#like she used to regularly play splatoon and this might just be nostalgia for splat1 but iirc she hasn't touched her switch in months

[machudson]

@bup-oh​ said:

Hey, sorry if this is a little weird, a random person in your askbox, but with talk about tammy and her shortcomings as a writer, I wanted to interject. While I DO believe tammy isn't a fantastic writer, imo her main issues are; she seems to favor quantity over quality, and has bad time management. She works on multiple comics, and strictly commits to her once a week updates. She posting pages before the comic is fully complete(?), shes on a time constraint to get pages drawn, and (1/3)

most likely be forced to rush to get them out the door at some point. On top of this, she has to keep in mind that we only see one page a week, and I feel like it effects the pacing. IMO, tammy doesn't necessarily lack skill with character development and proper character interaction, she just doesn't give herself time to do it. Throughout CCT and ESPECIALLY OE, it feels like some of the pages are missing panels and are spaced too far apart (2/3)

You can see in some of the pages she wants to do more, but doesn't have the room to do it. Pair all this with the fact shes so excited with starting BUP (which I don't blame her) and even more time is taken away from her. Tbh I feel like if she got better at time management, and when shes down to one comic for continuous updates, she could greatly improve and put more thought into her writing, by. giving. herself, ROOM. (3/3)

ok so im gonna try and sum up your points just for my own ease of understanding this: 1. you agree that she’s not great re: time and 

actually wow im so bad at reading comprehension rn. thot you were trying to start discourse not just add your own point of view LOL im so good at this

personally i feel like she is good at time management, she’s just... idk... i wanna say she’s just focusing on bup way more than cct. because she was able to keep up four comics at a time (rd, ice climbers, cct, and the private nsfw cct comic i think), but she finished rd a while ago and ice climbers is almost finished on the patreon side. she basically has half as many comics going as she used to. (and a bit off topic but now that i think about it, i don’t think her writing re:character development declined from where I felt it was at while reading first match two years ago, it’s just becoming more relevant and visible now.) so it’s not rushed because she just doesn’t Have time, but she’s probably managing it poorly

ok so i came back to this after i wrote the above bit at 11 pm last night and wrote like three paragraphs and then tumblr crashed on me and deleted them so uhhh im gonna. rewrite all that. remember kids, when writing long tumblr posts, write them in the drafts page and save often. or just write them in word or gdocs or something just make sure you wont let tumbly fuck u over

so. personally I believe she’s not really having a time management issue. she has fewer running comics than she used to - she’s finished RD, ice climbers is nearly done on patreon, and the nsfw comic she once had going has been long over - and even when doing four comic updates a week she still managed to be successful. ice climbers is fully sketched and just three pages away from finishing on patreon. cct is 8 pages ahead on patreon and tammy sometimes leaves responses like ‘oh just wait till next page’ so I think it’s safe to say she has a couple pages sketched in advance. she’s been doing comics for at least a decade, i think she’s pretty experienced in that area by now.

i agree she’s rushed, but not in regards to bad time management. she’s got a good work schedule for herself, but with her focus shifted to bottled up, she’s rushing herself in terms of comic progress. she clearly wants to start bup as soon as possible, and that means finishing her other comics as soon as possible. and to nobody’s surprise, rushed comics are lower quality! she plans to start bup before the end of the year. there’s expected to be ten or so more  patreon pages in cct, or about 19/20 publicly, and there’s twelve more thursdays this year. and ice climbers is gonna stretch into the new year too, ending on jan 8th i think. (so unless she decides to give another slot to one of those two she’s probably gonna give the former RD update day to bup if she wants to start it publicly this year.)

though I do think she has an issue with writing. she’s said before that for cct, she never writes down her plot lines in advance. she just keeps them in her head until she sketches the pages. and i feel like this really screws with pacing and also just the writing in general. idk if you’ve seen it but a while ago there was a post floating around of pixar’s writing tips - one of which was “putting it on paper lets you start fixing it”. which I feel really applies to tammy. if she wrote down her plans before sketching them, i feel like she could work them out at a better pace and with better quality. she also tends to think of a lot of stories and plotlines she wants to get to, but ends up with way too much on her plate and never manages to get around to covering most of them. also the one page a week schedule definitely affects pacing too. i feel like since we have to wait a week to see each page, it’s kinda common for them to end on cliffhangers to keep readers hooked (like yesterday’s public page)

also related, she doesn’t…. stay true to her word. i had another example for this but its mostly regarding future comic stuff thats currently patreon only rip. but you know for tetrox’s story. she’s recently been talking about how tetrox was the octarian soldier who attacked whinter back in HoI. and i think at one point she had a more in depth story planned for tetrox (and probably also arnick) regarding that, but since she wants to get onto bup soon she made the decision to skip it over and just move onto final match, and how her original plan was to have tetrox be an infiltrating soldier who planned to take the zapfish again. and she’s been saying that since she isn’t going to do that tetrox arc, that she might change tetrox’s backstory to be more like octo expansion’s story - watched the match against Octavio, decided to run away to the surface to join inkling society. And personally I feel like it’s … really telling of tammy’s character (as in, how she is as a writer) that she decided to just change her backstory because she knew she wouldn’t get to writing the comic.

a while ago on patreon she answered an ask of mine with the sentence “My stories and especially my mind changes all the time. So, holding me to things I say months back isn’t really the best idea.” and that’s really…. bothersome to me because while I love stories that develop and bloom as they move along, like cct (and also ovw’s lore), it’s incredibly disappointing when you practically memorize the lore and then the writer decides to retcon major details. and it shows how she hasn’t been planning well enough to keep what she’s already said in the past as canon. going back to the third paragraph, she might not have this issue if she wrote down her stories before sketching them, But Alas. :(

tldr: i believe she doesn’t have an issue with short-term workloads, but instead has trouble with long-term planning and writing her story.