#i did my first at level zero and got a ton of garbage

[transmasc-wizard]

how to plot if you hate plotting but need to/want to try, from a pantser-turned-plotter

the first thing to know: the internet likes to say writers are split into 2 camps: plotters, who outline every detail, and pantsers, who don't know anything but their MC's name (if that) before they get writing. You're one or the other, and you HATE doing what the other does.

This is, and i say this with complete certainty, bull.

Everyone is somewhere between. I've never come across a single writer who knew what every last little sentence would do, nor a writer who didn't at least daydream about what will happen next. Additionally, some people do more/less plotting for different WIPs.

I will admit different people SHOULD outline differently based on what they need. So how do you tell? And how do you DO it?

With Nico's Plotting Levels, of course! My "plotting levels" are amounts of outlining you do; you start at 1, then go to 2, then 3, 4, etc and stop whenever you're comfortable. So what are they, specifically?

Level 0: Train Tracks. This is outlining for whoever doesn't know their whole plot, and is actually applied while writing. Basically, you do the typical "pantser thing" and write a chapter or 2 not knowing WTF you're doing. Then you stop for the day... and daydream. You think about what might happen next, what you'll do to this character or that character. Even if you're a panster, you've probably done this--i know i used to. You're comfortable with that, you've done it before? Ok, next level.

Level 1: Barest Bones. This is where you know the absolute basics: at least 1 setting, the beginning, maybe the middle, probably the end, and your characters. know your freaking MCs. You don't have to fill out a huge questionnaire; im a hardcore plotter and NEVER have. Just know their motivation (escape, love, revenge), biggest fear (the dark, fire, dying), best trait (intelligent, compassionate, charismatic), and worst trait (selfish, paranoid, cruel). Everything else will slowly follow. (You then do Train Tracks.)

Level 2: Tentpole. You've done Barest Bones; you want to go further. So you figure out your main 3 events of each part/act. It's basically up to you to decide what those are! It doesn't have to be your typical tentpoles. (One of my Events barely influenced the plot, but strengthened the characters' relationships). You also learn some of your character's secondary traits (polite, shy, book-nerd, etc), some of their insecurities (looks, brains, athleticism) and maybe what they look like. ('Train Track' for the places between the story 'Tentpoles'.)

Level 3: Notecard. You can do it after levels 1 and 2, or skip 2 and go from 1. From here on out, "Train Tracking" will be minimal. For Notecard outlining, you take notecards (or sticky notes, or whatever) and write a sentence or two on each of them. Each card can represent a chapter or a scene, and once you're done, you'll have a general understanding of your plot! (This is where a lot of "plansters"--half-plotter half-pansters--stop.) This can also be done with bullet points. When it is, i call it Bullet Points (Basic), because 4 is...

Level 4: Bullet Points (Advanced). For this, you bullet point about five to fifteen sentences per scene. For length reference, i did this for my April 2021 project and ended with a 7k outline for a 90k book. For my current NaNo project im aiming for a 5k outline (and a 70k 1st draft). With this process, you also learn your characters' other fears, life code, what makes them BREAK their life code, their relationships with the other characters, their hobbies, 80-90% of their traits, and most info over their character arcs.

(You also typically do a LOT of worldbuilding by this level, though i actually consider world and plot separate and think you can have a VERY built world and a VERY basic outline, or vice versa.)

~~~

One note: If you're typically a pantser, but need to outline for whatever reason (or just want to try), i suggest only going up to levels 2 or 3 for your first try. Level 4 will be very overwhelming if you're used to just being level 1 or even level 0. However, if you're outlining because you recently realized you hate pantsing and need to plot thuroughly--which is what happened to me--and think level 4 is best, definitely go for it!

Another note: i've realized i don't actually say *how* to come up with plot. Basically: think about your story a lot, more for each level you plan on plotting to. Think while you run, lie around, draw. Think while you're watching TV and wondering how a plot point would have worked differently. Just think up a bunch of disconnected scenes and snippets, regardless of how odd they are; actually writing your outline is when you figure out where they go, and what you truly want to keep!

And a final note: this is, of course, my way of looking at plotting. If you want to do something else--skeleton, snowflake, whatever--and completely throw my advice out the window? I genuinely LOVE that. I think one of the greatest things about a community like writeblr is that you have SO MANY PEOPLE doing SO MANY THINGS and we're all sharing and learning from each other, but we're all also different!! It makes me incredibly happy.

And if you do find something here that helps? I love that, too, and you're welcome to tell me about it!!

[pokemoncreepypasta]

Strangled Red

[STORY SOURCE]

There are tons of stories out there about hacked Pokémon games. Some of them really quite neat, such as the one about a version where you get a ghost as a starter.

Some are ridiculous, silly stories about individuals dying after playing a game, or the game talking to them. God, don’t these writers know less is more when it comes to these stories? Ah well, I digress.

I grew interested in these hacked games that are apparently in any thrift store, on eBay, or handed out by homeless people to random passersby.

I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting these creepy people, I merely found this particular cartridge in a trash bin when the garbage truck backed into my neighbor’s dumpster.

I noticed the game and asked the trash man if I could take it, and he didn’t seem to mind. It was thrown away, after all. I of course checked with my neighbor to confirm if they actually didn’t want it, though they seemed perplexed, as if they’d never seen it in their life.

Their son made a grab for it, a little boy who saw the Charizard on the cover, crying out “Pokémon! I want, mommy!”, but his mother told him no, seeing as I found it. He didn’t even have a Game Boy anyway, he just liked Pokémon.

Thinking nothing more, I simply went home, looking at the cartridge’s sticker on the way.

Just a plain old Red Version, the sticker torn slightly across the Charizard’s neck, but that was expected with such an old game.

I had Blue Version as a kid, so I was a bit eager to see the, albeit minimal, differences Red Version had.

I was rather disappointed by what I saw when the title screen showed up.

“Pokémon: Strangled Red Version.”

Well damn it, it was a hack. Hacks were neat and all, but they had zero monetary value. The originals quite valuable by now, and I wanted to play Red anyway, not this crap. Oh well, it was free, might as well try it.

The name was odd, however. Strangled Red? That made no sense, not even in a morbid description of someone being asphyxiated, as people turn blue when choking, not red. Who knows, maybe there was a pair of these hacks and I just got the red one.

The more I thought about this though, the more interested I became. My initial disappointment turned into curiosity. I wanted to know what the creator had made, and I was going to note everything I saw.

The first oddity I noticed was the start screen had a Charizard next to the trainer instead of a Charmander. Also, the Pokémon never cycled through like the original versions did. It just stayed Charizard, even after five minutes of waiting.

Shrugging, I hit start, noticing there was no Charizard cry as I did, like there was supposed to be.

I saw there was a “Continue” option, so I figured I’d do what everyone did with used games and see what the previous owner had done.

“… No…”

I blinked in surprise. No? What do you mean, no? The game wouldn’t let me continue no matter what, though on the fourth attempt, I heard the Charizard cry. Quiet and barely audible, but there. Shrugging it off, I decided to just hit New Game, like I would have done after checking the old file anyway.

The screen cut to black for a while, no Prof. Oak, no starting theme, just nothing at all.

Eventually, the screen came back, showing a bedroom, two beds, two TVs, and a computer in the corner. My trainer sprite was the usual one, consistent with the original Red Version.

I was curious as to why it didn’t ask my name, though that was answered as I opened the pause menu, noticing my Trainer was named “Steven”. No, this isn’t my real name or some stupid crap like that. This game isn’t self-aware or haunted, at least not that I know of. It just had a name chosen already.

Curious, I saw he had the starter amount of money, no badges. He didn’t look like Red though, his hair was longer, almost reaching halfway down his back, Red’s usual smile replaced with a confident smirk. Honestly, I found this sprite much cooler than Red.

Next, I checked out his Pokémon. 

A single Charmander, level five, named “Miki”.

Nothing was odd about it… or should I say her, with the name and all. She had beginning Charmander stats, only knew Scratch and Tail Whip, basic stuff. The game seemed relatively normal.

Returning to the game, I walked about the room, noticing Steven’s long hair was present on the back of my trainer sprite when my back was turned to the camera. I didn’t recognize the house, but I descended the stairs to see more.

Downstairs was another trainer, who spoke to me the instant I came down.

“Mike: Ready yet?”

“Steven: Yeah.”

I assumed this “Mike” was my rival, pre-decided for me, a replacement of Blue most likely, though I thought back to the bedroom having two beds, realizing they weren’t just rivals, they were brothers.

They talked back and forth, basic Pokémon dialogue. Become a Pokémaster, catch ‘em all, stuff like that, before having a little argument over which is better, Charmander or Squirtle.

Which of course led to the introduction battle, like the one vs. Blue in the lab.

Simple enough, Scratch, Tackle, Scratch, Tackle, 'til I won purely for having the first turn.

I took note of how much better Steven’s sprite looked in combat than Red’s, a different pose, his hair looking like it was blowing in the wind, a brief, minor upgrade, but still, much nicer.

I left the house after some more banter with my “brother”, stepping out to the Pallet Town theme.

Going to the east, I found this was indeed Pallet Town, the house was simply on the outskirts to the west. I noted there was no mysterious grassy field like in normal Pallet Town.

Wandering about, I decided to check in on Red’s home.

His mother was inside and when I talked to her, she commented on how handsome Steven looked, hoping her son would look up to him as a role-model for when he became a trainer himself next year, which of course led me to realize this game took place a year before the original Pokémon.

Red was even upstairs, playing the SNES in his room, commenting, “I’m gonna be the best too, when it’s my turn!”

I was starting to like this hack. It was interesting, a completely new adventure, a different character. Hell, Steven even seemed to have a history with the people in his town, a reputation, a personality beyond a silent protagonist. The people in town talked to him as a person, making conversation, not just spouting tutorial crap.

Even Blue’s sister had new dialogue.

They seemed to be in a relationship too, as the dialogue ended with a kiss and a heart over her head.

Prof. Oak simply wished me well, giving me a Pokédex to aid my adventure. He wasn’t giving it to me to be the reason behind the adventure like every other Pokémon game out there. He gave it to me out of kindness, something to help me on my way, a gift. I was liking this more and more with each second. The game seemed to have an actual story now! I was somebody, not just a cookie-cutter protagonist anyone could be, not some blank sheet that could be replaced without notice.

The story was different, though the actual game play remained unchanged. I went north like I was supposed to, went from town to town, collected badges, received the praise of the leaders. Steven’s fame even seemed to spread, as some NPCs would talk like they knew him.

I used Miki for every battle, and she was growing surprisingly fast. She handled Brock with ease, even pounded Misty with no trouble at all. She wasn’t as adversely effected by super-effective attacks as others, did more damage than a regular Charmander, she was a veritable powerhouse!

She even became a Charizard at the mere level of twenty-five, not bad at all I must say.

Things started to get weird though as soon as I reached Lavender Town. I know, I know, Lavender Town is the focus behind every creepy story and the like, but it was the only place that was noticeably different. There was no Team Rocket invasion, which I found odd, though I did remember this was a year in the past, so the invasion wouldn’t occur until Red’s time. I tried to enter Pokémon tower, aiming to get a Gastly, but that’s when it got odd.

“Steven: I have no reason to be here…”

Steven wouldn’t go into Pokémon Tower no matter what I did. This was weird. I mean, hell, there are a million places in Kanto you really have no need to be. Little random houses with nothing but children NPCs, for example.

Why was it here that Steven wouldn’t enter?

With a shrug, I figured I wouldn’t need a Gastly, seeing as Miki could handle anything, so I simply went on my way, with Lavender Town serving no purpose other than a passageway with a Poké Center.

The game progressed normally from there, the remaining gyms fell and eventually I made my way to the Elite Four and defeated them.

As with Blue, my “brother” Mike was there before me, initiating the championship battle, which Miki swept with ease.

The aftermath of the battle was quite pleasant, none of the tension that was present between Red and Blue at the end of their match. The brothers congratulated each other on their progress and shook hands, before the screen went white. No Hall of Fame, nor any credits.

When the screen came back, it was at the house again, the two brothers sitting at the computer and conversing with each other.

“Steven: I don’t want to…”

“Mike: Come on, I just gotta borrow her to finish the Pokédex.”

“The entry won’t register unless she recognizes me as master.”

“Steven: But she’s my Miki…”

“Mike: I promise I’ll give her back! Come on, please?”

I was a bit perplexed, so I hit No to be cautious.

“Mike: Come on, please?”

No.

“Mike: Come on, please?”

I realized this would simply continue to loop until I hit yes, so I did, just to see what would happen.

“Mike: Alright!”

“This will just take a sec, then we’ll both be Pokémasters!”

“Steven: ……..”

The screen changed to the animation shown when two people trade Pokémon, which I found a bit weird, seeing as I was solo, but whatever, this was what was apparently supposed to happen.

Miki went first, and I watched lazily as she began to travel down the trading tube.

SNAP!

That made me jump, the sudden noise resonating in my silent bedroom, loud due to the volume being way up. Looking at the screen, I noticed the game had seemed to freeze, Miki still in mid-trade, but the game wasn’t doing anything.

With a sigh, I just turned off the game, wondering when my last save was.

When the game turned back on, I stared for a moment at the start screen, there was no Charizard next to the trainer.

Upon pressing start, I saw the New Game option was absent, leaving only Continue. This was… strange to say the least, so I selected it, the game staring without even showing my stats as usual. My jaw dropped at what I was greeted with.

“ONE YEAR LATER”

The Lavender Town theme came first, playing its normal way, the screen slowly fading in from blackness.

Steven was in the Pokémon Tower, which made the music even stranger, seeing as the tower had its own theme. He was standing in front of a tombstone, not doing anything. Wondering what was going on, I pressed A.

“Steven: …”

Confused, I tried walking, realizing I was indeed in control at the moment. I brought up the pause menu and checked my party.

Miki was gone. Not just Miki, all Pokémon. He had nothing.

The Pokédex was absent from the menu, his bag was empty. Honestly concerned now, I checked his trainer card.

He had no money. He had no badges. His play time was 8795 hours, which was impossible as I had only 30 logged in before. But that wasn’t the strangest part. His picture, the picture of the handsome, confident young trainer was… different. His eyes were blank, his face turned slightly down, that smirk of his was gone, replaced by a lack of any expression at all. That long hair of his, before in a perfect perm, was now messy and unkempt.

I couldn’t look at him any more.

Closing the menu, I went to move out of the tower, but with every step I took away from the tombstone, the screen flickered, like it did when a Pokémon was poisoned.

Gulping, I brought up the trainer card again. His picture was getting worse.

Every step I took, he hung his head more and more, his shoulder slumped, he bent over.

By the time I had exited the tower, he was on his knees, hands to his face, hair draped across him.

I had guessed already what was going on, but this clinched it. I began to put some things together in my mind. I had always wondered why there was no champion in the original games besides your rival. Why is it you, the protagonist, had to beat your rival, when he just waltzed in, no previous champion to challenge?

Then, it struck me. The answer was right here. The previous champion gave up.

His precious Miki was apparently dead, and with her, so died part of him. His Pokédex, the other Pokémon, his badges, his fame, all of it, he threw it away. In that year, the year that I missed, the year where all those hours came from. I even did the math, there are 8765 hours in a year, add that to my 30 from before and it matched up.

Even so, the game kept going. This should have been an ending, I thought. I mean, what else was there to do? I had no Pokédex, no Pokémon, not anything. What was I supposed to be doing? I talked to everyone in the town, but they all said similar things.

“Are you OK?”

“Still mourning, I see…”

“Everything will be alright…”

“Please… Is there anything we can do?”

Steven never replied to them, and they all simply said the same things over and over. I couldn’t put the game down now, this was all so strange.

Curious, I headed off into the tall grass, and eventually got into a battle with a Rattata. No Pokémon was sent out, just Steven’s sprite. I was wondering how I’d battle.

”Wild RATTATA left you be.”

The battle ended without anything happening. This was certainly interesting, and it happened with every Pokémon I encountered.

“Wild PIDGEY ignored you.”

“Wild PONYTA wandered off.”

The music never changed either. No matter where I went, Lavender Town came from the speakers, following me, sometimes slowed down slightly, sometimes not. I searched everywhere, every town, talked to everybody, wondering just what the hell I needed to do.

My frustration was mixing with the depressing atmosphere of all this, making the experience altogether unnerving and uncomfortable, but I couldn’t tear myself away.

I was starting to get a bit angry, though. Nobody telling me anything besides giving me their condolences and trying to give me items like LEMONADE or COFFEE, each met with:

“Steven: … No…”

I slapped myself for idiocy, suddenly realizing how the likely answer was right in front of me.

Pallet Town, of course!

It took a long time, having to walk, no Pokémon to fly with, no bicycle to ride, and Steven only seemed to move half the regular movement speed, but when I went there, it wasn’t much different.

I first tried talking to Prof. Oak.

“These things happen…”

“You were just unlucky.”

Next I tried Blue’s sister.

“Please… Don’t leave home again…”

Red’s mom wouldn’t even talk to me at all.

With nowhere else in mind to go, I walked to the west, finding the house from the beginning, which I had never entered since leaving Pallet Town.

Inside was Mike, but talking to him was just as useless.

“Mike: I’m so sorry…”

I pondered for a moment if this really was the ending, Steven doomed to do nothing but roam Kanto in misery, haunted by the memories, forced to listen to everyone’s concerns about him.

As a last ditch effort to do anything, I went to the bedroom and walked over to the bed.

“Steven: I’m going to sleep…”

The screen faded to black for a moment, but then slowly faded back in, the world having a dark tint to it, Mike’s sprite laying in the other bed, I assumed this meant it was night.

“Steven: I’m going to do it…”

Do what? Again, I had no idea, tried inspecting everything in the room, nothing happened. As soon as I left the house, another dialogue.

“Steven: IT can bring her back…”

“IT can do anything…”

What in the hell was IT? Something that could do anything… I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out. Wandering about, I tried to leave Pallet Town the usual way.

“Steven: Not that way.”

He wouldn’t go any further, I tried the homes.

“Steven: Screw them…”

I quirked my eyebrow at that, forgetting for a moment this was not a real Pokémon game. The vulgarity just took me off guard.

I continued to look around, but there was nowhere I could go.

But then I accidentally stepped on the ocean, and Steven walked right in, with only the upper half of his sprite visible, like the swimmers you encounter in the Cerulean Gym. I didn’t know he could swim…

“Steven: The missing one…”

Missing one? I paused for a moment, no, he couldn’t possibly mean… that. I hadn’t tried the MissingNo. trick on this hack yet, but it just fit too well. That had to be what he meant.

I “surfed” all the way towards Cinnabar. I began to feel something was off, more so than this already was. Silence. The Lavender Town theme had stopped, there was no noise at all, nor were there any Pokémon.

I just kept going, finding Cinnabar and surfing up and down the east coast, lo and behold.

“Wild MISSINGNO. appeared!”

“Steven: Mine…”

“Wild MISSINGNO. was caught!”

What the hell? Steven didn’t do anything. He just commanded that atrocity of broken data to join him, no, become his possession, and it did. I was getting more and more disturbed by this all.

Checking the start menu, I saw MissingNo. was not in my party, but instead an item, making things even stranger.

I checked the trainer card as well. Steven has his back to me, his long hair draped behind him, his hands in his pockets, nothing else.

Remembering what he said at the start of this night, I realized what I had to do… I surfed to land and made my way northeast to, where else, Lavender Town.

Along the way, I noticed all the trainers, oddly still out at this hour, wouldn’t look at Steven. All of them turned when he passed, even those that were normally static.

I tried talking to one of the officers in the guard-house type buildings.

“Just go…”

They all said the same thing, though one sent chills down my spine.

“Sometimes dead is best.”

My hands were sweating by this point, Steven was about to try the impossible, something some would see as a crime against nature, which many of these people shared that opinion. I steeled myself. It was just a game, and I was going to complete it.

It took an eternity to reach Pokémon Tower, but I got there eventually, taking a deep breath and heading toward the tombstone.

I remembered which one.

The image of Steven standing before it was burned into my mind, after all.

First, I tried inspecting it.

“Steven: Miki…”

Nothing happened.

With a gulp, I opened the menu and selected MissingNo. from the bag.

“OAK: Steven, don’t use it!”

I was reminded of when Prof. Oak would magically tell you that you couldn’t use a Key Item somewhere, like when using the bicycle in a building, though the message this time was different. Even worse, Steven responded to it.

“Steven: In a world that cheated me, why should I play fair…?”

“Steven used "It”!“

"……………………… ………………………”

“Steven obtained #’M#!”

What in God’s name did I obtain?

I couldn’t tell you, because the game took away my control. Without my input, Steven began to leave the tower on his own, walking single step by single step. The Lavender Town theme started again as he left the tower and began his excruciatingly slow journey against my will.

Every time he crossed one of the borders where the music would change, it got progressively slower, more and more disturbing, by the time he reached Cerulean City, it was a demonic rumbling. I just stared, watching him, trying to guess where he was going, but it was getting more and more obvious.

He was heading to Pallet Town.

The music had all but stopped when he got there, playing single note by single note.

He went exactly where I had guessed, right to his own house, inside, and up the stairs.

At this point, there was no music.

Steven moved step by step, stopping at his brother’s bed, turning to face him. At first, I though the game froze. He didn’t do anything, simply stood there, and I couldn’t move him.

I did however, find out I could open the pause menu. I was terrified to look, but I couldn’t stop myself. I selected his trainer card.

There was a low growl noise, like a distorted Pokémon cry. Steven was looking at me again, directly at the screen. He was hunched over, his bangs obscuring his face, his hair was wild and feathered out.

Between his bangs, there wasn’t even a face at all, just black, two red eyes looking straight forward, a white grin contrasting with the darkness. That wasn’t all.

His name was now S!3v3n.

I couldn’t look away, my eyes glued to his, not breaking contact for some time. My vision was getting blurry until I couldn’t see very well, my face grew wet. I was crying, like a baby.

There was nothing I could do to hold back the tears. I was with this boy from the start, I built him up to greatness, and was then forced to watch his decline after a tragic accident, and now… He was this. This thing, this abomination.

I watched him go insane.

Halting my tears, wiping my eyes, I closed out of the trainer card and tried to save the game, wanting to just quit. The game informed me this was impossible.

“Nothing can be saved now.”

The pause menu wouldn’t close no matter what I did, so with no other option, I checked the bag, nothing happened.

I checked Pokémon, and there was one. A single sprite met me, it had zero HP, its status: DED, its name #’M#.

I selected it, and I was greeted with four options.

>STATS “It’s her…”

>SWITCH “Never.”

>CANCEL “…No…”

>STRANGLE

My fingers shaking, I selected STRANGLE, and the menu closed, showing Steven in the room again.

“S!3v3n: Goodbye…”

SNAP!

The game shut itself off. I was more dumbfounded than frightened.

In a bit of shock, I turned it back on, the title screen showing the manic S!3v3n and a horribly glitched Charizard. I pressed start, then Continue.

All I saw was a zoomed out view of Pallet Town, showing Steven’s home to the west, tall grass surrounding it, and those unmovable stones blocking it from the rest of the town.

The image was completely static. No music, no movement, before fading to white, going back to the title screen.

It was as it had been when I first popped it in. A trainer and a Charizard. I attempted to hit Continue.

“… No…”

[coolgreatwebsite]

Cool Games I Finished In 2020 (In No Real Order)

Oh, hey! Right! I have a website! I’m like a week late on writing this, but what’s a week on top of an entire year of not writing, right? 2020 was... well, we all know what 2020 was. For me personally, it was simultaneously the best and worst year of my life. The worst in both ways you can probably assume and ways you definitely can’t (neither of which I’ll be getting into), and the best in ways I absolutely never would have guessed. That uncertain job I mentioned last year got very suddenly much more certain, at a much bigger company, for a much larger amount of money. That allowed me to get my own place, making my weird living situation much less weird. Still haven’t gotten the majority of my belongings off of the east coast, but if the entire world wasn’t currently fucked up by a global pandemic I’d have sorted all that out too. What I’m saying is that, for the third year in a row, my life has been a complete whirlwind that has left me very little time to get comfortable with any aspect of it. But I did manage to play more video games than I did last year! Which is perfect, because it’s once again time for another one of these. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2020.

Astro’s Playroom (PlayStation 5, 2020)

My one word description of Astro's Playroom is "delightful". It's just an absolute goddamn delight. A total surprise too! Included with every PlayStation 5, Astro's Playroom is, in my opinion, one of the best pack-in games of all time.

First off, it's an incredible tech demo for the PS5's new DualSense controller. It was easy to brush off Sony's talk about the controller's haptic feedback and triggers as some Nintendo-style HD Rumble bullshit, but it really is incredibly cool once you get your hands on it. The game is obviously more than a tech demo though, or else it wouldn't be on here. It also just so happens to be an extremely solid and fun platformer on top of that. Astro controls exceptionally well and the levels are all well-designed and fun, even the gimmick vehicle ones designed to show off different features of the controller. It also has an oddly compelling speedrun mode, made all the more compelling by the PS5 notifying you when your friends beat your times and the ability to load into it within two seconds from anywhere on the console. But the biggest thing for me and, call me a mark, because I am, is that the game is an honestly incredible love letter to PlayStation history.

For the first time ever, Sony has pulled off a nostalgia piece without it ending up as embarrassing garbage in the vein of PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. There's a Nintendo-like joyful reverence for all things PlayStation oozing out of every single corner of this game. There are so many nods and references and gags for literally every PlayStation thing of note throughout the the last 25 years, and then on top of that there's a whole heap more for the things that AREN'T of note that only hyperdorks like me would get! A sly reference to the ill-fated boomerang controller? Yep. A goof on the fat PS3's Spider-Man font? You betcha. A trophy you can earn by repeatedly punching a Sony Interactive Entertainment sign until it breaks and reveals the Sony Computer Entertainment sign it was slapped on top of? Yeah buddy. It's deep cuts all the way down, even up until the final boss which had me grinning like a total dipshit the entire time. The game is endlessly, effortlessly charming.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo Switch, 2020)

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the perfect game at the perfect time. That doesn't mean it's a perfect game, I actually have some issues with it, but it could not have released at a better time than when it did. It came out at the very very beginning of everyone going into lockdown due to the pandemic, and it was the biggest game in the world for a couple of months as a result. I played like 300 hours and that pales in comparison to the amount of time many others put into it.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the most different Animal Crossing game there's ever been, and I'm of two minds on it. Like, I loved the game, I played a ton of it, but it's lacking so much of the stuff that made me love Animal Crossing in the first place. The series has been slowly trending in this direction for a bit now, but it's not really a game that happens around you anymore. It's all about total player control. You select where everything goes, you customize every detail of everything to your liking, hell, you can even terraform the landmass to be exactly what you want. Your neighbors take a backseat in focus and end up as little more than decorations with limited dialogue and next to no quests associated with them. Series staples like Gyroids are missing in action. Facilities and services that have been around since Wild World aren't implemented. It's similar to past Animal Crossing games in a lot of ways, but on the whole it feels like a different thing.

But like I said, two minds. New Horizons strays from what I truly want from an Animal Crossing game, but I can't deny that the game as it is is a hell of a lot of fun. There's SO much you can do and SO many options, it's super addictive. Plus it implemented my long-requested feature of letting you effortlessly send mail to friends online! Too bad the actual online play is as cumbersome as ever.

In conclusion, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a land of contrasts. I'm kidding. It's good, but definitely missing something in a way where I can understand some people being disappointed in it. I had a ton of fun though, and I'm probably going to get back into it later in 2021.

Trials of Mana (Nintendo Switch, 2019)

Late in 2019, with the physical release of Collection of Mana for the Switch, I decided I was going to play through each game on it for the first time and finally find out what this whole Mana thing was about. I went into Final Fantasy Adventure (the first game in the Mana series, because every RPG had to be Final Fantasy back then) with zero expectations and found a totally serviceable little Zelda-like with light RPG elements. I enjoyed my time with it. I went into Secret of Mana with the expectation of it being a beloved classic and found the worst game I beat that year, hands down. That game fucking sucks. I get why it made an impression on people at the time, but it's just so so SO awful to play. Needless to say I was pretty disappointed. Honestly, I would have been disappointed even if I hadn't heard it was one of "the best games" for so long. It would have been a disappointing follow-up to Final Fantasy Adventure, a game that in and of itself isn't anything incredible. Secret of Mana is just that rotten.

I braced myself for more disappointment when (after a much needed vacation from the series) I started up Trials of Mana. This game had a reputation too, as a long-lost classic that never made it stateside. One of the best games on the Super Nintendo, criminally never released for western audiences! Like Secret of Mana before it, I'd heard nothing but effusive praise. Unlike Secret of Mana, however, I was very pleased to find out that Trials of Mana mostly lives up to the hype. From a gameplay standpoint, Trials is an improvement on Secret in almost every single way. It's not perfect. The menus are still kinda clunky, animations for things like magic and items are still frequently disruptive. But the main thing is it actually plays like a sensible video game designed by humans with brains. Attacking is responsive! Hitboxes aren't complete nonsense! You don't constantly get stunlocked to death! There are more answers to combat than casting the same spell for five straight minutes to kill your enemies before they get a chance to move! It's great!

On top of being an enjoyable video game to actually play, the presentation is top notch. Secret of Mana could be a pretty game with decent music in some spots, but Trials is consistently gorgeous and the soundtrack is across the board great instead of randomly having songs that sound like clown vomit. And while Trials of Mana doesn't have the deepest story in the world, it manages to avoid being completely paper-thin like Secret. The story actually kind of has a reason for being a bit straightforward, and the reason is that it has a really cool system where you pick your three playable characters from a pool of six. Each character has their own goals and storyline, some of which line up with other potential party members, some of which don't, and you'll even run into the characters you didn't choose as NPCs along the way. This and the relatively brisk pace of the game make it highly replayable.

I'm really glad that Trials of Mana made it over here in an official capacity, even if it was like 25 years late. It's as good as I expected Secret of Mana to be and singlehandedly saved my interest in seeing any more of the series. I'm aware the quality of what came after is very spotty, but I'll get to the rest eventually!

Final Fantasy VII Remake (PlayStation 4, 2020)

They (almost) did it. They (basically) pulled it off. They remade (a chunk of) Final Fantasy VII and (for the most part) didn't fuck it up. Ok, funny parentheticals aside, Final Fantasy VII Remake is astoundingly good coming off of over two decades of just absolutely dreadful post-FF7 sequels, side games, and movies.

Final Fantasy VII has been historically misremembered as this kind of miserable, angsty, brooding thing, both by fans and by the company that made it. FF7-branded media after FF7 itself is a minefield of changed personalities, embarrassing original characters, and monumentally lame stories. Final Fantasy VII Remake is the first post-FF7 anything that actually remembers the characters, setting, and plot of Final Fantasy VII and what made them memorable and special to people in the first place. Which isn't to say it's a slavish recreation! There's a ton of changes and additions, and I actually like almost all of them! Except for some really big stuff I'll touch on in a bit!

The combat in Final Fantasy VII Remake is great. I was super skeptical about it when the game was first announced, but they actually managed to make the blend of real-time action and turn-based RPG menuing fun and engaging. The characters all play super differently from each other too, which is a huge and welcome difference from the original game. The Materia system fits like a glove in this revamped combat system as well. The remixed music is good as hell, and the visuals are beautiful (outside of a couple of very specific spots that I'm kinda of surprised they haven't fixed in a patch yet). It's a well-executed package all around.

But alas, as always, there are negatives. For starters, this is only part one of the overall Final Fantasy VII Remake project. It goes up to the party leaving Midgar which, as you may or may not recall, is the first six hours of the original game. They compensated for this by fleshing the hell out of the Midgar section the game, ballooning the overall playtime to total of about 30-ish hours. The game feeling padded is a common complaint but for what it's worth, I didn't really feel it until the unnecessarily long final dungeon, There's also the previously mentioned and funny parenthetical'd changes and additions I don't like.

This is big time spoilers for this game so if you don't want that jump ahead to the next game on the list. The Whispers suck ass. Final Fantasy VII Remake should have been brave enough to be different without having to constantly derail everything in the most ham-fisted and intrusive way possible. You can have Jessie twist her ankle without making a spooky plot ghost trip her. I don't want to fight the physical manifestation of the game everyone thought they were getting as an end boss. If you're not doing a straight remake, that's fine, but have the fucking guts to stand by your artistic decisions without feeling the need to invent the lamest deus ex machina I've ever fucking seen. The last couple of hours of this game are 100% about the Whispers and are awful for it. It's a true testament to the strength of the rest of Final Fantasy VII Remake that this aspect didn't completely sour me on it. I can only hope that they stay dead and gone for good in the games yet to come and the remake can be different while standing on its own two feet.

I truly cannot wait for the next entry in the Final Fantasy VII Remake project. I'm excited for Final Fantasy VII in a way I haven't been since the late 90s. I have a bit of trepidation that they could royally screw it up. I mean, they already got kinda close, as I said in my last paragraph. But they got so much right in this entry that, for the first time in decades, I'm willing to believe in Square Enix when it comes to Final Fantasy VII.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (PlayStation 4, 2020)

My one word description of 13 Sentinels is "fucking crazy". I realize that's two words, but shut up. A bizarre hybrid of visual novel, adventure game, and strategy RPG, 13 Sentinels not only makes that work, but makes it work incredibly well. 

The story is fucking bonkers. It's told entirely non-linearly and is purposefully dense and confusing, but it does an amazing job of hooking you with a cast of likable characters and some impressively well-paced twists, made all the more impressive by the fact that you can tackle the story in basically whatever order you want. I'll say it again for those in the back, the story is Fucking Bonkers. Wherever you think it's going, it's not going. Where it is going is PLACES. Seriously, if you want a wild goddamn ride, this is the game for you. The presentation is also stunning. It's a drop dead gorgeous game with a really nice soundtrack. Easily Vanillaware's best looking game, which is saying something seeing as looking good is Vanillaware's whole deal.

If I had to levy one criticism against the game, it's that the strategy RPG portion is just kind of ok. It's enjoyable enough, it doesn't get in the way and there's not too much of it, but once it starts introducing armored versions of previous enemy types it's kind of done doing anything different. It is really good at getting people to out themselves as having no idea what tower defense is as a genre though!

Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition (Nintendo Switch, 2018)

I haven't really historically been a "Musou Guy". Not to say I've actively disliked them, they're just not something I've seeked out very often or played very much of. Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition kinda turned me into a "Musou Guy" a little bit? It's good, surprisingly-less-mindless-than-you'd-think fun.

I actually super don't care about the Zelda branding. I think all the fanservice stuff is meh at best. What I do care about is that there's a ton of character variety and a metric shitload of content. There's so many different characters and weapons for those characters that all play differently from one another and SOOOOOO many levels to play. Like the story mode is, again, kinda meh, the real meat of the game is the Adventure mode and there's a ton of it. It's 8 different world maps, each based off a different Zelda game, with each square of the map containing a little mini-scenario with unique objectives and rewards. There has to be at least 1000 scenarios between all the maps. There's so much. And that's not even getting into some of the other side stuff like the challenge modes and the fairy raising. It's a crazy amount of game in this game.

And again, it's not as mindless as it'd seem. It's not really a game ABOUT destroying 5000 guys, it's an area control and resource management game where the 5000 guys are one of those resources. Knowing who to send where and when to fight who is way more important than pressing the XXX YYY XXX YYY on the more than one million troops.

I'd say that if you're even cursorily potentially maybe interested in a musou game, this is the one to try. And if you like it, it could literally be your forever game. A sequel came out recently too, and I'm looking forward to trying that out soon.

Phantasy Star Online 2 (Xbox One, 2020)

Phantasy Star Online 2 finally came stateside in the year 2020, eight years after its initial Japanese release and initial American cancellation. It's no Phantasy Star Online 1, but it is a really fun game in its own right provided you can find the willpower to break through its clunkiness and eight years of confusing poorly tutorialized free-to-play MMO cruft.

The main thing going for PSO2, and this is a major improvement from PSO1, is that the act of engaging in its combat is fun. The combat is just feels really really good. There's a bunch of different weapon types and classes, and once you find the ones that really click with you you're in for a good time, whether you're izuna dropping dudes with wire claws or literally doing air juggles and rainstorm from Devil May Cry with the dual machine guns.

The other stuff around that combat is weird. I generally like it, but it's weird. The story mode is one of the most bizarrely presented things I've ever seen. It apparently used to be something you'd seek out in the levels themselves, but presently it's just a list of scenes you pick from a menu and watch with next to no context until it makes you fight a boss sometimes. There's some weird moments in there that MIGHT have been cool if it were presented in literally any other way?

The systems and presentation are also way more... I dunno, pinball? Pachislot? In very stark contrast to how chill original Phantasy Star Online was, everything in PSO2 is designed in a way to maximize that flashy light bing bing wahoo you got ~*~RARE DROP CHANCE UP~*~  feeling. Which isn't to say I don't like flashy light bing bing wahoo, but it's a weird different thing.

