Legends say that hummingbirds float free of time, carrying our hopes
for love, joy and celebration. Like a hummingbird, we aspire to hover
and savor each moment as it passes; embrace all that life has to offer
and to celebrate the joy of every day. The hummingbird’s delicate
grace reminds us that life is rich, beauty is everywhere, every
personal connection has meaning and that laughter is life’s sweetest
creation. –Papyrus
ursulavernon
I…Ah…hmm.
Look, it’s a great photo. The photographer kicked butt. They should be very proud of this photo.
But hummingbirds are not carrying your hopes for joy around. I am sorry. Have you met hummingbirds? Hummingbirds believe strongly that they should be eighteen feet tall and have flamethrowers. They are a half ton of pugnacious wrapped up in a half ounce of feathers. Given the choice, hummingbirds would fly around with “Ride of the Valkyries” blasting out of tiny speakers on their wings, putting the eyes out of their enemies.
They do not fear humans, but if they learn that humans will provide feeders, they will become very demanding. They are fiercely territorial. They are…kind of jerks, actually.
Also, there are papers indicating that female hummingbirds engage in what can only be termed “nectar-based prostitution” where they trade sexual favors to males in return for access to particularly rich nectar sources.
If your hopes for love involve nectar and your hopes for joy involve crushing your foes, seeing them driven before you, hearing the lamentations of their nestlings, etc, then possibly the hummingbird may carry them around, otherwise…uh…have you considered vultures? Vultures are very pleasant, affectionate, and social birds. You should probably give them your hopes and dreams. They would be better at it.
Jack (full name: Jack Sparrow) lives at the Hawk Conservancy. (He’s missing some toes because he was rescued from Vulture Smugglers.)
When you interact with Jack, you can tell he’s at about the level of … something between a ferret and a dog. Funny short little attention span, and a weird face to look at, but a human reads him as curious, friendly and interested in people.
When you meet a working vulture, you realize that they are definitely a wild predatory animal and very instinctive, but with a
consciousness that extends to interest in their surroundings; like, he’s
very much focused on THE SNACK, but before and after the SNACKTIME he
also wants to have a chat about your day and look at your face and peer into your camera and ask to look at the pictures you took and then say “hey now take one where I’m doing duckface” and you’re like “ok Jack go ahead”
Contrast with owls, which are typically pretty, but which are basically as interactive as a pop-up ad. They exist to land on things and eat them. They are not complicated. Vultures are hey-whatcha-doin. They’re yeah I’m a psychopomp but my real hobby is DJ-ing. They’d like to couchsurf next time they’re in town. You’d let them.
I would give Jack my dreams to carry. He would hold them well, in his big black lovely inky eyes, in his broken gentle feet.
I watch her as she fights. Her left leg flies through the air – a roundhouse – rolling into a spin. She misses, but I guess she’s supposed to. Her foot lands and launches her into a jump. Up she goes again, just as fast. The other leg pumps, high knee gaining altitude. The jumping leg tucks. Her body rolls midair, momentum carrying her sideways. She kicks. A tornado kick, they call it. The top of her foot slams into Rodrigo’s head, burying in his temple. Didn’t move back far enough, I guess.
His head, it snaps sideways like a ball knocked off a tee. Skull off the spine. His eyes roll back, and he slumps. Whole body limp. Legs just give out beneath him. He clatters to the sidewalk; wrist rolling off the curb.
She lands, making the full turn and spins back around. Her eyes are on his body. One foot on his chest. I don’t know if he’s alive. I don’t know if she cares. Nah, she’s looking over her shoulder. Looking at me.
The truth twists my gut. I should’ve started running a long time ago.
The first key to writing a good fight scene is to tell a story. The second key is having a grasp of combat rules and technique. The third is to describe what happens when someone gets hit. The fourth is to remember physics. Then, roll it all together. And remember: be entertaining.
If you find yourself in the “and then” trap, it’s because you don’t have a firm grasp of what exactly it is your writing. “He punched” then “She blocked” then “a kick” only gets you so far.
