I love the word shiny. People who are shiny are just better all around people. It’s not enough that they just be really good at one thing and a jerk and a failure in all other aspects of their life, but the people who are genuinely good people, great at the thing they love, and just share joy instead of misery. In real life, I absolutely feel honored to be with them because shiny people just make you feel like you’re totally awesome at being a person even if you’re a (pick a unit here) the degree of shiny they are.

It also ended up with a minor rant about people who would rather comment with their opinion as though their one exception to rule that happened one time and is only slightly fabricated in a million to one shot somehow negates all the rest of the deliberate points the OP brings up. I hate that. Don’t do that. The OP gets that he/she is not making rules that define the planet’s retrogrades, he/she’s making a general observation that is going to apply to more situations than it does not apply in. They’re not creating natural laws.

I think every book needs a shiny person in it. And what is shiny to me isn’t shiny to another person at all, that’s the beauty of having an ideal reader. Your ideal reader will have an ideal shiny person, and all you need to do is put that person in your book and your reader will love him. In the truest sense of the word, Edward and Bella are shiny people to some (though to be perfectly honest I should just say Edward and Jacob) Even when Bella out-mary-sued all her other mary-sue vampires at the end (don’t judge me, I read Cracked “If (whatever the last book was called) was 10 times more honest and a 100 times shorter) she’s still not a shiny person because she doesn’t make people feel good about themselves as people.

You just know if Jacob or Edward would have a fault, it would be one of those amazing faults that is such a burden to the man who wields it but the envy of everyone else, like having a 12″ penis.

I’m sure actually having a 12” penis would be a horrible thing and I’ve deleted the next three paragraphs because I’m trusting that most people would understand why without me needing to explain it. But this is fiction, so if that’s what your ideal reader wants and that’s your thing, go for it. I’m really not up for debating this, so if you feel the need to comment as to why I’m wrong on this ridiculously stretched simile, I’m just going to delete it from the comments.

And if you think this is too much effort to discourage people to post with their one exception that one time where the events would never likely to ever be repeated, you’ve never talked to people who have the one exception to any kind of general rule. They’re general rules. Exceptions are part of using the word general, and yet each person with their one exception story feels morally outraged and feel They Must Talk About Themselves Now Because of Reasons.

So that was long and involved but I really hate that one person who stops reading so he could go down to the comments to tell the reader what he thought of the reading before he finished reading it.

Jeepers, I hardly feel like finishing this post. So, um, yeah. Include shiny people, but things that test the shiny people are the highest tests of all, and when a shiny person breaks, its way more emotional than just any old character. I’m taking the shiny off a character I love more than any character, and it’s emotionally brutal.