#twist half of the characters’ motives and actual events of the story why don’t you

[antibayern]

actual footage of me watching house of the dragon season 1 episode 9:

[nanowrimo]

Making Time: 5 Ways Writers Prepare for Success With Timelines

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Aeon Timeline, a 2022 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is a visual hub for your entire story. NaNoWriMo writers can try out a free trial of Aeon Timeline through December 15! In this post, the folks at Aeon share a few ways that making a timeline for your novel can help your story:

If you are like me your story has been gnawing inside you for months. An intriguing premise; a character to explore; a surprise twist; a cliffhanger ending—something is telling you that you are the person to write this story.

Yet every year, only one in ten Wrimos make it to the end. Over 200,000 promising novels are abandoned—typically in the sticky middle stages.

At Aeon Timeline, we believe that visual planning with timelines can bring purpose to your writing, add depth to your characters, and sustain your creative energy until the end.

With help from authors David Williams and Andrew Hanson, let’s look at why so many stories fail in the middle stages, and the planning you can do now to avoid those mid-novel traps.

1. Steer your story in the right direction

Writing a novel any time is tough; finishing one in a month is crazy. To get to the finish line, you need to make sure every scene is pulling in the right direction. 

I find it easier to maintain momentum when I have the lure of a compelling climax to write towards. Creating this sense of direction is what building a visual story timeline is all about.

Don’t worry: 50,000 words provides abundant room for creativity. Planning a few signposts won’t change that, but it will make writing less stressful.

“I like to write fast and I like to write loose. Aeon Timeline allows me to do more of that, because it encourages me to be spontaneous in the space in-between. It’s actually going to enhance your creativity, and give you more freedom.”

– David Williams

2. Perfect your pacing with the right time frame

We writers talk a lot about setting, but stories live in time as much as they live in space. Time is crucial to controlling pace and tension.

Ask yourself:

What is the chronology of my story? What are the key moments and when do they need to happen?

What if I compressed my timeline? Would it increase tension, and force my characters to act impulsively? Or do my characters need more time to grow?

You could use pen and paper, but using a digital timeline encourages you to freely experiment and find new possibilities:

"Looking at this on the timeline, I thought, that's actually the beginning and end of the story. I’ve taken 20-odd years of information, and reframed it around a single weekend. Just the freedom to be able to throw these events around made me realize I had been getting it entirely wrong.”

– David Williams

3. Cultivate characters with purpose

You determine every choice for your characters, but you want them to bring their own goals and motive to every scene. To pull off this magic trick, each character’s stakes need to be high enough that they can’t simply walk away.

To ensure authentic choices, it helps to build thorough backstories for your characters and your world. What recent events instigated your story? How are they compelling your characters into action? Which historical scars and social pressures provoke their reactions in each scene?

By plotting these histories visually, you can cross reference personal and world events—prompting fresh insights about your characters.

“I start with the characters, and then flesh out the backstory events to make sure that the story logic makes sense. By story logic, I really mean that the events leading up to the present day of the story make sense to the reader.”

– Andrew Hanson

4. Amplify tension throughout your middle chapters

The first quarter of your book is done—your characters have taken that first irreversible step. The final chapters are whispering to you with the siren call of crisis and resolution.

But first, you have half a novel to increase stakes and layer pressure on your characters. That is a lot of empty space to fill with complications that don’t feel repetitive or contrived. You can drop another dead body, but can you really drop five?

It is easy to see why so many stories are abandoned in the middle. Why not plan your escalations in advance, while you have time to experiment and your story feels fresh?

If a better idea strikes while writing, that’s great! But if it doesn’t, your story timeline can keep you on solid ground: 

“The timeline is my barometer of story. It gives me an idea of where the pressure points are in a story, whether the story is working or not. It’s my eyes and ears on the story.”

– Andrew Hanson

5. Plan scenes as agents of change

We have all stumbled on that one scene that doesn’t want to be written. You can’t wait to throw yourself at the next crisis point, if you could just get that one scene right. But until then… Everything. Just. Stops.

Often, this block is surprisingly simple: your scene isn’t doing anything:

“The most important thing that every single scene has to have is change — external plot change or internal character change, but ideally both. If I am struggling with the writing of a scene, I can go into Aeon Timeline and fill in the details to work out where the scene has gone wrong.

– Andrew Hanson

Aeon Timeline is a flexible visual hub for planning your entire story. You can find detailed case studies describing how David and Andrew use Aeon Timeline on our website.