Was it worth the wait? Yeah, sure! For me! This is another one that I played like 300 hours of! I haven't even seen half of it, I fell off right before Episode 4 released because it coincided with my move! I'm gonna go back and see all that shit! PSO2's fun! A different flavor of fun than the original, sure, but fun all the same. Another one that I'm glad finally made it over here.

Riichi Mahjong (A Table, 1924)

Holy shit I fucking did it I finally learned how to play Mahjong and it rules.

It started when I picked up Clubhouse Games for the Switch. I saw that it had Riichi Mahjong and something in my brain snapped. For whatever reason, I decided that this was the time I was going to rip the band-aid off and figure this shit out. It wasn't too dissimilar to the first time I decided to try eggs, but that's a different and much stupider story for a different time. I did the tutorial in Clubhouse Games, looked up some more basics and advice because the tutorial wasn't super amazing, and I kept playing while being aided by the game's nice helper features like the button that pulls up recommended hands. I kept playing and... sorta got it. I learned the basic rules, but none of the strategy. And then I stopped playing for a few months.

In that few months, for whatever reason, a decent amount of people I know had their brains snap the same way? Like a more-than-two amount of people I'm either friends with or following online also decided to learn Mahjong. I decided to get back on the horse and downloaded Mahjong Soul and I don't know whether it was perseverance or the power of anime babes, but this time I got it. I still refer to a sheet with all the hands and whether they work open or closed, and I'm by no means a master player, but I actually honest to god understand what I'm doing and it's an incredible feeling.

Mahjong has such a huge amount of what I like to call "Get That Ass" energy. It is the energy you feel when you get someone's ass. In Mahjong you are either constantly getting someone's ass or getting your ass gotten. Someone puts down the wrong tile and you fucking GET THEIR ASS DUDE! They're got!! They're a fucking idiot that put down the wrong thing and now you have their points!!! Or you draw what you need yourself and you're a brain genius all according to plan and everyone gives you points because you're so wise!!!! It's great!!!!!

Mahjong has long been one of those games where I'd say "I'll learn this someday" and never reeeeally actually try to learn, and I'm so glad I finally took the effort to because it's good as hell. And, truth be told, it wasn't THAT hard to learn? Like you can get to the point where I was where I didn't know the strategy fairly easily in my opinion, and once you do that It's just a matter of continuing to play to understand the rest. I highly recommended that you also go out and learn it if you similarly revel in getting that ass, it's so satisfying once you do.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon (PlayStation 4, 2020)

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio took a big gamble with Yakuza: Like a Dragon. After seven games (more if you take spinoffs and remakes into consideration) they decided to focus on a new main character and, even more unexpectedly, they decided to change things up by turning the series into a turn-based JRPG. Their gamble paid off in spades. This is easily in my top 3 favorite Yakuza games.

The JRPG gameplay is surprisingly solid. There's definite room for improvement, but they nailed a bunch of it right out of the gate. Some mechanics are a little janky and I wish the job system was more fleshed out or just worked more like Final Fantasy V's, but they nailed one of the most important things and made the battles brisk and fun. It's a great foundation, especially for a team that's never attempted anything like this, and it's way more fun than the combat's been in any of the previous Dragon Engine games. I can't wait to see them iterate on it.

Everything else is top fuckin' notch. The music is great, the side content is fully fleshed out in a way it hasn't been since before they switched to the Dragon Engine, and I love the characters and story so much. Yakuza has a new main character in Ichiban Kasuga, and he's my son and I love him. Kiryu was great, and I love him too, but he was a bit of a passive protagonist. Stuff happened around him and he mostly just stoically reacted to it. Ichi is a much more active lead and it's great. He's a big lovable dope, and his tendency to keep an upbeat attitude and eagerness to leap into action is such a breath of fresh air. And it's not only Ichiban, since this is an RPG you have a whole party of characters and they're all great! Having them with you at all times bantering with each other and reacting to things is another great change of narrative pace, too. 

Yakuza: Like a Dragon just straight up rules. As someone who has historically not been too much of a fan of the Dragon Engine games, it's simultaneously a refreshing new take on the series and a fantastic return to form. I can't wait for what comes next. Wherever Ichiban goes, I go.

Moon: Remix RPG Adventure (Nintendo Switch, 2020)

After 23 years of Japanese PS1 exclusivity, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure finally got an English release this year for Nintendo Switch. I'm glad it did, because Moon isn't just the very definition of A Sebmal Game. It's the Sebmal Game missing link. In addition to being just a great video game, it helped me make a mental throughline for a bunch of games I love and a large part of my taste in video games.

To keep a long story short (seriously, I have a much much longer version of this saved in my drafts that I'll maybe finish someday), Moon turned out to be not the JRPG I assumed it was, given the title and basic story pitch, but a secret prequel to a game I love named Chulip. Moon's developer, Love-de-Lic, was formed by a handful of ex-Squaresoft employees, many of which worked on an extremely formative game I love named Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. Love-de-Lic broke up in the year 2000 and its staff went on to form a bunch of different studios that ended up making a BUNCH of different games I love like Chibi-Robo, Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, Dandy Dungeon, and the aforementioned Chulip. These games, when you make the connection and line them up, all have a very distinct weirdness in common that makes perfect sense once you've realized many of the same people worked on them. Figuring this all out felt like snapping a piece of my brain back in place, and it was really crazy to come to understand exactly how much this studio that formed and disbanded decades before I'd even heard of them had impacted my tastes and, hell, my life.

So what is Moon, for those who don't innately understand what I mean by "a secret prequel to Chulip"? Moon is an adventure game where you explore a world with a day/night cycle, learn about that world's inhabitants, and eventually solve their problems. Think of it kind of like The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, but if the sidequests were the entirety of the focus with no Groundhog Day time reset mechanic and none of the Zelda stuff like combat and dungeons. You play as a young boy who, after a late night JRPG binge session, is sucked into the world of the game he was just playing. Everything is off from the way it was portrayed while the boy was playing the game, though. The hero he had previously controlled is actually a silent menace, raiding peoples' houses for treasure and slaughtering every innocent animal that crosses his path in an endless quest for EXP. The townspeople seem more concerned with problems in their day-to-day lives than the supposed world threatening crisis outlined in the game's intro. It's up to you as the boy to investigate this world's mysteries, help the townsfolk, mend the damage the hero has done, and eventually restore love to a loveless world.

Speaking of love, I fucking loved Moon. I loved the story, I loved the characters, I loved the music, I loved the way it looks (even though the Switch port is a little crusty in that basic emulator-y kinda way), I loved how constantly bizarre and surprising and funny it was. Like I said earlier, it's the very definition of a game made for me. It was essentially the progenitor of a long line of games made for me, and of games potentially made for me but I don't know yet because I haven't played them due to not understanding Japanese (UFO: A Day in the Life translation next please? Anyone from Onion Games reading this??). For as similar as Moon and Chulip are in their systems and pacing, I think I might actually like Moon better despite it coming earlier? It's not as full force maximum impact absurd as Chulip is, but it is a lot more playable and less obtuse once you get a grip on the time limit mechanic. You don't need a full strategy guide included in the instruction manual for Moon, and you don't need to exchange business cards with every single character to get information vital to finishing the game either.

I truly cannot recommend Moon enough if your taste in games ventures anywhere off the beaten path. Maybe this is a little conceited of me, but I assume if you're reading this article, let alone this far down into it, you relate to my video game opinions at least a little bit? You should play Moon. Everyone reading this sentence should play Moon. Moon: Remix RPG Adventure is my game of the year for the year 2020.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Death Stranding (PlayStation 4, 2019): Death Stranding, much like Metal Gear Solid V, was a game I enjoyed for the gameplay and not much else. The story, characters, and writing were a huge disappointment for me, but man if I didn't enjoy lugging those boxes around and setting up my hellish cross-continental goon summer camp lookin' zipline network. Mr. Driller Drill Land (Nintendo Switch, 2020): I am a known Mr. Driller Enjoyer, and I enjoyed this Mr. Driller. Originally released for the Gamecube, Mr. Driller Drill Land is another long-time Japanese exclusive that finally came stateside this year and it's packed with new and novel twists on the Mr. Driller format. It looks super sharp, the music's great (also the credits music is the most impossibly out of place and extra as hell shit in the world and it's hilarious), and it's just a good ass time. The main campaign is pretty damn short, but if you're a post-game content kinda guy it has that and it's all super hard. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 (PlayStation 4, 2020): They finally made another good new Tony Hawk game, and all it took was perfectly remaking two of the best old Tony Hawk games! Plays exactly like you remember it with the added benefit of the best mechanics from up to THUG1, looks great, packed full of content, even has most of the music alongside some mostly crappy new stuff. It's the full package as is, but I do hope they end up adding THPS3 to it eventually. Mad Rat Dead (Nintendo Switch, 2020): Mad Rat Dead was a pleasant surprise that I only picked up because I saw a couple of people on my Twitter timeline constantly talking about it. A fun and inventive platformer where all your actions need to be on beat with the music. The gameplay feels great (aside from some not so great performance issues on Switch), the soundtrack is fun, and it's got a real good style to it. Demon's Souls (PlayStation 5, 2020): I love Demon's Souls and this is Demon's Souls. It plays exactly the same with some minor quality of life changes. I don't agree with many of the artistic changes, but there's no denying it looks incredible on a technical level. If you want to play Demon's Souls again or for the first time, this is a perfectly valid and fun way to do so. Groove Coaster: Wai Wai Party!!!! (Nintendo Switch, 2019): Groove Coaster is one of my favorite rhythm games, and they finally made an acceptable at-home version with Wai Wai Party. It's not a perfect replication of the arcade game control-wise, I have some issues with the song choices, and the pricing is frankly fucking ridiculous if you're not a Groove Coaster maniac like I am, but the same ultra satisfying gameplay is all there. You can even play it vertically in handheld mode! Flip Griiiiiiiip!

And we're done! Phew! Honestly didn't realize I played that many good games until I typed all this out. Thanks as always for reading this far. I'm gonna try and get back to regularly posting Breviews this year at the very least. Honestly don't know if I'll get anything else up on here, but we'll see. Here's to hoping 2021 is a little bit less of a nightmare!

[hopeymchope]

Magia Record: Reflecting on the Anime and the Game’s Story Ending

With Magia Record's story now complete in-game and with the anime "finished" (only the first season, but it took until literally this past weekend for the production team at Shaft to acknowledge that the second season is coming/inevitable), I have like… a ton of thoughts about where the game and the anime landed.

This will probably mostly be gripes, but overall, I'm still pretty happy with both. I've invested my past year into Magia Record during a lot of my free time, and hey – no regrets here. That game was absolutely worth the experience. The anime? Jury's still out somewhat, but it looks good so far.

This is definitely a normal thing to find surrounding a radio tower.

Anime Adaptation Thoughts:

The original Madoka Magica anime made the world feel slightly off-kilter by employing locations that were just a little off the rails from reality. The producers noted Madoka's bathroom as an important example; it's simply too large and has too much wasted space. It's maybe the biggest room in their house for no discernible reason, and that's by design, because it feels wrong. Another one was the music store we see in the first episode, where the technology is noticeably on a level that you just can't find in any real shop. On the flip side, the Magia Record anime creates a world that is deeply bizarre in many ways – much moreso than the original anime or the Magia Record game world. This is probably because the creator of the witch designs in the original was given far more creative control over the series as a whole this time around, and the result was BUGNUTS. Take note of the massive stack of discarded school desks that is arranged in a dangerous, precarious pile atop the school building (helpfully labeled as a waste pile, despite the fact that… well, who is picking up these garbage desks from the goddamn roof?). That's some imagery straight out of a witch's labyrinth, but it is ostensibly "reality." I think that's where Magia Record's anime really goes bugnuts, sometimes to powerful effect in that it makes things feel more unsettling… and sometimes to ridiculous effect. I mean, the field surrounding the radio tower now being replaced with a yard of jagged, cockeyed, towering gravestones and cross-like woodwork dangling with ropes and tridents? That's a LOT. That's… that's too much.

Look, if you were a die-hard fan of Kaede in the game, I am deeply sorry, because your girl got done DIRTY by the anime. Anyone who played the game who then sees where she winds up at the end of episode 12 is likely on a train straight to Double-You Tee Eff Station. I can't deny that it makes sense for the limited story she's given to develop across, but it was still disappointing to see. I suppose we don't really have the time to develop up all of the other characters from the game, so somebody had to sub in for this role… but oof.

Sana's backstory with her family is not nearly explained or explored enough in the show. I honestly think it comes off as confusingly unclear why they treated her like this or why they didn't notice her vanish at all. The game justifies this devastatingly well, but it feels like it's not clear at all here.

I think they could've had Kyubey run around Kamihama for part of the first season before he got ousted/blocked, and I think it would've been beneficial to do so. Now, that's not just because I love his character and find him fascinating, although that's definitely true, but it's also because there's so much exposition that I wish he could deliver to the characters about what's happened before we got here. Like, the tragic truth about Felicia's backstory is wonderfully awful, and I wish there was some way to deliver that into the anime, but I don't think it's possible without a ton of flashbacks. (And to be fair, players of the game may never know it without playing her particular Magical Girl Story.)

The change to not having Mami attack Yachiyo when they first meet was something I felt was a positive move. I loved that Mami got to have a moment she never had in the game during the Radio Tower arc, too. In generally, I enjoyed the slower, more piecemeal involvement of the original Holy Quintet, which has served as nice slow tease compared to having them be more upfront in the game. I did kind of miss the Madoka/Homura involvement in the radio tower case, but I ultimately came away feeling like it was better to save those two for later in the story because they're probably the best-known characters from the original series.

The combat soundtrack is exquisite - maybe better than ever before, honestly. The Magia Record anime has the best fight music in the series outside of, say, Rebellion.

Game's Ending Thoughts: (Spoilers Within)

The anime cutscenes in the final chapter are delightful.

Puella Magi has never shied away from having its characters die in the original anime or in the many manga stories. I'd argue that those deaths are at least part of what makes it such a successful subversion of the Magical Girl formula; the threat of death (often via witchiness) establishes the idea of there being permanent consequences that simple hope and faith and love can't overcome in spite of what those other anime may have told you. On the other hand, Magia Record turns out to have very close to zero consequences. Aside from established deaths from flashbacks that have occurred before the game even begins, by the end of the game, literally no one dies. Not even the most blatantly psychotic character is allowed to shuffle off her mortal coil; she just "disappears" and escapes. I particularly like (please note the sarcasm) how three different characters do some kind of "super-move" during the final two chapters that is said to most likely kill them, and yet they all survive them! At least ONE character winds up with some paralysis, but jeez, the others walk away completely unscathed. I can only hope the anime doesn't go quite so weak in the knees about any of the characters suffering actual consequences from the potentially-world-ending-level battles that occur.

I previously griped that I actually expected the psychos responsible for the entire storyline to get off scot-free, and although they don't get off 100% free and clear by the time the credits role, they come extremely close to doing so. However, I was really happy with the "Cherry Blossom Dreams" epilogue event, because there is dialogue in there that has the Magius admit that whatever guilt they have now, they are still capable of being complete sociopaths who want to dominate the Earth. That one person's presence (Ui) shouldn't be (and isn't) enough to keep them from being incredibly dangerous. Ultimately, the solution/punishment they receive is probably the best one available in light of their overall survival. Well done.

Speaking of the Magius, I mean… is it really possible that so many feathers never questioned that they were following a couple of 11/12-year-olds and one blatantly obvious psychotic? I guess having face time with the Magius was pretty rare, but there was still enough that some of the feathers declared their allegiance was primarily to those three above all else. And most magical girls range closer to 16 than to 11, I mean, y'know? Which is practically an eternity in terms of maturity. So I guess MIfuyu did a lot of heavy lifting on NOT making them seem like absolutely the worst possible choices for leadership, huh? (And for that reason: Mifuyu got off fucking LIGHT.)

Aaaand speaking of "one obvious psychotic," I find it funny how almost nobody knows Alina outside of her Magius role except for Karin. Because, just… it's so perfect. Karin (who is not a "Karen") happens to be the most insanely tolerant person when it comes to Alina. She seems to shrug off Alina's entire everything as amusing, forgivable quirks. Perhaps because so many people believe Karin's own obsession with Halloween is a weirdly morbid quirk, Karin doesn't even question Alina's obsession with making art about death using actual human remains. Which is… funny? No, seriously. I think it's legitimately comedic in a good way. But it should probably be much more alarming to me that she doesn't care. I'd like to think that Karen feels it's just delightfully Halloween-y for Alina to paint her canvas with legit blood, and I do believe Karin isn't really the kind of person who would ask where the blood came from because whatever, it's probably fine, better get back to planning my pageant or something. She probably even thinks Alina's skulls are plastic Halloween decorations. :P

We need to talk about Mami: Mami in "Another Story Chapter 9" felt so off and out-of-character compared to how she was written in things like Rebellion or A Different Story or Wraith Arc, and furthermore, despite that chapter being entirely about Mami wanting to just be a simple peer with no superiority over the rest of the Holy Quintet, Another Story Chapter 10 has her immediately revert back to being the smart senpai character, further cementing how weirdly "off" Chapter 9 felt. I realize they had something difficult to write, here, though. It's painful how Sayaka has to run middlewoman between Kyoko and Mami in Chapter 10 of AS. I feel like I could write a whole screed about Kyoko's behavior across the franchise and how difficult a character she is for me to like even though I "get it" and don't think she's necessarily a bad person; she's just living on the edge of being almost a total hypocrite basically ALL THE TIME. The conclusion where Kyoko acknowledges that she's going to continue to work with Mami and the others semi-regularly in spite of everything is really the best closure you can hope for with her. She's too antagonistic to give us much else, and she prefers it that way. It would take years to see her mellow.

At this point, it seems safe to assume that there isn't going to be any "season 2" of the game like what happened with Fate/Grand Order after its finale. The main narrative is well and truly done, and it's just going to be various events from here on out. Is that enough to keep me around? Um. I don't know. Probably not? Hard to say. I don't really know what other mobile game to throw my heart into. I've considered Attack on Titan Tactics, but like… Attack on Titan hasn't been kind to me lately so uhhhhh.

[pcttrailsidereader]

April is the Worst Time to Start the PCT . . . Here’s Why

This is a perennial question that has no right answer.  That being said, it is an important decision for each individual to make based upon snow pack, skill level, tolerance for crowds and need for solitude, pace, and, of course, when you need to be done. Daniel Winsor offers his perspective and outlines a number of considerations.

This post seems an appropriate follow-up to the October 29 post about the changes to the permit system for 2020.  It will become increasingly important because these changes will make skipping the High Sierra and returning later more difficult given new permit regulations.

By Daniel “Beta” Winsor

…ok, ok, so maybe it’s not the absolute worst time. December, for instance, probably deserves that title.

I thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in 2017, starting on March 26th. But if I did it again, I’d start a week earlier.

Heresy, I know.

Because April 15th, plus or minus a few days, has traditionally been THE time to get on the trail headed north. Last season, those permit dates were the first to go, within minutes of the permits opening up. You ask a group online for their opinion, they’ll tell you mid-April. You read a book on the PCT, you’ll get the same answer.

It’s not a very good answer.

Now I’m not saying it can’t be done, obviously many people have started in April over the years and did just fine. I’m proposing that more people think about starting in March, specifically the last two weeks of March. Here’s a few of the rationales behind starting in April, and why March is almost always a better answer.

1. Snow in Southern California

Specifically Fuller Ridge near Mt. San Jacinto and then Mt. Baden-Powell later on. Honestly, there’s not much too worry about here.

I went through Fuller Ridge on April 5th on one of the highest snow years in recent history… and it was about five miles of low angle snow. People were getting through without any snow gear (not recommended). For me, it was slow, but manageable, in microspikes. Hikers with crampons used words like “cake” and “joke” enough to make me wish I had crampons.

People summit Mt. San Jacinto in the winter. You just hiked over a hundred miles to get to Fuller Ridge. You can most likely handle walking along a peripheral ridge for a few miles in the spring.

Mt. Baden-Powell is along the same lines as San Jacinto. The snow is steeper, but only slightly, and longer, about ten miles. Many of us managed just fine with microspikes, but those with crampons ran across with a common theme of “was that it?” once they were off snow again.

If there’s ANY snow in the Sierra you’ll be dealing with (a.k.a. every year that isn’t an extreme drought year), don’t fear the small patches of snow in SoCal. Get your ice axe and crampons out and go boost your confidence. Never used those things before? Go learn! It’s a great opportunity to figure out if you feel ready to tackle Sierra snow or if you need to flip up north to avoid the white stuff.

There is MUCH chatter about those first snowy obstacles. This is the first time you’ll likely see the word “impassible” crop up online…

Low angle snow is never impassible with the right gear.

2. Snow in the Sierra Nevada

If you start the PCT in March, then there will be a ton of snow in the Sierra, right?? Yes and no, it really depends on the snow year.

During high snow years:

…such as 2011 and 2017 (and 2019), starting in March puts you in Kennedy Meadows in late April or early May. Most people will need a few days to put their gear together before entering the snow, then you’ll enter into the Sierra in the first or second week of May. At a comfortable pace in the hard, firm snow, you’ll exit the Sierra in the first couple weeks of June.

Does that sound early? It is, BUT you get to leave the Sierra before the melt happens in mid-to-late June when crossing creeks becomes a harrowing, dangerous obstacle. Traveling on snow isn’t (terribly) dangerous, crossing creeks is dangerous. Snow is slow, but you’ll keep moving safely forward. Swollen creeks have the potential to turn you around or even kill you. Many of the creeks, up to 80% of them, are possible to cross on snow bridges during the month of May after heavy winters.

Unfortunately, a well known rule-of-thumb is to leave Kennedy Meadows on “Ray Day”, which is June 15th. Hikers who followed this guidance in 2017 damn near gave themselves a death sentence. Most who went into the Sierra in the month of June were forced to bail. Some even died.

Go when the snow is still snow.

During low snow years:

…such as the drought years from 2012 to 2016, March is still the better answer. You aren’t racing to get to the Sierra before the melt happens, but seeing the Sierra in at least some snow and solitude before the crowds move in on the John Muir Trail portion of the PCT will be the highlight of your hike.

An earlier start gives you the gift of time also. The Sierra is an incredible place, most hikers consider it their favorite section of the whole trail. Nobody should be running through it. There’s plenty of monotonous hiking in the hundreds of miles ahead to push mileage.

There’s great trail towns and side trips all along the Sierra also, take more zeros! Like Bishop, California? Stay there a couple extra days. Mammoth is great spot to go skiing in June! You’ll hike right by Yosemite Valley, an incredible side trip to go play tourist for a day or two.

3. It’s too cold.

I’d actually flip this concern and consider it too hot to start hiking in April.

Starting in late March means you’ll be hiking through Southern California section mostly in April. The hottest and most waterless sections of the PCT happen 3-4 weeks after you start, just before getting to Kennedy Meadows.

Water is a big factor here too. Seasonal water sources in Southern California start dwindling in early May, some even earlier. Without those intermittent water sources, you have to carry more water. Some stretches can be 7-8 liters, even more if you’re hiking slow. The most I had to carry was five liters, which turned out to be excessive.

Water caches are a personal enemy of mine (more on that later), but they are a (wrongly) heavily relied on source through those hottest sections, sometimes getting hikers in trouble. Caches tend to be well stocked very early in the season, even before they’re really necessary, but many run dry as the folks who were maintaining the caches don’t have the time/energy/money to keep them stocked the whole season. Earlier hikers have a better chance coming across water in the water caches.

TO BE CLEAR: NOBODY SHOULD BE RELYING ON WATER CACHES.

I apologize for all the capitol letters, how annoying. But anyways…

If you start in April, you’ll be walking through 90F days in May with disappearing seasonal water sources and questionable water caches. Starting in March, you’ll be walking through 70F days in April with every seasonal water source flowing and freshly stocked water caches.

One of those sounds a bit better than the other, right?

Oh, but you can just hike through the night to beat the heat? Uh. There’s cool stuff to look at out there. Why would you want to miss it? You could just stick a treadmill in your basement, stop showering, and turn off the lights if that’s all you wanted out of your thru-hike.

…although you’d also have to pencil in some off-treadmill time for the psychiatrist.

As for the cold, if you have a 20F sleeping bag, you’ll be fine. My coldest morning in Southern California was 23F near Big Bear. But then I was sleeping back in the 20’s the last few days in Washington! If I had started later, I’d have been spending the last weeks on the trail even colder, through snow storms and other garbage that NO ONE wants to backpack through in the final weeks of such and long, exhausting trip. The beginning of any thru-hike is the time to be uncomfortable, not the end.

4. There aren’t any trail angels or trail magic around in March.

Wrong. One of the best parts of hiking in the early season is that you’re one of the first PCT faces most people are seeing. You’re ahead of the “herd” of hikers, so businesses are still happy to see you. No asshat thru-hikers (yes, these exist) have come along to put a bad taste in anyone’s mouth yet. You’re still a novelty in trail towns. You’re the ONLY hiker at bars and restaurants. People haven’t seen PCTers in a while, so they want to say hi and buy you beers and give you rides. You know what people want to do when they walk into a bar with 20 thru-hikers? Probably leave after they throw up, because why would a hiker shower first when there’s hot food waiting?!

Big trail angel stops are still psyched on the season starting. You’re in places like Hiker Heaven and Hiker Town with less than 10 other people, not 50 or 60.

Just like thru-hikers, trail angels get worn out as the season goes on. By the end of the “herd”, there’s fewer and fewer trail angels around. Earlier season hikers easily have it the best when it comes to trail angels, and this continues all the way up to Canada.

5. I’ll miss the bubble of hikers if I start in March!

Uh. Good.

Not that all thru-hikers aren’t amazing people, I made many incredible friends on my thru, but think about what happens when there’s 50 people starting the trail every day for weeks before you and weeks after…

What are the odds that perfect campsite is free at the end of the day?

When someone leaves a couple six-packs of IPA’s as trail magic, what are the odds there will be one left for you?

Ever tried hitch-hiking along a road with 20 other hitch-hikers?

You like solitude? Hopefully you’ll get over that.

I don’t mean to say that a ton of thru-hikers on the trail is a bad thing, but some people like it, some people don’t. I prefer a tight-knit group of hikers I can get to know, but spend as much time alone as I want. That’s what I got by starting in March.

Final Consideration: Permits

Note: See the updates to the Permit system in the October 29 post. These changes have occurred after Daniel Winsor wrote this piece.

This upcoming year is the first time permits will be given out in November, before anyone has any idea what will happen during the upcoming winter! This is understandably frustrating for 2018 thru-hikers.

So what’s the safe bet if you’re not particularly good at telling the future? Once again: March.

If you go with an April permit and we have a dry winter, you’re in for a hot, waterless desert section. If we see another high snow year, an April permit will put you in the Sierra right when the rivers get dangerous.

If you go with a March permit and we have a dry winter, you’re in for a pleasant desert hike with decent water sources. If we see another high snow year, a March permit will give you choices: head straight through the Sierra on hard snow before the melt, flip up to Hat Creek Rim while it’s still pleasant, or drink beer in Bishop hoping it all melts (which this year, it oddly did).

The earlier permit thing sucks. No way around that. But if you’d like to play it safe, March is the way to go. The beautiful advantage to starting early is that you can always take more zeros. If you start too late, you can’t insert time into your hike if you need more.

All considered, you have to choose your starting date based around many more factors. Time off from work, time away from loved ones, financial limitations etc. The most important thing about choosing a start date is to allow as much time as possible for your journey. Nobody wants to death march through such an amazing trail. Take your time, stay uninjured, and go camp next to that gorgeous lake! A core regret of many thru-hikers is not allowing themselves time to thoroughly enjoy the trail.

Starting in March will give you that time.

[minaminokyoko]

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker--A Spoilertastic Review

Boy, oh, boy.

Well, it’s over.

And I don’t know how I feel about it.

Let me start as I always do by saying I have no attachment to Star Wars. It’s always just be something to watch for me, nothing more, nothing less. I am ambiguous and apathetic. I admit that the first time I ever perked up was with The Force Awakens, which I still think is on par with the first two original films in terms of being engrossing. I actually liked it more because Rey and Finn connected with me more than I did with Luke as a kid. Then Last Jedi happened and it derailed the places that I had hoped we were going to go. I didn’t dislike Last Jedi, but I certainly didn’t like it either. I appreciate the risks it took, but I felt it didn’t pull them off and that’s why I had zero expectations for this film. It left a lot of people unsure of the future.

And unfortunately, J. J. Abrams pussed out.

There is no other way to say it. He basically listened to the people who complained about The Last Jedi and catered the characters’ development in order to try to please them. Which is shitty as hell.

That being said, this is an enjoyable movie, imo. It’s a satisfying end to the overall Skywalker saga, I think, but not to its original characters. I’ll explain below.

Overall Grade: C+

Spoilers ahead, as always.

Pros:

-The action is great. Just great. Really engrossing, really fun sequences. Everyone pulls their weight, too, unlike the subplots in Last Jedi. It’s also visually stunning. It’s a polished film, much like what we’ve been enjoying about the Mandolorian, how it integrates real sets with effects instead of just that sterile bluescreen nonsense Disney has been doing recently.

-Reuniting Finn, Rey, and Poe was a fucking Godsend. They are so likable together. It was the whole reason I liked The Force Awakens so much. They’re a good group and you really root for them the entire time. I’m glad they let them be in the story together. It’s the way it should be. They have a ton of chemistry and I would like it very much if they are kicking off an original franchise now that they have ended the Skywalker saga. We’ll see.

-Poe in particular is a lot of fun in this film, which is much needed since he was such a headstrong pain in the Last Jedi. Here he’s back to being just charming and salty and likable as hell. I really enjoyed Isaac finding a path for Poe, because at first he was kind of filling the snarky badass role that Han Solo did but he found his own way and I like him a lot for that same reason. He’s convicted but he’s softened up from how he was in Last Jedi and I think it works great.

-Rey being at the center of the story—and don’t worry, we’ll talk about this below, ugh—even though I highly disagree with the direction they took her in, is still great. I like that they still didn’t listen to the whiny gits who hate a woman being a Jedi. I like that Rey is fighting every second to hold onto her own truth and be her own person. Good for you, girlie. I do hope she gets more stories. She’s a good bean.

-The tribute to Carrie Fisher was nothing short of beautiful. I got choked up. Thank you for honoring her. I miss her so much. I only wish she could have seen it herself. She’s such an inspiration.

-Good pacing. Nothing stagnates and there aren’t any subplots that feel extraneous like in Last Jedi. The film is focused on all the right areas.

-Kylo Ren fucking dies like he deserves. See ya later, Darth Fuckboi. But we’ll also discuss that below.

-The Han Solo cameo caught me waaaaaaaaaaay off-guard. Harrison Ford has made no bones about hating Han Solo, which annoys me because I still think Han is his best performance, and yet he still agreed to cameo, so that was pretty neat. Unexpected for sure. But I’m sure Disney waved a very pretty paycheck and he only had about 10 lines, so why not?

-I did like Rey’s adoption of the Skywalker name. Thank you for giving meaning to that strange title choice. It’s very heartwarming to end on that image of Luke and Leia, together again, smiling fondly at this little girl they adopted. She ended a war and now she can be herself. I loved her creating a gold lightsaber too. It’s very fitting and it’s such a great thing to see. As a female fangirl, it makes my heart sing to know that millions of little girls get to grow up with a female Jedi as the lead in the new franchise.

-It was nice to see Lando again! Good for Billy D.

Cons:

I have three big fucking problems with this movie. They don’t break the entire movie, but they damage it so much that now I get why the movie is getting so many mixed reviews. The things this movie does well, it does well, but the things it fucks up? My God, does it fuck them up. Let’s dig in.

-First huge problem: *gets out loud speaker* KYLO FUCKING REN DID NOT DESERVE A FUCKING REDEMPTION ARC. FUCK. THIS. FUCKING. FUCKBOI. HE DOES NOT DESERVE A REDEMPTION ARC BECAUSE HE IS A GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING SPACE NAZI AND HIS ACTIONS DO NOT AT ALL WARRANT A KISS FROM REY NOR FORGIVENESS FROM ANYONE. FUCK DARTH FUCKBOI. FUCK ANYONE WHO THINKS HE COULD BE REDEEMED AFTER KILLING HIS FATHER IN COLD BLOOD AND TRYING TO KILL HIS MOTHER AND OH YEAH REMEMBER THE BILLIONS OF DEAD INNOCENT PEOPLE HE KILLED AS A PART OF THE FIRST FUCKING ORDER OH MY GOD THIS IS THE WORST WRITING HOW FUCKING DARE YOU.

Ahem.

This arc did not work in the Last Jedi either and yet here we fucking are. We are in a world that is asking us to forgive a goddamn Space Nazi. It’s so unacceptable. But I shouldn’t be surprised, since this is the same fucking year Hollywood is trying to ask me to feel bad for the goddamn fucking Joker.

Kylo Ren does not and never will deserve a fucking redemption arc. He willfully slaughtered billions of people. Billions. Fuck you for asking me to care about him. Fuck you for that disgusting kiss. He is an abuser and Rey has not shown any romantic interest in him whatsoever up until this point. I can’t fucking believe they pandered to the fucking gross ass Reylo fans. And yes, fight me, I don’t care, Reylo is fucking problematic as hell and that was the most forced bullshit I’ve ever seen in my life. Go to hell.

-Second huge problem: retconning Rey’s backstory made me fucking furious. It was the one fucking thing I didn’t want J. J. to mess with and not only did he mess with it, he went with the most illogical fucking method to make Rey’s lineage “important.” Say what you want about the Last Jedi but the thing that worked best was Rey’s parents being fucking nobodies who sold her off. That was a great story element. It reinforces the very important idea that you are who you choose to be, to quote the immortal words of The Iron Giant. Where you came from does not fucking matter. Your blood does not matter. You are the person that you want to be and that’s how you should live your life, with choices that are important to who you are, not where you came from. They backtracked just to pay lip service to the originals for no reason and because they got too scared to color outside of the lines.

-Third huge problem: Palpatine’s retconned inclusion in the story. There is no way you can convince me that old ass Palpatine crawled on top of a woman and made a baby. It does not fit at all. It’s just stupid, stupid crap and I hate it with my entire soul. I want to slap whoever the hell wrote it. Not only does the Palpatine bullshit make no narrative sense, it’s a straight up retconned bullshit plothole. I defer to the experts, but from what I remember, there was no indication he was still alive in the previous films. It overshadows what was a promising story and it derails so much for her fucking character to have this useless lineage garbage that doesn’t work on any level. There was no reason to crawl back to Palpatine when Last Jedi felt as if it was leading towards Kylo fulling stepping into the Big Bad role and Rey rejecting his stalker, abusive shit to be the Jedi she wanted and needed to be.

-Continuing the “maybe Rey is secretly evil” bullshit from the last movie. I hated this in Last Jedi too. Rey shows absolutely no signs of being evil. Ever. At most, she loses her temper, but that’s it. Normal good people can lose their temper. The movie constantly keeps saying maybe she’s bad but her actions are universally good, kind, brave, and helpful, so why the hell did they pursue this nonsense at all? It’s clear that Rey is virtuous. The First Order has done nothing but oppress her and kill innocent people, so why the hell would she ever entertain the thought of joining them? It’s so pointless. The only time it even made a little sense was when Palpatine said she could save her friends by commanding the Final Order and even then it was a fucking stretch. Christ, I hate it when the writing is forcing something that does not match the character’s actions. Good job with the Force vision, by the way. Every single non-stupid person knew it was going to be a Force vision when we saw it in the trailer, you cliché bastards. They were wasting everyone’s time with this and they should be ashamed of themselves.

-Not going anywhere with Finn telling Rey how he felt. Finn in general was still sort of not as important overall as I want him to be, but we’ll see if that changes if their stories continue past the Skywalker saga. Either way, the attention has constantly been shifted away from Finn and Rey and it’s very frustrating because their friendship is so endearing. Whether you ship it or not, it’s an important relationship and I wish they had spent more time on it instead of having him fret after her constantly. Sigh.

I probably need to keep marinating on this film. There’s a lot to drink in. As I said, I’m not sure how I feel, since the good is really good, but the bad is really bad. It feels like it’s not good enough for a B grade, but it’s better than a C grade, like I need a letter between these two. It could’ve been done so much better, but it also could have been done much worse. I definitely like it better than Last Jedi, but it’s not exactly good either. It’s a trouble film. It’s a fun film. It’s just…a lot of things. I would say that the scale makes it satisfying as a closing statement to the saga, but not for the individual characters. Rey’s derailment due to Darth Fuckboi is a huge disservice, so while I think people are overreacting, I get why they’re angry at the film, especially for the three things I noted. It truly seems to be a film split right down the center in terms of good/bad. That’s all I can say for now.

[tangentmoth]

It’s all you’ve got inside your head; you better get up and leave instead...

(Hey cool, I managed to make another lyric from 30 Seconds to Mars’ Echelon fit for a tagline.  Rad!)

Greetings, fellow Stalkers!  Tangentmoth is back with another chapter of Scorch the Skies, which fills in the gap between Clear Sky and Shadow of Chernobyl (from the POV of the various NPCs we met along the way).  Man I am KILLING IT this week.