You’ve got to get a sense for shape and feeling, and a sense of motion. Take a page from the comic artist’s playbook and make a static image feel like it’s moving. Try to remember that violence is active. Unless your character is working with a very specific sort of soft style, they’re attacks are going to come with force. So, you’ve got to make your sentences feel like your hitting something or someone.
“Ahhh!” Mary yelled, and slammed her fist into the pine’s trunk. A sickening crack followed, then a whimper not long after.
Angie winced. “Feel better?”
Shaking out her hand, Mary bit her lip. Blood dripped from her knuckles, uninjured fingers gripping her wrist. She sniffed, loudly. “I…” she paused, “…no.”
“You break your hand?”
“I think so. Yeah.”
“Good,” Angie said. “Think twice next time before challenging a tree.”
Let your characters own their mistakes. If they hit something stupid in
anger, like a wall or a tree then let them have consequences.
Injury is part of combat. In the same way, “I should be running now” is. When the small consequences of physical activity invade the page, they bring reality with them.
People don’t just slug back and forth unless they don’t know how to fight, or their only exposure to combat is mostly movies or bloodsport like boxing. Either way, when one character hits another there are consequences. It doesn’t matter if they blocked it or even deflected it, some part of the force is going to be transitioned into them and some rebounds back at the person who attacked.
Your character is going to get hurt, and it’ll be painful. Whether that’s just a couple of bruises, a broken bone, or their life depends on how the fight goes.
However, this is fantasy. It is all happening inside our heads. Our characters are never in danger unless we say they are. They’ll never be hurt unless we allow it. A thousand ghost punches can be thrown and mean absolutely, utterly nothing at all to the state of the character. This is why it is all important to internalize the risks involved.
The writer is in charge of bringing a dose of reality into their fictional world. It is much easier to sell an idea which on some level mimics human behavior and human reactions. The ghost feels physical because we’ve seen it happen on television or relate to it happening to us when we get injured.
You’ve got five senses, use them. You know what it feels like to get injured. To be bruised. To fall down. To be out of breath. Use that.
Here’s something to take with you: when we fight, every technique brings us closer together. Unless it specifically knocks someone back. You need specific distances to be able to use certain techniques. There’s the kicking zone, the punching zone, and the grappling zone. It’s the order of operation, the inevitable fight progression. Eventually, two combatants will transition through all three zones and end up on the ground.
So, keep the zones in mind. If you go, “she punched, and then threw a roundhouse kick” that’s wrong unless you explain more. Why? Because if the character is close enough to throw a punch, then they’re too close to throw most kicks. The roundhouse will just slap a knee or a thigh against the other character’s ribs, and probably get caught. If you go, “she punched, rammed an uppercut into his stomach, and seized him by the back of the head”, then that’s right. You feel the fighters getting progressively closer together, which is how its supposed to work.
Use action verbs, and change them up. Rolled, rotated, spun, punched, kicked, slammed, rammed, jammed, whipped, cracked, etc.
You’ve got to sell it. You need to remember a human’s bodily limits, and place artificial ones. You need to keep track of injuries, every injury comes with a cost. Make sure they aren’t just trading blows forever.
I’ve seen advice that says fights all by themselves aren’t interesting. I challenge that assertion. If you’re good at writing action, then the sequence itself is compelling. You know when you are because it feels real. Your reader will tune out if it isn’t connecting, and the fight scene is a make or break for selling your fantasy. It is difficult to write or create engaging, well choreographed violence that a reader can easily follow and imagine happening.
*English-reading online transformative fandom often using AO3 and tumblr and willing to complete surveys :)
This month’s @threepatchpodcast episode, When I’m 64, looks at fandom and aging. To go along with these discussions, here are some demographic stats from a few fandom surveys on the age distribution in our online fandom communities.