Download a free trial on Mac, Windows and iOS.  Discounts are available to all NaNoWriMo participants until December 15. To claim, log into your NaNoWriMo account and visit the Offers page.

[starberry-cupcake]

So, Midnight Mass is a good example of something I tried to explain before, about what is important in storytelling for me personally. 

To me, it isn’t essential for a story to be entirely surprising or to have a “plot twist” I didn’t see coming at all. I don’t mind knowing, as long as it’s engaging. It doesn’t matter if I anticipated a character’s actions or where a story would go, as long as it’s fulfilling and it makes me think about it. 

To me, it’s about the how. 

One example is Pruitt’s and Sarah’s relationship. 

I realized Pruitt was Sarah’s father halfway through the show. We kept waiting with my sister to see if it was true, and then I worried if, revealed too late, it wouldn’t matter plot-wise, because of how little time there was to work with it. 

What I didn’t anticipate, even if I had suspected for half the episodes, was that it didn’t matter if there wasn’t much time after, because the way in which the reveal played in the story, it had mattered all along. 

It was actually the catalyst of the entire series of events. 

That speech, heartfelt and unrehearsed, that Pruitt gives to an empty church except for Mildred, is the single most important thing he’s said in the entire show, to me. 

Because it’s the moment he stops dressing his motivation in sermons and the moment I can finally, finally, understand why he did it. It hadn’t been a self-righteous pursuit or a journey to be chosen or the will of power. 

It was about love. 

He said it was selfish, but love for another person, whichever kind, for his family in this case, is one of the most human reasons to do whatever you can to save them. And, in that moment (with the sublime performance from Hamish Linklater oh my god) I finally got Pruitt’s journey, his motivation, his full character. 

The moment he has with Sarah, telling her how proud he is of her, that’s enough to click into place everything and to tie their ends. It didn’t matter if I knew the twist, it was the how what floored me. 

Same thing with Riley’s choice. 

I had a hunch that Riley was going to decide what he ultimately did. There had been very evident clues all along, especially the dream in the boat. 

Still, when his father tells his mother that the transformation gives them an urge but “doesn’t change who you are”, it clicks into place. How Riley, someone who had gone through addiction, through “temptation” as it was put there, and who had harmed an innocent because of it, was the first of them to sacrifice himself without ever falling into the urge to hurt another. 

He had learned, had made peace, he used his experience to learn what to do next and to make his choices according to who he wanted to be. 

And then, in his end, when he becomes one with all, as Erin said, he finally makes peace with what he did, holding his victim’s hand, learning and leaving behind knowledge for others to know better. 

It’s very often about the how with Flanagan. And this show is no exception. 

[kuh-boose]

While I’m on a rant. Lobdell needs to learn that connecting every little thing is not good story telling. Things are allowed to just happen and be random. Things are allowed to be normal and small scale and not massive, confusing, mystical events, and still be important. Good writing makes small, relatively normal events still feel important. Jason’s death was relatively small scale and normal for Gotham, it was the writing and the connection built to the character that made it hurt--gave it impact. Jason was an interesting character because he had a clear and relatable motivation. He was a person, he was hurt, he acted on that hurt. Comic book writers in general need to learn to write with either character arcs in mind, or just a general consistent plot with an overall goal (or both, I do like characters and plot). Mangas do a just fine job having arcs that have a start and end. 

 And things can be left in the past. Jason’s parents can be dead. They can be bad or useless people/parents and still be loved by Jason. It doesn’t have to be complicated and I don’t need to keep hearing about them. I’m not impressed or astounded that there’s some twist with his dad and Ma Gunn, I’m just annoyed that you couldn’t stop rehashing his origin and write him in an actually comprehendible story that doesn’t take me ten minutes every new issue to figure out wtf is going on and why he’s there. Legitimately, I am not sure what is going on almost every time I start an issue. And I generally don’t have a much better idea by the end of said issue. Stop. Jumping. Around. please, i’m so tired

There’s stuff I like with RHATO, obviously. But there’s so much that is just frustrating. Hundreds of fans working together write him more consistently and comprehensively than one guy manages to. They make him an actual person. And I KNOW Lobdell can do it. He managed it for like the first... dozen? chapters of Rebirth. And then it’s like he couldn’t help himself and had to make it progressively more stupid and overly complicated.