Where we last left off, the stragglers back at the Clear Sky base were not having a great day.  But what about our valiant men of Duty?  Deadly anomalies, dangerous mutants, anarchists and bandits: none will stop Duty on its triumphant march toward saving the planet!

...right?

Chapter 2: The Bad Death of General Krylov

As told by Gormov, Duty technician.

Same old Hundred Rads.

Place never changes, and thank God for it.  Whole Zone’s going to pizdetz faster’n ever, blowouts firin’ off like the end of the fuckin’ world, took out all our power and most of our comms for three whole days.  The Loners all fucked off back to wherever like they always do, told us there wasn’t any deal with the General now on account of he was dead.  Good riddance to ‘em, far as I’m concerned, you can’t trust them for anything, no discipline whatsoever.  We lost at least six of our men to bandits sniping us from the rocks while we tried to to cut around their shithole base on our way to the main road and another twelve because all the anomalies on our maps aren’t where we marked ‘em anymore.  But we came through and will you look at this place?  Power’s on, same old Big Lander metal on the radio, same old shitty static on Barkeep’s TV, Barkeep’s trying to get you to side-hustle for him just like always, even that fucking Bandit’s still in the same corner trying to sell people his bullshit intel.  I’d shoot that fuck if he wasn’t, like, practically the Hundred Rads Mascot.  Same old place alright. 

Fuck it’s good to be back in Rostok.

Anyway, yeah, you heard right.  Colonel Voronin’s taking over, though I guess it’s General Voronin now.  But Krylov’s as dead as it gets.  Most fucked up thing I ever saw.  

We were holding a base at the old Agroprom Research Institute complex, down in the Garbage.  Been down there?  Yeah, it lives up to the name.  Nothing but rocks, bandits, and ARS in those hills.  And shit tons of anomalies, can’t forget those.  No place anyone in their right mind’d choose for a base, but the General had a thing going with the military way further south in the Cordon, and they won’t come up as far north as Rostok unless they’re airdropping Spetznaz in.  Besides, we’re Duty.  It’s our job to take on the worst places and put ‘em to order.  

Agroprom looked good on the surface.  Fortified, all the walls mostly intact, there’s live utility lines to hook into, plenty of towers to set sniper watch from.  Once we swept the Bandit rats out we had a pretty solid setup.  Only trouble was, there was this bigshot Loner, Father Valerian, who had an idea he was gonna organize all the Loners into an actual faction.  How the fuck do you organize Loners?  It’s like herding cats.  Anyway, he’s got eyes on Agroprom too.  The General was a good man, though, knew how to work with people, and to be fair to the Loners they’ve got good eyes and good ears.  So Krylov makes a deal with this Valerian - the Loners get half the complex, and in return they help us with pest control.  Worked out pretty well, until…

Well.  Until one of our privates decided to have himself a look in the basement.

Kid comes scrambling back up the stairs, shrieking like a firebell, bleeding out the side of his neck.  You know there’s only one thing makes those wounds.  He must have caught it out of the corner of his eye and yanked back just in time.  If that Bloodsucker’d gotten any closer to the kid’s carotid he’d have had himself a nice little afternoon snack.  But Mitya and Kolobok get the private patched up, pour a bottle or two of vodka down his throat, and he’s more or less fine.  Nothing like your first Bloodsucker to get your attention, eh?  

Anyway, the attack gets reported to the General, who sends a team down to clean out the tunnels.  Except not a single one of them come back.  Not a single. One.  And it’s not just us, either, we talked to the Loners and turns out they’d lost half a dozen down there, give or take.  The ones who did come back up came back addled, so we knew there had to be more than just bloodsuckers down there.  There was actually a nutty rumor on the Loner side of the base that there was one pack of two or three Loners who were living down there for a few weeks before they lit off North for the great Unknown, but I’d sooner believe in Ded Moroz, after what I saw later.

So now we’ve got ourselves a mess.  We can flood the tunnels, but the valves are all down in the basement.  Nobody wants to go downstairs, not even Inquisitor, our big-game hunter.  Said he preferred to do his hunting aboveground.  Meanwhile the freaks in the tunnels know we’re here now, so they’re coming upstairs.  Milutin and Fyoki were manning the gate and they swear they saw a huge black bloodsucker jump on another one of our guards and just disappear into the treetops with him.  The General’s not big on wasting Duty lives, and you can’t order Loners to drink vodka, let alone go underground to end up bloodsucker food.

Then all of a sudden, one day, this big guy--and I mean BIG guy, must have been two metres, face like the evil robot from that old movie--comes strolling into camp.  He’s got this weirdo outfit on, glacier-blue camo that barely fits and a green flak vest and this ratty leather overcoat that looked like he looted it off a Bandit, but he says he’s a Merc, and after a couple days he up and volunteers to do the job for us.  Perfect solution, right?  If he succeeds, we’re good to go.  He dies, well, no great loss, and we don’t lose any of our own.  Tell the truth, none of us expected him to actually succeed, but this guy must have been something else because it went off without a hitch.  We gave him some gear and some cash as thanks, I fix up his Vintorez, he stalks on over the hills and far away, and our base is safe for operations. Or so we thought.

See, what none of us were counting on was the blowout.  That big one.  It fucked everything up.

I was on survey with the General, trying to take stock of the damages to the facility.  It was...a day after the blowout?  Two, maybe.  I don’t know.  Those things fuck with your head.  Time gets weird.  You know?  At any rate, he’s got me with him, because I’m the tech.  I don’t know shit about architecture or infrastructure maintenance, mind, but I’m the closest thing we’ve got.  

We’d sealed up the entrance to the basement levels with an old steel door we cut from one of the labs in the building.  What the hell they were doing here I don’t know, something to do with agriculture’s my guess but fucked if I know. The door was rusty but still sound, at any rate.  Well, when we got down there to make sure the shaking hadn’t damaged it, we saw Sergeant Nalivayko standing outside the door.  Just...staring at it.  Eyes big blank zeros.  

Then he started screaming.

Screaming and screaming, holding his head, his ears, like he was trying to hold his brains in.  Saying ‘it’s inside, something’s inside me!’  I didn’t know what the hell he was raving about, I thought the blowout must have sent him mad somehow.  Except...then I started to hear something too.  Ever been too close to a grenade when it explodes?  That ringing in your ears after?  Like that.  But it didn’t stop. 

That’s when I started booking it the hell back up the stairs.  Suppose I ought to be shot for cowardice, but so far nobody seems to care.  I made it up to the first landing, and when I looked back down…

Nalivayko was still down on his knees screaming, but General Krylov was still perfectly calm.  I still don’t know why he did what he did.  He was a good man.  A hard man, but this is a hard place.  At first I thought he meant to go in there and kill whatever it was behind that door.   But then I remembered there should be nothing behind that door...nothin’ except god knows how many cubic fucktons of water.  

I yelled down at him...shit, I don’t know what I yelled.  I couldn’t hear past that ringing noise.  Maybe he couldn’t either, because he went right on ahead and opened the door.  Soon as he does, all that water starts pouring into the stairwell...but it was all wrong.  It was glowing.

Like I said.  The blowout.  It shook stuff up, and not just the ground...it moved all the anomalies around.  Ever seen the ones they call “fruit punch”?  Looks like a glowing puddle of bubbly water, but it burns like industrial strength lye.  Dozens of them must have sprung up in those basement tunnels, and they’d gotten into the water we filled the place up with.  General Krylov and poor Sergeant Nalivayako melted to death in that stairwell like...like the fucking Nazis in Indiana Jones.  Fuck.

We left Agroprom the next day, and whatever the hell still lives there.  I’m not sorry a bit.  Rostok’s Duty’s place, always has been.  We can do our jobs from here just as well, and I get better parts for my repair shop since everyone comes through here to trade with Barkeep.

So I say fuck the Garbage, and fuck Agroprom.  The Bandits want it? Great.  Let ‘em have it.

[comicteaparty]

November 9th-November 15th, 2019 Creator Babble Archive

The archive for the Creator Babble chat that occurred from November 9th, 2019 to November 15th, 2019.  The chat focused on the following question:

How do you deal with a lack of engagement from your audience, both emotionally and physically?

IzzyNinjaMaster

Oooo now that's a good question. If my online audience doesn't respond, I personally always show any new page updates to my family and friends and get feedback and comments from them. Really great for support. But sometimes their not available or I don't have anything new to show them. When this happens, I just look to myself for support. I know that doesn't really make sense or sounds kinda cheesy but it's what I do. I get myself pumped up and excited for what I can do next in the story and how awesome it will look all drawn out. And I go from there, I'll start drawing out ideas or writing out new chapters. So just be your own hype man, not just with your comics either but with everything. Great for self esteem.

Sorry went on kind of a rant right there

carcarchu

I prepare myself emotionally to not have any expectations. If you expect nothing and receive something you'll always be happy!

IzzyNinjaMaster

Lol true very true XD

Deo101

I'm not completely sure what this question means by physically, but I just kind of keep making art to move past it. Something that has helped me a TON is to make art that's just for me (like, that I don't post anywhere). I think that if everything is made to be shared, then we get a little too used to trying to find validation with engagement. With comics, specifically, I try to make none of my goals relate to engagement. I only have goals for myself and what i'm producing. If I'm hitting all of my goals, then I feel good about what I'm doing! No one engaging with it is just kind of like "okay!" Another smaller thing that helps me is getting my work done well before I upload it! for some reason just getting a bit of time distance between when something is done and when I post it I dont feel so bad if people don't engage.

Cronaj

I'm fairly lucky that I have a small following on one of the sites I post on, so while some weeks might be slow with feedback or engagement, I'm usually not completely devoid. I also have some very supportive family members who read my comic and often comment or text me after I update. As for what I do personally when I don't have a lot of engagement? I do a lot of self-reflecting, which is probably not the healthiest of practices. I question what I'm doing, trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong and how I could improve. I also try to understand other external factors at play, such as my readers' personal lives, jobs, school, holidays, that might have delayed them from engaging with my work. For example, I know that during November, as we get closer to Thanksgiving, there is going to be a huge drop in readership, because a lot of my younger readers will be preparing for school finals and visiting with family. By knowing this, it helps me cope a lot better. And if all else fails, I vent to my fiance or my little sister. It really does help to have someone to whine at for a bit

khkddn

If I were to get completely zero engagement on something I'd do what I'd always do, message people I know irl like "validate meeeeeeee"

In general I just take a step back from what I've posted and focus on something else. That way I remember webcomics isn't everything, and by the time I check up on things again there might be some sort of audience response.

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

I kept my work hidden for the first few years I was working on it (wanted to iron out any wrinkles before I was comfortable sharing) so in comparison, any engagement afterward - even a tiny amount - is pretty great! And even now, some updates get more traffic than others, for a lot of different reasons. Luck, timing, quality, etc. I always keep in mind that this project is - at its heart - for me and my own enjoyment/fulfillment. And if I’m pleased with where it’s going, that’s a win.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Oof, that question really hit me where it hurts. Over the years I’ve lowered my expectations, because while I used to have an active audience in the ‘00s, I’ve rarely gotten any engagement on my comics in the ‘10s. It’s definitely made me feel depressed and like a ‘failure’ to put heart and soul into my comics and art and get 0 reaction online. I honestly don’t have any way I ‘deal’ with it. I make something, hoping to get some comments > I get no comments > I get depressed about it and feel like my work is garbage. Rinse and repeat several hundred times. I keep going because I just love to create, but it’s like an actor trying to put on a performance and no one shows up to the play. It has gotten better lately and I’ve started getting some engagement for the first time in many years, but I honestly don’t have a good answer for how I handle that emotional reaction to reader silence.

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

Also good to keep in mind that lots of people may read without commenting, and still enjoy it! I did a poll wondering who would be interested in doing guest art, and way more people responded than I expected. It opened my eyes! Sometimes you just can’t tell until you outright ask for feedback

keii4ii

There's definitely a risk to that, though. You ask and still get nothing. Or worse, you ask and get negativity. Asking is a worthy gamble, but it takes courage! Sometimes when we don't have enough courage, we gotta find it elsewhere first, before we can try that gamble...

I lost that gamble one too many times and need more Courage Fund before I can try again, lol

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

True true! It was a gamble I had no real expectations/assumptions about, so I didn’t have much room for disappointment. Even getting one person who says “This is cool!” is enough to fuel me for days. But I know that’s not how it is for everyone. Once you’ve been disappointed once, it can take a while to get the urge to try again. I can’t imagine getting negativity, though... I think THAT would wreck me.

keii4ii

Sometimes I don't even ask and someone just randomly drops negativity off at my doorstep... I need to remember that I have also had wonderfully positive responses, that it wasn't all negative. But it can be hard to remember that on bad days.

Deo101

Yeah, negative comments always seem to be the loudest ones... They can drown out dozens of good ones if they hit you right.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I did develop a pretty thick skin for negativity in art school, which was really fortunate because my comics garnered a lot of negative attention at first. Though thinking back on it, I was making very androgynous and gender non-conforming characters (even though I never stated anywhere that they were queer) in a time when the public attitude towards such things was far less kind than it is today. At the time it was draining to get so many trolls, but unless I was already having emotional difficulties in other areas of my life, I was able to let it roll off.(edited)

keii4ii

The weirdest thing with my negativity is 99% of them come from actual readers who mean well. So I have a hard time dismissing them like 'oh they're just haters.' It's not necessarily harder than dealing with blatant trolls, but it is an entirely different beast.

Deo101

Sometimes I go and reread positive comments when I'm down about things

Yeah I'm not sure that I've had any trolls tbh... Its all readers saying what they think

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Avid readers who give backhanded compliments and ‘well-meaning’ but very subjective critique can definitely be detrimental.

keii4ii

In Korea, I dunno if they're still a thing, but 1-2 decades ago there was this type of theft called slash theft. It's a type of pickpocketing, done on the street while walking by. They bump into you, briefly and lightly, but you don't think much of it because Seoul is a crowded city and you brush against other people all the time. But during that brief bump, they manage to slash open your purse and take all the contents. It's an amazing ninja level skill for sure. I know people who had their stuff stolen that way. Back to the Courage Fund analogy, sometimes a negative comment isn't just a normal theft of your Fund. The comment slashes your purse open, and now your bag can't contain Fund even if you put more and more into it.

It can take a long time and lots of support to sew your purse back.

Deo101

Idk if other places to slash theft, im sure they do, but im pretty sure historically its been a big thing. The term "cutpurse" comes to mind

keii4ii

(:o I didn't know that was a term! The more you know)

Deo101

(some book i read (wasn't great but you know) used the term a lot and i was like "ok wtf is this")

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

That’s a very good analogy for it, and I definitely understand what you mean. I had to take a three year hiatus from one of my comics once after a IRL ‘friend’ ripped the comic apart and called me a terrible writer in less-than-kind words. I had already been going through some very bad things with my health and family and it hurt me far more than it should. It took some encouragement from some very dedicated readers to convince me to pick up the comic again.

Deo101

(so i associate it with pirates now)

That's really terrible lee... Om glad you picked it back uo though!!!

keii4ii

I can super relate to harsh comments hurting way more than they should, when you're already in a bad state. >_<

Deo101

And also it is a really good analogy keiiii

Yeah things just kinda get harder to deal with in general when you're more tired/upset in other areas

keii4ii

The most devastating feedback I've got would have done far less damage if I weren't in a fragile state at the time.

Deo101

Like you can't go be safe elsewhere if everything is a source of stress...

keii4ii

(For all we know those slashers in Korea could be pirates )

Deo101

:o

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Does Korea have pirates? If so, I’m moving to Korea.

(Sorry, we’ve probably gone way off topic for the discussion)

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

I got antsy when someone made a small critique of my lettering (rightfully so, though - lettering is hard and I’m still learning) so a proper heart-stabbing, bad-faith critique might sideline me for a while. Gotta be prepared for that someday

Deo101

Its weird, it really seems to be mostly about how I'm doing elsewhere in life now that im thinking about it. Also being further along in the comic helps cause I've got years of support and "just keep chuggin" under my belt

Like the other day someone critiqued me randomly and called my characters stupid and i was like "dam ok, your comment getting deleted then" but a year or so ago a comment like "I'm sorry im a little confused..." Made me second guess everything for weeks

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

Ohhh Maybe the obviously mean/troll comments are easier to deal with, than feeling you let down a reader who was genuinely trying to understand the story. I would definitely react similarly.

Deo101

Iunno, the big old critique was a normal reader who has left other comments he jusy kinda randomly did it. But yeah I think it can be easier to shrug off things that are CLEARLY antagonistic versus someone being harmlessly confused

Because confusion can mean I'm not being clear enough and need to change things and whatever. Its vague in a way that hits your anxiety

keii4ii

Yeah, when someone is obviously being a jerk, you know it's on them

omg... reader confusion has been the bane of my existence

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I dunno, man, art school just toughened me up to most negative comments. If one person out of five is confused, I don’t take it personally and just explain it to them to clear up confusion. If everyone’s confused I think ‘Hmm, maybe I should retcon in some dialogue to make it more clear’. I guess art school really teaches you to distance yourself from your work and be very objective about it. BUT as I said, I’m not immune when other bad things are going on and it becomes the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Deo101

Though THEN you kinda get like "why am I being a target???" And its very frustrating, at the very least, and it does definitely still hurt... (Wrt trolls)

keii4ii

It's hard to tell who's confused and who isn't sometimes

Deo101

Yeah Lee im in art school right now, but for me its different when I make something to be critiqued versus a passion long term project

If I am asking for critique too, im braced for it in a way I'm mentally prepared for. Im not always braced to have someone be like "its pretty good buuut..."

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Ahh, I can understand that. I guess I’m able to view my passion projects the same way I did my school projects. It took time, that’s for sure. It’s a process of desensitisation, and was something I had to build up over years.

keii4ii

I'm disproportionately sensitive about reader misinterpretations/confusion. I'm 95% sure it's because one bad experience. Someone thought my main story was garbage, but they liked parts of it, so they told me to basically make a different story using those parts. After that, every time a reader didn't recognize the main story (I got a very prominent B plot, so it's kinda understandable that some people mistake it as the A), I got vivid flashbacks of that one bad experience. Every time someone said they liked [this character that The Other Person liked], I got flashbacks. Took me good 2-3 years to get over it.

Deo101

Its also a lil different when it's like.. i wont be changing these pages so unless it's a critique for moving forward its kinda pointless and i cant really apply it

Damn keiiii that's really rough

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Yeah, that sucks.

keii4ii

Yeah, it's hard to be motivated when the underlying message is "your first 100 pages are hot garbage, but you can still improve........ even if readers will give up long before they get to the decent 101st page!"

Deo101

RIGHT...

I don't want to have to preface "check out my comic!" Wirh "i promise it gets better..."

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

COUGH That’s exactly why I’m reduxing Eryl’s hot garbage beginning right now COUGH

Also because I’m a masochist and perfectionist.....

keii4ii

I think "it gets better" is fine when it's a reader reccing it. (I remember some of my friends reccing multi-season anime series to each other, going, "it gets better after season 1") But yeah, as the author we can't be the ones saying it.

Deo101

Mhm.

And I'm still hapoy with my old pages. I know I could do them better now but they're perfectly fine and they get the job done so... Idk its just hard when someone is like "wow two years ago you made a mistake, :/"

Like. Yeah, duh... I've spent like a thousand hours on pages theres gonna be some mistakes

keii4ii

It took me a long time to realize that Flaws =/= Problems

Deo101

I'm learning and getting better youre gonna have to bare with me here

Nutty (Court of Roses)

are you kidding i still get crit on stuff i made TEN years ago

Deo101

Mhm

keii4ii

omg

Deo101

Well its not a competition

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Same, Nutty

Nutty (Court of Roses)

True sorry ;;

Deo101

Ur name just changed colors keiiii

You: flaws =/= problems Your name: im ascending

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I think...learning how to like not be bothered by negativity that much is a skill. Super freaked out one time when someone said they didn't know what's going on when reading HotV whoops

(turned out they just had to re-read a bit and it was just webcomics being webcomics)

Deo101

I had a group of readers say they were co fused and one person asked me to explain the last 2 chapters and i was like "holy shit am i being this unclear????"

Its stressful for sure

Nothjng wrong with being concerned with ut

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Keiiii has reached a new plane of existence. The blue is unrefutable proof

Deo101

Its something you're passionate about and you want to be as good as it can be

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Yeah...

Deo101

So any critique, regardless of validity will be something you WANT to consider

Which is fine and theres nothing wronf with taking things to heart like that

But also if youre Happy with it that's all that matters

You gotta be your #1 fan kinda thing

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I'm personally super uh...yeah I am having a hard time dismissing criticism

even if it's in bad faith, haha.

keii4ii

The #1 fan thing sometimes reminds me of that scene from Lilo & Stitch

The scene of Lilo's rag doll. It's been years since I watched it, so memory's a bit fuzzy, but I think all the kids were showing off their dolls, and Lilo wanted to show off hers too

but the other kids didn't like her homemade-looking doll, and it made her sad, almost not like her doll for a moment

but she picks up the doll again afterward

There are days where I relate to that. I never not-love my story and my characters, but sometimes I feel like everyone else has a low opinion of it, you know?

and I'm like lonely Lilo hugging her rag doll in the sad corner

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Yeah I totally get that and...loving what you do first and foremost is really important. I don't think in a medium like webcomics you would be able to keep going

keii4ii

I'll always love my Doll but I do wish this little corner weren't so lonely, kinda thing

Deo101

I feel that keiiii

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Hmm

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

When the ‘critique’ is detrimental it does become a problem. Like that ‘friend’ I was talking about earlier who bashed Eryl to bits. He told me to ‘read some Stephen King’ to learn how to write. I was making a high fantasy story, not a horror story. The writing of a horror author is simply not applicable to building a good fantasy adventure story. That’s when I knew he was full of shit. But the damage had been done, and I lost all motivation for the project for years.

keii4ii

uuugh, I'm so sorry that it happened to you D:

Deo101

Also this story is one that i have dropped and picked up SO many times, and its wildly changed over and over, and so i worry a lot im not making it in its final form, i suppose. I worry i started it too young, and so critique of the older parts hits that anxiety

Wow lee that's terrible...

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Gosh...

Deo101

Also you can't really compare Novel writing to comics imo. The structure can be compared but...

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I think HotV is like a project I've worked on since...2008? And it changed with me and I feel pretty confident that it's in its final stage.

keii4ii

and not every story needs to be a Stephen King story

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

But yeah, you can really not compare writing for novels to writing for comics wth

nah

tbh it's weird (I like King personally) but his stories and also his writing do have flaws too so

what

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I actually do use novels as a source to study how to construct my comics. But! Studying the right genre is important. I’ve the feeling the only books that guy read were Stephen King, so that’s the only kind of story he was familiar with.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

God when I was still developing a picture I did got featured somewhere and someone criticised the way I did knees and linked to the picture of another artist going: Hey draw knees like that

Deo101

Every story will have flaws, its impossible to make one that is perfect. Well. Its impossible to make a story thats perfect for everyone. So alk you can do is try to make a story thats perfect for you!

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Agreed, Deo

keii4ii

^ THAT REMINDS ME

Deo101

Omg

keii4ii

(going back to the original question) With no response, or negative response, one thing that helps me is hearing other people gush about their beloved unpopular stories!

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Hmmm

Deo101

!!!!!! Me too!!!!!!!!!

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I am having this problem and went to ask on twitter what ppl loved about their projects

and that's really uplifting somehow

Deo101

I LOVE reading other comics and just seeing how much passion is in them its like a light

keii4ii

I need to remember that just because someone, or even a lot of someones, thinks a story is trash, doesn't make it the universal truth

Deo101

^^^

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I WILL GUSH ALL DAY BOUT MY BELOVED UNPOPULAR STORIES and once you open that damn I am unstoppable. You will regret it, trust me.

keii4ii

And people gushing about their unpopular favorites is an excellent way of reminding myself

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

hehe

Deo101

I have been very lucky and have had a few incredibly kind people who i can remember fondly when i worry my story isnt reaching people. I Know it has touched a few lives, and if it makes even ONE person happier (even if thay person is me) then im doing my job and its worth all the time and effort.

That was kind of off topic i swear it connected in mt mind

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Absolutely

I feel it's connected

Deo101

Phew

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

bc hmm it's a way to deal with times when there is not much engagement?

Deo101

Aha! There we go yes :)

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I do generally write very off-beat, unpredictable stories because I like reading / watching those kinds of things. A lot of my favourite movies bombed at the box office because they weren’t formulaic, which was what I loved about them.(edited)

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Remind yourself that there is people who enjoy what you do and who are happier bc of it C:

Deo101

Mhm ^^

Also i have my characters on a shirt so i can just wear that and be like "fuck yeah. I have a shirt. It cant be a bad comic if I've got merch babeyyyy"

Which admittedly is a very odd way of dealing with anxiety

But like.... You should get your Characters on a shirt.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

dfhwioufheuf Deo that's cool tho

I made so many like...background designs and posters for HotV and some of those I WANT ON A SHIRT

Oh I think what also helps me is to find a friend and just talk about the comic?

Deo101

The place i use lets you get up to 6 items a month as a sample order and it's severely discounted my shirt was like $15

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I should do that. I have designed some T-shirts but that wasn’t for personal stuff.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

omg

keii4ii

I'm actually in the (long) process of re-learning how to talk about my comic

Deo101

And yeah for sure having people i csn talk with/joke with about my comic helps soooo much

Like the fact that i know these 5 people will get my jokes like this

THAT helps a TON

These people actually are the reason I was confident enough to be able to start after having a bad friend drive me to almost drop the story for good

So having their support is probably one of the biggest things thst helps if no one else engages.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Okay, so on the original subject of ‘How to deal with no feedback’ I do talk about my stories a lot with my two best friends. They are my biggest fans and my sounding boards. They let me go on and on about plot threads in my comics and it’s one of the main reasons I keep going. Even when I get 0 reaction online, I still have two people who I know are reading the comic and think I should keep going.

Deo101

Or like, when my family is being homophobic about my work kinda thing. Friends are good for that...

Yessss lee having people you can talk with about it is SO good

keii4ii

ngl, I'm jelly of those of you who have go-to support friends who are genuinely into your story! That's something I hope to have some day, myself

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I don’t know whether to give a sad react for homophobic family or a happy react for supportive friends

Deo101

Happy react ^^

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Still sorry about your homophobic family tho, but your friends sound awesome

Deo101

Yeah but :> I know I'm doing good work. Again those few people who i know my story has touched.. i know I'm doin good work.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

@keii4ii Just know I’ve been an acid fan of your comics for over 10 years and honestly think they’re some of the best comics I’ve ever read

AVID

NOT ACID(edited)

keii4ii

Hey acid is important too

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

GOD MY PHONE

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

hiodcnioefwe acid

love this

I have one friend who has supported me since 2007 and I can always count on her freaking out about my comics Y_Y

so when I feel especially bad I turn to her

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

My phone is old and the keyboard lags and autocorrects like AAAAARGH(edited)

Deo101

Its okay same here lee

Typo club babeyyyy

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I have to edit almost every comment I make THANKS A LOT PHONE

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

shakes fist at ur phone to be more kind

I can't type on phone at all so...

keii4ii

Yeah, swipe-typing is high level sorcery to me

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

As someone who’s normally a grammar freak it causes me great pain that my texting is a syntactical disaster.

Deo101

I've been doing swipe a bit lately so it doesn't hurt my hands to text (I Tex too much)

keii4ii

This actually makes me wonder

What are some good, safe(ish) ways to reach out to people who may be 1000% willing to become that Support Pillar for your comic?

Deo101

I just straight up start doing it

keii4ii

For all I know they exist. But.. Schrödinger's pillar

Deo101

And gague the reaction

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

As an antisocial gremlin who hides under a rock, I have no idea.

Pakky

never hurts to ask

keii4ii

@Pakky You would be surprised

Deo101

Start sharing art, see if theyre curious, get deeper if they're good with it, kinda thinf

I've got friends who like to see my art but don't really care about my comic, and you kinda just gotta take it case by case

Pakky

mm fair enough, i always try to be supportive of content creators mostly because i would hope for the same in return. theres a lot of bluntness in my industry so if you do well you get praise but if you do poorly, you very well know it :/

keii4ii

Me: "Thank you for supporting my humble comic!" (this wasn't even asking, just thanking) Reader: "Well, your comic isn't that good." Me: "?????????"

Deo101

Wh

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I’ll be honest, on the rare occasion a reader starts trying to get really close to me, my dumb brain freaks out and I put some distance in because I have Issues for days.

Pakky

thats just rude on their part

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

what

holy fuck

keii4ii

I've Been Burned

omg, that question mark react is so appropriate

Deo101

I've chatted with some readers here or there but I don't know if id wanna use them as a support pillar

I kind of have trained myself to think readers as fickle.

If they get sick of my story, theyre allowed to leave

They dont owe me their time or energy and them being here is a gift

So I'll chat and stuff and answer questions but unless someone is my friend i will not lean on them for support.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Honestly it’s happened that I’ve gad readers try to get really close or be my sounding board, and I think they were just trying to be enthusiastic and supportive but my stupid broken brain always panics and goes WARNING STALKER ALERT WARNING ABORT ABORT.

Deo101

Hey better safe than sorry

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

juppp

Deo101

I'll chat but i wont give personal information and im not gonna like, get all into spoiling everything im planning lmao.

If someone asks me a question thats a spoiler ill answer it in private

But bringing raw ideas up for help... I need very specific people for thst.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

The thing is they weren’t even being creepy or trying to get really personal. They were just very friendly and I apparently can’t handle that. ><

Deo101

The friend group i get writing helo on are all writers, and they all understand my vision. They don't write stories like mine, i dont write stories like theirs, and we all fully understand our suggestions may go unfollowed.(edited)

Also whoever put the eye emoji yeah if u have a question straight up dm me and I'll answer.

keii4ii

It's okay, your comfort is important. If you want to be more open, you can work on that. But not everyone has the same comfort level and that's okay too

Deo101

Yes! Its all about what you're comfortable with

But I've personally got a small curated group of writers/artists who all circulate our work between eachother

Which i know is very rare.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Same, Deo...helped me a lot and I also know who to turn to when I'm down about engagement

Deo101

Mhm ^^

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

(also they are all perceived better than me so I believe them if they say sth nice)

Deo101

Omg

That group of people have done SO much for me honestly. Im thinking about them. I love my friends.

Also dont worry its nit all about me they also talk about and we help their work too i wanna be sure thats clesr

keii4ii

I figured it was all mutual! but now that you've said it's not all about you I'm suddenly imagining The Cult of Deo

That is 10000000% wonderful though

Deo101

I walk in and I'm like "y'all check out this new millennium lore" and they all take their hoods off and start scouring it for plotholes

keii4ii

Whilst sitting in a circle (a magic circle to be exact)

Deo101

Of course of course

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Damn, that’s awesome! I only see my friends every few months so I dump a lot of plot on them all at once, and it’s harder for them to give really detailed critique. XD

Deo101

Oh, I do this all online

Irl I sit down with my sister and we talk for 4 hours and Lose our voices LMAO

Cronaj

Good convos literally ALWAYS happen while I'm at work

keii4ii

I'm still here

Cronaj

Good, because it made me sad when you said you didn't have a support pillar

And that readers are fickle (which can be true)

But I don't think you know how much I love your comic

keii4ii

I'm seriously honored! I still fear that maybe people are not seeing the story I'm trying to tell, and are following the comic for some other reasons (which is valid, just not what I'm trying to achieve). But hey, I'll never find out if I don't keep going, right?

kayotics

keiiii, i love your comic and i think it's beautiful in many ways, not just the art

but also, on the topic of lack of engagement... I'm pretty fortunate in that my spouse is always really supportive of my comic, so when I need a little pep talk I can always ask them

sssfrs

I’m trying to collect as much negative feedback as I can so that I’ll know my comics strengths and weaknesses and I’ll be prepared to take criticism as it comes in the future. It is pretty frustrating having no response or fanbase right now but I started my comic pretty recently and theres still time for growth

Glowbat (Aloe)

when you're collecting feedback be mindful that there's a difference between constructive criticism and people being unhelpful and simply telling you they don't like your work

the latter wont do anything but bruise your self confidence(edited)

keii4ii

Yeah, and sometimes even well-meaning critiques can miss the point too, like if it comes from someone who thinks your work should be X, when it is intended to be Y. Easy example: My previous comic was a depressing drama centering around a terminally ill young woman and her doctor, and once someone told me I "needed more fight scenes." It wasn't even an action comic! In that case, the lack of fight scenes was not a weakness. It simply meant the comic wasn't for that person.

DanitheCarutor

On the topic of lack of engagement. My answer is really boring, but I just keep working on my comic regardless of how much/little engagement it gets. I never intended or expected to have an audience to begin with since my comic has sooo many problematic elements in it, whenever I get feedback it's super nice! Always a surprise, like seeing the machine light up when winning $500 on the penny slots! (In a way, getting engagement is kinda like gambling. You post a page and you may or may not win some comments in return... Not equating real people to items to win, of course!) Admittedly, if there is a page I feel would cause reaction but I get nothing, it is a little sad. It's not the end of the world, though! I got a story to tell, and as long as I can still draw I'm content.

kayotics

i relate to that a lot, Dani. I also never intended to make the comic for anyone but me, so the fact that anyone reads it is really exciting to me.

Cronaj

@keii4ii (Potentially off-topic, but is there somewhere to read your other comic(s)? Or are they all in Korean?)

DanitheCarutor

@kayotics Every so often I look at my reader base and think "Man, there are people into this kind of stuff??" It's an almost surreal feeling.

kayotics

Yeah I get it! I wouldn’t say mines too out there but there’s so many other fantasy dnd inspired comics out there that they could read that I’m surprised they even glance at mine.

AntiBunny

How do I deal with it? Usually experience a series of emotions such as "how hard is it to leave one little comment you losers?" Then "Who am I kidding, no one is reading this, I'm creating into a void," and finally pry a few comments from people who know me personally, reassure myself that I create out of a compulsion to tell my stories even if no one's reading, and start the process all over for next week. Not exactly a healthy method I admit.

keii4ii

@kayotics There is only one Toivo out there

@Cronaj aaaa the previous one was in English. But I would not recommend it It's unfinished (though it does have more than 600 pages IIRC) and honestly really rough.

kayotics

@keii4ii true....... one weird wizard boy

Cronaj

Dang... I LOVE medical stories. I'm seriously addicted to them. @keii4ii

keii4ii

I enjoy them too and I appreciate your interest!

Cronaj

scours the internet for the lost records

keii4ii

The site layout is also broken so yeah...

I guess another thing I do is try to comment more on other people's comics, to rec them publicly, etc. Being the change I want. I don't do this as often as I want, but I think/hope even the little bit I do counts.

mathtans

Heh, I'm basically with Cap'n Lee in terms of a cycle. I think part of my issue is I won a fanfic competition in 2004, and it's kind of been downhill since. I've posted regularly to a serial site for over 4 years, accumulating 300 posts, and last month it had 100 total views... there's been 2 comments since March.

On the actual comic side though (not serial) I've relaunched it more than once, and tried to flag the more recent index as a starting point. And yeah, just hold on to the few good comments, like the guy who applauds me for continuing to post even though I only have 10 people following on Tapas.

These days, of course, I'm too darn BUSY to really think much about the lack of engagement. So one solution might be to get married and have a kid. Then you're just happy when you manage to get content out, never mind if anyone remarks on it.(edited)

Mharz

Popping here just to answer the question becos it's interesting. The lack of engagement was a bane in my existence and honestly one of the factors why I had to see a psychiatrist. My doctor told me I have self-esteem issues which leads me to seek validation from strangers. This is the first thing I work on. I have to be confident enough to not break even if nobody likes my stuffs. Which means I have to love myself first. (People prolly see me as vain at this point) Second thing I do is keep a mentality of "nobody has to care. They have things going on as well" which helps me appreciate the small percentage of people who actually took the time to engage, talk, and be friends with me. I also try to put a positive spin on it. "Nobody cares therefore I can make as much noise on my social media as I want and no one will bother criticizing becos nobody cares." If people unfollow, it's on them. It just means they're not really a fan of my work and I shouldn't waste my time. And if my mental illness is too much, then I will disconnect from the online world a bit. Treat myself. Do something fun like gaming and baking and hang out with friends IRL if possible.

Mharz

I sometimes think it's karma on my end becos I'm so vain, I rarely get interested in anything so I'm not really a fan of many stuffs so that is something I accepted as well.

AntiBunny

Perhaps being a webcomic author sort of goes hand in hand with needing validation.

MJ Massey

OH BOY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT A LACK OF ENGAGEMENT?!

