User blog comment:Arcane Spork/Hierarchy of Fears/@comment-24399271-20140119155022/@comment-1988716-20140119174556

Plenty of Fears target wrongdoers. It depends on who's writing them. Some people, myself included, find it really cathartic to write a tragedy where someone does a horrible thing and is targeted by a Fear as a result. Examples are The Grotesque in Harlequin Metropolis, The Black Dog and The Convocation in Rapture (actually, a lot of Rapture Fears are pretty good about going after bad people), or The Blind Man in ''Topography Genera. ''I think you guys do just need to read more blogs; the concept of a Fear doing good things has been around for a very long time. The reason it hasn't caught on in popularity is because ethics are one of those things that will never be popular but will always be there. Personally, I think blogs that don't give their Fears any morals make the Fears too unrelatable and I lose a lot of interest.

AS FOR THE NEW HIERARCHY

If you want my advice, I wouldn't base your hierarchy off of anything "general" in the Fear Mythos. For one thing, it's an extremely niche thing to be topical with, and by the time you write stories in it the whole power balance thing will already be different so your hierarchy will be obsolete. Fear Hierarchies are fun things to play around with, though, so I do not want to discourage you from having one at all. But there is a pet peeve of mine which I feel I should bring up: Don't put more thought into the Verse than into any story. You can have the greatest and most in-depth worldbuilding in the world, but if your story doesn't have basic emotional catharsis and literary semiotics, it'll still be a badly-written story. Not that I think you'd make a badly-written story, this is really just part of my random pep talk here. But the reason the Fears are written in certain ways a lot is because they seem to support those themes to people (like making The Mother of Snakes a Fear who makes people doubt whether they're good people or not-- how powerful she is doesn't matter, what matters is what purpose she plays in the protagonist's development), so the best reason to write a Fear differently is because ''you have something you can see the Fear doing differently. ''As long as the end product makes sense, y'know? Basic narrative sense. Then you're good.

This is really the main reason I haven't been able to give the best advice on this. I don't like looking at Fears like they're all just a big list of eldritch monsters to throw into stories willy-nilly; they're characters and disasters that depend on the themes of the story.

Actually, no, I have advice: Maybe try just jumping into a story with your Verse with what hierarchy you think works best. Don't get too caught up on the details here-- there's only so much other people can help before everyone becomes like me and just rambles.

..okay and The Cold Boy. He's not written about much and he's rarely given much power. The Convocation is also written about very little. The few times they are written about, they're just kinda there. The Nightlanders are similar: The few times they're written about, they're just kinda there (or worse, they become a Wooden Girl expy and focus on body horror for some reason). Come to think of it, yeah, put EAT low on this list, I can see why you'd say that. Oh, and Mother of Snakes is another Fear that is written about pretty little and usually gets the same interpretation. ..ope yeah and Unnamed Child, even I have difficulty figuring out how to make that one work, if you can do that then you will be a hero.

There, I tried to give help on as many fronts as possible. Probably just made another confusing post, sorry. xD