anneapocalypse:

Honestly a lot of shortsighted or limiting interpretive lenses break down when you try to translate them into actual writing advice, to the point that it can be a pretty good test of the lens, like

“villains should never be humanized” I mean sure, if you want to make all your antagonists cartoonishly evil-for-evil’s-sake cardboard cutouts you can, but when you have to live with that antagonist and stay interested in them yourself for the full length of a project like say, an original novel, you may feel differently about that.

“you should only write about the kind of characters you are uniquely qualified to write about” sure, right up until you need to populate an entire fictional universe in a way that feels actually representative of humanity. (There’s something to be said for leaving certain kinds of narratives to authors who’ve experienced them, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t going to need to write characters who aren’t like you.)

“conflict between these two characters means one of them must be abusive toward the other” please try to write a full-length original novel with no conflict between any of the “good” characters and come back and let me know how that goes.