how i think about theme and plot

2025-08-29T22:41:21Z

I'm currently engaged in the effort to unfuck one of my problem child WIPs, and at risk of jinxing myself, I've turned a corner. While the efforts of my unfucking centre around plot--making the sequence of events make sense and feel satisfying, because currently they do not--I started making actual progress when I set down my follicle-damage-inducing attempts to rearrange, cut, or add scenes.

Plot and pacing (which is closely linked to plot) were the things I found most daunting when I started writing long stories. This is a common experience! Particularly in fandom, many writers are happy to say they write plotless things; there are whole subgenres of fic ostensibly founded on the lack of a plot. But is there even such a thing as a PWP? What is plot, anyway???

A lot of what's contained below will likely read as incredibly basic and obvious to people who already write fiction, especially longer fiction, but there was a time at which these things were neither basic nor obvious to me, and sometimes I need to be reminded of how engine go brr. I have to pretend I was a baby longfic writer again, and revisit what it took to "get" plot, which was not Freytag's Pyramid or three- or five-act structures or the Hero's Journey or anything else you can visualize via diagram, but themes.

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my thoughts on hunter exam era illumi

2024-09-17T18:18:55Z

I do not presume that all evil is rooted in a history of trauma survival. Most trauma survivors do not become perpetrators. But most perpetrators have a history of malignant trauma, that is, an experience of psychic or physical torture, or both, inflicted by another. I propose that this traumatic history finds a singular articulation in the interpersonal and intrapsychic operations of evil.

(SUE GRAND, from The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical & Cultural Perspective)

My big late summer media focus has been diving back into Hunter x Hunter. I watched the 2011 series in 2014 or so, though I never watched Chimera Ant arc or beyond. Recently, I've gotten back into it as part of the HXH renaissance kicked off by the Media Club Plus podcast watchthrough. I've been watching the 2011 with some friends (+ also my housemate, separately), listening to MCP, as well as watching the 1999 adaptation and reading the manga roughly in parallel with our progress on 2011. We're just kicking off Heaven's Arena arc now, and I remember what is to come with inconsistent levels of accuracy. With that in mind, it's possible I'll confidently assert something below that will get jossed as I continue, but for the time being...

I. Love. Illumi Zoldyck. And I will explain my passions.

(Content note: this whole post is about child abuse. No spoilers past Zoldyck family arc.)

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this is the light of autumn, it has turned on us

how i think about theme and plot

my thoughts on hunter exam era illumi