Run for Cover

By Rose Benjamin In books and movies, antagonists/villains are often portrayed as hideous beast-like people. Of course, there are exceptions, but writers usually tend to make their villain's appearance match their behavior. This may be to add to the reader/viewer's perception of the antagonist as a villain, having less empathy towards them. Many antagonists are already generally bad people, however, so it shouldn't be necessary to have them look weird. I think it is more likely that villains' appearance is designed to scare a reader or viewer, creating a more immersive experience. Different stories have different reasons and backstories for their villain's appearance. One book published in 2004, The Legend of Holly Claus by Brittney Ryan, tells a story about Santa Claus having a daughter, which then awakens an evil warlock deep below the Earth. This warlock has been sealed inside a prison for a very long time, so it makes sense that he would be ugly. However, the n...

    The SCP Wiki is an expansive public creative writing project housed on  scpwiki.com . The SCP Foundation (the Foundation) is a secretive fictional organization inside the SCP universe which contains thousands of people, objects, and places that have anomalous properties. These range from a cardboard box which origami dragons fly out of to a deer god that can turn any matter into a hexagonal column. The anomalies that the Foundation contains, how they are contained, and the stories linked to them are detailed in Special Containment Procedures, which take up the majority of the content on the wiki. Currently, there are six "series" of these procedures, each with a thousand articles.     If you go into a random article on the wiki, you will probably be overwhelmed by acronyms, numbers, and unfamiliar names. There are a few articles that detail what some of these things mean. Useful links are always provided in articles whenever they're mentioned. Object classes...

It was Wednesday morning, and I was hunched over my laptop, brainstorming about what I could possibly write about for the last blog post of the year. After a lot of staring at a blank Google Doc and thinking, I decided on “A History of Writer’s Block and How to Overcome It.” It seemed dramatic and fitting enough, except then I stumbled upon an article about Graham Greene, an English writer considered to be one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. He suffered a long period of writer’s block, until he started his dream journal. All that mental distress slowly morphed into creative productivity, in the free-flowing form of jotting down his dreams in writing. The idea of dream journaling intrigued me, particularly because I have been recalling my dreams and nightmares especially well these past few weeks, and texting my friends about it seemed to be just another form of dream journaling. I went off on a tangent of articles and when I returned to trying to write about what writer...