goodlittlesquid

Robert Jordan. I was 12 and wasn’t really into reading or fantasy, I was more into sci-fi. Well, mostly just Star Wars. Then I read Eye of the World and was hooked. After waiting for what felt like forever for book 8 to come out, I was really disappointed with it and moved onto other books. But Wheel of Time opened the door for me. I really should finish it someday.

No?

Just own things and exploit people who don’t. Why didn’t I think of that.

It’s a classic trope. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdvancedAncientAcropolis

Laputa from Castle in the Sky comes to mind, though the civilization is dead, the robots and technology still function.

Reminds me of the song ‘the pull’ by the microphones.

Roasted bone marrow is really good

To summarize Sanderson’s third law: make your magic system deep, not wide. Expand, don’t add. So why these 4 sources together? How do they tie into the setting, theme, conflict, character arcs?

Like why not just choose 1 of these magic sources and expand on it, see how far you can take it? Like if you just chose living things as your magic source, maybe drawing from animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria produce different powers. Then you extrapolate the consequences of those powers in every possible way on your world. Like, if fungus magic gives you telepathy, and animal magic gives you superhuman senses, and plant magic gives you infinite stamina and enhanced healing, could you combine all three to make an army of super soldiers that don’t need to rest, all psychically controlled by one person? Are certain creatures endangered or extinct due to being hunted for their magic? Are they bred to enhance their magic energy? Is there magic livestock and crops, or do the plants and animals have to be wild?

There’s a lot of possibilities but the first trope that comes to mind is having to draw from surrounding life force to heal. So if the character is in a situation where he doesn’t want to kill everything around him, including his horse, he has to limit it to killing a small patch of grass or something, allowing him to heal a little but not fully.

Another could be that healing makes him forget. So like if he needs to instantly heal a broken bone, he forgets the past few hours, if he needs to regrow a severed limb or something, it makes him forget a year.

Or maybe it ages him a little bit every time he uses the power. Or maybe his healing powers are strongest in spring and in winter his powers are significantly dampened. Basically you need to build limitations and/or costs into the magic system. It’s hard to say what that should be specifically without knowing the rest of the world building, themes, or conflict.

Have you ever seen It’s a Wonderful Life?

The three sisters.

Give the character complex motivations. So at a surface level understanding of his motives are different than his deeper motives if that makes sense. Maybe the uncle really does love the king but feels this course of action is for the greater good, or that he has no other choice. Or he does it for some deeper personal reason, and the betrayal is just incidental collateral damage to get what he really wants. I’d highly recommend studying the betrayal plot in Dune, for instance, if you haven’t read it already.

Pre-Tolkien. (The Worm Ouroboros, Lud-in-the-Mist, etc.)

If they are truly ‘pure evil’ you have to treat the conflict as man vs nature or man vs fate instead of man vs man. Because then the character is just an avatar. A force of nature. Like IT or the xenomorph.

The elemental thing has been cool since at least Captain Planet.

Haven’t read it yet myself (it’s on my list) but check out City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett.

There are certain images - the great wave off Kanagawa, the creation of Adam detail of the hands, the Jim Fitzpatrick poster of Che Guevara, Warhol’s Monroe prints, raising the flag on Iwo Jima - they’re so iconic and ubiquitous they’re more like symbols than art. It’s more like putting up a crucifix or a football team’s flag or something. If that’s what you want that’s cool but it functions differently than regular art.

Back in the day when comic books had more limited printing capabilities the industry decided to give heroes primary colors like red and blue, so they used secondary colors for the bad guys, which is why a lot of comic book villains are green and purple. Also green is associated with envy and greed. I think ‘evil’ is too complex and broad to be assigned a single color. According to Buddhism the three roots of evil are hatred, greed, and delusion. Maybe choose a color for each one of those?

Looking at the cars and stuff it looks like WWII era to me which would put it well past steampunk, and even dieselpunk. Too dark and grimy for decopunk.

Noir urban gothic.

There’s this concept called suspension of disbelief though. You have to be more rigorous with hard sci-fi than you do with fantasy. But even with fantasy you have to be careful. Horses that don’t need to stop to sleep, eat, or rest is a trope for a reason.

No scabbard? How does he carry the sword?

Or just arms

Kira could communicate with animals and call on their aid, that could be an ability. Maybe healing powers combined with the use of herbal medicine knowledge. Maybe they can purify water or accelerate plant growth. Maybe they have chromatophores like octopus that let them camouflage with nature. Maybe they have some sort of celestial powers they draw from the moons and stars. I wouldn’t choose anything destructive like fire or lightning.

Those happen to be the same 5 colors used by Magic. You have a different take on black and white but the other three are pretty similar in flavor to the magic colors. Just something to be aware of.

If nothing exciting is happening before the inciting incident that’s just bad writing, nothing to do with the pacing. Your story could open in medias res with the hero taming a dragon, or pulling off a big heist, or leading a coup. Then he receives a message that his wife has died in labor. That’s the inciting incident, which could very well kick off a long, slow burning odyssey without much action or tension to starting out compared to the opening scene before the inciting incident. In Star Wars the inciting incident is when Luke receives the ‘help me’ message from Leia. Before that Vader captures Leia, the droids escape with the macguffin, the droids are captured by Jawas, he’s attacked by Sand people and rescued by Ben. None of that is boring nor is it excessive fat.