And who is hiring these artists? Jesus christ, just hire fan artists at this point, since half of DCs artists are drawing arms that look like braids and women that look like a laffy taffy with boobs. Don’t even get me started on faces. (Dexter, you can ignore this part, I love you. Jason walking through smoke in his classic outfit. *chefs kiss* the motorcycle??? yes. so much yes....omg side note since this is just a messy rant anyways, but like go look at Nick Robles art of Jason. I’d give that man my right kidney to draw a full series of him. the writing can be bad, idc, I just want female-gaze!Jason.)

Look, what I’m saying is being a Jason Todd/Red Hood fan is hard and the fans are the only reason I have been able to stay so in love with the character. Especially since, in canon, at this point he’s practically a ‘choose your own adventure’ book. Though really, that seems to just be comic books in general at this point. I’ve found Manga and whatnot to be far better at delivering comprehensive and clean stories with plots and character arcs you can follow, but I think that’s mostly because they’re contained within themselves and generally written by just a small team of people. 

[pianostarinwonderland]

Thoughts on the Beans Day event

So after reading some translations from a server, I think I can give my own thoughts on this. I can’t put this under a read more so if you don’t want spoilers, you may scroll past.

So

Hhhhhhhh this event is a blessing!! We get to spend time with Cater and Jade, two of the characters we barely spent time with in the main story. And Jade is my fav Twisted boi and Cater is up there in my list so yeeeeee

Ok so spoilers: monster team won, and here I was, hoping the protag armor held up and we would win, but after reading the second part, it’s understandable why we lost despite having six dorm leaders in our team.

First of all, we have no braincells. And the few braincells in the team went to those with either no motivation or no stamina.

Idk what happened to Riddle but we all know his PE grades are shit and put him in an environment where magic isn’t allowed... 💀

Leona was too lazy fnjfjfjf bruh

Kalim was cooking kebabs in the gardens like LMAO DUDE WAS HUNGRY SO HE COOKED FOOD FOR THE FARMERS FJFJFJFJD bruh Jamil managed to find them because the smell was so strong Kalim whyyy

Not gonna lie though, I first read the second half without translations and thought Kalim and his group were mass producing beans for some reason DJDJJDJFBV

Vil playing seriously was actually really interesting. Too bad Jack caught him I think. :<<

Idia was busy running a black market in Sam’s shop.

And Malleus was too busy running from the monster team while basking in the attention he never gets otherwise.

Idk what happened to Deuce the poor boi

Floyd was too lazy lmao not in the mood

Silver... well he’s probably sleeping somewhere oof

Cater kept his location on by posting his selfies ndnfjjfjf dumbass

Honestly, the only one with brains, motivation, and stamina here was Jade ffffff (MC too I guess)

Yayy Jack though!! Good boi, managed to bring the win for the team! And yay for Azul too because apparently, Savanaclaw bois were roasting Azul for his PE grades. Boi needs the grade BDFJFJF

Also, Jade’s SR story apparently reveals that he hid in the freezer in Sam’s shop... but he’s fine. He could survive cold because of where he was born. Boi

Ok but speaking of which

HOT BOI YES MMMM 🤤👌👌

To be honest, I was hoping his groovy illus was gonna be him protecting mushrooms but this this I likey

Ugh Jade, I love you.

[bestworstcase]

We all know that the Gothel twist was terrible and was only there for the sake of having a twist, but if it absolutely have been done, how should it had happened to make it better narratively?

so. i spent a lot of time kind of mulling over and autopsying s3 and my personal conclusion about what went wrong is that tts hamstrung itself with poor narrative structure. and this is going to be one of those posts where i lead with definitions of the terminology i’m going to use, for the sake of clarity and to avoid any misunderstanding. 

to whit: 

story is the sum total of every element of a narrative: character, plot, setting, theme, and structure.  

character is, of course, the people in the story. it’s “who?”

plot is the events that happen in a story. it’s “what?”

setting is the time and place of the story. it’s “where?” and “when?” 

theme is what the story is *about.* it’s “why?”

and then there’s narrative structure, which i think is a little harder to grasp because it’s much more invisible than the other things. but it’s the framework of the story, or the scaffolding. it’s “how?” — how are the characters rendered? how is the setting created? how are the events of the plot strung together along the throughline? how is the story built? 

now… in my opinion, character is the single most important element of a story; compelling characters can salvage an otherwise mediocre story, and nothing kills a story faster than uninteresting characters. 

