#Vision's writing hasn't really developed or changed to reflect this

[brw]

Thinking about The Vision.

[vzyee]

gonna collect my thoughts on on earth we're briefly gorgeous since i finally read it after four years of it being the biggest thing in every sphere. preface is that i know this was like landmark literature & i can acknowledge that while also you know griping.

so first of all i thought this was straight up memoir when i read it due to assuming it was an extension of his more autobiographical poetry.

i made a joke abt how it reminded me of barry s3 but its like, the comparison is nearly there. turning from just depthless ancient sadness to like, extremely contemporaneous colloquial language and stylings. which isn't to say that the depictions of generational trauma in gorgeous (ancient sadness) are necessarily more remote/removed of course & in a lot of ways the early aughts details are alienating when you'd expect them to be grounding.

i also noticed how neatly this fits into the like goldfinch genre which im always going on about. obviously it borrows quite a bit thematically from the big gay dark academia epics (art trauma and memory) although crucially the academia element is sort of plucked out of the story. he goes to college this seems like it would have major implications in the narrative of americanness and yet it's barely factored in. and further barbara kingsolver totally did the whole first day on the tobacco farm thing in demon copperhead down to the gloves being too big. i'm calling dc a big etc gay novel even though it barely is because it also to me derives from that same tradition. However. and the point is. it disrupts that genre primarily by not being an epic. Like the prose is actually very efficient. a lot of the scenes are precisely what they are. to my taste i actually like a very long unwinding of every mood and development from one stage of life & being to the next & i do think. gorgeous accomplishes a lot of that even if nonlinearly. but for instance in the "sometimes being offered tenderness" scene, that felt to me like a moment that could have been more thoroughly arrived at as something that fundamentally changed the terms of little dog & trevor's relationship and their understanding of their place in their own & each other's lives. but instead it is so distilled. which is interesting. in a lot of other ways obviously it doesnt seem like theres a ton of disruption as with the dramatization of violence, drugs, intense angst etc and the very knowing floaty tone of the narration. which i did not appreciate as much.

last big point had to do with like, maturity of voice. to me this still seemed absolutely like . well a debut novel. an early work. i've read some of night sky with exit wounds and i have some familiarity otherwise with vuong but i don't think i've read anything more recent than gorgeous. i really like ocean vuong in interviews and i think he's immensely quotable which is a gift some writers have whether due to insight & reflection or just composure both of which are very impressive. vuong i think has both. however i think the impression i got over and over in gorgeous was that his voice either hasn't fully developed or he's still coming to terms with how to use it in practice. i think about this a lot, like what the metric is for a "mature" and "developed" individual voice vision style whatever in writing. basically it's when your conviction matches the level of your ambition & i did not see true conviction here. which is not a bad thing in and of itself in a novel of fragmentation disorientation and resistance. but amid the confusion and the immense efforts of the narrator to preserve recollect and reassemble there are still these grand poetic gestures of generalization summary and aphorism. once again "sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that we've been ruined" (one of the most successful attempts at generalization i think).

also he says somewhere in an interview that he's working against legibility which i'm not entirely sure he does. he mentions genre bending and the inclusion of for instance butterfly and opioid trivia, he mentions nonlinearity. all of this though is honestly more or less digestible, and the novel is actually fairly rigidly structured. Especially with the amount of im gonna call them tropes maybe cliches. that dictate the general plot progression. quite legible. & i feel even stronger abt that now that i realize those actually were conscious authorial placements and not like, real life experiences that just happened to follow a highly exaggerated narrative arc. which genuinely confused me when i was reading i thought he had to be at least embellishing. and he was

[beevean]

Huh, interesting. He does also say that things could very easily change "10 issues from now," and that video is from 3 years ago, so it may not reflect Sonic Team's current vision. Also from that clip, it sounds like the games have more freedom to change the status quo of the characters than a licensed comic adaptation, and any changes would have to be reflected in the comics. Sega and Sonic Team are also wildly inconsistent (as you pointed out,) which I imagine would be annoying for any writer.