over the past week, I got 24 users. Granted, I didn't update, so that's probably why

So this is a four month overview of my website traffic. I hit a high of 184 unique users in August, and after that it plummeted to just barely over 100. And I hadn't really done anything different

I have never really gained a lot of traction with my comics. I'll admit that Black Ball definitely has more appeal than my last comic, so I have slowly been building an audience with it, but it's still been very slow. Sometimes it feels like I have to adhere to some extra set of rules while others can just throw up their comic on Tapas and have instant success. Of course, that's not the case at all

the key is to remember "why am I doing this? isn't it because I love making comics?!"

and to keep on pushing, keep up that hustle, and enjoy the ride. Make great content and it will be rewarding in and of itself

carcarchu

I'm not really sure it's as simple as simply throwing something up on tapas and getting instant success. there's a lot of work that goes behind every comic even if you don't perceive it

MJ Massey

well yes of course, I'm just saying sometimes it SEEMS like that

I'm a marketing professional, so I know there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes

Glowbat (Aloe)

theres, i think, a lot of factors in certain comics gaining traction faster than others that are mostly out of a creator's control. on mirror sites like webtoons or tapas you have to factor that more attention is given to certain genres and art styles over other because of what that crowd likes. if they're into slice of life romances in anime-esque styles then someone who writes fantasy mysteries in a more western influenced style may not get as much love as they deserve

its tough out there

ive been fairly fortunate to gain a steady bit of followers on tapas but on webtoons my reader engagement and subs are significantly lower

Glowbat (Aloe)

i chalk it up to the type of crowd

MJ Massey

I've been analyzing my audience and my work and have a hypothesis that my work just works better in bulk format. I think 2020 will be a year of transitioning into bulk distro instead of the page at a time format

and see if that helps. As well as some new marketing techniques and getting back into the con circuit

Kabocha

A lack of engagement... This is definitely... a topic. I feel like, sure, one's general marketability in any given platform will definitely make it easier or harder to attract an audience, but on the other hand? It's also worth making sure you kinda figure out what you want out of webcomics. Some people have been working on their projects (or existing within a fandom) for years - decades, even at this point, which can be a big boost to initial readership on a new project! Other people just have the advantage of being able to sit down and advertise, or having someone do that for them. Personally, though. I went in not expecting to get an audience, and for a long time, actively avoided even having a comment section on my site. I just enjoy making comics and creating things - and if it happens to make someone happy, that's awesome. But comics and art aren't the only thing I do in my life that make me happy, and I've found engaging other people directly about things like comic craft and resources to be about 100x more fulfilling than posting comics themselves. (And it is fun, sometimes, to gush about my OCs and how dumb they can be.) But how do I cope with it? Eh, it's honestly not a big deal to me. It feels less stressful in some regards, because the dayjob can get hella hectic, and trying to balance "OH GOD COMICS" with "OH GOD THE SERVERS NEED PATCHED ALL NIGHT TONIGHT" can be.... interesting.

(But oh god, I will admit, having someone come up to me and say, "I read your thing or used your photoshop/csp brushes" can be incredibly motivating. But other days, I have to be my own motivation, so...)

kayotics

Sometimes it’s helpful to keep a list of really nice comments or to write down memories of when someone told you they like your work. This can take a while to gather but if someone says something nice about your work, keeping it somewhere safe for a day you’re feeling bad can help boost that morale

It also helps me sometimes to think about how there’s a TON of people who never comment on things, but they’re probably regularly reading.

MJ Massey

Totally! I was building a landing page for my email subscription, and I was able to go back and find old reviews from my last comic, and it really got me pumped

Kabocha

Yeah! When I worked in a call center, the metrics on calls in -> surveys was something like... At best, you get 10% of your callers leaving surveys. And it's usually because you left an impression (good or bad). Usually the reality was at best, you'd hear back from about 2% of your userbase unless you gave them an incentive them to say something.

Mharz

re tapas and other platforms: I have to agree that certain genres really are more appealing there. I have two comics with different genres that I regularly update and the numbers are literally like night and day. It's a sad truth.

Mharz

I also love getting notifs on tapas when a person is binging my comics and liking every update. It means I got them hooked. :'3(edited)

nice reminder that there ARE people who like my comics.

Kabocha

Well yeah - even in traditional publishing, some genres generally get larger readerships than others (and higher advances) because they're more easily marketed. There's a reason why some publishers will categorize what's basically a fantasy story with romance subplots as a "romance" overall for a relatively unknown author (it's because they're more likely to attract more readers because romance is HUGE)

MJ Massey

true that

and you have to find where you audience lives as well

Kabocha

Yeah... I have some readers who only engage when they come back to catch up, which can be every 6weeks or more. Some only read when a chapter is done being posted, which is about every six months.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Re: Tapas. Yeah, Tapas especially has very particular styles and genres it likes (anime style + romance, especially BL). I posted Children of Shadow there for six months and had 20 total subs before taking it down. A while later I tried posting it on Webtoons and got 60 subs in one week. That level of engagement slowed down considerably almost immediately though, because the prologue episode is in colour and the main series is greyscale - and I discovered the hard way that the majority of Webtoons’ users do not like greyscale (I even got rating-bombed over it). My second comic is doing much better on Webtoons since it’s in digital colour rather than pencil like Children of Shadow. Each platform has its specific interests and it can be a struggle to get noticed if you’re not making something that falls into its normal styles and genres.

Glowbat (Aloe)

both tapas and webtoons really dont push their scifi comics hardly at all. Tapas' top scifi section is littered with discontinued stories (at least theyve abandoned tapas at any rate idk if theyre for sure no longer continued) which means that because i update weekly and sorta fall into a semi-anime inspired style i get some decent traffic from the small demographic who go hunting for a scifi comic

RebelVampire

That's not that surprising, tbh. Even in the realm of novels sci-fi is more of a hunt for where the audience is sometimes.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Scifi is an under-appreciated genre, imo. Unless you’re Star Wars, Star Trek or a Marvel comic, it seems like people don’t talk much about scifi.

It might help boost views if you rework your genre labels on places like Webtoons. Like, have Adventure or Drama as your main genre tag and Scifi as your secondary genre.

Glowbat (Aloe)

actually ever since avas demon went on webtoons ive been getting about 10-15 subs a week there

for a while i had listed aloe as drama first but the results werent fantastic as i think that genre has been flooded over there

keii4ii

I think sci-fi has some very prominent associations with the genre that don't apply to every sci-fi story -- e.g. the first thing a lot of people immediately think of is spaceship explody battles. So if someone sees sci-fi and they're not into spaceship explody battles, they won't read.

Glowbat (Aloe)

i may try adventure though if scifi doesnt pan out

keii4ii

Alternatively, if someone sees sci-fi and they ARE into that... and only that... they will leave once they find out the comic is not about that

Glowbat (Aloe)

thats also a good point

keii4ii

I've had similar difficulties even though fantasy is more widely accepted these days as a more varied mega-genre

People expect X, comic contains only a sprinkling of X and is about Y instead.

Glowbat (Aloe)

in my personal case, i've alienated potential readers i feel sometimes simply by having the cast be primarily lgtbq with an agender lead. but i dont regret that and im happy to have it deter people who arent down for that

RebelVampire

That is definitely true about sci-fi. Film has really biased people as to what fits sci-fi, where in reality sci-fi is a really wide genre. So a lot of stuff never gets a chance cause it confuses people.

Nutty (Court of Roses)

Yooooo i feel that, glowbat. On one hand, I want ppl to know that my comic is a safe read for LGBT, but at the same time I know that announcing it as such will deter others on principle.

The Q - working on WAYFINDERS

I feel the same way. The whole cast of Wayfinders is some form of lgbt+, but we don't actually adress it much, because it's an adventure story moreso than a romance. So it's like.... how do we tell the readers it ain't straight

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Fantasy does seem to get drowned by numbers. Eryl gets about 5 new subs per update and Children of Shadow only gets 1-2, and I think they’re just getting lost in the crowd.

Nutty (Court of Roses)

Two of my characters jokingly told each other their identity through bard puns, plus I keep pushing for gay ships within the story, so I'm pretty overt with my readers about it ahaha.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

@The Q - working on WAYFINDERS I’m having some difficulty with that dilemma, too. Both my comics feature large LGBTQ+ casts but romance isn’t the focus of either. It often feels like there’s no good way to bring it up naturally until the romance threads surface very far into the story, and I’m always worried about homophobes lashing out when they eventually discover the comic is G A Y

Glowbat (Aloe)

in my descriptions i describe the comic as a lgbtq+ themed scifi flat out

keii4ii

Early in HoK, one character embarks on a journey for a personal reason, and the MC tags along. I've semi-recently heard from an American friend that she didn't really get the character's reason. He wanted to take a younger family member away from a bad living situation, but to the friend, the situation didn't seem so bad. After some talking, we realized it was a cultural thing. The situation was very obviously bad to Koreans, but it didn't/doesn't seem like a far departure from the range of normal life in the US, for cultural/societal reasons. I suspect that was a big part of the reason why people kept pegging my comic as a "fun adventure romp" despite the lack of fun adventures (it has elements of adventure, but is not that as a whole). The reason for the journey seemed superficial, like the author (me) just needed an excuse to start the Fun Adventure-Filled Journey. Whereas Korean readers, back when I was publishing it in Korean, immediately understood it was an intensely personal, difficult task that the shy boy decided to accept for the sake of love.

And yeah, LGBTQ+ as a tag/ part of the description seems like a good option to me too!

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

But then I’m also anxious that LGBT folks will think that’s false advertising because the characters’ labels aren’t mentioned until really far into the story (and it’s no where near that point yet). Aaaagh maybe I just overthink everything.

Glowbat (Aloe)

its really interesting to hear the difference in reception HoK gets

keii4ii

Yeah and the setting itself apparently feels different, too! To Koreans, it evokes secondhand nostalgia. But some non-Koreans have told me it feels fantastical and Ripe For Adventures

Glowbat (Aloe)

I feel you Lee- almost none of my chars have mentioned or done anything to illustrate their identities yet

keii4ii

(I also feel the need to mention, there have been non-Korean readers who got what HoK was about. Those readers mean so much to me! But I don't know if they understood that particular detail about Danbi's motivation for the journey early on.)

The Q - working on WAYFINDERS

(I'm gonna put so much lbgt+ love in the background of the story everytime they get to a new city ahahahaha >:) )

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

To me, @keii4ii HoK is very reminiscent of Studio Ghibli films because I get similar whimsical vibes. But Studio Ghibli has always been more about emotional journeys so after a couple chapters I was like ‘Ah, yes, I think this comic is about the characters’ emotional growth’(edited)

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

(muhahhaa, also just let Sallly flirt with all the ladies in the BG)

Glowbat (Aloe)

yesss flirt with ladies

MJ Massey

I'm worried that my comic is not "gay enough" to warrant the LGBT+ label. The character's sexualities have very little to do with the actual story, and one character is actively hiding their identity

The Q - working on WAYFINDERS

SAME

keii4ii

I'm aro/ace/agender and I don't really feel "LGBTQ+ enough" so I can't really use the LGBTQ+ label for my own comic, even though I know the label isn't exclusively for ownvoices stories.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I admit I’m not sure I ‘got’ Danbi’s motivations on a cultural level, but I felt like the tone being presented in that scene made it pretty clear she was in a bad situation?(edited)

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

but... we have calculated a total of 1 straight character in our whole comic.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

‘She’ as in the niece, not Danbi. XD(edited)

MJ Massey

that's what it seemed like to me too, or at least that by leaving their village they were going to a better situation

Glowbat (Aloe)

first of all- high fives keii because agender solidarity and second of all if you have chars who identify as either not straight or not cis or both rolled into one then its gay enough to have the lgbtq label

to heck with gate keepers

there are plenty of queer peeps who just want to read stories that casually include people like themselves

but if you dont feel its needed you dont have to either

MJ Massey

I guess there is a certain expectation when you say "I make an LGBTQ+ comic" of how that comic will be, and I don't want to disappoint people or set them up to expect something different

I just figure that all kinds of people exist in the world, so I should include as many different kinds of people as I can in my work

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I probs should just put LGBTQ+ labels in the descriptions and be like ‘this is genre fiction but almost everyone’s queer even though you can’t tell yet’. XD

Nutty (Court of Roses)

I use the term "LGBT-friendly" to indicate that they're present, but might not be the full focus

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I write genre stories because I’m not that into romance-centric stories myself. I want queer heroes in the kinds of stories I like to read without the entire focus being on their sordid love-lives. I just want to read about the hero who slayed a dragon to rescue his prince instead of his princess, lol.

Glowbat (Aloe)

lol im in a similar position where i'd rather see the hero befriend the dragon

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I have plenty of that in my comics, too!

There’s some nice dragons and some very-not-nice ones. XD

Glowbat (Aloe)

(im insufferable in d&d i was a bard who tried to be friends with everything)

eryl is on my lisssst <3

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

This is why I love bards

Glowbat (Aloe)

hehe

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I'm always happy when people mark their stuff as LGBTQ+ if characters are present tbh Y_Y

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Also agreed with everything said above

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

All right, now Imma definitely have to add the LGBTQ+ labels to my comics next time I do website maintenance.

Glowbat (Aloe)

yay!

Nutty (Court of Roses)

Aw ye aw ye

Join the brigade

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yiss

I feel a bit bad bc I rarely read sth that's not clearly marked as LGBTQ+ or where I know the authors are part of the community whoops

But it's mostly the fact that I consumed hetero-focused media my whole life and now I can...choose.....

the dream

Glowbat (Aloe)

heck yes

im way more drawn to stories that are marked lgbtq+

keii4ii

Don't feel bad, because seriously, even if you exclusively read LGBTQ+ marked stories? There ain't enough time in this life to read every good story that fits that bill.

There are too many good stories out there and we do need to choose.

Glowbat (Aloe)

its just nicer because then i can enjoy the story without having to worry that in the middle of it im going to get a rude wake up call from an off colour joke or somethin at my expense

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeah that's true

keii4ii

Sometimes we miss out on stuff that we may have fallen in love with, but that's the name of the game, the game of not having enough time

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Webcomics feel a lot safer than other media in that regard atm

Jupp especially if you're also working on your own stories

Glowbat (Aloe)

it sucks thinking theres a bunch of stories out there that im sure id love if only i had the time or mental fortitude to sift through a bunch of others.

keii4ii

(OTL that reminds me... there is one instance of trope use in an early chapter of HoK that falls into that 'off color joke' category. I don't have any excuses for it, just 'I just thoughtlessly parroted a trope that I saw elsewhere.' I regret it and hope to figure out an elegant way to rewrite that one scene.)

Glowbat (Aloe)

i dont have the energy to be burned so often by stories that seem good and then hit me with random transphobic bs or using slurs as jokes

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Yeah, as someone who grew up in a time when no one positively portrayed queer folks in mainstream stories (and there was no internet and living out in the boonies made it impossible to discover underground cultures) I love that now I can seek out tonnes of LGBTQ stories and drown myself in the gay every day.

Glowbat (Aloe)

yesss

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

jupp ;;

Glowbat (Aloe)

man if i could give ten year old me printed copy of paranatural and turn to the pages with rj's identity being explained? that kid would have grown up way happier

living in small towns aint great for queer peeps

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Nope it’s not. I was badly repressed until honestly only 3 years ago when I suddenly asked myself why I loved reading about and writing so many gay characters. And then suddenly my whole life made sense.

Glowbat (Aloe)

im so happy for you<3

Glowbat (Aloe)

its a heck of a thing thinking back on things and realizing why you do certain things

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Honestly there were giant clues from when I was still a little kid and I can’t believe it took me so long. XD But I’m digressing from the comic talk, lol.

Glowbat (Aloe)

haha i understand what you mean

i think its why its so important for comics to be inclusive

spare some poor kids the heart ache and confusion

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Yes! The internet has created such a boom for indie comics and that huge variety of voices has been so so important.

Glowbat (Aloe)

as much as comics are an art, they're extremely powerful as a vehicle for teaching and generally conveying ideas

FeatherNotes

Can i just say how happy i am that y'all are making LGBTQ+ comics that aren't just romance tho? I'm pretty indifferent and on the ace spectrum for sure, so its so refreshing that we can have a queer cast just being cool and not hurt by identities. I wish i had that as a kid

Also no shade on romance but there's def a lot and lgbtq+ isn't just for that genre

So yes yall are 'gay enough' lol

Glowbat (Aloe)

i agree! queer peeps shouldn't be squared off in romance, which unfortunately i think is a result of people's gross misconceptions

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Admittedly, I use my comics as a vehicle to work through my own issues, so there are scenes planned where the characters have to deal with transphobia or homophobia. But I will always counterbalance that with other scenes that validate the characters’ identities.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Hmhm my story also deals with transphobia and dysphoria bc I'm working through own issues. I don't think that's a bad thing though

generally I think it's pretty ok if the story is not a constant misery train

(even those can be written well, but they are usually not my cup of tea)

Glowbat (Aloe)

i think its perfectly acceptable to use comics as a vehicle for that lee

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeahh tbh

MJ Massey

there's no wrong reason to make comics/create a thing

Glowbat (Aloe)

youre a queer creator and you're working with what you know so why not

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I know focusing on queer suffering has been criticised a lot but I feel there's more nuance to it. Especially if it's a LGBTQ+ person writing about it

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Yeah. I’m a miserable emo and I write miserable emo stories, but I try to inject some hope into it, because I think that the majority of humans are good and/or want to be good.

Glowbat (Aloe)

theres this comic called dropout that does a wonderful job exploring the grittier truths of being queer

its a fairly short read but its super good

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Hmmm, I may look that up

Glowbat (Aloe)

i can dm you the link! no pressure to read it tho

twothirty

gosh, i just want to chime in because i really relate to earlier comments around labelling comics. I'm bi, but i don't wear it on my sleeve, and my own comic has like...1 straight character. I feel like there is an expectation for comics labelled as lgbtq+ and i don't want to disappoint people who are really looking for that content to be directly addressed.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Tbh I feel many people are just happy, if there's queer characters doing cool stuff (at least that's how it's for me).

Glowbat (Aloe)

i label my own comic as lgbtq+ and the plot hardly hinges on that being the central theme

just a bunch a gay scientists and robots in space

...i swear its way more interesting that that lol

man i wish i could get more of my comic out faster so i didnt have to worry about spoiling basic things geeze

twothirty

haha im into it! Ahh, well probably a big part of it is my own insecurities, but what are webcomics for if not... for figuring out your own crap (edited)

keii4ii

I feel that X'D

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

juppp...I get the anxiety tho

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Mess of anxiety solidarity.

Glowbat (Aloe)

oof yeah

also hey while we're at it with the queer biz in here:

aro/ace/bi peeps are all gay enough full stop

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

YES

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

jupp

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

As a demi-bi dude I fully endorse that all labels are valid.

And that gatekeeping sucks and helps no one

Glowbat (Aloe)

yeah anyone who makes you feel like you dont belong under the lgbtq+ umbrella isnt doin right by you

and your comics should be allowed to be considered as queer as you want them to be

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Also all gender identities are valid and don’t hinge on having a physical transition. You’re valid as trans whether you change your body or not.

Glowbat (Aloe)

^^^

YES

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

YESS

Glowbat (Aloe)

all our experiences are valid and the comics we make because of those experience are beautiful

Deo101

Oh man I missed a huge convo, but I love y'all and it's wonderful seeing so many kinds of comics out there and seeing people make their own content

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Yo, nothing "gross" about romance, and the reason people flock to it is because romance with same-gender couples and/or trans people has been treated as "deviant disorder that needs to be cured and cleaned up, or at least kept far away from polite society" for so long (and still is, in many places)

All queer stories are valid, queer characters don't need to be in a romantic storyline to count, but please let's discuss that without echoing homophobic rhetoric about queer romance being "gross", yeah?(edited)

MJ Massey

I don't think it was meant gross as in queer romance itself being gross, but more in the finding a general distaste for romance tropes and romance as a genre

but I agree, that we should be careful about implying those sorts of things with our work

keii4ii

Romance as a genre is valid too; the consensus was just that there's a lot of it, and other genres are valid too. That every genre is valid

MJ Massey

true, but people might just feel strong distaste for certain genres from a personal point of preference

it's part of what makes the fabric of human existence so fascinating, we all have different opinions, likes, dislikes, viewpoints...

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

tbh I love romance stories but the thing that disheartens me is that the queer stories people take most serious are romances

keii4ii

The pigeonholing

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Can you elaborate on that Keiiii?

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Those are the stories that get repressed and erased the most, is the thing, so it takes more effort to get them produced and shared, and that makes people extra-happy

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I don’t think anyone said romance stories were gross?

Just that it’s not necessarily our jam.

keii4ii

Oh, I meant that's what people are doing when people start exclusively associating a very diverse experience/ group of people with ONE thing, to a point where the people in that group are not allowed to be anything other than That One Thing

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I was reacting to "queer peeps shouldn't be squared off in romance, which unfortunately i think is a result of people's gross misconceptions"

keii4ii

and it's a really unfair, inaccurate restriction

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Ahhhh

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

OH okay, thank you for elaborating, Keiiii. I couldn't really associate anything with the term at first!

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Misconceptions are the reason queer people have been excluded from most romance for so long

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I think in that case it was more about people's misconception of queer identities being inherintly sexual and/or romantic though?

and not about queer romance being gross

DanitheCarutor

Huh, I thought 'gross' in that context was more akin to 'outlandish' or 'exaggerated', but I could be misunderstanding.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I think it means more that a lot of people fetishise queer relationships when there’s only representation in romance.

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Associating "queer people being sexual and/or romantic" with "gross" is still hella dicey

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

the misconception is what's gross, not the queer people or their romance?

Glowbat (Aloe)

re: gross misconceptions :Oh! i think i said that Erin- i don't think i did a great job of explaining my thoughts on that. on sites like tapas and webtoons its fairly common for gay couples to be exploited for an audience thats less interested in representation than fetishization(edited)

MJ Massey

yes I think there was some lamenting that it could be difficult to show queer characters without an element of romance to make their identities apparent?

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I don’t think they meant gross as in disgusting but gross as in ‘far off the mark’

MJ Massey

because some people wanted to have queer characters but not focus on a romantic plot

@Glowbat (Aloe) I know what you are talking about I think

Deo101

Yeah, though I'd like to add on as someone who is writing LGBT romance, I get lumped in with fetishization content a lot and that is very frustrating for me, too

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

And it does take a lot of digging to find respectful representation in romance instead of stories made by and for straight people that use bad stereotypes to fetishise queer relationships.

Not that all romance by and for straight people does this.

But it’s a problem in the genre

Deo101

I work very hard to portray healthy loving relationships and people lump me in to their hatred of romance in general or categorize my work as bl or discount it for having that. It gets fetishized or dismissed an awful lot and that's very frustrating for me to see happening

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

If you want to talk specifically about something you feel is stereotypical or fetishizing, I wouldn't object to that, it's the broad swipes at all romance that become a problem

Glowbat (Aloe)

agreed

queer romance is very important to represent

i dont think anyone here would imply otherwise

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

And, hey, sometimes queer writers/readers also enjoy a romance that's unrealistic or trashy or silly or melodramatic, I don't want to dismiss "all romance that wouldn't represent a healthy and respectful relationship IRL" either

Glowbat (Aloe)

very true

Deo101

Yeah, not what I was trying to say.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Idk if anyone was saying that tbh

Glowbat (Aloe)

i think our initial conversation though boiled down to that we were happy to see stories with queer people being allowed to just be people doing things that didnt focus on romance

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I'm personally very glad that we are getting a wider variety of queer romance now

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

What we were discussing earlier is more that it’s important to portray queer protagonists in all kinds of genres, instead of only romance. Which doesn’t mean romance isn’t also a valid genre.

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Sure, and part of my discomfort is that queer characters have already been "allowed" to do non-romantic things in mainstream media for a long time -- it's being "allowed" to have an explicit romance that's new and different

keii4ii

^ I don't know about that. It probably depends on where you are, both IRL and part of the internet?

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I never saw a queer character that wasn’t either tragic, a deviant, or the butt of a joke in media until the late ‘O0s(edited)

MJ Massey

both views are valid--it's good to both want explicit queer romance and to also just want to see queer people doing a wide range of things

DanitheCarutor

@Glowbat (Aloe) Yeah, to parrot what you said. I just chalked the convo up to seeing queer characters expand into different genres, and being happy that queer fiction is starting to be known for more than just romance.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

There was no positive representation in any genre in the media I had access to for most of my life(edited)

Deo101

It helps with the normalization of stories like that, but I also think it makes homophobes be "more comfortable" with gay stories sometimes in a way that bothers me

I have had someone say that my story is the only bl they can stand so I'm sensitive about this subject though

Cause there's a lot to unpack there

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

The "if there has to be a queer romance, at least make it awful and tragic" trope was absolutely true in my area too

yikes, I can see being sensitive about that

Deo101

Like me writing something that primarily isn't romance and just has a romance b plot is making homophobes and fetishizing people read my work and that's frustrating for me in a way I can't articulate. I'm very happy within the LGBT+ community to have these works be made but among the straight people I know it's uncomfortable when they start saying things like "oh yay finally some gay stuff that isn't romance" kind of thing

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeah that makes sense

Deo101

From other gay people I get it, it makes sense and I'm the same way! Especially with the oversaturation of bl

DanitheCarutor

@Deo101 Gah I got a comment like that before, it was a weird situation because not only was it unnecessary but... TGtaHR isn't even a romance...

Thinking about it, that's actually kinda worrying.

Deo101

But it's important to remember that the LGBT+ community is a bubble and though it's safe to explore all sorts of stories here, it's not safe outside of our bubble

Or, not necessarily safe

Like a homophobe reading a gay story with an unhealthy dynamic could just bolster their bad opinions about gay people even if it's exploring it in a healthy way

I have a hard time explaining what I'm thinking and I really hope this all makes sense

keii4ii

I get you

Glowbat (Aloe)

(i get what youre saying deo <3 )

Deo101

And its not something we can really change but I think it's important to remember with regards to society at large and how our stories are percieved outside the community

Phew lol

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I get what you're saying, although in that case, the homophobe was probably going to think that no matter what, and if it wasn't the story they'd find some other "evidence"

Deo101

Yeah absolutely

And I think it's important to remember that when talking about exploring stories that have unhealthy Dynamics and things other than romance and whatnot. I don't want those things to become safe for cishets to exploit basically

Like "oh great now I don't need to write them kissing so I can access BOTH the LGBT and everyone else!"

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Ah, you mean like "the author says they're gay, so that counts as representation and LGBT people should buy this, even though there's never anything explicitly gay in the story"

right?

Deo101

Yeah

Deo101

Which again within the community I get and it's important to explore things like that for sure

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I think the important difference is, writers within the community are going to do something to indicate the queer identity, even when it's not "having an on-screen romance"

And that's something that, say, your average JKR doesn't bother doing

Deo101

Again I have a hard time explaining myself and I might be tripping over my words a bit here

Yeah that's true as well

I trust LGBT people to be navigating stories with an inherent nuance

For the most part

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

That, or (I think people were talking about this upthread) we don't advertise a story as "look at all this representation!" while the characters' identities haven't come up in the comic yet

Deo101

Yeah I know I didn't say my story was LGBT til I had the married couple kiss cause I was worried people would think I was gaybaiting

I know I'm not but it feels wrong to me like I'm trying to rally up readers kinda thing...

But also if you know you're planning to do it I feel like you can say it'll be there

I just have anxiety LOL

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

No, I get you. Even if it's definitely going to happen in the future of the comic, it'll disappoint readers if you rally them up for something that isn't there yet

That would happen with anything, not just queer identities

Deo101

Yeah I also don't tag my pages or whatever for disability if a character isn't disabled on the page

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Like if it was "read my comic for cool space battles!" when you had only posted the 5 pages of setup with characters having a chill talk in a field

sssfrs

I think what bothers me about lbgtq focused romance stories is that they’re often centered on how ~scandalous~ the relationship is and how the characters have to overcome personal biases or homophobia/transphobia as the central struggle

Deo101

I don't want the wrong audience. I mean I also could probably slap bl on my cover and I feel like I'd get a lot more readers but they're not the readers I want

sssfrs

Or at least I dont enjoy reading stories like that

Deo101

Yeah that frustrates me too, personally

But some people like seeing that overcoming idk

sssfrs

My comic has at least 2 visible prominent gay relationships but its not about romance at all

I guess thats personal preference(edited)

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I think a lot of the time you also know what intentions the person behind telling a story like that has? I have a straight aquaintaince writing BL and it's totally clear that she thinks the whole ordeal is kinda cute and endearing when it's pretty...harsh for actual queer people

Deo101

Mines got 5 and it is about romance cause I absolutely love romance and I love love, but I am overly frustrated with romance as a genre. Which is why I write my own

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I think that goes back to the "talk about a specific trope that bothers you, don't treat it like the whole genre" thing I was saying

Deo101

Yeah I think there's a lot of nuance to it that cishet people largely don't have

sssfrs

I feel like it makes the romance into a statement about how society is bad and its not interesting or groundbreaking to represent that bigotry in your media without adding something new

Deo101

I'm frustrated with the often unhealthy Dynamics and the frequency with which homophobia and transphobia are shown.

I live in a homophobic household I don't want it in my romance cause it hurts to see

But, I don't think it's bad to tackle those issues it's just hard for me personally

sssfrs

I like pairing up side characters but only 2 pairs are going to have an Arc. so far....

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I...feel for many cishet authors it's also a good excuse to not have the characters get together right away without actually thinking about why they would not for other reasons (like personality based). So there's a lot of "I'm not gay!!!" type of thing

Also totally understandable Deo :C

Deo101

Yeah absolutely.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

It’s also valid, as a queer author, though, to show characters that do have to overcome their ‘gay panic’ when they first realise they’re gay. It’s something a lot of us have gone through, but it’s important to show the comfort you finally feel in yourself when you come out the other end if it.

sssfrs

Why should fiction include all the shitty parts of real life

Deo101

I think straight people see LGBT authors tackle these issues and go "oh so I can too!!!"

And yeah this is why I'm largely drawn to sci-fi and fantasy, I get to entirely remove all the things that hurt me about reality. Dude can just use a cane and everyone is like dope

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Because sometimes fiction helps us process all the shitty parts of real life. Both happy stories that take away shit and gritty stories that acknowledge shit are valid and important

Deo101

Ppl can just be trans and it's fine

I agree they're all important

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

(I think I'm just super bitter bc here I've seen cis and straight women get awards for their queer romance stories which just hmm)

Deo101

^

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I agree it's a super nuanced topic

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

...I feel like you've also gotta make some allowance for bad writing. Like, maybe someone's not getting a lot of nuance in their story because their skills aren't sharp enough to handle it yet.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Agreed, Erin!

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

And one of the ways they'll get good enough to write better stories is by working out issues through writing the worse stories.

sssfrs

My main character is a butch lesbian gnc completely androgynous person and no one is ever going to say anything nasty to her about it

Deo101

I feel you sssfrs lol(edited)

Deo101

I thirst for gentle, nice LGBT stories. I just crave them

Nutty (Court of Roses)

I feel that. As I build Prismal and decided to include lgbt folks in it, my first thought about it was "would there be any reason for them to be hated in this society? No? Then why would I include that theme?"

Deo101

And yes it's important to delve into the harsher realities and I think it's good to use fiction to explore and work through those themes, definitely, but personally no thx

sssfrs

I like where ppl are just all expected to be pan or bisexual by default

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

heh, I literally have 2 comics and one of them is "real world where characters struggle with realistic prejudices" while the other is "fantasy world with 0% homophobia/transphobia."

Something for everyone!

sssfrs

Nice

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I’m too goddamn miserable to write such nice stories, lol. But writing gritty stories where my characters go through hell helps me process the stuff I go through in my life. But I love reading those nice stories where we can forget racism and queerphobia exist.(edited)

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

hehe...I've decided to go into some queerphobia in my next comic only bc I want to...explore historical queer spaces and the kind of space does not make sense in a world that's 100% accepting

Deo101

Yeah it's just all about that nuance babeyy

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeahhh

Deo101

I think that's also why we see so much more LGBT content of all kinds in indie media

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Absolutely

Less gatekeeping, less opportunity for homophobes to shut it down

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

No big boss complaining it’s not ‘marketable’ to be inclusive

Deo101

And I worry that mainstream stuff will be like "ohoho, so that means I can do it too" *stumbles and sets gay people back 10 years in the eyes of the general public *

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

YEEEEEEAH there’s that

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I think the mainstream is going slow enough that that's far from my biggest worry

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

But change never happens smoothly

Sometimes it goes up and down before society evolves into a better mindset

Deo101

Well yeah ofc, but even on a smaller scale of bad people reading good works it is kinda happening I feel like

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

So there’s gonna be periods of shit before being queer is faithfully represented in the mainstream

Deo101

Yeah for sure

It helps normalize things but it also can do it in an unhealthy way and it's frustrating

As in people going "yes let's include gay romance *it's just bl tropes *"

And things like that

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I think the best way to counter that is by producing & supporting more stories of all kinds -- the more complex and multifaceted a view people get, the better

Deo101

Yeah

From people who are handling those stories well, too ^^^

Which is subjective of course I know that

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Also, something nobody's mentioned that I think should come up...a lot of times you don't know who's straight/cis and who's not. Like, if it's Famous Mainstream Author JKR, you can be pretty sure, but with small-scale indie creators, how much can you tell the difference between "straight/cis artist who thinks BL tropes are how all real gay relationships work" versus "gay/bi/trans/etc artist who understands IRL fine, but it's fun and self-indulgent for them to write those tropes"?

Especially since the artist could be actively in the closet. Or could still be on their own journey of self-discovery and not know they aren't straight and/or cis yet. All the more so since indie creators are more likely to be younger than well-established mainstream standards.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I don’t know about you guys, but it’s always BLATANTLY obvious to me by how they’re writing.

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

How did you confirm it? Did you ask them?

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Call it intuition

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I don't think it's always confirmable tho :C

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Granted, sometimes a person writes with enough nuance that I can tell they're queer, but how do you tell a straight writer from an awkward/inexperienced/clunky queer writer?

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I know a lot of authors thinking they were cishet and later on realizing they were not

and some of them wrote a lot of "yikes"

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

There’s writing patterns and use of tropes that signal whether the person is actually respectful if the queer community or not

Deo101

Also just cause you're working through things doesn't mean it's a healthy exploration that is good for the community at large

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Even if they’re queer and self-indulging, there’s a lot of tells both in the comics and in their commentary

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

tbh I think some tropes are fair to criticise no matter if the author is queer or not but there are also queer authors writing disrespectful tropes

it's not sth that I see a lot, but I've seen it

Deo101

^ yeah this

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

All questions of their writing aside, there are definitely queer people who don't respect the community IRL, either...

Deo101

Like it's not good to write glorifying rape fic of pedophilia no matter who you are or how it's helping you work through things. I mean you can write it but then to share it is something else entirely

Not saying those are common things but they're pretty very much "bad" things

And actually glorifying rape is something I do see much more than I would have expected

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

And that’s problematic, too. When you’re part of a community but not respectful of it, that’s just as bad as a straight person being homophobic. Sometimes the worst homophobia cones from within the community, but that doesn’t make it okay or healthy.

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

If you share a dark story behind accurate warnings and labels, then it can reach other people who are working through something by reading it, and be avoided by people who don't.

Deo101

Yeah there's a lot of lateral agression within the community

Okay but glorification of it isn't a healthy way to work through those things it's not a dark story

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I'm not saying homophobia from within the community is okay or healthy, I'm just saying it doesn't have to indicate that the person is straight/cis.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I have a lot of dark themes in my comics. There is rape, but it is never shown on panel and never never glorified. I think it’s a subject that’s important to talk about, but I find it extremely disturbing how much it’s romanticised in fiction.

Deo101

^^^

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeah...

DanitheCarutor

Huh, this convo reminds me of an article a friend sent me from someone's Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/posts/25994657 It talks about creation policing, and problematic fiction. You all proooobably won't agree with it given the direction of discussion (which all points of view are totally valid), but this whole subject is super interesting.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

All right, true, you can’t always know if an author is queer or not. I should have been more specific in whether an author has a healthy view of the LGBTQ community or not.

Deo101

So you might not be able to tell if someone is gay by their writing, but there are certain trends that gay people do not generally fall into that MOSTLY indicate someone is straight, though there's no way to know for sure.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

THAT is always obvious to me.