CAVEAT: These surveys are not random samples of the transformative fandom population. All numbers come from voluntary online surveys distributed on social media and fandom media, and the limits of opportunity and inclination introduced biases (more on that for the F&S survey here). Still, it’s the best data we have, so here is what @fffinnagain is willing to infer.
From these survey results we can draw a few main points:
Fans’ ages range from preteens to late sixties and beyond
Many (possibly most) are in their 20′s and 30′s
Most of us started engaging in things we fan over by the age of 19
But new fans can be of any age
For adult fans, there is a fairly even chance they’ve been in fandom for less than 3 years (~5-10% by our counts)
The usual plots and explanations below.
How old are these fans?
Whatever our expectations, responses to fandom surveys show that these fanfiction readers seem to be mostly in their twenties and thirties, but there is no apparent upper bound on age in these communities.
From the 2013 AO3 census (11k participants), the average age was 25, with a median of 22-24, and a mode age of 21. 4% were under the age of 16 and 19% of participants in the the AO3 census reported being 30+.
However, the distribution of age depends a lot on community. Our small TPP listener survey in 2015 (230 participants) showed an older demographic: 55% of participants were 30 and above, with a strong mode between 28 and 32. Also, approximately 12% were over the age of 50.
TPP’s fandom and sexuality survey (2195 participants) limited its participant pool to fans 18 and over, but the trends fall somewhere between these two. Average age of 28, mode of 25, and 40% over 30. The distribution of those responses is plotted above.
While none of these surveys capture these online fandom communities cleanly, the consistency of the pattern strengthens their claim: the largest age bracket are people in their 20′s, with substantial presence of teens and people in their 30′s. In all three surveys, more than 50% were between 20 and 40. Fans above the age of 40 are not as common, making up somewhere between 5% and 35% of the active population, depending on the community.
How long have these fans been in fandom?
The fandom and sexuality survey included questions about fans’ first experiences, including the age they started engaging with fandom stuff.
By 19, 70.9% of the F&S survey participants had begun their first forays into fandom life! These early experiences may not have been within the same communities they currently inhabit, but the enthusiasm for transformative works starts young, and opportunity may be an important factor in who gets involved when.
From this we can run a quick calculation: how long has it’s been since their first fandom experiences? Across these 2195 fans, the median time since first fandom was 11 years, mode of 15. We can’t assume that all participants have been consuming fanworks continuously since first contact, however these responses make it obvious that interest in fanfiction, fan art, etc., is not restricted to the eight years of teenage-hood.
There is a long tail in this graph, with small but tangible numbers of people coming into this part of fandom in the 40′s and 50′s. Are older fans more or less likely to be recent inductees?
To look at this from a different angle, we broke the participants into age brackets. This figure reports the percentage of each age bracket with X number of years since their first fandom.
The most important spot here is the first clump of columns: fans that have been involved in fandom less than 3 years. These are the newbies. Quite strikingly, they are pretty even across these groups: ~5-10% survey participants in each bracket were relatively new to fandom!
If I (@fffinnagain) were to hazard a guess, the ratio of active fans with less than 3 years experience is probably higher than 1 in 10. The F & S survey was long and serious and I can imagine a larger portion of newer fans would have felt unsure of whether their experience was relevant. Not everyone steps on to a scene and owns it within 12 months! However, I wouldn’t assume this factor would interact significantly with age, so it still seems fair to extrapolate that within these age bracket, the proportion of new fans is still consistent. Teenagers, however, would be a different story and this data sadly cannot speak to their experiences.
All this suggests that when we meet adult fans, be they in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, or older, there is a pretty even chance that they are still getting acclimatized to this culture. So be kind, and don’t assume one way or the other.
‘All this suggests that when we meet adult fans … there is a pretty even chance that they are
still getting acclimatized to this culture’: *raises hand*
coworker told me he “hates all mollusks” today. and to each their own obviously but like… theres 100k species of mollusk… you really hate all of them bro? nautiluses and oysters and snails and nudibranches and chitons and thousands of animals youve never even heard of???? what did ammonites even fucking do to you
fishyfishyfishtimes