but the one thing good characters can’t ultimately compensate for is poor structure. if the construction is shoddy, so to speak, sooner or later, the roof is gonna leak. right? and we can see this happen in tts: s1 and s2 are solid, and then bam! we hit s3 and it’s a mess of bizarre pacing and dropped characters, the feelings and motivations of key players get all wonky, the plot loses focus, and things increasingly feel like they’re happening by authorial fiat. the weak structure of the narrative has failed, and it dragged the entire story down with it. 

and we can look back in retrospect and see that, yeah, all of these problems existed before; tts always had odd pacing, always had an issue with maintenance of the supporting cast, always relied more on convenience than a narrative really should. but these things didn’t hit a critical mass until s3. 

so what does this have to do with gothel? well,

in and of itself, “gothel is cassandra’s mother!” is not a terrible plot twist. the problem with it is a problem of execution, which is to say, the flaw is in the structure, not the plot.

#1: set-up

plot twists are kind of difficult to pull off well, because you don’t want to blindside people, but you also don’t want to tip your hand too soon. you want to surprise, or maybe even shock—but you don’t want your audience to go, “wait, WHAT? that makes no sense!”

do you remember the whole “ricky’s quest” thing that went on in s2? we were told that there was an important piece of foreshadowing somewhere in s1 or s2 that no one had picked up on yet and there was this whole thing of people trying to figure out what it was, and then… rapunzel’s return aired, and ricky revealed that the answer was “cassandra briefly glances into the shattered mirror in rapunzel’s tower.” 

and that, + the fact that we know cass is adopted and doesn’t remember her birth parents, + vague visual similarities, is the entirety of the s1-s2 foreshadowing for cassandra being gothel’s daughter.

which isn’t nothing, i’ll grant you, but for something as major as the gothel twist, for something that profoundly changes the worldview and motivations of one of the main characters to such a degree that she completely changes sides because of it, it might as well be nothing.

gothel is afforded zero narrative importance in s1-s2. rapunzel has one nightmare about her, and some lingering trauma connected to the tower that is explored, and of course tromus briefly uses her image to try to control rapunzel in rapunzeltopia. but gothel herself is a non-entity until she abruptly and without warning becomes the emotional lynchpin of the entire conflict in s3. that’s jarring.

cassandra is a complex character whose apparent motivations for turning against rapunzel are meticulously built up over the course of s2… only for s3 to pull a bait-and-switch, sweep all of that set-up under the rug, and replace it with cassandra’s messed up feelings about gothel’s abandonment. even her ruined hand never gets mentioned again—not by her, not by zhan tiri, not by rapunzel, not by anyone. that’s jarring, too. 

to use my own work as a point of comparison here, the bitter snow equivalent of the gothel reveal is cassandra finding out that sirin is her aunt and her parents were innocent. like the gothel twist, learning that information profoundly changes how cassandra sees herself and the world, and it’s intended to be a big shock… but unlike the gothel twist, i did a lot of setting up for it: 

1: sirin has real narrative importance in the first half of the story, pre-reveal. the fic opens with her, her involvement with the separatists is established early, etc. 

2: pieces of cassandra’s backstory are threaded through the first half of the story. by the time we hit the reveal, it’s been established that cass is saporian, that her parents were executed for treason, that this treason involved selling poisoned crops and causing outbreaks of a deadly sickness. 

3: there are many demonstrations of anti-saporian discrimination and prejudice in the first half of the story: the way cass sees herself and the alienation she feels from the rest of corona, past incidents where she was targeted for being saporian, basically every time gilbert opens his mouth, what happened to caine’s dad. 

4: cassandra discovers evidence of the harsh, unjust nature of the crackdown and realizes that at least some of what she’s been taught about coronan law enforcement and recent history is inaccurate… thus planting the seed, for the readers if not for cass herself, that other things might be false too.