Deo101

And like def there are bi women who fetishize gay men, and there is transphobia and biohobia and everything within the community

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

If they’re being homophobic or just don’t ‘understand’ the queer community, I mean

Deo101

Etc etc, so even if you can't tell whether a harmful representation is written by someone who is LGBT it's a harmful representation regardless

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

^^^^This

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Yeah. I'm always very hesistant on how to address things like this

Deo101

Me too esp since I have such a hard time saying what I mean

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I'm not saying it's impossible to write harmful representation, but "this is harmful!" gets used as a cudgel against any representation, so often that I'm wary of talking about it as a vaguely-defined blanket category.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

It’s hard to articulate things clearly when in fast-paced chats like this

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeah, haha

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

At least it's good for leveling people up, huh?

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

eifhiuef pfft

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Lol. ‘You levelled up talking about homophobia!’

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

(I feel we're all respectful and try to explain ourselves and give others the chance to do so too)

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

At least it's good for something??

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

(so that's good haha)

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Yes. Talks like this are super important to help see each others views on tricky subjects

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Yeah, I feel like we're making good-faith attempts to understand each other, which...is not something you always get in internet discussions

To put it very very mildly

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

We all have our own stories and unique perspectives, and that’s important to share both in the fiction we write and in discussions with each other

DanitheCarutor

@Phin (Heirs of the Veil) The subject is pretty sticky. On one hand artists should be allowed to create whatever they like, on the other if that work can perpetuate harm for a certain community should it be allowed? There is a lot of this going around right now where people want sanitization in media, and what works of art are and are not allowed to exist. Not saying it's bad, but it is fascinating. I'm not fully getting into the convo because I'm honestly super neutral.

kayotics

I’m definitely watching the convo play out, it’s interesting to see a chat like this develop

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

yeah I'm taking notes this is not my area of expertise, and it's all good stuff to keep in mind

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I'm okay discussing & criticizing specific examples (which is probably why I keep bringing up Dumbledore...), but I don't like being critical of broad categories, because they can be so ambiguous & easily misused.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

@DanitheCarutor I think it is very hard to differentiate between people who want difficult subjects to be explored (which is valid) and people who don't want to be called out for certain kinks for example and a lot of the times stuff like "purity policing" gets used to shut legit criticism up. On the other hand there are a lot of examples of callout culture gone wild and honestly ??? Idk anymore.

Deo101

Its very frustrating

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

But I'm also at a point where I'm getting super tired of constant discourse so

Deo101

Yeah I've literally had to block words like "ace" cause it's just so often discourse from either side and I'm just so tired of it

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Plus there’s always going to be stories that help one person work through things but that are very toxic and upsetting to someone else. Just like there’s people who are toxic to one person and important to someone else.(edited)

Deo101

I've also blocked LGBT and "feminism" kinda things

I JUST see cats and memes now thank you

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Lee: absolutely, which is why accurate labels are important

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Eyyyy, it's my turn!

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Yes

kayotics

I think it’s important to curate your online experience, and sometimes NOT curating your experience leads to purity policing

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

HMM

kayotics

But yes tagging is really important!!!

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I think there is the creation of a lot of anxiety in what and what you can't tell in stories

Deo101

Tags are super important but also when someone doesn't think or realize they're doing something harmful they might not tag it

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Warning labels all around are always a good idea

Deo101

Like if someone is being a homophobe just cause etheyre homophobic they're not gonna tag that

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

True

Deo101

Why tag it's glorifying abuse if they think it's hot or reality and don't realize that's bad

Etc etc

kayotics

There’s definitely a lot of creator anxiety lately, I’ve had a lot of friends come to me with anxieties about not wanting to start a project they love because they’re afraid of who might attack them online

Deo101

^^^ I've been scared about this

kayotics

Me too, honestly

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Same honestly

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

There’s always the issue if ‘should harmful ideas be given a platform’ vs ‘stifling voices you just don’t want to hear’ it’s a fine line.

Deo101

I once got all in a tizzy cause I was like "oh my god my planet of women is asking a man for help"

Yeah cause some free speech silences other's

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

Same

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

And sometimes you get people thinking "if I label this with a warning that it contains Bad Content, the internet police will come after me," so they don't use warnings for that reason, and then it's just bad times all around

Deo101

Yeah.

And also there are things no one thinks to warn about, like some very specific triggers

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeah...

Deo101

Its just all around a very difficult to navigate space

DanitheCarutor

@Phin (Heirs of the Veil) Right? People do that with anything, if it's not the "purity police" excuse it's "my style", or "I'm friends with -insert minority here-!" I don't bother with the arguments anymore since I've been pushed into them enough, I'm more into seeing opinion on general art policing, or what is and isn't allowed to exist in art. Sorry, I'm being slow at typing again.

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Heck, if we're talking about actual psychological triggers, most of them are going to be super-specific

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I have a trigger for fungal growth on bodies now bc I have 3 people who either have probs with plants growiing on bodies OR funghi lol

Deo101

Ya I have a "someone watching someone else sleep" trigger which people use a surprising amount

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

...wait, Phin, now you have a trigger, or now you use a warning for it?

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

@DanitheCarutor srsly don't worry about it, haha. It's a nuanced topic and I think generalizing is pretty bad when it comes to what you can and can't portray

I use a warning for it, sorry Erin, wasn't clear

I had multiple people approach me so I warn in update posts and should probs also do it on the website

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

no worries, just wanted to be sure

kayotics

I do have an extreme phobia of needles and you’d be surprised how many news sites use active needle shots for vaccination stories

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

GOD I KNOW

I am not afraid of them but like once they are near skin

I don't wanna see...these shots

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I have a deathly phobia of vomiting and there are NEVER warning labels for it.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeah I think most people don't regard it and sometimes it's hard to get everything...

a friend of mine, Eli, creates a very gory comic and they put all their warnings on their update post images

and I kinda wanna try to be similarly mindful?

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

(I’m okay if it’s in a comic and off-panel or the gross part is not shown but the sound and sight are crippling for me and shows and movies just SHOW it all the time)

kayotics

That’s true. Not a vomit fan.

DanitheCarutor

Ah I've thought about using page by page TWs, and I tried it out with one page, but with the amount of triggering thing in my comic I decided on a general warning. (since almost every page would get a warning) A few of my readers also said they preferred not to see them due to possible spoilers.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Hmm...I have a list of possible triggers in my about section

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I probably should start doing that bc my comics get very bloody

kayotics

I know I’ll have a scene eventually that I’ll want to have a warning on, but I’m not sure how to warn for it without spoiling?

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I installed a spoilertext plugin on one of my comics for that! Now I can put specific warnings at the front of a storyline, and readers who don't have triggers & don't want spoilers can leave them hidden.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

OHH that's a cool idea

DanitheCarutor

Yeah, mine is like a general pop-up that you have to click on to proceed to the comic.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I’m going to have to look at that plugin. Potential spoilers are the only reason I don’t have really detailed warnings on my comics

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Here's the one I use: https://wordpress.org/plugins/inline-spoilers/

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Yeah I'll look into it too. It seems super useful.

Heck thanks Erin!

DanitheCarutor

I don't know how you could make a warning without spoilers, @kayotics! I mean, you might have to if you want to do a page specific one.(edited)

Sorry, my cat sent the message for me.

kayotics

I was thinking a page specific one for the upcoming scene.

So I’m glad that doesn’t seem weird

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I'd say super-general warnings are mostly not spoilers. A movie will say "contains graphic violence", and that doesn't tell you who's being violent, or why, or how it's resolved.

DanitheCarutor

^^^

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeah, I think that's not a spoiler, especially if the comic was already violent

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Yeah. I have warnings for things like ‘graphic violence, blood and gore, nudity, etc. But some chapters or pages probably warrant more detailed TWs.

Deo101

Yeah I'm gonna put in my a/n for a few updates before like "hey there are some spooky scenes comin' up!'

kayotics

I wouldn’t say my comic is already violent, so it’s more applicable for this one scene

Deo101

And yeah things like "watching someone sleep" is gonna be at least somewhat of a spoiler...

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

hmhm

DanitheCarutor

@kayotics I think it really just depends on the person too. Some readers like page by page TWs, and don't see them as spoilers, others are the opposite. Your readers might appreciate a warning more than mine since your comic isn't overall super graphic.(edited)

Gah I can not type today!

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I put "this will get bloody" before some of the vampire storylines, not spoiler-cut -- because it's not a given, but shouldn't exactly be a surprise, either.

Deo101

I also do not mind spoilers whatsoever and I WILL spoil to anyone who asks as I've said many times, but I know not everyone is like me and spoilers are a big deal to many people

"i don't mind spoilers" i love them and they make me enjoy things more for many reasons

DanitheCarutor

Ah same! I'd love to just spill everything!

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

(Deo high five bc same)

Deo101

My people

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

tbh spoilers got me interested in many comics and I actively spoil myself

like getting into new comics and reading the updates before jumping to the beginning haha

kayotics

I’m very much the opposite

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I don't want to spoil anything, I want to keep people guessing! But sometimes you gotta.

Deo101

Yes. I get incredibly stressed about whether or not things will work out and spoilers relieve that. Even if it doesn't work out like at least I know

I get so so sooo stressed about it

kayotics

Whenever people tell me spoilers I actively like content less

DanitheCarutor

I don't mind them myself. My mom absolutely hates them, and used to make me spoil every movie if I saw it before her, so I'm pretty alright with it.

Deo101

Yeah ik many people are that way

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeah I also think that's fair

DanitheCarutor

Also spoilers don't affect me either since it's not the content that means anything, but how it's used. Imo

kayotics

Usually for me it’s like. “Ok you spoiled a major character death/reveal, that’s not fun for me anymore”

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

OH yeah Kay! Tbh

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

If there's a big twist, I want to be unspoiled the first time I watch/read/etc the thing. If it's handled well, I can always rewatch it again with the knowledge.

kayotics

Because then I don’t get to experience that anymore

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

that's sth that can also ruin a story for me

kinda didn't get into the current season of CritRoll bc of such a spoiler

with comics it's kinda like...I see them on twitter, read along a few updates and then jump to the beginning so there I don't mind spoilers at all

it's more scoping out if the story's for me

Deo101

Oh man I sometimes only get into things because of spoilers LOL I know I'm weird with this but genuinely I love spoilers so much they make me comfortable with what I'm watching. I love rewatching things cause I know how it goes down and I'm not stressed by it

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I sometimes have troubles to deal with...raw emotions towards media so spoilers help me with that too

like preparing myself for it to hurt

(not always tho)

Deo101

Right yeah for sure

Even if I know it won't work out I KNOW and I don't put energy into getting my hopes up

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I hate spoilers, personally. I love going into stories completely blind or with just the bare-bones ‘genre, overall theme’ because I LOVE being shocked and surprised and have plot-twists thrown at me, so that’s what I do with my own comics(edited)

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeah that's also fair. Right now my brain's not in the mood for that so I gotta play it save hehe

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I still don't like saying "here's what the Beings are" in ads or sales pitches for BICP, even though the page where it was revealed is several years old by now

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

But everyone likes different things so there’s nothing wrong with giving spoilers for your own stories if people want them(edited)

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeah it depends honestly and that's pretty okay.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Everyone’s different and everyone’s valid

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I don't spoil my own story, except with artworks and mostly it's without context or cryptic enough that it's not...a real spoiler

yeah!

in that regard, it's just a huge matter of taste

twothirty

i also jump into webcomics, read them backgrounds for a bit then realized im actually into it and read it properly haha

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

hahaha yes

If I get invested without context I know it's good lol

Deo101

I don't spoil on public platforms cause I know people don't wanna necessarily see that (unless it's in an ama but I try to avoid spoilers still) but in private? I'll spill whatever tf u want like

I have and I will again!!!! Lmao

I know no one is gonna write it like me and also it's p linear so the only spoilers people really ask are Character things not plot things, anyways

So I'm not worried about theft im not doing anything super wild or original lol

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

all my favorite panels I've done are all the most spoilery ones, so... whether I share them or not, I lose

Deo101

Aw man

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

SAME

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

nooo

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

but it makes sense! I put all my effort into those moments where the story twists and turns

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Some of my fave panels or pages are when big reveals or plot twists happened

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

and it shows

so meh, I'll live

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

So I can’t share them to people who haven’t read my comic yet XD

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

luckily they don't make a ton of sense out of context, but... as soon as people start reading they might be like OHHH I know what's coming now

but it got them reading so shrug

I guess all mileage varies

Deo101

I feel like even the way I talk about my comic spoils it LMAO whoops

I'm made out of spoilers I can t hold them all in very clumsy

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

haha

I feel the same a lot

(But I also just wanna scream 24/7 about my stories whoopsie)

Deo101

I once had readers asking me to sum up a chapter caus ethey were confused and I just waited til someone else did it cause I was worried I'd spoil Something in trying to sun it up

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Linear stories are good too, though! Just reading a satisfying, well-written story is great; there doesn’t really NEED to be twist and turns for it to be food.

Deo101

Who doesn't wanna scream all the time and their stories hahahahha

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

GOOD

NOT FOOD

GAH

Deo101

Millennium is yummy yummy yum

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

...for the in-universe version of spoilers, I just had a moment of "hang on, this scene could've been way more dramatic if this one character hadn't already been given a certain reveal last chapter"

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

good food, agreed

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Normally I get away with not having a long buffer prepped ahead of time, but for once I wish I could still change this

Nutty (Court of Roses)

i spoil a lot about my characters more than i do the plot lol

i mean except their backstories sometimes

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Oh :C sometimes it's like this, Erin. Reasons buffers are good, but when do you have the time....

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I've tried putting this one on hiatus to prep a buffer, but it turns out I need the deadlines and the regular feedback to push me through making the pages...

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

oh I see. Understandable though...the only time I create real buffer is when I finish a book for print and have a deadline there.

(I wanna try to actually...get better though, since I wanna start a second comic project)

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I mean, sometimes if there's a process that works for you, you gotta just go with it and not waste energy fighting it. Even if it's not the Best or Most Professional way.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

yeah that's true. It's just frustrating when you compare the work you get done in these phases vs. every other time.

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Clearly the solution is to split it up into smaller books, so you have more print deadlines!

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

haha, that might be!

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I need buffers or I get super stressed. Unfortunately I also find them difficult to keep up.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Buffers are very hard to keep up. I'm running out of mine next week, whoops

But I've already started working on new pages

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

I have...a half-finished, past-deadline page open in another window right now, lol

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I haven’t been able to draw for about a month, so one comic’s buffer is getting low and the other’s going to either miss this week or be late.

And I’m stressing about it. -_-

sssfrs

I’m so excited for my story to progress. I’m tempted to talk about it but when I am I think that nothing I say casually will be as impactful as just letting the story actually play out

Desnik

I deal with lack of engagement by throwing my ideas (or myself) at people. I learned that keeping secret twists as spoilers was inhibiting my growth as a writer, so instead I talk through my plots with my writing group and I often walk away with much better ideas to write

We're a kidlit/MG/YA group and I'm writing in a similar fashion, so we usually don't have to warn each other about anything we're writing, which is its own kind of freedom

if I can get the content to be good enough, and land in front of someone who'll help me take it further, then the engagement will follow

keii4ii

(This the right place?)

Deo101

Speaking of a lack of engagement, i feel like my engagement rates are incredibly low. I get a good bit, i get comments on every page and im very happy with that, but it's odd that i dont get more given my amount of readers and I wonder if some comics just aren't the kind of story people feel a need to say anything about, or what?

I think so?

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

My engagement rates are... almost nonexistent.

keii4ii

I TOTALLY GET THAT DOUBT

When my anxiety is bad, it gets... really bad. "Maybe my story isn't worth commenting/ there is nothing to talk about it." I know that's just anxiety, so I try my best to not listen to that voice.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Although I think my audience is just not there? My page-views are pretty low, too, so maybe I just don’t have enough readers to comment (outside of you awesome SF perps)

PEEPS NOT PERPS

MY GOD THIS PHONE

keii4ii

Yeah, my views are fairly low too, considering the sub count I have on platforms

Come on, phone. We're not criminals. (Probably. )

Deo101

Yeah, its just weird when i have like. 1000 readers on tapas and get 0 comments i guess? I do kinda feel like my comic is very.... Its very linear its character driven and people can onky say "aw cute ^^" so much so idk what they would say

Like its legit .1%

keii4ii

hides the bloody knife

Deo101

ITS IN THE FLOWER POT!!!

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I was getting about 1k daily views right after I joined SF but now it’s back down to about 100 a day, so shrugs

keii4ii

Views though, it's natural they spike like that even if you retain 100% of the people who checked out your comic!

because typically, people only go through the old pages once

so they give you more views upon first visit

Deo101

^^^

keii4ii

But I 100% understand the worry of "why do people check out my comic and decide not to read it... is there something wrong with my work"

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

On webtoons I think I have relatively good engagement for Eryl considering my low sub number. I have about 350-some subs and get an average of 1-2 unique comments per page, though that number goes up when a character dies. (edited)

That’s true! They do get kinda ‘falsely’ inflated when people binge-read archives

Deo101

Most comments i ever got is when I said "tell me your pet names"

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Lmao, I should try that

Deo101

And then outside of that when luzio and sage do something cute is the most I get like, organically just frim my content

Amas are second most comments which are again, me starting the discussion

Maybe alk my authors comments should be like "tell me about your fave color" that'll inflate my stats

keii4ii

One person told me they don't comment because everything seems so obvious, and they don't wanna be captain obvious. Which I can respect. But I don't think everything is that obvious if the most common comment I get is "I'm lost"

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Hmmmm

Deo101

Hahahahhahahahah

Like "NO PLEASE SHARE THESE THINGS"

keii4ii

IKR

Deo101

Help everyone else out!!!

keii4ii

There is a term in Korean comment section culture

"Konan" (from Detective Konan)

It's a term for commenters who explain obtuse stuff for other readers

Sometimes you'll even see comments like "Hurry up, Konans! I'm too tired to think! Spoonfeed me what happened in this update!"

Deo101

Me reading every comic ever

keii4ii

I NEED A KONAN IN MY COMMENT SECTION

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Honestly I wish western readers did that, but they either get attacked for being ‘Captain Obvious’ or people scream SPOILER!!!! at them

Deo101

I really wish people woukd expkain for me too because then i know some people get it, but ALSO i dont want to explain things i didn't show, accidentally.

snuffysam

one thing i've found that helps with engagement is making sure to include something on the page for people to talk about, no matter how relevant it is. like a while back i had a (in my opinion) fairly boring scene where it's basically "where do we gotta go" "i'm not telling" "please" "ok you gotta go here" so to give readers something to talk about i had one of the characters take a hotdog out of a pokeball and eat it.

keii4ii

There was also this incredibly, incredibly obtuse comic. It had a fascinating hook but then became almost impossible to follow. You'd see comments like "so this is the Forbidden Realm that even Konans cannot enter."

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Hahaha

Deo101

I try to make every page have something, i usually have 3 goals i want a page to accomplish but it's not very... Fun i guess? Its just kibda like "yes this happened"

keii4ii

It's also kinda sad when you DO put something important to you, and nobody says anything (or worse, says "so when is it gonna get interesting???")

Deo101

Yeah...

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

So once I spun this theory on a comic by picking it up from context clues. And I was like ‘Hey guys, what if X character is the dragon???’ and everyone was like ‘WELL DUH IT’S IN THE HOVER TEXT.’ I read comics on mobile where hover text doesn’t always work, and after getting sneered at for something ‘everyone knew already’ I was put off of ever being a Konan type again.

Deo101

:(

I never read the hover text unless its by accident I just dont think t

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Yeah. And it wasn’t obvious from reading without the hover text so I was really proud of myself for figuring it out. But it just goes to show how rude commenters can scare away well-intentioned ones.(edited)

keii4ii

aaaugh D:

snuffysam

tbh i'm not sure why an author would put something important in the hover text where mobile readers can't see it. or tbh in blogs, side stories, etc. if it's important to understanding the main story, it should be in the comic.

Deo101

Yeah that's what im thinking... Hover text should be for puns

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

It was revealed later that chapter in the main comic, but apparently it wasn’t a ‘secret’ like I thought it was.

keii4ii

Bleeeh, sorry that happened to you. >_< This is why we can't have nice things

Where is the nearest Konans R Us, I want to order one for each of our comics.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Yeah... I’m very socially anxious / awkward so I’ve been scared away from quite a few comment sections. I still read the comics and buy them if they go to print, but a negative commenting experience usually discourages me from ever participating in the discussion.

keii4ii

100% understandable

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Which is why I feel it’s super important for the creators to moderate their comments (or hire a good moderator if they don’t have the time). A lot of comment sections get toxic if the author is lax about fostering a positive discussion environment.

Deo101

That makes me feel much better about the times ive asked people to cut Something out or deleted comments.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I appreciate that effort very much.

Deo101

I worry that its "disengenuous" or something and if someone has a negative opinion I don't want to be like "nope you're ONLY allowed to be nice to me!!!" But it's not good, i don't think, to let people feel safe being mean In my comments.

keii4ii

Yeah, there is being critical, and there is being mean

Deo101

So I rarely do it but I have and I don't feel any guilt over the times i have

Right

keii4ii

Sometimes a comment can tread the fine line between the two and it's really annoying that it's not Obviously, Blatantly Mean

Deo101

Yeah hahahahahhaha

keii4ii

But I try to remember that I too have walked that line unintentionally and obliviously, back when I was younger

Deo101

Right. I have too

I was like "oh man I am so smart and im about ti IMPART MY KNOWLEDGE ON YOU!!!" *Is a jerk *

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

That one comic I was talking about earlier: the author had a hard time keeping up with moderating and eventually took comments off the main site. It was 100% not her fault and she was herself getting emotionally distressed from the amount of negativity in the comments. Especially since the comic itself is really thoughtful and has a lot of messages of acceptance.

Deo101

:(

keii4ii

>_<

Deo101

Uhh but yeah! Does .1% feel like about what y'all get as far as comments:readers goes?

.1-.2

I feel like i have no actual gague for this lol

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

It varies from comic to comic (for no quantifiable reason, usually) but that is about right. 99% of readers are lurkers.

Deo101

Dope, I was worried I had like super low numbers when talking with some people and it got me worried about my content

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Plus subs don’t necessarily translate to active readers. A lot of people just never clean out their library after they stop reading something / subbed it to read later and never got around to it or left the site entirely.

Deo101

But I've also just got a lot of anxiety about what im producing and how it's percieved in general

Yeah ik

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I can see people binging my archives from my stats but maybe 1 in 100 or less leaves any comments.

snuffysam

on average, each subscriber to my comic has posted about 45 comments total (which is like 0.07 comments per subscriber per page) if someone clicks on a page (subscriber or not), there is a 0.5% chance of that person leaving a comment.

Deo101

See for me its like. 1 in 1000 leaves a comment...

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

(It’s okay I get anxiety over it, too)

Deo101

Yeah i was gonna say uhhh whats it called

Shoot i lost mt train of thought.

Right. I feel like the longer a comic goes on tbe less frequently people engage

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Yeah, I’ve noticed that in my comics, too.

Deo101

Like less readers will have made it to the end, more will be inactive, etc

snuffysam

i've found that my active commenters take a jump in early march (i.e. right after the comic's anniversary), and any time a book ends (since, i guess people like seeing how all the stuff that's happened in the book culminates)

Deo101

Oh that's an interesting note

snuffysam

i suppose that's some other advice on increasing engagement - give a reason for even caught-up readers to leave comments. one thing i've been doing is redrawing old pages and releasing the redraws on anniversaries, which gives reason for people to re-read.

and for end of book stuff, i suppose people are more willing to predict how something is going to end when it's close to ending

Deo101

Hmmmm

I'm taking notes

twothirty

seeking validation through comments is my downfall, because i just dont seem to write a comic that has the type of readership who is into that. What helped was just looking at google analytics and being like "oh right, of course people read this, its clearly here in this data" haha.

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

twothirty, same. It's kinda hard to get out of that mindset.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Raises hand I need constant reader validation and get depressed easily when there isn’t. It’s not healthy, but it’s really hard to break out of that mindset.

Deo101

Im not seeking validation through comments, but when i have thousands of readers and get only like 5 it does make me look twice and start wondering if there's something I'm doing wrong.

And yeah it's hard to break out of the mindset

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Me constantly atm haha

Deo101

Especially if you've bee. Hurt in the past and you feel like people secretly hate your work because... In the oast they have

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

I wonder if it's actually...a change in how people interact with media nowadays?

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Oh yeah, definitely, Deo. I got so much negative feedback when I first started posting webcomics and it still sticks with me today.

Deo101

Yeah I've been lucky where people have been mostly nice to me or otherwise just indifferent which makes it so I don't have a super negative experience that my anxieties latch onto

And its STILL hard

Because words of affirmation is my love language lol

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Partly I think it was because I was creating a lot of gender-nonconforming characters in an era when that wasn’t well-accepted in Western comics (reminder that I was surrounded by a veeeery conservative environment at the time), and partly because my skills were just not what they are now. There were a lot of nasty comments from both strangers and people I knew, and it was really tough to work through. I think if I hadn’t had the Tomgeeks forum to hang out in, I probably would have given up.

(For you young’uns, Tomgeeks was a webcomic list site and we had a really tight group in the forums. A lot of that old crowd are now in Spider Forest).

Kabocha

(Sorry, saw the tomgeeks mention! I remember aspiring to be in that group one day, but I was a lil' too much of a noob back in the day.) A lot of media is kind of... Sometimes you need to put a call to action to be like, "HEY LEAVE A COMMENT!" or something - else, they forget in a lot of cases, but ofc that's no guarantee.

keii4ii

Re: people being less willing to engage the longer a comic has been going on, that is definitely a thing

I think it's called archive burn or something

and I feel it too sometimes, as a reader. I feel like I'm not "allowed" to start reading a comic unless I can find a big enough chunk of free time to finish the archive in one session

It's 100% irrational but... it is a thing

I've found that I don't experience it IRL, with physical books. The end of each volume is a really good stopping place

snuffysam

then i suppose a problem is that webcomics don't really have stopping points you can physically see like physical books like when you're reading a book series, you know where one book ends, but when you read a comic you don't really unless you check how many pages each chapter has

and even then it's hard to keep that in mind when it isn't physical

mariah (rainy day dreams)

I definitely understand that feel. It's kept me from doing a lot of the book club comics because I'm like "I got ten pages in, but that's not enough to comment" T_T

snuffysam

maybe someone could program a widget for comic sites that works similarly to the page indicators in ebooks. like "you're 40% of the way through the chapter, and at your current reading speed you have 10 minutes left"

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Comic Rocket!

mariah (rainy day dreams)

Does Archive Binge also have a feature like that?

I feel like they might... I don't use those kind of readers so I'm not super familiar with them.

snuffysam

archive binge lists what page you're on and how many pages the comic has, but there's no reading speed thing no

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I don't know. I'm technically on Archive binge, but didn't get any subs there so I didn't look into it past creating my listing. I don't use those services myself because I like a nice long archive to work through, but I know that comic Rocket shows you how much of an archive you've read.

snuffysam

also, the thing i'm talking about would be for chapters as well as the whole comic. because if there is a big archive, people like to know how long they have before a good stopping point

mariah (rainy day dreams)

I'm on Archive Binge. I don't think I have any subs either but definitely get traffic regularly as if I did. How even does internet work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

snuffysam

i guess recently updated?

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I usually check out the archive page of a comic to get a good idea of chapter length, myself. So I know if I'm in for 10 pages chapters or 100 page chapters. Plus, idk, I have no problem stopping anywhere and picking it up again later, but I may be a pretty atypical reader.

Lmao, I have no idea how the internet works. I was one of the first people to list on Archive Binge and I have never gotten a single click from it. I get a steady number from Comic Rocket, though.

keii4ii

I wonder if it'd be worth experimenting with chapter numbers? Like, re-number existing chapters like "Season 2, chapter 2 of 15" instead of "chapter 20" ?

Deo101

^ thats a good idea

seeing "chapter 20" makes me as a reader go like, oh god, theres so many,,

snuffysam

^ that's one of the major reasons i label things "book X chapter Y" instead of just counting up chapters forever though adding "out of" is an interesting addition...

keii4ii

I'm nearing the end of season/ book/ whatever 2. I should give this a try

Cronaj

Lol, my books are going to be 3 chapters long each, so I don't think it would make much sense for me XD

keii4ii

Yeah, my chapters are short but numerous, so this might have a different effect than comics with longer but fewer chapters

Deo101

I'd be afraid of saying "out of" cause... well, i dont know how many heheh...

it all gets wacky when it comes time to actually make the thing

snuffysam

i mean, could add 'em retroactively as each "season" finishes

Deo101

oh thats true!

keii4ii

I would probably do "Chapter x out of [REDACTED]" (not that but something similar) when I start posting book 3

Cronaj

Yeah, my chapters are around 35-50 pages, so they're pretty long'

snuffysam

listing how many chapters are in book 3 would kinda spoil a twist lol, so i'll probably only do it retroactively

same lol

and some are 80 pages

book 3's going to have one 120 page chapter which is wild

Cronaj

I was thinking about printing 4-5 chapter books, make it more like a manga-length

keii4ii

You know, some comics (Korean comics do this a lot) do like... Chapter 10: Happy Day, followed by Chapter 11: Happy Day (2), followed by Chapter 12: Happy Day (3)

Cronaj

but full color printing is expensive

keii4ii

Dividing what might have been a single chapter into digestible chunks

snuffysam

i've split "arcs" into multiple chapters before, but unfortunately there aren't really any solid split areas in the chapter in question

Cronaj

and I doubt anybody wants to shell out $25+ on a 200 page comic

This is of course, a consideration for the future, as I don't even have the first chapter finished yet, but ya know

Come next year, I'll have some big decisions to make

@keii4ii Is that a webtoon thing? I've noticed that webtoons have shortish chapters

snuffysam

webtoons an entire chapter is posted at once

keii4ii

It's a Korean thing, which means Webtoons gets some of it

Cronaj

I mean, technically I post my comic in scrolling format, so I consider it a webtoon, but it's definitely drawn for print

@snuffysam, I mean the length of the chapters. The chapters (or episodes) are usually somewhere between 50-100 panels long, which is anywhere between 10-20 pages of a traditional comic

keii4ii

(Tangent, but as a Korean speaker I'm very weirded out by the word "webtoon" in English contexts. Over there every webcomic regardless of format is called a webtoon; I guess it's like anime/manga in Japanese? That in Japan, every animated show is anime, and every cartoon thingie is manga?)

Cronaj

Yeah, that makes sense

In the english speaking world, originally there were comics and webcomics, with little difference between except that one was posted online

but when Korean webtoons entered the English-speaking market, the naming conventions changed

The major difference being the prevalence of scrolling-format webtoons, which made people think that the difference between webtoons and webcomics is the format

but really, it's just a naming thing

You can call a comic a manga, and people expect a black and white comic in a specific style, but really, it's just a comic in Japanese

keii4ii

Yeah

Deo101

I usually just say "scroll style comic" or "page format comic" because im putting pages up on webtoons so it feels... weird to me

keii4ii

That too

IT'S A PICTURE STORY THINGIE WITH SPEECH BALLOONS

Deo101

hahahaha

Cronaj

In the end we are all just children XD

kayotics

this is really late, but i've been getting a lot more comments on my main site lately and I have no idea what I did to encourage that.

Deo101

people caught on

kayotics

That's probably all it is, but it's really surprising that my main site is the one getting more comments, since I wouldn't say it's necessarily a well built comment system? It's the native CMS comment system, and I require the first comment to be moderated

keii4ii

Does this mean I can claim I started reading Ingress before it got famous 8)

kayotics

yes

BUT, I'd say that the estimation of 1% of readers (or whatever the number was) is still accurate.

Deo101

.1% ish

kayotics

I have the most eyes on my comic over on Tapas, and while I do get a handful of comments there, it still equates to less than 1% of the total people subscribed. I'm sure there's a lot of reasons for that (like subscribers who aren't regular readers, people who quit the app, etc), but even the ratio of views to comments is pretty low.

Deo101

yeah I've been noticing that too

I have the most eyes on webtoons but I still have like. a good chunk on tapas and I think those are just more... casual sites

kayotics

yeah absolutely

Deo101

like on comicFury I have way higher engagement rates and i think that's pretty typical cause most of that audience there is also creators

kayotics

I'm sure there's some people who are pretty dedicated on Tapas, but I'd guess that there's more dedicated readers on my self-hosted site, just because they have to specifically seek out the content.

Deo101

^that makes a lot of sense to me

I know a lot of people who follow me on tapas are following 100+ other comics

and i know for SURE I wouldnt be able to take the time/effort to comment on like 10+ comics a day, assuming theyre even keeping up with all thsoe

wow yeah I just checked my list this person has over 6,000 comics theyre subscribed to, and a few have over 500

just on the first page of my readers(edited)

sooooo yeah it makes sense why engagement would be low if people are regularly reading that mant...

keii4ii

I actually rambled about this on twitter recently!

Deo101

and also makes me feel a little bit less bad when people are confused hahahahaha

keii4ii

How I thought I'd get a very small readership who are into what I'm making, but I ended up getting that very small readership PLUS a huge number of people who are just casually reading it

That first expectation was mostly based on my experience with my previous webcomic, but things were different back then. Big platforms weren't a thing, so casual readers were less common.

Deo101

yeah that's really neat

since I've only been making millennium for like... a little over 2 years and it's my first comic, I kinda just started with like 5 mirrors and was like "alright well, lets see how this goes I guess"

I had only ever read one webcomic before i literally have no idea how or why i got so convinced into making a comic

but since I was like 12 years old I was like "hm... I am going to make a comic i think." I just never did any research or tried til recently

or read any. I dont know how this happened

keii4ii

Casual readers vastly outnumbering the dedicated ones used to make me feel like I was doing something wrong, but I think that's just how the times are.

Deo101

Yeah :/ it's hard NOT to notice and feel like you're doing something wrong though.

when its like "okay i have 7,000 subs and got 5 comments" it's like ??? what am i doing WRONG

even though... its nothing wrong

it just be that way

hard to match those two ideas up though

almost went to continue this thought in an entirely different channel.

I think there is also something to be said for people not wanting to repeat a comment

like "oh someone already said what I thought so I'll just give it a thumbs up"

keii4ii

That's what upvoting is for!!!

Deo101

yup!

keii4ii

though, tfw highest voted comments are like "I have no idea wtf is going on lol"

Deo101

YEAH.

also do you ever comment on your own pages?

like not replying to people

keii4ii

I think I did once or twice, back when I actualy had relevant info and didn't have enough room in author's notes or something

Deo101

I've done it a few times, but it's usually kind of to ask questions where I can get replies

keii4ii

I have also seen a pro Korean creator post "first" on their own comic because they were tired of seeing so many of those

Deo101

I did that once LMAO

it's funny when people comment on my comic "FIRST!!!" cause i'm like. dude i get like 10 comments it's not that special to be first

but i'm happy theyre there and theyre excited its kinda cute i guess

keii4ii

Yeah, it's harmless

Deo101

and it's also nice to have people think that they have to race to be first

even though they don't

so it's kind of a nice comment to get even if it's not commenting on my work at all

keii4ii

It's kinda like hitting the like/heart button, just with more HURRY POINTS

Deo101

yeah hehe

oh i do 100% like all my own pages though

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I actually get the most commenters on Webtoons but I’m (fairly?) sure I have more readers on my website.

Deo101

on webtoons, I don't do it on tapas cause you can see i did it LOL

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I think I only ever got one First! comment and that was the only comment on that page.

keii4ii

Hey no shame in being your own #1 fan

Deo101

the one time I said "first!" was cause it had no comments on it for like a year and a hal

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Oh no, I don’t like my own pages. For some weird reason I feel like it’s cheating.

