(no subject)

Theme is the most difficult aspect of writing to criticize, because with other things you can present examples, references, theories, &c., but with theme, essentially the only argument you have is I don't want the world to work like that.

Which is, I think, a totally valid objection! But it's very difficult to convince someone with. Which brings us to the second, tangentially related part of this post:

Dear writers-in-general: It is not okay to just magically reverse traumatic change after the appropriate angsting period has passed! That shit should be permanent, okay. --I don't mean that in a this-is-what-beginning-fantasy-writers do way, I mean that the things that come from traumatic change are things that characters should keep. Like, I just read a fic in which a character gets body-horror wings, and a bunch of stuff happens, and at the end he cuts them off and gives them away to somebody else, and the magic powers that went with the wings to a different somebody else. That is in-universe plausible, but it just doesn't ring right to me. At all. When you change in a big way, you don't get to just hand that off after you're done with whatever emotional growth you wanted, whether that change was physical or mental or whatever.

You become a monster, you stay a monster. Okay?