I was thinking about two characters the other day: Rainbow Dash, whom we all know and love, and Komi Shouko, from Komi-san Has a Communication Disorder. If you've never heard about the second story, the basic thrust of the concept is so: Komi-san is the most beautiful and beloved student in her classroom, dubbed "The Goddess" in one particularly memorably chapter. She's calm, composed, unflappable, totally aloof--or at least that's how she appears to everyone else. The truth is, she's

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"There must be some mistake!"

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[Spoilers for the Season 8 Finale. Obviously.]

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Eeeyup, I've got another rant this time about sexual nonsense in fiction. This one comes to us from "Bulletproof Heart," which is honestly a really entertaining Western. But with the Western genre comes... well, Western sensibilities. By which I mean rape.

Oh, content warning for rape, by the way. (And possible spoilers for "Bulletproof Heart," which I still recommend you read, provided you can get past this.)

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I've wanted to do this post for a while--a dig into Steadfast Characters and what makes them different from Changing Characters. However, I didn't quite know how to do it in a way that would feel different from all of my previous posts that have brushed against the concept. While I'd pushed this concept towards the back of the sock drawer that is my brain, another project came to me, which just so happened to tether nicely to the idea of explaining Steadfast Characters like I'd wanted. But

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All right, everyone. One more post on Starlight Glimmer. I think I've got some insight into why some episodes start warming me up to her, and why some leave me sighing and rolling my eyes. We'll break this conversation up a little bit by talking about a principle of making characters fun to write and read about, and we'll segue from there into attempting to predict these very strengths and weaknesses.

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• The Catfish--Appear as multiple different characters, all with differing motives, when really you're funneling the main character into your trap.
• The Innocent--Appear weak and helpless, ingratiate yourself to the cast, then sneak in and take what you need while their defenses are down.

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So as I was watching "Non-Compete Clause" last weekend, a horrible thought occurred to me--the kind of thought that throws everything into sharp relief and makes you question everything you love about the show. I've been more-or-less kinda done with the show for a while, but when I had this thought... man.

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Hi, all! "The Queen Beckons" is one of my favorite stories I've ever written. My reasoning for it was simple: I wanted to modernize and revitalize Hamlet in a way that everyone could enjoy. I wanted to take the soul of Hamlet and squeeze it into the pony world, and, if I may say so myself, I think I succeeded. Of course, Hamlet wasn't the only story I had in mind for this. Jackdaw's Revenge is the early makings of Othello, as another example. But I had plenty

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There's this really interesting concept I learned about during my master's program: affect theory. From what I remember, it asked the question, "What does a certain text make the reader feel?" I'm going to attempt to recreate that theory, as best as I can recall and with my own little flair to it. I'd like to discuss how we can inspire different emotions in our readers; specifically, we're going to start with fear, one of the deepest and most primal emotions we've got. If you're writing

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