Deo101

and hell YEAH! I'm my number one fan so much that i'm making a dang comic for how much I like these characters ;D

keii4ii

I don't feel bad about liking my own pages, but I rarely do it because I wait a bit before even looking at the post

Deo101

inflate your own stats its cool. all the cool kids are doing it

keii4ii

And by the time I look at it, I forget about liking

Deo101

I only do it on webtoons cause I have to manually post there anyways

so i post and its like "heres the page!" and im like :) good job me :)

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I might start doing it. XD I get an average of 5-10 likes per page so why not.(edited)

Deo101

I also rate myself 10* or whatever the max is wherever I can

keii4ii

Yeah, and TBH one like isn't gonna give you an unfair advantage anyway

Deo101

^

keii4ii

If you're making a dozen alt accounts to give yourself more likes, now that's a bit questionable

Deo101

yeah that would be not so good

but you're a real account who likes your work so why not!

keii4ii

Yeah!

Deo101

I also honestly kinda like to sub to my own stuff and like my pages partially to make sure it's all working right

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I should probably rate myself 10* bc both my comics got ratings-bombed at one point for really dumb reasons.

Deo101

like to see when the page goes up and everything

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

The ratings have slowly crawled back up a ways, but it’s always disheartening when people attack my comics for stupid things.

keii4ii

Oh, to go back to an earlier point about asking questions to readers to encourage commenting, I might straight up ask next week if my comic is making any sense.

Deo101

ohhhhh man i dont like swingin at that hive lol

keii4ii

I'll have to word it well because I do not want it to be a pity party

Deo101

but i mean it might encourage the people who do get it to go "yup!"

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I do straight up ask every now and then. Sometimes I’ll get a pity comment when I do and sometimes it’s still crickets.

Deo101

also I feel really lucky that I havent had anyone be like, mean to my about my work.

I feel like trolls have really gone down in popularity

keii4ii

like even right now I feel like nobody's getting it (except maybe <10 people) so..... I don't think the answers could make me feel worse

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I meant I straight up ask for comments, ugh, I misread Keiiii’s post.

I GET IT, KEIIII

I LOVE UR BABIES

Deo101

oh man, I could never just ask for comments. if I'm feeling really down I usually send it to my friends like "can i have smth nice please" I just get really anxious asking people for things

not that asking is necessarily bad I just, as a person could never do that

also keiiii I havent read it yet but it's on my list cause the way you talk about your work and what I do know of it... seems like it would really jive right with me

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I usually do it along the lines of: ‘If you enjoy this comic, don’t forget to leave a comment! Getting feedback motivates me to keep drawing!’

Deo101

oh okay thats not so bad

oh my god how are the eyes moving

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I’m shameless, you can say it

Deo101

I have too much shame probably

keii4ii

It is my anxiety moving the eyeballs

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Give me sone of your shame, it’ll even us out

Deo101

please take it

keii4ii

(anxiety with Nitro powers)

Deo101

NOOO dont be anxious im gonna love it

god that eyes shaking emoji is so great

keii4ii

ikr!

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

So fun fact- my real face eyes do that

keii4ii

I think Tatsumaki wants to see you do it

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

It’s called nystagmus and it’s super trippy if you’ve never seen it before!

keii4ii

OH, I knew someone with that condition!

I never noticed anything about their eyes (only heard about them having the condition from talking), because I never met them while wearing my glasses X'D;;

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

My eyes just RANDOMLY do it a lot and it really freaks people out XD

Desnik

I've found that comments don't matter too much, but getting a boost from someone with a big following does

and the only comments I take seriously are from people I trust, although I get it: chasing the internet numbers is fun

snuffysam

what do you mean by "comments don't matter" you mean, like, in terms of garnering popularity?

Desnik

yeah, and as validation they can be a bit fluffy too

my perspective changed when I started printing out my work as zines and got people to buy them irl, it was very eye-opening

very few people commented on them online but in person I've found out they're not bad? And one of them got me a lettering job

keii4ii

Eh, I think it's okay to have different goals. To some people, good comments mean the world, and that's totally valid to want that.

Desnik

I know, just stating my pov

keii4ii

I mean that to some people, a good comment is not just an "internet number."

Desnik

fair enough

I believe I allowed for 'good comments' as being from someone I trust

keii4ii

Me, I treasure insightful comments from anyone who's invested in my story. To each their own

FeatherNotes

I have a book that I write them down to give me a lil boost to morale when I need it! i def appreciate the time it took for someone to write something thoughtful

keii4ii

Yeah!

Capitania do Azar

Oh comments are like.. What I like the most! (not all comments are the same tho). The reason I put my story out there is so I can share it and discuss it with people and the fact that a few take some time off their day to actively tell me what they think it's what keeps me moving

eli [a winged tale]

I really enjoy comments too. I always respond to my Instagram ones but not the comic ones mostly because of platform difficulties

Glowbat (Aloe)

I love reading through all the comments- they really motivate me when I'm having a low point and need a pick me up to get goin on pages. I just wish I was better at knowing how to respond instead of just liking the comment and hoping they recieve my telepathic brainwaves of gratitude

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Replying to comments is very hard and I always have the anxiety of "ruining" it haha ;; whatever it is (the person's enjoyment of my work?? who knows)

Glowbat (Aloe)

I feel that- part of me is always nervous I'm gonna say somethin to off put them or smthn.

Though I do try my best to curate comment sections if things are looking like they're gonna get rowdy

keii4ii

YEAH, and/or sometimes you're like "this comment is Awesome and deserves an Equally Awesome reply... HOW DO I DO THAT" and get stuck in a loop

Glowbat (Aloe)

yesss exactly that

I'm not that clever and I require lots of time to come up with anything I'm confident in lol

and by the time I have something cool to say back its been like a week

keii4ii

I made a Discord icon to express my internal response in a visual form to such Awesome comments, but I can only use those on Discord

This one:

Glowbat (Aloe)

Hehe

cuteee

and also a mood

keii4ii

Sparkling tears of happiness

Capitania do Azar

I believe them

Cronaj

Man... I will admit, I barely respond to comments

And that probably sounds terrible

But I honestly don't have time to respond to every comment

As well as the anxiety of not know what to say

It does depend on platform tho

keii4ii

I mean, as a reader I don't expect a reply if my comment is like "ooo nice!"

Cronaj

Generally, I respond more readily to comments on Tapas than on Webtoons, because I only have like 2 commenters at most on Tapas

And usually it's readers who ALWAYS comment, so I almost feel like they deserve a response, even if it's just a smiley face or a "thank you"

keii4ii

But if I've written a long ass essay comment, it would be nice to have some kind of engagement with that. Don't get me wrong, the creator doesn't owe me a reply but it's like... should I ever do this again with this comic. Or is my reply-writing time better spent on another comic

Cronaj

True

keii4ii

I def respect that not every creator has time to read all of the comments, regardless of how many comments they typically get

Cronaj

On Webtoons, I have way more engagement, but most of it is thirst for my characters or talking about the art style

keii4ii

and that not every creator may even aim to get comments

Cronaj

So I don't usually know how to respond to stuff like that

keii4ii

But if that is the case........ I would rather know before committing myself to multiple essay-length comments

Yeah, that is understandable!

Cronaj

I read every comment, but I don't want to respond to all of them

keii4ii

I'm 100% cool with "thicc" comments on my MC's butt or on my tiger dude's legs, but I can't necessarily think of productive replies to those

Cronaj

The only comments I respond to on Webtoons are either a) incredibly funny, b) meaningful and noticing more than the art, or c) a genuine question

Like if someone asks about my update schedule

Or if someone wants to know which programs I use

I had one comment about how good my grammar in the dialogue/thoughts is, and I felt so honored that someone else noticed

Usually I get comments about the art (which is also nice), but I prefer comments about the story or subtleties

keii4ii

It's the best thing when people notice the things that you put a lot of thought and love into

Cronaj

For several years in high school, I played around with the idea of getting a writing degree, so grammar and literary language have a special place in my heart

sssfrs

I respond to every single comment... I get one comment a month pretty much though

When friends or readers say nice things about my comic on any platform I save a screenshot and read them if I start to feel like nobody likes what I’m making

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

I do the exact same

FeatherNotes

Its a good practice when things are kind of slow! Or just for that lip morale boost too

[officialstandardhumans]

SH52: The Climate Crisis — What's Going On?

How many trees would you have to plant to offset your carbon footprint?

Which countries are environmental leaders? And which are laggards?

In this episode, the humans discuss environmentalism and sustainability. Looking at how humanity is doing globally, how Canada matches up to the rest of the world, and what you can do to help.

Standard Humans is hosted by Aidan Dennehy and Evan.

Shownotes:

Ceilo Farm Bed and Breakfast

This Is Your Brain on Pollution - Freakonomics Podcast Ep. 472

Carbon Neutral Goals by Country

Bhutan

Economic Freedom Index - Bhutan

Suriname

Country CO2 Emissions per Capita

List of countries by population

Economy of Trinidad and Tobago

Economy of Canada

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

Carbon Footprint Calculator

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Evan: I think honestly, in Canada, and in the U.S., because we have so much exposure to nature around us, we take it for granted. Because we're like, I can drive out camping, like I did this weekend, two and a half hours in my gas powered car. And just hang out there and make a ton of garbage while I'm there and then throw it away. And then, it takes away the pressure to like actually make more sustainable sort of stuff.

[00:00:23] Evan: Yeah. Welcome back. It's been a little bit due to various working and cottaging. Maybe not more than normal. I don't know.

[00:00:33] Aidan: Actually, I was a little bit ahead before this, on the editing so that there hasn't been a delay yet. And we'll see what happens in the future.

[00:00:40] Evan: Well then hello listener after may be the normal amount of time.

[00:00:44] Evan: Much for you cottaging and for me, going around Gatineau has been done. How was the Cottage?

[00:00:50] Aidan: Cottage was excellent. The goats were fantastic.

[00:00:55] Evan: What?

[00:00:55] Aidan: Oh, yeah, it it was just a guest house on a farm, a little outside of Peterborough. And they had all sorts of animals. And we got like fresh eggs from chickens, maybe like 50, or a hundred meters away from the house.

[00:01:07] Evan: What is this place called?

[00:01:08] Aidan: It was an Airbnb, it was like Cielo farm or something like that.

[00:01:13] Evan: That's amazing.

[00:01:14] Aidan: Yeah, actually, it's a public listing. So like, why not just give them a little plug there? It was a great experience.

[00:01:21] Evan: Holy cow. That's that sounds like the most cricket and me place to ever exist.

[00:01:25] Aidan: It does actually, it's pretty chill. And it has a stupendous view because their house is like a little bit on a hill, like overlooking, just like big fields and farms.

[00:01:34] Aidan: Would recommend. I'll leave the link in the show notes.

[00:01:38] Evan: Yeah, these guys are going to be like, oh thank you. Because we got one new visitor and it was Evan.

[00:01:45] Aidan: Hey, that's the standard humans effect. When we check someone out who they go viral.

[00:01:52] Evan: Yeah. We're going to leave an Amazon link to buy the farm on Amazon. And so we get 10%.

[00:01:58] Aidan: Oh, that'd be great. I've heard that rural real estate agents make a killing. So like, if we can get a cut of that, like cool.

[00:02:04] Evan: Oh yeah. This is what the whole podcast is actually been about.

[00:02:08] Aidan: It's a play to get into rural and farm real estate.

[00:02:11] Evan: Sweet rural money,

[00:02:13] Aidan: Perfect. That's where the real cash is at, all those fools moving to the city.

[00:02:18] Evan: But that this is kind of related. Sorry, if somebody was excited, that's not actually what this one's about. This one is about environmentalist and, our individual role in it. If this seems pretty random, it started from a click hole, just like a Google hole or a Duck Duck Go hole.

[00:02:39] Aidan: Okay, thank you for elaborating on that. Wasn't quite sure what a click hole was.

[00:02:43] Evan: I don't know if I'm using that term actually correctly, but basically you just hear something and then you Google it and then you Google something related to that. And then you click on a link from there. And then it's just two hours just learning about those of random subject.

[00:02:57] Aidan: I'm familiar. It's both a great time and a can be a time suck.

[00:03:01] Evan: Because of that. I'm actually pretty well versed on the fino-russian winter war.

[00:03:05] Aidan: An excellent subject.

[00:03:07] Evan: No. So this one kind of starts with a story. So a week or two ago, I was, had to pretty chill work. Yeah at the gym because they're open again. So I've been able to go back. At the gym and then I was like, you know what, I'm going to do a little bit of a cool-down maybe walking a treadmill for like 10 minutes, 15 minutes. See what's up.

[00:03:27] Evan: And the treadmill was playing the news, which I never usually watch, but I was like, I don't want to bother with this, with the controls. I'll just watch it. And I'm all across the news there was that UN report that's like, we're all gonna die. That obviously isn't what it actually said, but it was the media has taken it very drastically. They're, they're very drastic about it, which honestly, I think is maybe a good thing.

[00:04:03] Aidan: Yeah, in terms of sparking action, that's probably a good thing. And it's also just the media's thing.

[00:04:08] Evan: Yeah, exactly. They just want you to click on it. And if it's, like the planet is going to explode, you're like, I'm going to click on that.

[00:04:14] Aidan: Not a bad headline. Maybe that's what we'll name this podcast.

[00:04:17] Evan: If this is worrying anyone the actual report, isn't actually that intense as the news is. It is interesting though. I've, I've checked out. Some of them haven't heard the whole thing cause it's really long. I've looked up more about it. But basically seeing that instantly gave me a stomach ache. And between that and the recent Ontario forest fires. How have you guys in Toronto gotten like smog from it?

[00:04:43] Aidan: Not that I've seen, but I'm going to be honest, I don't go outside every day. So.

[00:04:48] Evan: I guess I should rephrase it. Have you guys gotten more smog from it than your usual Toronto smog?

[00:04:54] Aidan: That is a good point. Not that I've noticed, I've been thinking I should check the air quality more often. Cause I don't really usually do that, but I haven't noticed any visible smog.

[00:05:05] Evan: I am not sure what you, what you do with that information. Maybe like, or a gas mask outside of them.

[00:05:11] Aidan: Or just go outside less often.

[00:05:12] Evan: Side note. I'm drinking to you right now. I hope that's not being picked up in my mic and just grossing everyone out.

[00:05:17] Aidan: I wasn't hearing it that you made some great like tea preparing noises at the beginning.

[00:05:22] Aidan: Lots of clicking and clanking and whatnot.

[00:05:25] Evan: Some new Japanese green tea I bought today. Very delicious. Um, But yeah, here in Ottawa or Kanata, I guess, we had a few days maybe seven in total, five to seven, somewhere where it was like, it was this weird layer of smog. And it was super freaky. And it was, from the forest fires, the air just coming from you know, the Northwest and coming down on us.

[00:05:49] Evan: But those things together. Yeah. That just gave me like an instant stomach ache. And I think with all these environmental issues. there are a few things going on, like obviously changes are being made at like the governmental level, but I think it is causing more and more people, more and more sort of mental freakout.

[00:06:08] Evan: Because we're hearing all these things, but on a personal level, with a problem that big, that's just basically like too much pollution. Most people like don't know what to do. And so that was that was my thinking. I was like, I want to do something, but I have to know what to do.

[00:06:24] Evan: What am I going to go drive up to the Northwest and pour a bucket of water on there? Maybe.

[00:06:28] Evan: So basically what I wanted to do here was find ways that one individual person could actually do something. I find there's a lot of, conflicting information too. Because it's like, oh, if you want to help the planet, you can go vegan.

[00:06:43] Evan: It's oh no, actually grains are destroying forests because of farmland. So you actually got to go paleo or go local. Or like, you should have an electric car. It's oh no, the batteries are super bad. You actually got to take the bus. So yeah, I just thought we could, first sort of go over some facts about Canada. Some of them I found very surprising in my research and then do the little carbon footprint quiz. But this is a more interesting one because it has some more concrete results at the end.

[00:07:15] Aidan: Ooh. That sounds very interesting, actually.

[00:07:18] Evan: Yeah. Basically, I'm just making what I wanted about two weeks ago. It's like what, what is actually going on and what can I do?

[00:07:27] Evan: Am I going to oversell my tea? Oh, wow. You know, It's coming out really slow. So you just keep pouring it into your cup because you think it's going to just like peter out, but then it just keeps going constantly, and you're like, ah.

[00:07:38] Evan: Anyway, so yeah, let's start with some Canada information.

[00:07:42] Aidan: Big prediction. Canada's doing shit with all its mining and whatnot, in terms of the environment and its goals.

[00:07:49] Evan: I'll just say, this this is on visual capitalist.com. I'm not saying this is like an infallible resource, but this data here matches up pretty closely. Like it's not like wildly inconsistent with all the other data I've found. It seems like generally okay. But the specifics might be contested.

[00:08:07] Evan: This is called the race to net zero carbon neutral goals by country. And, I came across this first because. A few months ago, China instituted a carbon cap and trade system nationally, which they'd never had anything like that before. Huge moves for the carbon in the atmosphere being gone. Actually not gone, that would suck. That would be pretty bad.

[00:08:29] Aidan: You need some carpet.

[00:08:30] Evan: Yeah. you need a little bit you need a normal amount. Not too much. Not too little. Otherwise the trees are like borough, but anyway, so that brought me here. And they have all the carbon neutral goals by country.

[00:08:43] Evan: And there's currently one country. Uh, hope you haven't looked. There's currently one country in the world that is pretty much by all accounts, carbon neutral or sorry, carbon negative. They actually absorb more carbon than they transmit. There's a couple of more that claim it. And it's possible, but it seems more dubious.

[00:09:03] Evan: But yeah. Do you know what that country is?

[00:09:06] Aidan: Yeah. Maybe send me the links after, cause I did glance through the article already. Unfortunately. Shout out to Bhutan for having both the best flag in the world and being carbon neutral or achieving their goals.

[00:09:17] Evan: Oh, the dragon?

[00:09:18] Aidan: Yeah. Love Bhutan.

[00:09:20] Evan: Yeah, me too. And they've got cool monasteries. Like what a place.

[00:09:24] Aidan: Yeah. What's not to love about Bhutan.

[00:09:26] Evan: Yeah. Bhutan is currently well, the only country that I've found, like pretty much every source saying is carbon negative. Another one mentioned is Surinam another one I've seen as well as Morocco.

[00:09:37] Aidan: Where is Suriname?

[00:09:39] Evan: It is the north east coast of south America

[00:09:43] Aidan: Ah, okay.

[00:09:44] Evan: And they speak Dutch they're, weirdly.

[00:09:47] Aidan: It's the Americas, man, this shit just happens. I don't know. Colonialism, am I right?

[00:09:52] Evan: So yeah, Butan is the one that I found pretty much every source agree upon is carbon negative. Pretty interestingly, they have super green energy. They have environmental protection laws designating that no less than 60% of their country has to be like undisturbed forest or undisturbed nature.

[00:10:10] Aidan: Oh, okay. That would help.

[00:10:13] Evan: Yeah. And they, they did it very early compared to other countries, basically they just put less of a pressure on modernizing and industrializing and more on sustainability, like earlier than a lot of other countries.

[00:10:24] Evan: And I think, if there's any country to learn from, for this sort of thing, it would be them. Granted it's a lot easier to do these things in a largely homogenous, smaller country than it would be in a, very diverse, larger country, like Canada, or even more so U.S. But there are definitely things that we could learn from them just about like prioritization and balancing business and the economy with the environment.

[00:10:48] Aidan: What even are their exports. I know nothing about them other than monks and the dragon.

[00:10:53] Evan: Well, One thing I know about them is that they have, I believe they have free energy. So they dissuade people from heating or cooling their homes with their own like gas stoves and whatnot. I guess you wouldn't call it with that, but like, or sorry, burning wood themselves. They have free energy. That's what I saw on some sites that I cannot verify.

[00:11:11] Aidan: After three years in the moderately free category Bhutan's economy fell back into the ranks of the mostly unfree this year. The government has a lot of tariffs and other restrictions on trade.

[00:11:21] Evan: The King? The have a King still

[00:11:23] Aidan: Oh, no, they, I transitioned from absolute monarchy to constitutional parliamentary democracy in 2008.

[00:11:31] Evan: Wow.

[00:11:31] Aidan: That's late

[00:11:33] Evan: That's really cool. Actually. What the heck. Places with Kings, I think it's so cool though.

[00:11:38] Aidan: An absolute monarchy until 2008.

[00:11:41] Evan: it's actually wild.

[00:11:42] Aidan: Reading what is this heritage.org article? It says Butan has one of the world's smallest and least developed economies, even late into the 20th century. The landlocked countries, largely agrarian with few roads, electricity and no modern hospitals.

[00:11:56] Evan: That I believe is both like a sort of a cause and an effect of their like, priorities or net carbon negativity, less focused on industrialization. It was ranked the happiest or one of the happiest countries in the world. So that's quite interesting.

[00:12:12] Aidan: But yeah, no. Definitely gets to your point that like, it would be easier for them, but that's also partly just because of their way of thinking or prioritization, as you said.

[00:12:23] Evan: And yeah, being smaller and more homogenous as well, does make things easier for that sort of thing.

[00:12:29] Aidan: It's easier when you have an absolute monarchy.

[00:12:31] Evan: Yeah. That's what I've learned. We need to get a king of Canada. To have absolute power. And then it's David Suzuki is the king surprise,

[00:12:40] Aidan: Anyways off that tangent. Thank you, Bhutan. Let's see, I guess now we know there's only one country with that carbon neutral or even negative status.

[00:12:52] Evan: the, yeah,

[00:12:53] Evan: Carbon negative is a thing that take in more than they expell.

[00:12:56] Aidan: Is that all because of all the trees they're able to take in?

[00:12:59] Evan: They have a lot of forest and yeah, relatively little mining oil and gas industry like that. Um, And not that densely populated. Probably more than Canada. But that's not hard.

[00:13:13] Evan: So once we heard about that, we see if the CO2 emissions of how it's net negative for some countries, well one to three countries, on worldometers.info, Uh, this is another site where the information like the actual numbers, maybe like contested, but the general gist is inline with the rest of the information I've seen. So for total CO2 emissions, do you want to guess which countries do the most total?

[00:13:47] Aidan: The most total CO2 emissions? And this is current? So like last couple of years or?

[00:13:53] Evan: Yeah, it's all a couple of years. Actually, it's 2016 for the total.

[00:13:56] Aidan: Okay. Because top one would have to be China. I know that they've used more concrete in last, like 10 years than the U S did in the whole like 20th century.

[00:14:07] Evan: Wow.

[00:14:08] Aidan: Yeah. Like They are building like mad.

[00:14:10] Evan: And they built the Hoover Dam.

[00:14:11] Aidan: Yeah. China would, I would say hard, like number one there. U S would definitely be up there.

[00:14:18] Evan: U.S. Is number two.

[00:14:19] Aidan: Ah, got them. And then next, India has a lot of people, but not that much, I'll say like industry or I shouldn't say industry what's the other word infrastructure. That's what I'm going for. So I would say they might be lower than like maybe other European countries, even though they're

[00:14:37] Evan: They are number three.

[00:14:39] Aidan: just the EU as a whole.

[00:14:41] Evan: No, No india.

[00:14:41] Aidan: Oh, India is number three. Interesting okay.

[00:14:44] Evan: Relative to the population, they have relatively little infrastructure, but when you're, when you're dealing with a continent's worth of people in one country, you're still going to have fricking load.

[00:14:56] Aidan: Good on them. I mean like that, it's a sign, I guess, a lot of ways of developing and people coming out of extreme poverty. Which is nice. I mean, Hopefully going forwards, we'll figure out ways to have that those not be tied together,

[00:15:08] Evan: That's the main thing. Because when a country's poor, you can't really ask people to like put sustainable uh, growth over like, will your family eat this week?

[00:15:19] Evan: well, We could make a shit ton of money and like, have, the general population, like be much more healthy and well fed. If we like sell all this oil we have. Or we could

[00:15:30] Evan: like put more priority on sustainability. Like you'll never get elected that way. Cause people are like, I want to eat.

[00:15:36] Aidan: I don't know, There's a whole double standard in there too of all the developed countries went through the phase of developing and they put out all sorts of CO2 just in getting to the point or the quality of life we have now, then we're saying to everyone else, it's like, no, no, but you can't do that because you have too many people and if you did that would just mess up the entire planet.

[00:15:56] Evan: Yeah, exactly. Hopefully just more sustainable ways of developing. Well, That's what has to happen.

[00:16:02] Aidan: Yeah, there was a lot of interesting stuff on that in Bill Gates' book. He lays out all of the big categories or he did lay out all the big categories that CO2 comes from and where we are right now on all. Whether we need like new innovations or just new policies or whatnot was a very good read. You'd probably enjoy.

[00:16:20] Evan: Yeah, I'm sure I would actually, and related to like where we are now, for most, or for a lot of north America and almost all of Europe The CO2 emissions actually have already peaked and are on the down now. But again, it's because they're pretty much done developing.

[00:16:35] Aidan: Yeah, we don't have too many more buildings to build. Or like we do, but like it's a small amount.

[00:16:43] Evan: Um, And then when people yeah, have guaranteed food and shelter, then there'll be like, then they might actually choose to do sustainable things or to make sustainable, like environmentally sustainable choices over gain an income because they don't need it as bad.

[00:16:57] Evan: But yeah, I'll just read the top 10.

[00:17:01] Aidan: Wait, I'm going to guess Canada isn't on the top 10.

[00:17:06] Evan: I'm just total emissions. Like not per capita. Just per country?

[00:17:09] Aidan: Per country, yeah, I'm going to say maybe top 20, but not top 10.

[00:17:13] Evan: Canada is top 10.

[00:17:15] Aidan: Oh, no Canada.

[00:17:17] Evan: But yes, it's China with 10 billion CO2 emissions. That's tons for that year. And then us has half that at 5 billion. China has half that at 2.5 billion. Russia has 1.6. So Russia is number four, Japan. Number five, Germany number six, Canada number seven, Iran eight South Korea nine and Indonesia 10.

[00:17:38] Aidan: What was Canada's gross?

[00:17:40] Evan: Yeah, just total was 675 million tons.

[00:17:44] Aidan: Okay. That is actually very in line with per capita, with the U S which I guess makes sense. Very similar lifestyles.

[00:17:51] Evan: Yeah. I initially was like, okay, Canada's got so few people, we can't possibly be in the top 10 like for total emissions, but we totally are. And it's I think like, honestly, Canada and the us are like some of the least sustainable lifestyles kind of out there.

[00:18:09] Evan: One thing, yeah, one thing I really don't like about a lot of Canada, that's kind of unavoidable with just the population density and stuff. Well, It's not unavoidable is that you have there's a lot of pressure to drive everywhere, super car based society.

[00:18:22] Aidan:  Yeah, there are pockets where you don't. I don't own a car because I live in Toronto, which is real nice. And I enjoy it. Like I prefer not to drive, so it's cool. But if I'm ever outside of, I'm going to say like maybe Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, you probably need a car.

[00:18:39] Evan: And now that Ottawa has a train.

[00:18:41] Aidan: You've got to train. Is it working now?

[00:18:42] Evan: It's working now? I took it today.

[00:18:45] Aidan: They've got the doors figured out?

[00:18:46] Evan: Maybe I took it today and I was fine. Ottawa, I would say you can get by without a car. I would say Kanata is the farthest you can live and get by without a car. If you live any of the like, Stittsville like anywhere more on the outskirts, you definitely need a car. But uh, even if people live downtown, a lot of people, just because that's what is the norm for us.

[00:19:07] Evan: Even if you can easily get places by train and bus, a lot of people will just drive anyway, because it's just ingrained in us. If you want to go somewhere, you've got to drive. Or even a lot of people if they live like a 15 minutes walk from a grocery store because of we got like the Costco model where you just get a ton of shit, like once a week or once every two weeks you drive two minutes and get there and just load it, load up your minivan and drive back.

[00:19:31] Evan:  It's too bad, but I think for stuff like that, it can't really be relied on like for each person to make an individual choice to be like, I'm going to walk, I'm going to take the bus. I think it has to be infrastructure, like increase amount of buses, make buses electric. Instead of giant block of houses, giant block of stores, maybe more like, in a lot of the rest of the world, it's just house have store house has store.

[00:19:54] Aidan: Very walkable community. You can get to every place that you need to go by walk.

[00:19:59] Evan: Walk in public transport centered sort of places. yeah, when I was staying in France, this is just a product of, because it's a very old city. It was, it would be like hugely impractical to drive most places because driving so annoying, like the streets are tiny, you can't park anywhere and you wouldn't ever need to.

[00:20:17] Evan: Cause there's a butcher, a bakery, a grocery store, like a liquor store, like a bar restaurant within like three blocks. It's pretty much anywhere. Or like within, let's say max, like 20 to 30, 30 minutes walk. So I think, I think aiming towards That sort of model would be much more sustainable.

[00:20:38] Evan: Another thing is because we have a very large fossil fuel oil and gas industry still, and a statistic I heard this is not verified, but what I heard was that the U.S. Gets more oil actually from Canada than Saudi Arabia.

[00:20:53] Aidan: That is odd. Yeah. I guess we are much closer, so it'd be cheaper to transport, though, cargo ships are pretty cheap way to transport anything.

[00:21:02] Evan: And we're just a big country. I think honestly, in Canada, and in the us, because we have so much exposure to nature around us. We take it for granted, because we're like, I can drive out camping. Like I did this weekend, two and a half hours in my gas powered car. And just hang out there and make a ton of garbage while I'm there and then throw it away. And then, it takes away the pressure to like actually make more sustainable sort of stuff.

[00:21:27] Evan: So basically why I think that we're so high CO2 in Canada because everybody drives everywhere because there's not as much infrastructure to not. And because of our industry. But now let's go CO2 emissions per capita.

[00:21:43] Aidan: Yeah, I was going to say, our per capita is going to be off the charts. Cause I looked up the like countries by population on Wikipedia. And we're like 37th in terms of total population. And you said we're seventh in terms of total emissions.

[00:21:56] Evan: This is interesting, actually. So obviously, yeah, with China and India are in the top three, obviously they're going to be much lower for per capita because they're playing in the billions. We're not even playing in the a hundred million, so we're not even playing at half a hundred million.

[00:22:14] Aidan: Are we like top

[00:22:15] Evan: We, we are still top 10 per capita. This was actually really interesting. So for CO2 emissions per capita, the number one, this, I guess isn't that surprising Is Qatar. With 37 tons per person per year of CO2 emissions. Uh, And then this one was a bit surprising Montenegro after that.

[00:22:33] Aidan: Is that one of those like micronations

[00:22:36] Evan: Yeah.

[00:22:37] Aidan: is that one of the ones that's all like billionaires with their like yachts and jets?

[00:22:41] Evan: Maybe it's because everybody has Ferrari's that they tried better or I dunno, or everyone has a yachts that are like gas-powered I dunno.

[00:22:49] Aidan: I guess. Yeah.

[00:22:50] Evan: Montenegro, Kuwait. Not that surprising. And then number four is super surprising to me. Like, I to me. Like, I don't understand this at all. Trinidad and Tobago with twenty-five tons per capita. Like them, I don't know if they have a giant oil and gas industry or? All the Arabian peninsula countries to me makes total sense. Cause like huge oil industry. Like you got all the other rich dudes right in their g wagons. Like I get that. It's hot. Everybody's blasting the AC, makes sense. But Montenegro in Trinidad and Tobago, I'm like what? I don't understand.

[00:23:29] Aidan: Apparently it's the wealthiest country pretty much in the Caribbean.

[00:23:34] Evan: Oh well, I have been there. It's lovely.

[00:23:36] Aidan: Yeah. And the fifth largest by GDP in the Americas, at least like their economy, but. Ah, it's the leading Caribbean producer of oil and gas. Its economy is heavily dependent upon these resources, but it also supplies, manufactured goods, notably foods and beverages, as well as cement to the Caribbean region. Oh, that'd be big.

[00:23:57] Evan: Okay, this makes a lot of sense. Cause I was, I was really confused by that one.

[00:24:02] Aidan: Yeah. That's like oil and gas is 40% of their GDP and 80% of export. But only 5% of employment, which is interesting. That might be a lot of foreign contractors or something going on there.

[00:24:14] Evan: There is a decent amount of income inequality. Then, so on number five, the UAE United Arab Emirates makes sense. After that Oman, again makes sense. And then Canada, we're at number seven. At 18.5 tons per person per year CO2 emissions.

[00:24:34] Evan: And honestly, it seems like all of these so far. These are pretty much having been to only one of the other ones from what I've heard are all mainly car based nations and uh, whatnot, but it seems like a lot of it is just mainly to do with an oil and gas industry.

[00:24:53] Aidan: That seems to be a common thread through all of them. Like including Canada, like we're probably, I would guess the least dependent or that would be the smallest, like piece of the pie.

[00:25:03] Evan: I would guess for the least dependent, because I'm not coming from the prairie's here. I'm not coming from Berta.

[00:25:11] Aidan: Yeah, we've got such a large country that like, it really depends on where you are. Like this wikipedia article is saying that logging and energy industries are two of our most important. And we also have a big manufacturing center with automobiles, and aircraft's being really big. And we also have a big like seafood industry as well as just like software and entertainment.

[00:25:35] Evan: We just do everything at a smaller scale than the states, except for actually, except for the naturalism. We do that kind of bigger.

[00:25:43] Aidan: Define naturalism.

[00:25:44] Evan: Like trees, rocks, water. Got a lot of trees and rocks and water here. But then yeah. So rounding out the top 10, I Brunei, Luxenberg and Bahrain. Brunei has a Sultan. That's a cool fact about Brunei.

[00:26:00] Aidan: That's interesting, actually I assumed Luxembourg was all like bankers. Is that just their lifestyle?

[00:26:07] Evan: I assume it's lifestyle. Cause everyone's very well off. So maybe everyone's got a ton of cars and like there's no buses cause everyone's rich. So they'd just drive everywhere.

[00:26:15] Aidan: Okay. Actually, I'm looking at the little, like breakdown of Canada's. I think this is GDP. Yeah. In 2017 and gas and oil is the biggest. I'm going to take a hot guests and say all these little numbers add up to like 25.

[00:26:29] Evan: Okay. That's still, I that's a lot. Luckily, not as high as a lot of other countries above us, but yeah, so Canada is quite high for our CO2 emissions per capita among the rest of the world. We hear in Canada all about like, oh, China's making all these emissions. India is making all this emissions and pollution. We got to remember that for per capita, we're doing way worse than them.

[00:26:54] Evan: Let's scroll down here. I'm scrolling down. I'm trying to find either China or India and. China. Okay. yeah, China's around 41. Interestingly, actually, the us is not in the top 10. I think it's because they don't have much of an oil and gas industry.

[00:27:11] Evan: And India, I'm scrolling. um, Let's keep going. Alright. I've scrolled very far. Past 50 and I've given up,

[00:27:21] Aidan: India is just not on the list in terms of per capita.

[00:27:24] Evan: Very low emissions per capita. That's something to remember. I think that initially I was like, oh no, Canada is so bad, but now I'm like, That's a good thing. If we're such a big player in like total emissions and like emissions, both total emissions and emissions per capita in the world, then you know, that's something actually that we can in some way affect, either through voting or like whatever or their actions just because like we live here.

[00:27:52] Evan: So that's actually quite reassuring that if I just, have, make some change to you know, the emissions and the policies of my country, then that actually will have a pretty large effect on that greater world.

[00:28:02] Aidan: That's actually interesting too. I just noticed that out of the top 10, we are the smallest population.

[00:28:08] Evan: Wait,

[00:28:08] Evan: Wait, Montenegro and Luxembourg?

[00:28:11] Aidan: Sorry. I was looking at the total list. Total CO2 emission.

[00:28:14] Evan: Oh yeah. So I guess, so we have the largest population.

[00:28:18] Aidan: Out of per capita maybe, but we have the smallest out of the total emissions. So meaning that all the countries ahead of us and like behind us for a bit have much larger populations and less like much lower per capita than us. So it's was just emphasizing here, we can really play a role.

[00:28:34] Evan: There's a lot of stuff that we can do, which is actually yeah, reassuring.

[00:28:38] Evan: The last thing I sent You I might've sent you my results by accident, but conservation.org. Again, I don't have any affiliation with this website. It is not gospel. It's just an interesting thing I found, but it, just it was sort of interesting to me. And so what we're going to do is calculate our footprint.

[00:28:59] Aidan: Let's do it. So this is a website that basically you tell them some like demographic and some other things about yourself and like, I guess your activities like your transportation and travel, yada, yada, and then they tell you what your carbon footprint is.

[00:29:14] Evan: Yeah, exactly. So I thought we'd, read that I can see. And then after this something to do as well. We'll get to that after.

[00:29:21] Evan: Have you got the like household transportation and travel thing?

[00:29:24] Aidan: Yes, I do.

[00:29:25] Evan: Okay. Cool.

