\n\n\n\u00a0Hey, to you sci-fi/fantasy writers out there (and maybe some others, but this is mainly for things that can\u2019t really be researched irl), if you want to write a character who is a driven, passionate expert on something, don\u2019t write about them rambling indifferently about some boring, mundane part of it. Give them a deep, intense hatred of some oddly specific wow-I-did-not-even-know-that-was-a-thing-and-it-would-have-never-occurred-to-me-that-it\u2019s-a-bad-thing thing they\u2019ll gladly rant about.
\u00a0Write a dragon rider who really fucking hates it when a dragon is trained to bow while being reined. A space ship engineer who is pissed off when perfectly good antimatter ship has been adapted to run on neutral matter. A historian who is still not over the massive failures of a general who lost a specific battle 300 years before she was born.
\u00a0The guy currently giving us a series of lectures on the restoration of historical buildings really, really hates polymer paint. At the artisan school our stained glass teacher really hated this one specific Belgian artist - we never really figured out what did that guy even do, but he\u2019s been dead for over 200 years and our teacher was glad that at least he\u2019s dead.
\u00a0Experts don\u2019t just know things you\u2019ve never thought about. They\u2019ve got strong opinions about it.
When I was in high school and presenting my identity-formation to myself as “learning how to pretend and pass as various subcultures” I realized the trick was to identify the right sub-subculture to performatively dislike
Real goths didn’t complain about normies, they complained about mallgoths. Real real goths complained about rivetheads, etc.
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