3 years ago was 2019, not that long ago, especially since the series was almost dormant from 2017 to 2022 - not much to change there

Yeah, he did say that the comics are subjected to the games' canon. And, well, that's the bare minimum :P IDW didn't start as a complete spinoff like Boom, it was meant to continue from Forces, so yes it was born almost as a "temporary" canon until the next game dropped. The moment it was decided IDW was set in the games' canon, Flynn had to play by the games' rules.

The thing is that I can't really comment on Flynn saying "oh we have to respect the game's whims" because IDW only existed in a context of no games so far. From 2018 until today, we only got Team Sonic Racing (which was a fairly minor game with a simple story and clearly had no impact on IDW), Sonic Colors Ultimate (a remake) and Sonic Origins (a collection). Frontiers will be the first major game since Forces... but it will still be influenced by Flynn, so I seriously doubt that something would happen that will force him to change the IDW canon. My point is... will we ever see if Flynn will really stay by his words? ALso because, in a far more recent podcast, he said "this is how Sonic is, by SEGA, and this is me basically spelling it out for anyone who hasn't quite figured it out by this point", and well, he sounds very confident that he's writing the original Sonic, not just an interpretation that might change eventually.

Sonic Team are also wildly inconsistent (as you pointed out,) which I imagine would be annoying for any writer.

Sonic might change from writer to writer, like going from being hyperactive in ShTH to being emotionless in '06 (that portrayal is indefensible, but I don't know where bad writing ends and rushed development begins) but there are some core concepts that have always been consistent and that make Sonic recognizeable as Sonic, from Sonic Adventure to Sonic Forces. If you're interested, there are at least two posts I can link that argument that IDW Sonic is extremely OOC once you get past his superficial traits. Let's just say that I very much do not agree with his assessment that IDW Sonic is SEGA Sonic, and it has nothing to do with Sonic Team :P

Flynn also apparently struggles to write Shadow, which is why he stopped including him (don't have proof of this though, if someone else has it I'd appreciate it!), which makes me wonder... is it really this hard to write Sonic characters? Especially for someone who is praised for working in the franchise for 15 years?

[alannah-corvaine]

So I'm reading fanfiction again (it's been a while) while in the process of developing my Dragon Age OCs as I play through the games, and I'm thinking a lot about both character development and writer development.

I started writing and posting fanfiction was I was 14 or 15 and picked it up again heavily in my early to mid 20s. I'm almost 33 now, and I find it fascinating to see how what I look for in characters has changed so much.

Full disclosure, I still dick around with ff.net instead of AO3 because that's where I started and I can't bring myself to leave yet. I don't know if there's an age demographic difference between the two.

But what I'm getting at is that it's suddenly so easy to spot the younger writers. The painfully shy and awkward and insecure OCs are a dead giveaway, the relationships are rushed instead of growing organically, and I recognize it because that's what I used to write too. I don't think it's a bad thing, we write what we know and it helps us work through it, ya'll know how it goes.

But we change, and I guess I'm just realizing I've changed too. I don't write those OCs anymore because I'm older and far more sure of myself and who I am, and now my characters reflect that too.

Alannah was one of those characters.

Anyone that's been following me for a very longass time might remember that when I was first started writing her, she was that shy awkward girl with crippling insecurities who could barely function in society. Eight years on, she has changed so much, so much that she no longer resembles my original vision for her, though the fundamental building blocks of her are still the same.

She changed because I changed, and even though she was never meant to be a self-insert, there's so much of me in her that it's hard for me to argue that she hasn't been a vehicle for me to deal with my own shit, even as she's meant to have her own story. And really, is that not the same thing I was doing when I was 14?

I'm looking at the OCs I'm creating now versus Alannah at her starting point and the difference nearly 10 years makes is...idk, it's a lot. Alannah isn't my oldest OC, but she is my longest running, and I think she'll always be the most special because she's changed and grown with me.

tl;dr: growing up is wild, ya'll.