Culture

Way With Worlds: Sex and Worldbuilding – All In Your Mind

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BrainSparks

OK we covered the biology of sex, which if I did my job, proved to be completely unarousing unless you have a major science fetish. If you do, then you’re welcome.

The thing with writing sex in your settings, with creating and understanding the sexuality of the beings and creatures in your setting, is that it goes beyond biology. Think of it as a continuity – the biology is just the start, but it leads to other things.  Biology is the foreplay, if you want to dangerously skirt metaphors I have no intention of expanding on.

Once you have creatures reproducing, be they human or otherwise, once evolution kicks in (or the gods take charge or whatever) then you may have sentient creatures dealing with sex. That’s when things get a lot more complicated and less scientific.

Sex is part of our minds. For some of us, an extremely large part.

Now things get personal. Literally.

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Disney’s Descendants . . . No

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I can’t say I’m a fan or not a fan of Disney.  Disney’s omnipresent enough it sort of doesn’t make sense.  But their upcoming show Descendents, which is a school drama where the children of four villains experience (?) redemption among the children of heroes sounded sort of like Ever After High envy . . . and the first picture isn’t promising.

DESCENDANTS_IMAGE

Now I won’t cast aspersions on the young actors.  If Disney taps you for some big, if insane, effort, you go. You get to play a Disney Villain, which almost without exception are a heck of a lot of fun.  But as for the characters:

  • Jay, Jafar’s son doesn’t look like the descendent of any kind of wizard.  He looks a bit too generic thug-bad-boy.  Could someone give him something wizardly looking?
  • Carlos, son of Cruella De Ville is definitely rocking the retro-80’s hair look with his mom’s signature color scheme, and his clothing color scheme is also appropriate.  I kinda dig the semi-Billy Idol.  It’s just this is not the son of a fashion icon – in his case “did your mom dress you this morning” should be a compliment.
  • Mal, Malefecent’s daughter needs some kind of horn getup.  She’s not even Maleficent-like (take a hint from Carlos).  Also we’re not exactly talking “sorceress” here.
  • Evie, the Evil Queen’s daughter  . . . well not sure on this one either, costume-wise.  Needs something more like mom.

So really it looks like Generic Punks causing trouble.  I’m still figuring out how the descendent of a world famous fashion icon ends up in a magical world.  Maybe mom got a taste for dragon skin dresses and things went terrible wrong.  Which is probably better than this plot.

Go look at Disney Characters As Warriors.  Far more awesome.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

On The Oregon Shooter

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As you probably heard, the shooter apparently was on a campaign to kill sinners according to his diary.  It shocked his church and family, and it seems fairly obvious he was pretty troubled.

The thing is everyone is talking about how they were surprised.

I think by now, we’ve heard so many times that “oh, he shouldn’t have done that” or heard how “how surprising this is” to think that maybe we should stop being surprised.  It’s clear that when people miss someone is on the way to a violent breakdown missing it is no surprise because it happens all the time.

It’s up to us to watch out for each other.  Not keep watch on each other, we don’t need some panopticon police state in our heads (we’ve got enough would-be’s in the world).  We need to make sure we’re there to ensure our friends and family and neighbors don’t fall into the darkness.

It’s up to us to pay attention for when things look like they’ll fall apart.  It may not be a mass shooting (and for all of you I hope it never is), but it’s realizing someone may have a drinking problem, or is losing their way and falling in with radicals, and so on.

It’s up to us to actually care about each other as opposed to expect people to follow some rote behavior that will inevitably cause them to snap or snap worse.

When someone snaps and there’s surprise, that’s no surprise.  That’s a problem.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.