[00:29:26] Aidan: Okay. I'm here to just got my footprint calculated.

[00:29:30] Evan: Okay. What is yours?

[00:29:32] Aidan: Your footprint is 12.69 tons.

[00:29:36] Evan: Oh, mine's 13.41. So I'm slightly more.

[00:29:40] Aidan: Evan you monster. Why do you hate the environment?

[00:29:43] Evan: it It says it takes 192 trees to offset your annual footprint.

[00:29:48] Aidan: Yeah, mine saying it takes me 181.

[00:29:53] Evan: What I found really interesting was the offset option here. I do not know where that money goes. It says you, you can offset your carbon footprint by like buying It's a, it's a tax deductible donation. I don't know where it goes. So I need to do research on that. See if it's legit or not.

[00:30:10] Evan: But then 192 trees, I found that really interesting. Cause I'm like, I can do that. I can responsible for probably 10 times that this year people who plant trees say they can do more than that in like a day.

[00:30:22] Evan: What I want to do is be responsible somehow either by planting them, myself, or donating to tree planting or otherwise, I want it to be responsible for what at least 192 trees planted this year.

[00:30:34] Aidan: That is a cool goal, yeah, that actually just off sets your carbon footprint.

[00:30:39] Evan: And in the bottom it says some things you can do. Oh, and like where the U.S. average is for like energy consumption or carbon, actually carbon emission. And it looks like the highest is just your house, which I find very interesting.

[00:30:52] Aidan: That is. Yeah. So what is it about here house that changes, because we just said like how size basically a number of people.

[00:31:02] Evan: I think it would be heating and cooling would be a large one as well as lights. And just how much space you have that is not forest.

[00:31:12] Evan: And they have some tips in the bottom like: meatless Mondays, fly direct. I think these are the same for everybody. I don't think that tailored for our results. Cause it says take the bus and improve your fuel economy. When I said I don't drive and I take the bus often. But these are some interesting, interesting things.

[00:31:29] Evan: But yeah, so the, my main takeaway from this is I want to, I want to be responsible for around 200 trees. Like I'd like to plant them myself, ideally. Cause I feel like I could do that in a long weekend, 200 trees. But if not, find some way to be responsible for that.

[00:31:44] Evan: And so I hope everyone uh, checks out some info like that about themselves. Maybe you just gets a scale of like where you live, what's the situation, you know, what can you do? How much are you responsible for yourself? And I hope this helps maybe ease some people's anxieties about the sort of stuff.

[00:32:00] Evan: But yeah. That's my main takeaway there. Maybe we should update later in the year, on what our takeaways from this.

[00:32:07] Aidan: Possibly. Yeah. And how many trees you've planted.

[00:32:11] Evan: And the other main purpose of this listener, I hope it inspires you to get involved where you live and just, get informed to get the information uh, about the sort of stuff as it pertains to you.

[00:32:21] Aidan: That is interesting. Yeah, because as we mentioned, Canada has a big opportunity to step up here. And I think the vast majority of our listenership is Canadian. So.

[00:32:32] Evan: Yeah, and I think also most Canadians think we're actually probably one of the more environmentally friendly countries.

[00:32:40] Aidan: Because you can just be like, look at the U S they're doing terrible. We were obviously doing great.

[00:32:46] Evan: And you'd be looking at many forests we have. Look at all that we can't be that bad.

[00:32:50] Aidan: Yeah. But they're all on fire. They're about to leave.

[00:32:53] Evan: And listener, to get involved and inform yourself.

[gotgifsandmusings]

My idiocy, reading lenses, and GRRM

So, I was away all weekend with family things. But as I said, I wasn’t able to stop thinking about my most recent podcast and the feedback I’ve received in reblogs, @’s, my inbox, direct messages, and replies. Which like, an absolutely sincere thank you for anyone who took the time, in whatever capacity.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Julia and I recorded a UBS episode called “is GRRM literal garbage,” which we were using as a platform to talk about the flaws of ASOIAF, while sort of being playful about the way that online dialogue puts things in such, you know, black and white terms. People are perfect or they’re toxic and garbage, right? And because of that, there are a lot of times where we feel—or really where I feel, cause it’s just my own thoughts I’m vomiting here—like content creators who at least like, *try*, really do receive unfair criticism.

But yeah, most of the feedback we got was very negative. Particularly, Julia and I—we’re two white women, and we recorded a segment on racial portrayals and racism in ASOIAF, since there are so many problems on this front that we felt disingenuous not doing it. We made sure to call out how we are white before entering into this discussion, and also said something like, ‘hey, if we miss something or if you disagree with us, please tell us so we can engage, because we are limited by our own lack of experiencing racism.’ (And anti-semitism is...not at all of the same vein; nothing pisses me off more than when white jews try to distance ourselves from our racial privilege, to be honest).

Well, not surprisingly at all, we missed stuff! Because of course we fucking did. And it wasn’t just that, but we also put ourselves in a position of saying, “oh we’re apologetic of Martin” and then trying to like...come up with reasons for what are obvious problems through the lens of intent or some shit, which is just...so not what should do ever. Hell, it’s not what we should do with any topic, let alone one where we’re entering into the conversation from such a place of privilege. So yeah, we missed stuff and we sounded like we were apologizing for racism which is not only not our place, but not even what we set out to do.

This wasn’t unique to the problems of racism in ASOIAF either; I received a lot of asks saying that it really felt like I was trying not to let my lens of Martin be challenged. And really ruminating on all this the past few days...there’s a ton of truth to that. Which is a bit silly, because I never exactly thought myself as holding Martin up in the first place—just what I got out of these book series. So what was it I was resisting?

It was Gretchen ( @gnelliswriter ) who ended up framing everything to me in a way where these things that were concatenating—all this criticism that I trying to absorb and understand, finally clicked. Because she talked about the balance of the 3 lenses: Doylist, Watsonian, and Reader Response. Which is also like, viewer response and gamer response, of course.

When she said this, it was just like...“Oh.” Because, Julia and I focus a ton on Doylist vs. Watsonian, you know? Watsonian being a character-level analysis, like “Cersei did this because she was feeling X.” Doylism then looks at what the author is trying to say. “Martin had Cersei do this because he was making a point about Y.” Julia’s the one who explained this to me in the first place—my background is engineering and I hadn’t done any type of literary analysis until the Arianne reread.

However, in terms of dialogue surrounding media, there is quite clearly a third lens. Reader Response is the *reader’s* takeaway. “Cersei did X and regardless of what Martin wanted that to mean, here’s what the message was that I saw, here’s how I reacted, and here’s the implications of it” (or just some aspect of this).

Which...this is the most obvious thing, because it’s the ONLY THING I talk about with Game of Thrones, right? Like, I say GOT isn’t worthy of Watsonian analysis, because it’s not, but then the series of retrospectives Julia and I do where we’re desperately hunting for a Doylist rationalization also reveals that...D&D don’t really have much to say anyway, and they don’t seem to particularly care. Then in these essays, we always go on and say, “Well okay, regardless of that, HERE’S the implications, and they suck donkey dick.” And fuck, I wrote an entire piece on the difference between intent and result, and why results really really matter.

So this whole thing, like... I don’t know, I realize I’m not an English major or anything, but in some ways I kind of feel like Reader Response is actually the only lens that matters? (I can hear the gasps from my academic friends right now.) Or at least, it matters the most heavily, because that’s where engagement is, and that’s where the dialogue occurs that fosters empathy and understanding. I suppose most stories I consume do also foster empathy in some ways (unless they’re nihilistic piss slop), but they’re not ever going to replace the experience of hearing a diversity of voices and viewpoints on something.

For example, with Legend of Korra, which I love, I had zero problems the first time I heard the line in the end about how Korra “needed to know what true suffering was so she could become more empathetic.” I thought the intent was clear, and it was a powerful way of showing someone recontextualizing their trauma and finding a healthy state of mind. However, after reading what many women of color in the fandom wrote on the matter, I understood why that had felt offensive to others, and why it was so uncomfortable to have had two white men put those words into the mouth of a brown, bisexual female protagonist.

So now I’ve like, written fix-it fic of that moment. Because the Reader Response to Korra’s words created that dialogue where otherwise my own lens wouldn't have been challenged, even as a bisexual woman myself. White women simply don’t have a history with the trope of being beaten to “learn respect” that women of color have in media. That’s a privilege, so learning about it was really important. All I want in life is to somehow work towards a world where people don’t feel like shit. The more we learn about the shittyness that exists and try to understand it, the better equipped we will be to fix it. Why *wouldn’t* we prioritize a lens of analysis that can bring that about? 

Honestly, as soon as Gretchen labeled “Reader Response” a third lens, it’s like the clouds parted, and the sun shined onto my own striking idiocy with how I’ve been talking about everything and framing everything (I think we’re going to do a joint piece on this soon). Cause like, it *is* deeply hypocritical—my approach to GRRM compared against my approach to D&D. I say it’s because of “benefit of the doubt”, and that’s a thing, but that doesn’t really explain what was actually happening, it’s more of “I don’t really want to think about this cognitive dissonance”, and it certainly doesn’t help me grow from what went so wrong on the podcast. I was using it as a rhetorical crutch. 

Like, before Gretchen parsed this out with me, I kind of thought a laser-focus on the flaws of a story was just someone being “too Doylist.” But that’s not actually a thing. How would that be one? You can’t try and figure out what an author is saying ~too~ much, though I guess if you only care about what the author’s saying you may, idk, not feel as into the characters or something.

No, what it is, is Reader Response and how you felt interacting with media, which...media is not created or consumed in a cultural vacuum. If I believe media analysis matters, which I do, it’s because of Reader Response. I’m not trying to take “death of the author” to the extreme, but there is a point where whatever authorial intent exists just doesn’t matter. There are impacts reading stories have on people, and on conversations.

So all of this makes how Julia and I approached a podcast about ASOIAF’s flaws all the more stupid. Because basically what we did was read out a laundry list of problems, which are all Reader Response by nature; if we happened to think it wasn’t much of a problem we’d say so (like when I said that I didn’t think Arya and Sansa’s scripting as sisters was sexist, which like...I’m sorry, but I’m sticking to that one), but otherwise the conversation was kind of us going, “oh this is an issue, but here’s maybe a Doylist or Watsonian reason for it.” And that’s...not constructive? I mean, what does that even do?

What should have been a tip-off, too, is that the only time we didn’t do this was when Julia tried to come up with an explanation for Dany’s scene with Irri, and I got really pissed because I just didn’t see any value or justification in it. As a queer woman, my reader response to that was super, super negative, and I had no patience for anything else. Well, Julia and I are limited by our own lenses and backgrounds, so apply that to other issues, and we don’t have experiences where we would get pissed about stuff about which other people are probably seething. But that doesn’t mean the people who are seething should have to listen to the bullshit of “well here’s a point you can consider that makes this gross ass thing valuable!” What the hell do we know about it?

Which, it wasn’t really what we were trying to do, but it absolutely is what the podcast ended up being. And frankly, it’s not like I’ve ever gotten positive or worthwhile takeaways from the way Martin portrays race, with maybe a small exception being the in-verse prejudice against Dorne getting deconstructed within Dornish POVs. That’s just because it even further hammers on POV-bias and shines a lens on Westerosi perspectives in a rather stark light, though I still question its effectiveness. And sure, you can apply that deconstruction elsewhere in the story and assume everyone is an unreliable and biased narrator (they are), but what value is there in Dorne being the only place that actually gets a closer inspection?

And even if Martin is doing something to a point, that doesn’t make it a helpful point or a necessary point. Like, oh we now know Dany’s in way over her head, and doesn’t understand the political or cultural complexity of where she’s trying to rule or what she’s trying to accomplish. Okay, but I’m about 99% sure that same point could have been made with Essosi POVs?? And almost certainly a lot better and clearer???

For fuck’s sake, if we hadn’t had any female POVs for the first three books and people were telling me, “oh it’s to make a point on women’s place in this society,” or idk to prove how unknowable women are to our male protagonists or some shit, there’s no way I’d even be reading this series. And it’s not as though I have any patience for super stereotypical jewish portrayal; it’s just that that’s not exactly possible in ASOIAF. If it were, you can sure as hell bet that I wouldn’t appreciate two goys telling me it’s all for the greater good of writing a...really gross world, or showing how much a character appreciates jewish culture. That doesn’t make any goddamn sense!

Look. Julia and I have gotten a lot out of Martin’s critique of the patriarchy. You can bet your ass a large reason for that is because there’s so many female POVs, not to mention male POVs who are also victims of this horrible setting, such as Theon and Aeron being victims of sexual assault (Theon’s chapters being a much more intimate look), Jaime struggling to define himself in a martial world now that he’s lost his hand, Sam’s trauma from his abusive upbringing, and so on. Julia and I also give Martin leeway because looking at his work chronologically, things do seem to be improving. Which...yay? Snaps?

But really, it’s something @witabif said to me that stuck in my craw as I was talking this out with pretty much anyone in my proximity the past few days: I have a huge tendency to take *my* positive reactions and takeaways to ASOIAF and apply them to Martin’s intent. I think the conflation of Reader Reaction and Doylism is the largest part of that, but what’s funny is I work overtime to not do that, especially with GoT. How many times have I said “we can’t know what’s in D&D’s head,” or steel-manned some dumbass plotpoint of theirs?

At the end of the day, all we really have to judge content creators on are their bodies of work. It’s why I say “it’s the pattern.” And Martin’s pattern? It’s one of a dude who is a pretty skilled storyteller, but also very much out of his depth in a lot of departments. Does he do better than most other 69-year-old white cishet men living in New Mexico? Probably. Is he making an effort to be more thoughtful as times go on? I mean...it feels that way in some places, but that doesn’t erase what’s hurtful in the books now, or what’s ugly, or most importantly, what’s shaping a large part of our cultural conversation because let’s be honest here: these books are hugely successful and have that power. This is why I’ve talked over and over again about fiction mattering. Fuck, this is why I engage with GoT at all and think it’s worthwhile looking at its flaws.

Really, ASOIAF isn’t any different. I mean, it tells a coherent story, so it’s different on that front. And I do find some of the takeaways of the books valuable. I also stand adamant that what Martin does with close PoV is impressive, and he is a gifted writer who can tease out nuance quite well. The battle between good and evil truly is within the human heart, and the experience of reading the books, and then rereading them where you find these other depths, has been one of an engagement I haven’t quite matched elsewhere yet.

But, part of liking something and caring about something means a willingness to engage with its flaws, no matter how deep or uncomfortable they are. Engaging shouldn’t be excusing, and even if I’ve found ways to tease out meaning (for instance, Cersei and Taena’s scene lands one way for me, but not at all the same way for many other wlw readers), my personal reaction and truth is...just that? And I do suspect that a lot of times, I’m seeing something there he didn’t see at all. Which is a tension I should have been digging into this whole time.

Looking back at the podcast, it was a horrible fucking structure for it. I don’t even know if it should have been an episode, to be honest. Because like, aside from just explaining what these problems were, and maybe sampling meta of people who had written on specific issues, there’s not much to add. We can’t proclaim someone to be literal garbage (which was part of the joke of the title), nor can we we proclaim them to be good enough, because...who the fuck are we anyway? I think what we could have done is had discussion about how to engage with deeply flawed media, as kind of a “Here’s all that’s wrong...so, what now?” thing, but we didn’t even discuss our approach beforehand.

I’m thinking about pulling it out of the feed entirely, and please let me know your thoughts on that. On one hand, I think it’s important to not hide from our mistakes and to allow a pathway to grow from them. For that reason, and because I just really want to after taking in this feedback, I’m working on a direct follow-up episode to it for the near future. On the other, I don’t want subscribers still hearing a conversation that’s out-of-balance and problematic, and I can see no reason why the follow-up discussion episode would require the former episode in the feed. I’m leaning towards the latter, but definitely value everyone’s input in the matter.

After typing all this out...it’s not complicated: it comes back to me not wanting to challenge my views on Martin. I didn’t. But now they have been, and it has been because of how amazingly thoughtful this fandom is, as well as the responses and suggestions I’ve received. And you know what? Yeah. I’m disenchanted with the guy. It’s not like a lightswitch, but seeing the misalignment between *my* reader reaction and *his* pattern/messaging has been eye-opening, embarrassing, and frustrating. He’s just some dude with a fairly unique approach to genre fiction and a few good ideas; there’s areas where he excels, and areas where he needs a lot of improvement. A lot.

I’m still going to say stop bothering him about writing speed and stop consulting actuary tables, because that shit is creepy. But otherwise, he’s welcome to fight his own battles. God knows he has the resources. I still think I will land in a different place with how effective his scripting of women is, among other things, and I look forward to continuing to have spirited discussions about all of that. However, it’s now with full cognizance that it’s our reactions and experience to the media that we’re discussing, and my own has diddly squat to do with Martin’s intent.

Which I should have realized from day fucking 1.

[l0ve-pand0ra]

anime review: boku no hero academia

not gunna lie.. i shit talked the Hell out of my hero. like sooo much shit. i claimed it wasn’t worth the hype that it was lame, bad plot, etc. all b4 actually watching it like a dumbass. oh , how Wrong i was. my hero for anyone new or old to anime is well known and is very big especially for the incredible character design. my hero gets alot of hype and i do thinks its for a reason. shonen anime is probably the most popular and is where the most popular  franchises are born aka naruto, one piece, and dbz. and my hero is at the front running for being this generations leader in shonen. although this is not an anime that i cant find faults in , i can find quite a few but this is one of my favorite animes and is definitely worth the watch, now lets get into it.

this shonen like many is about the underdog who can! when 80% of the population has some sort of super human ability known as a quirk izuku midoriya is in minority 20% of people in superhuman society that do not have a quirk. and with the birth of the superhuman powers came the rise of a new profession, heroism. in which people with quirks get licenses to use them to save people. it’s sorta like how kids now wanna be youtubers well thats what being a hero is in this anime. of course midoriya wants to be a hero just like his idol All Might the #1 hero and pillar of peace.

in order to do that he must get into the top hero school in Japan, U.A Academy. with an acceptance rate of less then 2% (or 0.2% i genuinely cannot remember lol) . midoriya is the classic meek bullied kid being pushed around by childhood friends kaksuki bakugou who is loud, angry, and LOUD, and also wants to be a hero. his quirk is explosions that he creates from his palms with his nitroglycerin like sweat.

one day midoriya gets to meet his idol and the series kicks off. midoriyas journey in getting into U.A, viallian attacks, sports festivals., interships, training camps and more!

now midoriya as a main character grew on me. truth me told the first 5 episodes of my hero are Painful to get through, they made me cringe and midoriya cries about 5 times in one 20 minute episode which is exhausting. personally my favorite type of shonen anime protagonist are himbos , aka dumb sunshines. midoriya is not this he’s actually incrediblely smart but he’s so meek it’s annoying and for a while I thought he was the worst choice for protagonist especially with how amazing the side characters are, but he grows on you and it makes sense why he is the way he is and his character development is good. he grows much more confident and sure of himself. he has that naruto talk-no-jutsu vibe about him lol. but overall he’s good, not my favorite character by anymeans in fact i doubt he’d be in my top 5 in this series.

NOW FOR THE BEST PART ABOUT MY HERO; SIDE CHARACTERS (now i am only a mortal so i will only be talking about characters that stand out and add something to the show aka invisible girl is not mentioned neither is tail boy)

bakugou!!!! listen, he is a piece of work. and honestly it took me till season 2 to actually like and enjoy his character. he’s defently different from the normal angry anime boy because he has Zero reason to be angry which sorta adds to the comedy of the show. hes weathly, has two good parents, hes liked and popular despite being somewhat nasty, and he has a cool ass quirk along with being a prodigy at basically everything. his inferiority complex is what he battles the entire show I do feel like his character development was a little too slow, they could moved it along a little bit and not held onto how angry he was for absolutely no reason but again it kind of adds to the charm his character. his design is so beautiful the blonde hair the red eyes he’s great and hes my second fave character. his anger is toward mostly midoriya toward most people hes just loud but he really has a problem with midoriya. a problem he lowkey made up in his head but overall bakugou is a strong character and a different type of hero, he’s the opposite of all might in everyway.

TODOROKI!!!!!! if you dont know who todoroki is and you somewhat watch anime or see anime content on your social media, you are lying. his character design is super well known and is honestly beautiful he’s literally breath taking. speaking of character design let’s leave the Zuko versus Todoroki discord somewhere else I just don’t care let’s leave it alone they both have scars and daddy issues big whoop! they would literally be bffs move on. now that thats out of the way, todoroki is phenomenal, he’s the more silent type but not tsundere at all. we dont see alot of him in season 1 but mainly in season 2, he’s the son of the #2 hero endeavor who despite being a hero is human garbage! his quirk is half cold half hot. essentially he has two quirks one creating ice from the right side of his body and create flames from his left (the coolest and most versatile quirk in the series) his hatred towards his father makes him unwilling to use his fire side. but he gets over it! todoroki i feel definitely got snubbed , i feel like the dimmed him down because of how easily he could overshadow midoriya and honestly my hero could have easily been about todoroki and his journey discovering what kind of hero he wants to be thats how good he is. I cried 4 times during his battle with midoriya. i love todoroki and he is my fave character of the series.

Kirishima!!!!!! his quirk his hardening, he makes his whole body rock hard. i adore kirishima hes is so wonderful as a side character. we really see him shine in s4 during his work study and i love that especially since he was often pushed to the side. he’s also the first person bakugou acknowledes as an equal and friend. his backstory and motivation is really touching and his character design is so fun !! i love sharp teeth boi’s!!!!! and also i dont know they made him so obsessed with being chivalrous and manly but not a misogynist that is like so hard to do and they did it so well. and the fact that his motivation to keep going is a woman and someone who he respects was also so cool. also his hero custome is so cool. he said full chest out !!

mineta, now this is a character that literally everyone hates and granted he’s not my favorite character not even close but I don’t think he’s that bad. He’s the classic pervert classic girl obsessed character. His quirk is literally detaching sticky balls from his head he’s gross but I don’t mind him like all he does is talk like they have an anime character is a straight up harass women which he does sometimes but I don’t know I just don’t get why hes so hated when there are tons of similar character types like him that are worse that don’t get that much hate like I’m not defending him he’s gross but it’s not terrible and he provides comedic relief which is not always funny but it’s there

kaminari! cute shock boy! hes a more digestible and attractive version of mineta, slightly girl crazy but hes fun! hes also friends with bakugou and his quirk electricity but if he over uses it he gives himself brain damage and turns dumb. again hes more often then not pushed aside but hes funny and his personality is awesome and bright.

Iida, someone im kinda lukewarm about? he’s definitely a major side character and gets his own huge moments and out of all the side characters gets alot of screen time. his quirk is engine legs that make him super fast. hes a stick up his ass class rep but he’s nice and way more likeable after the first few episodes

ochaco.....um. shes ok ig, her quirk is making these float. has a crush on midoriya which is fine even though she looks his she could be his cousin dndjd. idk i dont love her type of preppy i wanna be like my crush character type, hinata does it better. but shes ok again lukewarm about her, i definitely like some of the other female characters better but shes not awful. again most shonen animes use female characters as prop to further the male protagonist character along. idk i jus dont like her personality.

froppy!!!! tsu!!! i adore you ! would d word for you!!! i love her so much shes such a cool character and she doesn’t fit into a box in terms of character type. her quirk is frog meaning she can do everything a frog can do. she’s so level headed and smart and witty she really adds something everytime she comes on. she’s just so chill i really appreciate that.

jiro!!! wonderfully talented queen! her quirk is earphone jack! shes just so again chilled and laid back but also super smart and perceptive. sorta tomboyish which is really cool 2 see a different look for a female character.

yayorozu!!!!! my favorite female characters of the show. her quirk is creation, she makes anything she wants as long as she knows the structure. its dope af. shes so smart and responsible and has an awesome sense of self improvement. i do believe in eating the rich but i still love her. shes a natural leader which i love to see and i think she should have been class rep but as always, men have to be in postions of power ...

tetsutetsu!!!!! the only person in class b with rights. hes kind of like kirishimas counter part, he also has a hardening quirk which makes his body into steele. hes jus so Funny and loud and i wish he was in class 1 a he’d be so good. he brings alot of energy and his fight with kirishima was so fun to watch.

miro, again. someone i shit talked b4 seeing what they were about. i honestly thought miro was going to have some evil agenda against my midoriya but he didn’t he was so good so bright his quirk is so cool it’s permeation meaning he can like walk through walls and stuff he’s so cool!!

tamaki!!!!!!!!! I ADORE HIM! SO MUCH!! hes so shy and insecure but wtf so badass with an amazing quirk called manifest meaning he can manifest on his body the different types of food he eats like he eats octopus he gets tentacle arms which means he basically has like an unlimited number of quirks??!! so dope and his character design is so sexy hes my bf

shinso, now his design is very good he reminds me alot of aizawa, and his quirk is insane and i dont know how people like invisible girl, tail guy, fucking mineta got into the hero course but someone like shinso with a brainwashing quirk didn’t, all someone has to do is answer his question and their under his control, literally so useful. he’s a really hyped up character which I find interesting because in the anime manga people don’t come for me he isn’t really showcased which is really annoying because he’s cool and I get what the hype is about but I just wish we saw more of him I think there is in the actual manga but in the anime he makes like two appearances??

AIZAWA!!! hes so ,, hot, idc him a bun forget it.. im .. his quirk... SO DOPE I MEAN TO BE ABLE TO ERASE SOMEONE QUIRK,,? dope af, his tsundere with more dere then anything hes so sweet and genuinely loves his class So Much, they are his babies. his character is super genuine and its so fun to see him and someone like all might working along side eachother just because they are such different people. aizawa is definitely my third favorite character

all might!!! the big man himself! honestly all might is what superman wishes he was, he is just so Nice and caring and just wants to help people thats all he wants to do, hes the only person deemed worthy by stain. he plays such a huge role in the series in a way a mentor/idol really never has 4 me. i love his other version as well its so well designed to be such a contrast to his muscle form.

stain, the best villain on the show, most complex and truly thought provoking and just all in all they did such a good job with his character design and his motives the stain arc was my favorite in terms of villains because my hero really kind of lacks in villians and sure the league does get better but stain has the most like convincing argument and morals like the concept that he wants to purge the fake heroes of the society away is just fascinating because society in the series so overpopulated with heros and just ugh such a good villain and his quirk,, crazy being to paralyze people by tasting their blood wild

dabi!!! aka todorokis brother (thats not a spoiler jus a fan theory that i wholeheartedly believe) his quirk is  cremation which he basically has such hot fire that it jus turns everything to ash. aka his character design being him with burns, his body most likely can’t fully handle his quirk. hes so hot ugh literally come on emo boy! but really hes a cool villain and works for the League. I wish we saw more of him which I know in season 4 like toward the end he makes a pretty big appearance but after training camp we don’t see him as much as I wish we did and he’s super famous hyped up character again because his design is so dope. he’d be a good anti hero.

shigaraki!!! he’s actually my fourth favorite character.... you guys ever have that one character that one think most likely thinks is hot, but you do. YES HES CRUSTY BUT STILL SEXY GAMER. if i could just give him a skincare routine...His character is one that got probably the most development I mean we see this bratty childish kind of loser in season one in in season for a re-really see a masterminded plan from him and something truly thought out because I feel like a lot of his plans aren’t thought through and this is one of the first ones that I see truly come to fruition the way he wanted to. I really appreciate that from a villain who can grow because he wasn’t a very convincing villian and he had no motivation to do what he was doing and just seem like a dumb kid but like now after watching him grow he’s really coming into his own and for season five I want to see him continue that growth he’s having.

OK IM SO SORRY THE SIDE CHARACTERS TOOK 80 YEARS THERE ARE SO MANY

now onto my critiques these are MY opinions which literally don’t matter the author/artist is incredible and knows what they’re doing and they don’t have to cater to what I want at all this is just how I thought while watching the anime.

I feel like midoriya is a character that can’t really shine on his. I feel like side characters need to be pushed down and snubbed for him to look cool. and  in general I just feel like because of the personality that he has as a main character he kind of struggles to shine unless they dim the light of the other characters because especially in season four midoriya is just constantly pushed and pushed as this end all be all if feels which OK he’s the main character but like was it realistic for some of the things that happen in season four to happen I don’t wanna spoil but if you watched it you know like who defeated who and so on.  at least to me sometimes it’s really obvious that they’re pushing for you to have that midoriya is so cool reaction which just seems forced.

I mention this in some of the side character villains but my hero really doesn’t have like super compelling villains with proper reasoning to what they’re doing or maybe we just haven’t seen that yet in the anime but for me the only good villain the whole series was stain. sure the league of villains gets better but they’re seen as a joke for most of the series at least to me like I didn’t really take them seriously just them minus all for one. I feel like they have these major villains but only see them once especially with all for one we saw him once and then if you watch the my hero movie he’s like there for 2.2 seconds as a major plot point but him physically as a villain but I see him once in action and even so I still think stain is a better villain and notice how I’m not mentioning overhaul in this conversation. there was just something beyond villainious about overhaul especially the child abuse. and again he’s someone who was spoiler alert defeated and in one shot kind of way it only took half the season and if you compare him and his organization to the league their miles ahead of the  League so why did they get defeated first it just kind of didn’t make sense to me.

I was sort of annoyed when the big three got introduced for my side character analysis I praised two out of the three of them and I love the third member she is incredible and a bad ass I just couldn’t write any more about side characters or else this will never end but did we need the introduction of more students when there are so many in class 1a themselves that just don’t get the light of day especially in season four with Todoroki and Bakugou being absent for most of it.

endeavor doesn’t deserve redemption arc that’s what they’re setting up for now i don’t want it he’s gross he’s a domestic abuser he’s a child beater he’s a child neglecter. he’s gross and I don’t understand how this hasn’t been exposed to the public about how the number one hero beat his wife and kids how we just not know that.

I mentioned this with bakugous character review but I feel like his development was just so agonizingly slow for no reason because it wasn’t this deep-rooted issue it was something he misinterpreted and created this fake narrative in his head about midoriya. and even after they have that big fight and acknowledge each other I feel like there’s still something missing which bothers me because there is no reason one it should’ve taken four seasons when Todoroki‘s deep-rooted issues were solved in a couple episodes basically.

 I feel like the series attempted to add romance and then gave up which I think was a smart move just because at the moment there isn’t really a place for it and this is coming from someone who adores romance in anime and I thrive off it but in my hero specifically especially the way they were going to do it with Ocacho was just not it and I really hope they don’t reduce her character even more to just pining over the male protagonist because I’ll be sad because even though I’m not crazy for her I still think she’s a solid character who I don’t want to become just a propeller for character development for the sake of the male protagonist.

things i love!!

the animation is beautiful, it’s so unique and different and just feels really fresh. you can clearly see the movements and can we talk about how well they draw hands? got tier anime hands.

the fighting was the Best ive ever seen in terms of timing, most shonen animes can drag on battles for many many episodes especially dbz, it honestly feels tiring and i love the my hero has the Perfect length to i get all the action and never feel bored or over it. I also enjoy that the anime wasn’t super fillery, and when there was it wasn’t that noticeable that it wasn’t canon.

how everyone is friends really makes me happy especially to see midoriya be so loved and respected by his peers, and everyone views him as an inspiration. to know he was bullied and hated by his class in middle school to in high school having everyone love him enough to make him class rep at first. which I am so glad he stepped down from because it was lowkey cringe that he won djdj.

how rivalry is done is nice because its not a huge major thing, sure everyone is competitive but its friendly and motivating. its not cutthroat.

the dub is really good, ik people shit on dub which is fair. but sometimes the dub hits and there are moments when you wanna watch anime but you have stuff to do so you can’t solely focus on the screen. personally i don’t know why but i had a hard time getting into my hero with sub and had to watch it dub. but if you do like dubbed anime then the my hero dub is solid im sure certain things are said cooler in the sub than dub (aka hqs “dont let me down fellas alright?” jdjdxjxj) but it is a funimation dub which are almost always decent.

the structure of society and the information we get told about heros and the job are soo well done. I feel like I really understand the setting which in fanatasy animes can be somewhat difficult, and everything makes sense and is really normal. they do such a good job making being a hero a normal thing, especially since heroism especially in the western comics is viewed as this big deal that not everyone can do while in my hero its the opposite. i love that.

midoriyas not give up attitude is really endearing, sure most shonen protagonist have this but especially with midoriya being the Biggest underdog to the point where he ruins his body over and over again and still keeps moving. a moments i genuinely loved midoriyas character and fell for him completely was during training camp, when he fight smuscular and still keeps moving despite being Ruined. it’s my favorite right after stains.

i love seeing them train! ik the actual villains are exciting but things like training camp and the creating special moves moment were my favorite.

-

Overall;

i love my hero, it’s quickly made its way to my favorite animes of all time, the characters, plot, and motivations are so good. it’s an anime that makes me feel like I can do anything i set my mind to. I enjoy the fact that it’s an anime that like I feel like there can be a discussion and not one over about whether it’s good or bad because it’s definitely good but more in how things are done the reason things were done how things could’ve been done differently there’s a lot to talk about and I feel like this is a very unique thing because I think with a lot of anime everything is so set in stone and if things were done a different way and it wouldn’t work with my hero there are so many ways things would go which I love. and I also love that there are things that I don’t like about it or that I’m not crazy about and for some reason that makes me like it even more because I feel like again back to the discussion point there’s so much to talk about especially on like Reddit where you can see what other people think and if you’re wrong if you’re right it doesn’t really matter because I think today this is just anime! give it a watch if you are curious you wont regret it!



[kane-and-griffin]

I'm really sad about something I don't understand and was hoping you could explain. Why do people block without giving a reason to? I don't why it first seems like it's all going so well then the next you're blocked and you don't know why or what you did or said wrong? It's happened twice now and to say it hurts is an understatement.

Oh, my precious Kabby babies.  Circle up, it’s time for some firm butgentle life advice from Mom. 

First of all, unless I personally am the person who blocked you (whichI’m obviously not since we’re having this conversation!), in a very real sensethe short answer to this question is that you know I can’t actually answer thisquestion.  You’re asking me to tell youwhy a person I don’t know did a thing for which I have no context, and forwhich there could be a thousand reasons. So in a concrete, specific sense, my answer is: I do not know.

However.

(You knew there was going to be a however.)

Social media is a deeply personal avenue for self-expression and it’s also aworld where many of us spend a great deal of our time, which means that we havethe full and free right to customize it into exactly what we want it tobe.  The things that you post are personal reflections of you, which is  why it bums you out when someone mutes or blocks or doesn’t followback; it feels on some level like a personalrejection.  But the space you curate is also a personal reflection of you.  You have the rightto post anything you want and other people have the right to choose not to seeit.  Both of those rights are equal, eventhough you’re only on one side so naturally the other one feels like it’s insome way “wrong.”  

I’m speaking with zero context for what your preexisting relationship withthese people was beforehand (like obviously if it was a close friend and theyblocked you out of nowhere, you’re going to have to sort that out with themdirectly, I can’t advise you there), but it’s important to remember that theremay be no “right” and wrong” in this scenario.  It’s fully possible forboth of these things to peacefully coexist at the same time:

1) your absolute right to feel a little bit rejected and hurt that astranger on the internet made the choice that they didn’t want your socialmedia sphere to overlap with their social media sphere,

and

2) that other person’s absolute right to say “if something or someone makesme feel even the tiniest bit ‘nope’ I am purging it out of this space so it isexactly what I want and need it to be.” 

They don’t need to have a reason.  That sucks, when you’re on the receiving end of it, which all of us have been - it truly and genuinely sucks - but it’s also reality.  One of the hard truths that incidents like this make us sometimes have toface - and we don’t want to face these things, because they can feel reallyicky and vulnerable and ping all the little gremlins in our brain  - is this:

nobody on the internet owes you their time or attention foranything you do or say.

This sounds mean and brutal, and I don’t mean it to be, because you know mom loves you, but it’s incrediblyimportant, so I’m going to say it again to make sure that if nothing else, thisgets through:

nobody on the internet owes you their time or attention foranything you do or say.

The celebs you stan don’t owe you a response to your tweet, justbecause you want one.  The people you tag in meta don’t owe you rebloggingit to continue having that conversation with you forever, just because you wantto prove you’re right.  The fans of the fic you write for your mostpopular ship don’t owe you crossing over to give you hits on yourrare-pair fic if they don’t feel like it.  Nobody owes you a certainnumber of followers, nobody owes you a response to every anon you send them,nobody owes you finishing that fic you like in time for them to read it whenthey feel like reading it.  We owe each other one thing and one thingonly: basic human decency.  That’s it.  Everything else is freelyoffered to the world, and freely taken by the people who want it.  It’snot a transactional exchange.  If you make art or write fic and you put itout there into the world, you’ve done a cool thing, and whether it gets tenhits or thousands it was still worth doing.  There will be people whoaren’t interested, but if you get hung up on feeling rejected by that, it willparalyze you.

