Just ranting

Forced drama, Natural trash

Have you ever found yourself reading fanfiction, books, manga, comics, Etc, And thinking to yourself: "Is it me or this feels so fucking forced."?

I have and let me tell ya, It's not you, It's the actual scene itself.

It's pretty easy to tell when a scene is forced. Usually, it involves a simple concept, the concept of what is happening at the moment doesn't make sense in the context of the concept that the story had. Here's an example.

Let's take RWBY for example. Ruby Rose is a girl with a very naive perspective of the world, When she learned that Ozpin was hiding all the details from her she felt crushed. She understood the pain of betrayal and promised herself that she would be different, that she would prove Ozpin wrong.

What she does next? lie to Ironwood about the relics and Ozpin... Despite the fact that Ironwood did nothing to gain her distrust, on the contrary, he welcomed her with open arms and gave her and her friends all the resources that he could.

That moment was extremely forced because it didn't match anything that was established about Ruby Rose.

Now let's take fanfiction as an example.

Recently I was recommended another KDA fanfic, one where the MC is a soldier... again.

In the chapters, it is established that there is a secret portal that connects Runaterra with Earth and that the KDA girls went to Earth to expand their audience.

The plot happens, Nato fights North Korea... and somehow are getting their asses kicked. MC managed to save the girls and escort them back to a safe place. More stuff from the plot happens, MC gets wounded and can't serve anymore so he gets invited by the KDA to go with them back to Runaterra, where he becomes the first earthling in Runaterra.

So far so good, Sure the story has the most annoying cliches imaginable such as the MC suffering from PTSD(Which consists of nightmares) and constant flashbacks from his time in the army. They are annoying tropes but tolerable.

The newest chapter, however, completely ruined the story for me.

In the newest chapter, we are introduced to Seraphine.... who is Y/N's childhood friend.

I know what you're thinking. "What the fuck? I thought Y/N was the first Earthling on Runaterra, plus the story said that the contact between Earth and Runaterra is quite recent... so how the hell is Seraphine his friend... if she's from Runaterra?"

Well, the answer is... Seraphine was born on Earth, had an abusive family, and suddenly ended up in Runaterra, where she was adopted by a wealthy family and she never was more happy in her life.

Oh, and the reason why nobody knew was because she kept it a secret.

.... Let's be honest, that is just an excuse to make her close to the MC.

Then we're introduced to a very, VERY FORCED moment of drama. Where we learned that MC gets depressed, gets blamed for Seraphine's disappearance, his father dies, his mother gets sick, and he studies medicine to try to save her but she dies anyway, tries to kill himself, and then joins the army.

All this information... in a span of a second. No build-up, no foreshadowing, just the most "important" moments in the MC's life... revealed out of nowhere.

Scrap the fact that his backstory is a Wattpad cliche in every possible way, His backstory is simply revealed in a conversation... in a FORCED conversation with FORCED drama.

The rest is what you already expect. They loved each other so much but never revealed their feelings, Then they kiss, and the rest of the girls appeared. You already know how these stories go.

I lost count of how many times I ran into scenes like this on this website.

Wattpad authors, you have to learn one basic thing about storytelling: Build up.

Things simply happening out of nowhere feel FORCED and not natural. You need to foreshadow these moments. It doesn't need to be one hell of a plot twist like the ending of Infamous but there has to be something hinting about the subject.

Like the foreshadowing of Big Smoke being a traitor.

Or the build-up to meeting the master of the greybeards in Skyrim.

Or finally meeting Mr. House in Fallout New vegas.

In all these examples we see plenty of moments foreshadowing these events, we see or hear people talking about these characters, building up the moment and making those scenes Natural and Impactful.

If you wanna make the Backstory of your MC a big reveal, then hint at little details about it. Like the Abused and neglected MCs from rwby. If they used to get beat up a lot by Tai then make them flinch every now and then when a buff huntsman makes sudden moves, making the characters around them wonder why he/she does that.

Build the moment and your audience will love the reveal of the scene.

That's all I wanted to say. Thank you all for reading this book and I hope to see you all in the next chapter.

Peace! ✌