Dissecting Literature

Hey there, travelers! Today’s specimen is a controversial trope I have a love-hate relationship with. When done right, it can create wonders but when creators goof this up, oh boi… This one dooms generic shonen anime series and YA fantasy stories but has the potential to elevate basically every other trope there is-this is the hidden badass. As the name suggests, the concept is fairly simple: take a shy, introverted and generally plain character and sprinkle on a twist where they show some secret and extremely flashy superpower that nobody knew they had to save the day.  We first noticed this recurring element in Japanese cartoons where the titular badass was nearly always a teenage or even younger girl with a sunshine cupcake personality that spurred every viral male protagonist in a mile radius to protect her, just to take over the spotlight when the situation got really messy. Think about Lucy from Elfen Lied, Neliel from Bleach, or more recently Elizabeth from Seven Deadly Sins...

Hey there, traveler! You may have noticed there’s been a lack of BtS posts over the past month. The main reason is that I’m a lazy fuck and just managed to escape the horrors of the end term exams, so I've been busy creating a million Skyrim characters and not doing anything remotely productive. We also had a huge update for our desert fantasy WIP Shackles of the Storm (or SotS), since through the power of Twitter we managed to find a professional editor that suits both our needs and our budget. Hooray! That means I’m trying to finish self-editing the book as soon as I can (without burning out), so that sucks up a lot of creative energy. After all that bitching and excuses, what’s this post about? Well, I thought I’d share some info about the marvelous world we created to see what you may plunge yourself into if you decide to read SotS. I’ve labeled each section according to interest (I hope), so you don’t have to suffer through parts that bore you to death before the good stuff. H...

Hey there, traveler! Melancholic figures have been a part of literature since the classical era, although not always with the same frequency or popularity. They are dark, brooding, lost in their own world of gloom, and likely see the world with an irritatingly negative perspective. They had their peak during the 19th century, the era of romanticism, but today they tend to irritate readers and other audiences. How did they change so rapidly in such a short time? That’s what I aim to find out. Today’s post is more about my personal thoughts and deductions rather than scientific research, but I hope it’ll be just as interesting. So, first of all, what is melancholy? To simplify things, melancholy is a state of low mood, gloomy thoughts, and overall enerved behavior. The word came from the Greek ‘melaina chole’ meaning black bile, from an age where physicians thought behavior was dictated by four humours and their distributions in the body. Black bile caused dark thoughts, that’s where the...

You might have noticed, that we skipped last week's Dissecting Literature blogpost. I had a lot of things in my life in the last couple of months, and last week I felt that I can’t take it anymore, and I need a break. We can’t travel anywhere abroad because of Corona-chan, so Darr decided that we go to his family to the countryside, where I can rest a bit, so we traveled last weekend, and I didn’t have the time nor the energy to post – sorry about that. So now, let’s get back to the villains! Or, as we will see a very dark but often unnoticed personality disorder, which can cause a lot of harm, but not necessarily a trait of evil characters. I noticed, that the post about psychopaths was popular so I decided to move to the next of the dark triad. Everybody heard of the flower narcissus. The plant and this psychological disorder too got its name from Greek mythology, where Narcissus fell in love with his reflection in a pool, watched it for hours, and then turned into a flower. Of c...

Hey there, travelers! It is Wednesday again, so time for a new Behind the Scalpel post. This time I got a treat for you. As you might now we are in the middle of editing the second english draft of our first desert fantasy novel, Shackles of the Storm. Now we are at a stage where I'm not entirely embarrased to share it online, so here's an excerpt from the second chapter, an introduction scene to one of our main characters - the firey mercenary, Ezair "Aspis" Hazra. Comments and feedback are appreciated, and most of all, enjoy! ~:O:~ Aspis The city’s detention cell made quite an echo, despite the many cracks in the time-worn board walls. A melody rolled around in the room like a gust of wind, dancing and jumping as the musician—a young man on the doorstep of his twenties—dictated. He played a shingara, a weird instrument ending in nozzles both ways, mixing the attributes of a tin whistle and those musical sticks you could buy in the ramashi bazaar that beeped and cooe...