Social media is personal. That’s unavoidable.  It’s an extension of ourselves.  When someone is cruel to you or to one ofyour friends on the internet, even if it’s an anonymous stranger, it feelsshitty.  When you express an opinionabout something and a ton of people reblog it and the tags are full of “OMG YESTHISSSSS”, it feels great.  We all experiencethat in different ways.  Society has always selected arbitrary measures for young girls and women tolive up to in order to feel like they’re popular or they’re approved by thecool kids, and right now it’s things like “how many followers do you have” and “didyou get an RT from a celebrity” and “how many likes on your posts”.  So ona primal level, maybe having someone you thought was a friend block you on Twitter or Tumblr hits you in the same deep coreplace as having the cool kids not come to your birthday party.  That feeling is super real!  It brings upalllllll that deep stuff we try to hide and pretend that we’re aboveexperiencing, but we all have those squishy vulnerable inner selves that justneed the cool kids to like us and we feel bad when they don’t.  

I had this exact conversation with my therapist a few weeks ago when she wasgiving me a hard time because my book has 60 reviews on Amazon, of which likethe majority are 5 stars with two negative ones, and I have both the negativeones like memorized.  And she was like “CLAIRE.  WHAT THE HELL.  WHY DO YOU DO THIS?  58 POSITIVE AND YOU CANNOT QUOTE A SINGLEONE.  TWO SHITTY ONES AND YOU KNOW THEMVERBATIM.  THAT IS NOT HEALTHY BEHAVIOR.”  And I was like “… . okay fine when youput it that way, yes I do sound like a crazy person.”  So like my advice to you – advice which I havejust proven I am absolute garbage at taking myself, so like I may have justeroded my own credibility in my efforts to help – is to remember that you probablyhave a lot more than two followers so honestly this is probably not a badcollective ratio, and there may be lots of people who are very interested inwhat you have to say but you’ve focused a lot of your energy on these two people andit’s worth giving some thought as to why that is.

My question for you is this: what is the net negative impact of having thesetwo people block you on social media? Like in an actual, concrete way, separate from those sort of core gut “Ifeel unloved in this moment” feelings, what is the effect on your life?  You might be surprised.  It might be zero.  In which case, let yourself feel thosefeelings, experience them as valid, and then breathe through them and move onand keep on doin’ you. 

I’m pushing backon you a little bit here very gently because it feels, reading this anon, likeyou’ve made a determination of hurtful intent on the part of the person whoblocked you, or at the very least a certainty that this choice that made wasabout you and not about them.  That the fact that things seemed to be going fine and then they blocked you means you were somehow intentionally misled or mistreated.  Be really, really, really carefulabout deciding the cool girl didn’t come to your birthday party because she’s abitch who wanted to make you feel terrible and is sitting somewhere cackling atthe thought of your sad lil’ face waiting by the front door; maybe she didn’tcome to your birthday party because she has depression and it’s hard for her toleave the house sometimes and she knew your party would be loud and wild and crazyand too much for her brain to handle right now. Be careful about presuming negative intent with no proof it exists.  The internet makes this so easy, the internetconditions us for this, and itconditions us to respond in kind. The worst thing you could do here is to, like,make a callout post or subtweet in the hopes that it will get back to them andthey’ll feel bad, or to sic your other followers onto them, because that turnsthis into a situation that really doeshave a right and wrong; and since you don’t know if they were trying to makeyou feel shitty, or just went on a big block/mute purge to whittle their listdown for mental health reasons that are totally their own, once things escalateyou can’t put the horse back in the barn. It’s too late.  Now it’s A Thing,when maybe it never really needed to be A Thing.  And in almost all situations for almost allpeople in almost all ways, Kabby Mom’s advice is going to be, “please thinkcarefully before you make this A Thing.”

This got long, I’ve been having a lot of thoughts lately about theconversations I’m always having with fandom folks the way we let social mediapermeate and shape our sense of self, in good ways and bad, so I apologize formy verbosity but also not really because that’s how things roll over in KabbyMom’s Advice Corner.  But I will sum upin bullet points for those of you who have been skimming, to bring you up tospeed:

Everyone has the right to curate their own social media spacehowever they see fit, and they don’t have to explain their reasons.

They aren’t obligated to include you in that space even if you want themto.

None of that is an objective measure of your worth as a person or a signthat you should stop being you on the internet.

Your feelings of rejection come from a real place and you get to feelthem, as long as

You are striving to move through them without permitting them to paralyzeyou, and finally

You never use someone else’s choice to curate their social media sphere as ajustification for treating them like crap.

Focus on your positive interactions instead of negative ones – your friends,creating stuff and putting it out into the universe – whether it be art, fic,opinions, a podcast, gifsets, crackposts, whatever – and your social mediaworld will be a better place.

In the immortal words of the great Michael J. Fox, “What other people thinkof me is none of my business.”

[joshterry]

there are no ugly women in oxford, mississippi & other thoughts on anxiety & taking a break

2 days ago i made a very out of character, last minute decision… i decided i was going to take a vacation… and i was going to take it in 2 days…and i didn’t give zero craps what anyone thought of it. i made the decision on my drive into work and the first thing i said as i walked in the door to my staff was “hey guys i don’t mean to freak you out, but i’m going out of town on friday for 6 days. cool?”

i gotta admit my employee & our interns were a little surprised. i’m a pretty predictable person, i love routine, i like schedules and i tend to think most of my decisions are pretty calculate and planned out over a long period of time specifically to make sure no one gets affected - i like that about myself and i think others like it about me too, it’s part of what i think makes me steady. so i didn’t really know how they’d react. this decision however was different, i just felt in my gut i needed to disappear for a bit and i needed to do it suddenly. i shouldn’t have been surprised by this but they (along with all my clients) were very supportive of it. i think everyone probably felt “yea you’ve been a little abrasive lately, get out of here you lunatic.” i don’t say enough lucky i am to get to work every day with people who not only have such strong character but also care for me seem to be able to tolerate my own unique brand of “crazy person.”

traveling’s always been a big part of my life and the past few years i’ve tried to take one vacation a year that’s non-work related. because of my job i’ve gotten to travel all over the word to a lot of big cities & cool places. i’ve been blessed with travel to 49 states (minus alaska, which is just cold and i don’t do cold) and several international countries. so to do something a little different for actual vacations for personal enjoyment one of the things i started doing that’s served me well is i now exclusively go to places i assume others wouldn’t go on vacation to. i’ve been to boone, north carolina, savannah, georgia, athens, georgia, and mobile, alabama over the years. there’s just been something comforting about planting myself in a very small, beautiful southern city for a few days and forgetting my “problems.” these trips always refresh me in a way that the big cities or beaches just don’t. there’s not a lot to do, and you’re forced to just soak in the local culture, talk to regulars and it’s easy to disappear and feel like you don’t have to be “on." my friend leslie who i’ve known since i was in middle school has been offering me for months to come use her family’s vacant home in oxford, mississippi. it’s only 4 hours away from nashville and it’s actually one of the few cities in america i’ve never been to. so on a whim i hit her up on wednesday & asked if if the offer still stood. she said yes, gave me a ton of ideas of things to do and places to eat at, and said “the place is yours, here’s where you’ll find the keys.”

i’m sitting on her couch right now in the quaint little house & i’ve got to say it feels like exactly what i need at this moment.

so why does someone who has amazing friends & family, owns their own business that gives him a lot of freedom and flexibilty in his life need a sudden vacation you might ask? what’s so urgent you whiney 1% whitey? well truth be told i don’t quite know. the funny thing is nothing’s really going wrong. work is good - my business continues to grow, my acts are busy, i’m wanting to sign a lot more things too, i’m not burned out at all (which i gotta say is unusual because i have my hands in a lot of things), and my stress level because of all that is super managable and surprisingly quite low. my personal life couldn’t be going better - i’m in the best health, both physically and mentally, of my life. and i’m being as social as a person like me gets - going out regularly, making plans with friends, seeing lots of movies & more concerts than normal, dating regularly (which comes with its good & bad). so as i evaluate everything on the surface (which yes i do, i’m a dork), nothing really feels disconnected.

but something was feeling off for the past month. i just haven’t been inspired and i’m a person who does need inspiration to feel like i’m growing. i’ve been working hard on my personal life & my professional life but not getting the overall satisfaction from everything i’ve wanted. i think we all go through that though, right? little things that normally wouldn’t affect me were really getting under my skin. anyone who knows me knows that i hate listening to people complain about their problems when they have no solutions in mind on how to improve their situations, i call those kinda people toxic venters and for some reason i was getting surrounded by the marvel avengers of toxic venters lately. i was starting to feel manipulated, taken advantage of, and just honestly like everyone was being rude, self absorbed pieces of crap with no concern for what it was like for me having to be the person taking on their burdens. but instead of saying “i’ve had enough” i’d just listen and try to help, all the while knowing none of them wanted my help. the truth is none of these people are bad people, some of their actions i admit were questionable but i should have felt honored that they were coming to me with their problems, but instead i started to get resentful. i was also feeling quieter and less willing to show myself in situations. most people that know me realize i can be very extroverted, not at a loss for words & able to sit genuinely with who i am. anyone who knows me really well though, knows just how introverted i actually am. my normal preference is to be home in the quiet and not having to be “on” for everyone. being social takes work for me, being in quieter places where i can be more internal is where i feel more at home. and again none of this is unusual. i work in music, everyone’s problems are the biggest deal in the world (please note i say that sarcastically, because really some of y’all are silly with the garbage you get fixated on and very few problems that involve “music” are actual problems in the grand scheme of things) and i’ve learned over the years sometimes you gotta let people get their stuff out so they can get out of their own heads and start thinking more pragmatically & not make emotional (also read “dumb”) decisions.

the other thing that was messing with my head is i was also getting really sick from traveling, not just like “ugh i hate traveling” kinda sick where i snap mean spiriting pictures and post them on instagram from airports, but actually physically sick. on a trip back from LA i got what felt like the early signs of the flu, on a trip to portland several days later my ears wouldn’t pop which gave me a migraine and i felt like i was going to throw up the entire time at the show. on a trip to new york a few weeks later, i started getting crazy anxiety on the flight there and then awful motion sickness once we landed. for someone who has traveled as much as i have in my life, all of this just felt super, super off. i started feeling helpless on these trips mostly because i knew once i was on the ground i needed to power through meetings and have impactful time with my bands and the people working for me. then all of that spread from work to just general social settings. the thought of going to parties, having meet ups with friends or even attending work related events or concerts started stressing me the hell out, like anxiety you wouldn’t believe. and again none of it made sense, when i’d get there everything was fine, i’d have a good time, but man the "getting there" part was awful. all i could think about was i didn’t want to talk to people who were going to just talk about themselves, or worse yet were going to want something from me. part of the draw backs about working in a city where your profession is the focal point of the city is the amount of mooches per capita who are looking for hand outs is overwhelming. i had a show in nashville a few weeks ago & i couldn’t even keep up with the amount of hangers on-ers that came up to me (and i reiterate these are people who never talk to me unless they need something) and they were all looking for work or advice on some bad idea they had that they’ll likely never execute because (and this is going to sound harsh) they’re not good enough to keep their own jobs or see their own ideas through because they let their personal crap get in the way of them completing things or just being a professional in general. sorry i said it - fake that til you make that why don’t you. so saying all of that, because of feeling sick, anxious and frustrated i started feeling like a bad version of myself. i didn’t want to be that grumpy person that everyone was like “what’s wrong with that dude” & i noticed i wasn’t being as positive as i wanted to be with others and worse yet, i didn’t feel like i was as fun to be around or even funny (and y’all, all humility aside, lets be real... i’m hilarious, so if i don’t feel like i’m funny in public, somethings wrong).

so off to oxford, mississippi, i went this morning in my car and after a brief stop in memphis to check out graceland (which by the way did you know elvis has a whole bunch of stuffed animals in his living room & a freaking jesus statue with his name on it right in front of his grave and that junk is wild) i pulled into the driveway. only a few hours later, as cliche as it might sound, i could just feel my soul feeling settled.

i had a wonderful dinner at a place called snackbar and then just spent a few hours walking around the square in downtown oxford. looked around square books & picked up a few things i’m going to read this week while i put my phone on airplane mode & ignore as many emails and text messages as i can. i popped into proud larry’s - a bar & music venue that some of my very first bands used to play every other month which gave me a very comforting and reassuring "how far i’ve come/nostalgic trip down memory lane” kinda vibe. i was able to settle in & remember that even back then i was also an entrepreneur, albeit a really green and probably bad one, but as i sat there and had my drink i could remember how i felt back then. so full of possibility, so full of life. the little things didn’t bother me and i was reminded how many doors opened for me just because i was willing to put in the work, how open i was to collaborating with others and letting them into my life, and how it felt like i had a new idea every day and wasn’t afraid to execute them because of financial concerns or even dumber how i’d be perceived. i just did me, and doing me worked out.

i’m looking to a few days of solitude this week. i’m going to write a lot, read a lot, watch movies and just explore & visit places & do things that are fun to me. did i mention there are zero ugly women in oxford? ZERO! jenn - we might need to open a satellite office here, just sayin’ :) enjoy your next week of work suckers :)

[secretivecactus-blog]

Restoration Queen: Unit Retrospective

Find it beneath the divider. No spoilers this time, but it’s a bit long -- I gave some thoughts on all of the girls.

Eirika came a long way from her humble beginnings. Her strength really blossomed after a shaky start. Her skill and speed were excellent throughout, but her defenses were always somewhat unstable. Her HP improved a lot after promotion, which did help offset her squishiness.

She saw most of her use early-game, hitting level 20 by chapter 5 (arena abuse!). After that she was essentially benched, as I wanted those who could actually gain experience to have the chance to do so and her unpromoted caps were hurting her.

She had a support with Tana, and I made heavy use of it to boost both of them up against waves of enemy reinforcements. Eirika/Tana has been my OTP for the game since I first played it the day it was released in North America, so naturally I had to do their supports. Oh, I’m sure Eirika/L’Arachel would have been cute and that Tana’s other options were good, but an OTP is an OTP.

While her use rate never really recovered even post-promotion, she was a solid unit who took down a few lategame bosses and helped slap around minions in the final chapter.

Vanessa was my second usable unit, and her trajectory was the opposite of Eirika’s. Her poor defenses and middling offense made her nearly unusable pre-arena abuse, and even afterwards her defenses meant she had to be cautious of arrows.

Post-promotion, however, she really began to shine. Her resistance remained abysmally low for a pegasus knight, but she quickly capped her skill and speed and her strength shot through the roof. Her physical defense also became decent, though her HP was still middling.

She had a support with Lute, but their vastly different mobility meant that I rarely actually took advantage of it. Their supports were cute, with lots of Lute being Lute. I like Lute.

She saw the most use midgame, when most of my other units were still in the middle of development. When Shadowshot became common, she had to start hanging back -- while she had decent odds of dodging it, two hits would take her out. There were a number of close calls.

Neimi’s not bad... For an archer. Her resistance was very solid for a physical unit, though her physical defense resembled Kleenex. She hit reasonably hard and got a lot of criticals.

Neimi actually got a fairly even spread of use across the game. Coming as early as she does, she got in on my first round of arena abuse and got to serve as my primary magic tank for a while. Since I got the Orion’s Bolt the level immediately after arena abusing her to 20, she ended up as my second promoted unit -- and it was only the end of chapter 6!

She had a support with Amelia, and the two were rarely further apart than the support boost range. They were a formidable pair, and their supports were absolutely adorable.

The increased stats and caps from her early promotion made her part of my primary offense, where she remained all the way up to the final fight itself. I don’t think there was a single chapter after her recruitment where she didn’t get a chunk of the kills to herself.

Lute was a little like Eirika. She got a ton of use during the early game, even serving as my first promoted unit (end of chapter 5). She served as my primary healer between Natasha’s promotion and L’Arachel’s recruitment (and then again after L’Arachel’s promotion) as well as my main physical tank, as her defense and HP were higher than any of my other units at the time.

Because of her early promotion and heavy use, however, her level quickly outstripped that of everyone else. She was level 15 when Neimi was still level 4, so I had to reduce my use of her for the sake of spreading EXP around. She was barely getting any because enemies were so weak next to her!

Like Natasha, I gave her the ability to use dark magic via the control enemy glitch. This gave her the ability to use four different weapon types (all of the magical ones, with Anima at S and the others at A), the most of any of my units. Nosferatu cast at 30 magic was a very useful boost to her survival when combined with her already-competent defenses and HP.

Lute still got to serve in an offensive role up through endgame, though it was much reduced. She spent most of her time as a healer and running potentially dangerous errands, like going for chests in Rausten Court under the fog of war.

I don’t seem to have a low-level screenshot of Natasha’s stats, so you’ll have to settle for her level 20 cleric self, back when she was still pretending to be innocent.

Natasha never really saw the kind of use that other units did. She was just too frail -- one or two good hits would take her out of the game. It took a while for her magic to begin rising regularly, but she did end up capping it and gaining the ability to hit reasonably hard. She received my only Body Ring (one of the only two stat boosters I actually used) to give her a slightly easier time with heavy dark tomes, not that it was nearly enough for the really good stuff.

Natasha’s primary use was as a magic tank against gorgons and arch mogalls with Shadowshot, and she wasn’t bad at it at all. Her Slayer-boosted dark magic was also capable of tearing through monster units as if they were as fragile as she was, so when she went on the offense she was certainly far from helpless!

Natasha has no supports with females, so she didn’t get any support bonuses.

Most of her use came during the endgame, after I unlocked the final floor of the Tower of Valni to steal some copies of Stone to teach her dark magic. Since I couldn’t let her hit S in either of her other two weapon types, I had a hard limit for how much I could use her prior to her dramatic reveal as a cultist.

All in all, Natasha was a respectable unit that was simply overshadowed by her fellows.

Tana was nearly as res-screwed as Vanessa during the early game, though she had achieved “middling” status by the endgame. Her physical defense was noticeably lower, but that was more in line with a normal falcoknight. Her skill was much lower than Vanessa’s, and until near the end her strength was as well.

In the end, Tana saw almost as many battles as Vanessa. Part of this came from the fact that I paired her with Eirika, and part of it came from the fact that I gave her the Fili Shield.

By endgame, she was mostly being used for chasing down gargoyles and mogalls on top of mountains.

Amelia was the undisputed MVP of my team. She rose from the garbage stats of a trainee class to a powerhouse that naturally capped every stat except for HP. She saw almost 200 more battles than her girlfriend, who had the second-highest battle count. A lot of this probably came from the fact that she near-soloed Darkling Woods and its endless hordes, with a little bit of sniper assistance.

What do I even say about her? She had near-capped HP, and an Angelic Robe (of which I had three by endgame) would have finished her off (and in fact wasted 2 points). Her strength gave her a powerful offense, her skill let her hit and crit with frequency, her speed was high enough that (combined with her con to offset the weight of her axes) she doubled everything except Gwyllgis, her luck boosted her crit rate while reducing the odds of crits against her near to zero, her defense and resistance let her tank absolutely everything (though her speed meant she dodged more than she got hit -- a general with 95 Avoid is obscene)...

She earned the Swiftsole, which was the only stat-boosting item that I used aside from Natasha’s Body Ring. Natasha needed the ring, but Amelia proved herself worthy of those boots.

When I first got her, I had to use her carefully. She dodged a lot, but her defenses were both poor and her HP wasn’t great -- a wrong move and the little knight would have been crushed. Near the end of her knighthood, however, she began pulling in perfect level after perfect level. She was my only unit that actually hit 20 in a promoted class, and she did so with the highest of distinction.

Despite her low use rate in the early- and mid-game, Amelia defined my endgame, all the way up to critting the Demon King in the face with her only swing of Garm.

Tethys was one of the few units that didn’t manage to hit any caps, despite the fact that she made it to 20 (albeit as a single-tier class). She was, however, incredibly useful.

Her speed let her avoid every single attack launched at her -- I don’t recall her taking a hit at any point in the game. Even if she had been hit, her defenses and HP would have let her take a single blow from anything short of the Demon King.

Her support with Marisa was used almost as extensively as the one between Neimi and Amelia -- yes, I sent a dancer into melee combat and she came through just fine. As with Neimi, her fire affinity provided her more powerful partner with a ludicrous boost. The supports themselves were extremely sweet, and easily the most emotionally mature of those that I did.

Tethys saw use from the moment I got her all the way up to the very last part of the endgame. Dance is useful.

Marisa is another one who saw a lot of use all the way through from recruitment to endgame. She still had the potential to cap 3 stats with her last two levels, too.

As a myrmidon character, she had excellent skill and speed -- what was somewhat more surprising was that her HP and strength decided to keep up. With the damage and crit boosts from her support with Tethys (another pairing I’ve adored for years), she was a threshing machine that destroyed everything that got close.

Her defenses were somewhat fragile, but her HP managed to offset that almost as much as her evasiveness did.

From fighters to generals to dracozombies, Marisa killed it all without looking back even once. Aside from Amelia, she was the most endgame-defining unit on the team.

...And, you know, she’s been my favorite character since I first played the game, so. There’s that.

I don’t seem to have a single unpromoted screenshot of L’Arachel (I mean, she was a troubadour), so you’ll have to make do with before-and-after difference of 2 levels in her second tier.

L’Arachel was a solid magic tank, but... That was really all she had going for her. Her HP wasn’t great, her defense was low (albeit much better than Natasha’s), her speed was middling, and her magic wasn’t great. She had trouble doubling, did low damage, and took a lot of painful hits.

As much as I enjoy her personality, she mostly warmed the bench with a physic staff in hand. After a lot of close calls, it just wasn’t worth it.

Is she a bad unit? Not necessarily. If I had given her my Dracoshields and an Angelic Robe or two, I probably wouldn’t have had any major issues with her. I was hoarding stat boosters, however, so (like all of my other units) she had to sink or swim based on the RNG... Which did not like her this time around.

Myrrh is a Manakete, and it shows. She had poor bases and low caps, but her incredible growths quickly filled them out to respectable levels that were boosted through the roof by her Dragonstone. Even Amelia couldn’t quite match her defenses or raw offensive potency, though she was much faster and luckier.

The real drawback of Manaketes is the fact that the Dragonstone can’t be repaired by Hammerne, is unique, and has only 50 uses. Thankfully, gorgon eggs can be used to refill it -- something that I did, in fact, make use of. She still had 37 uses left at the end of the game!

Myrrh arrived as the game tilted over to the end, and saw most of her use as bait to tank against ranged attackers. Many of the kills that she did get were bosses.

A solid unit whose only drawback isn’t all that hard to get around. Definitely one that I had fun using.

[sigyn2012]

Update on stress, work, and other things

I thought I’d give everyone an update on how things are going with me. I got the report on the emergency ultrasound on my abdomen and for the most part, things are good. There were two areas of concern that were flagged: I have fatty liver and there was residualization and vascularity around my pancreas. The first one is age related and because I’m not a size negative 12; the second one was written off as age related, however, I’m not sure what to really make of it as when vascularity is found in areas of concern, it’s hardly ever a good thing or something that can be written off as normal. I have a follow up ultrasound in mid-September and then we’ll go from there on a few things. I also got back the bloodwork results and like the ultrasound, for the most part it was good with only a few areas of concern: my iron levels for my age group were almost critically high while my hemoglobin was laughably low(iron was at a 46 and hemoglobin was at a 6), my A1C was at a 4.5, and my fasting glucose was at a 48. These results are nothing new for me as I’ve had these kind of results my whole life and because the hemoglobin hasn’t been at zero(it’s come close at a 3) and my iron hasn’t been below 15(the lowest it’s ever been is at 18); it’s not considered a crucial issue by the medical field(despite evidence that it probably should be looked at by a hematologist; especially since my maternal great-grandma had a blood disorder related to anemia); when it comes to the A1C and fasting glucose, this is normal for me as well(and I’ve had fasting glucose levels in the mid-30s before), however, because I’m not fitting the narrative of ‘she’s obese so therefore she must have type 2 diabetes’, no one looks into it and when I had a fasting glucose of 90(which is considered normal)once, I was immediately labeled as prediabetic; even though my glucose level was considered normal according to every known diabetes screening chart. I figure the cause for these issues will eventually be found in my autopsy report so it should be an interesting read once that happens. Now to the work front: I’m pretty certain the board president is trying to make me have an epic heart attack or stroke because his demands and expectations have ratcheted up to Twilight Zone levels and there is no way I can do any of them; it doesn’t help that the 3rd in command at the organization I work for is coming to Bismarck from Grand Forks(a six hour drive one way)to have a ‘chat’ with me on May 10th; at this point, I’m rooting to be fired, being forced to resign, or being forced to have dinner with an incredibly handsome man in a really nice restaurant in the deepest darkest shadows as some form a fundraiser type thing only for the man to be part of the mob and I’m forced to be his wife or concubine(if the third one happens, I prefer the Irish mob or the Russian mob). I’m still looking for a new job and I hope to have one by the end of summer. If work isn’t trying to kill me, having my mom come visit me at the end of May will definitely make the likelihood of me having an epic heart attack or stroke in the pretty high-seriously how have you not croaked yet category. I get to be a babysitter for nine days(oh joy of fucking joys) and I have to make sure she doesn’t get me evicted, doesn’t pick fights with the neighbors or general public, doesn’t have another gambling relapse, doesn’t smoke in my apartment, doesn’t let tons of bugs into my apartment because she refuses to close windows and the patio door, doesn’t blare the TV because she refuses to get hearing aides, doesn’t forget her medication, doesn’t try to antagonize authority figures, doesn’t try to pick a fight with my uncle, doesn’t stuff the garbage can so full that I can’t get it out of the apartment thus making me a prime target for pests of all kinds, doesn’t go into epic political tirades, etc, etc, etc. I have to stay up with her and be with her at all times so sleep isn’t going to happen while she’s here and if you think I can just tell her not to come, you got another thing coming because I’ll have my entire family on my ass something fierce because I’ve been designated her official caretaker/ person we’re going to pawn her off on because we can’t deal with her now and I was nearly put back in a group home the last time I tried to get her to not come see me. I’ll be dealing with her again at the end of August when she comes up to go with me to the Weird Al Yankovic concert(it was the deal I made with my conservator in order to be allowed to go to the concert as apparently I still need a chaperone despite now being in my late 30s[still don’t like acknowledging that]). I’m trying(keyword being trying)to decrease my stress levels and I’m trying to work in social activities(so I can get out of the house and so I can actually attempt to show that despite having autism, I do have some form of social skills). I’ve seen a couple movies that were really good and I’m hoping to see the new Avengers movie this week(they were sold out here in Bismarck this weekend). I’m trying my best to limit caffeine as it’s possibly exacerbating the stress(it’d be nice if the store had those 6-pack bottles or cases of Schweppes ginger ale, grape crush, and A&W Cream Soda as those are the caffeine free sodas I like the most), I’m going to renew my fishing license this coming month so I can go fishing with my aunt and uncle in their camper this summer, and I’m preparing a speech for my conservator in the hopes that I can actually take a vacation as the doctor has ordered me to take one(he did everything except write a prescription for a vacation as you’re not allowed to do that for a number of reasons)and I’m really really really really really really hoping that I can actually take one because I need a break from everything(and I better not be limited to Minnesota or a self-advocacy conference tie-in type vacation because I’ll be extremely pissed if that happens).

[theglitchedworld]

Glitched - Chapter One

I woke up laying on my back and aching all over way more than I should for a virtual world. Even my hair seemed to hurt, which royally sucked. The smell of green growing things and the sounds of small animals of some kind moving through underbrush told me I was in a virtual world before I opened my eyes. If something had gone wrong with my login, I'd just have been dropped back into the orange-ish goop of the nutrient solution which definitely didn't smell anything like green growing things.

I opened my eyes to see a shockingly blue sky above me. And when I say shockingly, I mean so damn blue it looks like it's the realest thing you've ever seen in your life. God knows I've never seen a real sky look such a deep shade of blue in person before. I never spent much time looking up while I was playing before, I guessed. Must have missed out on a ton of stuff while I was rushing around to finish quests before my Suit made me log out. Yet another reason the Tank was so very worth the cost. Grinning at being so fully in The Bested World for what felt like the very first time, I reached up towards the sky like I could grab one of those puffy clouds floating so high above.

That was when the first clue that something was really damn wrong hit me.

The hand reaching up to the sky above me wasn't mine. Or, well, it was mine, but it hadn't been one I'd seen in ages. And the gloves that should have been equipped were missing. I shoved myself up from my prone position staring at my hands. My dirty hands. Like I'd been scrabbling about with something grubby for days.

And that wasn't the only problem. My arms - hell, my whole body - felt weak. Gone were the corded lines of hard earned muscle that had defined my body just yesterday, replaced by smooth skin that looked appallingly similar to my real world arms. A rough tunic and loose pants with a rope drawstring had replaced the customized gear I'd spent whole weeks clambering about for in some of the nastiest caverns The Bested World had to offer.

It felt like my heart was trying to rip itself out of my chest like one of those monster things from that old classic SF film with the space ship as what might have happened started to sink in. Everything was gone. Something had gone wrong on my login. Something had... No, it couldn't be. This was just a screw up with the server. It had to be. But still, I felt like I was going to be sick as I reached for my status menu.

The sight of my drastically reduced HP bar was like a fist to the gut. Level one. One. All the way back to the beginning. All those hours, those years, of work wasted! I blinked through the menus as fast as I could but it was all the same.

All of my stats were the miserable garbage I first rolled up when I started The Bested World and for a brief second I was almost glad I never got into any of those kiddy games that have even worse starting stats. All of my hard won gear was gone, replaced with noob crap. My skills had vanished. Even my class-

"Peasant?" I muttered, staring at the black print floating before my eyes with a frown. "What the hell kind of class is a peasant? It sounds like some sort of crappy NPC thing."

The one thing I knew for sure was that it definitely wasn't a player class in The Bested World. And the more I tried to convince myself I was wrong, the more evidence seemed to pile up that I wasn't. Wherever I was, it wasn't The Bested World. Which could only mean-

"Glitched?"

The word barely escaped my mouth it was so quiet. I felt hollow, like a plug had been pulled and everything that made me me had suddenly just drained away leaving nothing left. It wasn't possible. It just wasn't. Glitching was like winning the lottery. A freak accident. It wasn't something that happened to regular people like me.

But here I was.

I tried to log out. I could feel the switch with my mind, the familiar commands in my thoughts. But every time the rainbow swirl seemed like it was going to begin, it abruptly canceled, dropping me nauseatingly back into my avatar over and over. By the end of the sixth - or seventh, I think I lost count somewhere - try, I had to fling myself to the side of the path I was on to hurl into the bushes.

The gut churning wrench of needing to vomit, the burn of the bile in my throat, the disgusting taste in my mouth - all far from things that I had to experience when I logged in from my Suit. I chalked it up to yet another deepening experience from logging in via a Tank - not that it was a pleasant experience by any means. The other possibility didn't bear thinking on, but whatever it was, I could have done without the full reality experience of hurling my guts out on the side of a path.

I dropped back down on my ass after crawling a few feet from the muck and wiped the remains from my face with the tattered rag that passed for a sleeve with my new equipment as I tried to gather my thoughts. So I couldn't log out. That was bad. I knew that was bad. But at the same time, it was kind of exciting too.

I don't mean to sound like some kind of adrenaline seeking nutcase, but I had to admit that the trembling in my hands wasn't just from the epic purge I'd just experienced. If this really was a glitch - and I still wasn't fully ready to admit it was at that point - then I was looking at a whole new experience. Something no one had written any guides or recorded any playtest videos for. A whole new world to explore and beat. I wasn't worried about my body back in the real world - my Tank was set up to allow me to login without anyone needing to maintain it for months if necessary. And no one knew what happened to the Glitched when their real world bodies died anyway. It wasn't like anyone could find their connection's end - something that was supposed to be impossible - after all. Maybe they just became permanently part of this world.

So it was exciting. Scary exciting - definitely scary, just like anything completely unknown, right? - but still exciting. The first time logging into a new world was always exciting. This was just a terrifyingly high level of that rush. Or at least, that was what I wanted to believe. It wasn't like anyone was going to come checking on me any time soon and there had to be a logout point somewhere. This was still a virtual world, so it had been programmed by someone. All worlds had an out built in, even prison ones. You just had to find it.

That thought held firmly in the forefront of my mind, I got to my feet and tried to knock the worst of the dirt and grime off my body. All I had to do was find the world's log out point and everything would go back to normal. It couldn't be that hard, right? Even for noob gear, my equipment was pretty obviously for some kind of fantasy world, so at least I wasn't completely in over my head. The Bested World was one of the biggest fantasy TVRMMOs out there and I had years of experience in that world that had to correlate somehow to this one.

Looking at my skill page again made me groan though. Zero ranks in everything. At least the basic skills were still on my list. Trying to figure out how to find a trainer to learn how to defend myself before I got attacked by something would have royally sucked. The zero beside Botany would make things harder since I didn't want to risk a status effect gathering food, so I'd have to hunt and hope for the best until I figured out where I was.

I rezzed up the only weapon in my inventory, catching it the moment it fully synchronized with the game world and dropped out of the air. It felt light and easy in my hand, the leather wrapped grip comfortable and familiar, but the blade made me grimace. It was chipped and almost completely dull but the worst part had to be the length. I didn't have a ruler with me, but the pitiful length looked shorter than the big blade on my multifunction pocket knife back in the real world. Even if I could run one down - which I doubted in my current crappy stat state - I doubted I could even kill this world's version of a rabbit with it. If I had to go up against anything bigger, I'd almost definitely hit derezz before I could do any real damage. Not that I knew what would happen if I did hit derezz. God only knew where the respawn in this area was.

Not that I had time to worry about that. I was in the middle of who knew where with crappy gear - I didn't even have a decent pair of boots for crying out loud! - and a shit weapon. If there were safe zones in this world, this probably wasn't one of them. So I needed a weapon. Well, I needed a better weapon. And in the middle of a forest the most obvious thing had to be a club. If I could find a good stick and actually make one anyway.

Hearing a larger rustle in the underbrush than earlier made me swallow hard and look around the ground at my feet. A rock would also be good. I liked rocks. Nice heavy rocks that could brain big bad wolves were awesome. Or even a bunch of pebbles to convince whatever the hell made that noise that I wasn't as tasty as I probably looked.

The branches closest to the road moved visibly and so did I, scrambling towards the middle of the path so quick I tripped over my own feet and sat down hard. When they actually parted and I caught a glimpse of something pale coming through, I hate to admit it, but I screamed. I possibly also covered my head with one arm while waving my pathetic dagger at whatever was about to eat me with the other, but I'm not going to admit that.

"What are you even doing?"

The cool soprano washed over my ears brought an absurd amount of relief and I peeked out to see a tall woman in mottled green and blue leathers standing over me. Auburn hair slicked back from her face so hard it had to have been either pulled back in a crazy tight ponytail or braid or else held down with a lot of product and her eyes were a weird color that I couldn't tell if was grey or maybe green in the dim forest light. The upper arm of some kind of bow peeked over her shoulder, but I was more interested in the spear she was leaning on as she glared at me.

"You deaf or something?" she asked again, her eyes narrowing. "Or just stupid?"

"W-what?" Not my best response, I admit.

She sighed and shook her head. "Just stupid, I guess. What are you doing out here? Trying to get yourself drafted into King Radani's little army?"

"Who?" I frowned up at her. Wait. Radani? Didn't I know that name?

"Wow. You really are stupid." Her frown deepened. "Radani's the asshole who claims this area. And your ass is on his road. Unless you want to get drafted, you might want to get off it before his army blunders their way over here." She glared at me for a long moment before sighing and holding out her hand. "I just know I'm gonna regret this, but come on."

"What?" I shook my head before she could respond, her brows drawing down like thunderclouds. "Sorry, I just... Radani? Are you serious?"

"Do I look like I'm joking? If you don't get off your ass and start moving in the next five tics, I'm going to leave you here and you can figure it out for yourself."

"No! No, I'm coming, I just-" I shook my head and started pushing myself up to my feet. "I never thought I'd hear that name again."

"Did you hit your head or something?" she asked, cocking her head to the side and peering at me through narrowed eyes. "Radani took over years ago. Treats people like shit, but you're the first person I've come across claiming to have forgotten him."

I held up my hands, shrugging with an awkward smile. She had to be an NPC, so I couldn't break character too much without risking throwing off the AI. Not that I was sure what character I was supposed to be. "Sorry. I just... yeah, must have gotten cracked in the head with something. I woke up out here and, well-" I let my words trail off, not sure how to explain how I got out here, given that I didn't actually know how I had in the first place.

The growing irritation of her expression seemed to fade with my half-assed explanation. "Damn. Someone must really hate you." She turned her head, glaring up the road at a faint sound I could only barely pick up. It almost sounded like someone playing with a thin metal chain, rattling it between their fingers. "If you want to take your chances in that death brigade be my guest, but I'm getting out of here."

"Wait!" I scrambled after her, almost falling over myself again as she passed me headed for the opposite side of the road. Thanks to my crappy dexterity stat, I tripped over a rock on the edge of the road and fell headlong into the brush. "Shit!" The rough branches scrapped over my clothes, tearing the fabric and drawing long red welts on my skin. The sudden jolt of pain made me curl around myself defensively with an indrawn hiss. It also made me miss the heavy tread on the path that had joined the clinking rattle of chain sound.

The feeling of something grabbing the collar of my shirt and dragging me bodily backwards pulled a scream out of me, but it was muffled by the leather gloved hand clamped over my mouth.

"Shut. Up." The rapidly growing familiar soprano hissed in my ear, her breath hot against my cheek as she spoke each word so staccato they seemed like separate sentences instead of a single phrase. Startled and overwhelmed, I did what any red-blooded woman would do in that moment.

I froze.