassing) circumstances, and Delilah, a goblin queen with a taste for the chaotic.

But Bostwick’s theft of the Domino does not go unnoticed. To avoid a harsher punishment, he agrees to be Delilah’s butler for a hundred years. Before he can escape the queen’s clutches, he’ll have to face mad bombers, an all-bugbear police force, romantic schemes gone awry, and a mysterious goblin-turned-cat named Sebastian who also has designs on the Domino. And as if that wasn’t enough, he soon learns that Millicent is also a magician—and needs him to teach her!

Read more at rosecorcoranwrites.com

If you’re European, in a couple of weeks you will be denied any and all access to fandom contents on Tumblr and everywhere else on the internet. Here’s why.

On June, 20th the JURI of European Parliament approved of the articles 11 and 13 of the new Copyright Law. These articles are also known as the “Link Tax” and the “Censorship Machines” articles.

Articles 13 in particular forces every internet platform to filter all the contents we upload online, ending once and for all the fandom culture. Which means you won’t be able to upload any type of fandom works like fan arts, fan fictions, gif sets from your favourite films and series, edits, because it’s all copyrighted material. And you won’t also be able to share, enjoy or download other’s contents, because the use of links will be completely restricted.

But not everything’s lost yet. There’s another round of voting scheduled for the early days of July.

What you can do now to save our internet, is to share these informations with all of your family members and friends, and to ask to your MEP (the members of the European Parliament from your country) to vote NO at the next round, to vote against articles 11 and 13.

Here you can find more news and all the details to contact your MEP:

https://saveyourinternet.eu

Also, sign and share this petition:

https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-stop-the-censorship-machinery-save-the-internet?recruiter=50668942&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial

We have just a couple of weeks to stop this complete madness, don’t let them dictating the way we enjoy our internet.

#SaveYourInternet now!

Good luck, kid, we’re rootin’ for you.

I'm hearing a lot of things about how prologues are bad and that you should never put protagonist backstory in the prologue but that causes a problem for me. My character's hatred for the antagonist is explained in the prologue along with the urgency of their rivalry. What should I do?

Take that information and weave it into the story like you would with any backstory info. Unless it’s necessary to explain something that can’t be woven in (like an event that the protag knows nothing about), scrap your prologue.

As storytelling goes, which is more intriguing?

“My sister hates this kid in her class because he teases her best friend and also stole her Fruit Roll-Up, so today during recess she punched him.” 

or 

“My sister punched some kid at recess today.”

The first one tells the whole story in one go and allows for limited response. The second one leaves the listener thinking “Oh my god, why? Tell me more.”

Likewise, the rivalry and the urgency should be included within your story, not wasted in the prologue. The reader doesn’t even know your characters yet to care that they hate each other. If you saw two strangers in the street and someone told you “Oh yeah, they hate each other because of this and that…” you’d be thinking, “That sucks, but like, who are they and why should I care?”

That’s your readers when you try to tell the story before it starts.

—

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DC, Marvel announce Jack Kirby centenary publications, but what’s missing?

US comic publishers DC Comics and Marvel have both announced their plans to mark Jack “King” Kirby’s centenary in August. Kirby, born 29th August 1917, who died in 1994, was an Am…

Jack Kirby’s Centennial is up on us! (I’ve been looking for an affordable version of his works -- caught the Humble Bundle special about a month ago, but that only had Silver Star and some romance comics. Everything else was derivative).

Hidden landscapes the heatwave is revealing

Imprints of old and ancient settlements not seen in known memory are emerging from the soil as the heat takes its toll on greenery.

Britain’s warm mid-eighties temperatures dredge up old baggage.

Cool obscure languages.

BIG NEWS