5: caine points out that cass is the reason the separatists don’t let parents join up, and though she doesn’t elaborate on that, it’s because cass is proof that corona will steal saporian children if their parents are accused of treason.

and 6: everything sirin says to cass in chapter 14 is wrapped up in her being painfully, painfully aware that a) cass is her niece and b) probably doesn’t know the whole story—while also trying to stick to the plan. so… while she doesn’t spill the beans there, she knows who cass is, she stops andrew from hurting her, she makes a point of not acknowledging the legitimacy of cassandra’s adoption, and obliquely suggests that sir peter is a murderer… and while she tries to stop cass from interfering with what they’re doing, she doesn’t hurt her, even though she very much could.

so… in chapter 15, when sirin comes out with “actually, the blight was a natural disaster no one anticipated and saporians got sick and died too, your parents were just scapegoats because corona wanted someone to blame, and oh, by the way, you’re my niece,” it’s a shock but not one that comes entirely out of left field. cassandra’s parents being innocent victims of an overzealous and prejudiced justice system is a logical extension of all the stuff that has already been set up, and sirin being cass’s aunt helps to clarify motivations that were previously opaque (such as: why does sirin despise corona so much, why didn’t she just kill cass, etc). 

and because all of this stuff is given so much attention in the first half of the story, the way it snaps cassandra’s worldview in half and causes such a massive reorienting of her goals and loyalties feels natural. because it already mattered a great deal to her, and it related to the doubts she was already experiencing. 

which like, that’s the key. setting up a big plot twist isn’t about establishing one basic fact (“cass is adopted”) and tossing in one instance of symbolic foreshadowing (the mirror thing) and nothing else, over the course of two whole seasons of a tv show. it is about priming the audience to be ready to accept the reveal.

how could tts have done this with the gothel reveal? here’s some ideas: 

1: give gothel a greater presence in the narrative. the simplest way to do this would be to really lean in to how fucked up rapunzel is because of her. more nightmares, more overt moments where we see rapunzel still being haunted by her memory. alternatively, lean more into the fact that gothel was a disciple of zhan tiri.

2: give cassandra’s adoption, and the question of her birth parents, even a teeny tiny glimmer of interest. specifically, let “dad found me after my parents abandoned me” be the only thing cass knows about her adoption, and let that hurt her. she doesn’t even have to be curious about who her birth parents were—just have that pain of abandonment more present in the first two seasons. 

3: imply the captain knows more about cassandra’s origins than he lets on. 

4: you know the parallel in RATGT where rapunzel screams at cass the way gothel screamed at rapunzel? more of that. like, how delicious would it be if there were many little instances in s1-s2 of rapunzel lashing out at cass with behaviors she obviously subconsciously learned from gothel, only for s3 to pull the sucker punch of cassandra being gothel’s daughter? like! imagine how that could so EASILY make cassandra recontextualize her entire relationship with rapunzel by linking rapunzel’s toxic behaviors with gothel’s abuse and abandonment in her mind? and then in s3 you can really dig into rapunzel interrogating her own behaviors and struggling to break the cycle of abuse. 

5: if gothel being a former disciple of zhan tiri is narratively important, it can go hand-in-hand with zhan tiri and the other disciples more overtly targeting cass, specifically. even if we don’t know why until the reveal. 

i’ve seen a couple posts from other folks discussing how to “fix” the gothel twist, and many of them involve cass either knowing from the start or finding out much earlier, but while that could work, i don’t think it’s necessary. it’s all about the set up. it’s all about constructing the story in such a way that the audience goes “OH!” instead of “WHAT?!” when the reveal happens, and the specific timing of the reveal doesn’t really… matter.

#2: execution

surprising absolutely no one, i’m going to talk about zhan tiri now. 

based on what chris has said in various interviews, my understanding is this: originally, cass was originally supposed to be a secret antagonist all along and know about her parentage right out of the gate. her characterization softened early on in the process, her knowing about gothel got dropped, and suddenly the creators needed a way for her to learn that gothel was her mom, and thus zhan tiri entered the narrative.

she is a plot device whose whole purpose is to tell cass “gothel was your mom and abandoned you for rapunzel,” and then fuel her downward spiral. the rest of her character exists in service of that, full stop. 

which… like the gothel reveal, having a character whose primary function is to be a plot device isn’t a problem in and of itself. however. “ancient evil demonic sorceress with deep ties to the magical lore of the setting and an entrenched hatred for team hero, whose MO is manipulating people” is a terrible character archetype to use as this kind of plot device, because that kind of character needs to have an agenda in order to function, and as soon as you give them an agenda they develop a gravitational pull on the rest of the story, especially if they’re directly involved with a main character. 

and if you’re willing to roll with that gravitational pull, it can be fine. but if you’re not… you get tts s3. 

chris has pretty much spelled this out in interviews. he said at one point that they debated multiple potential motives for zhan tiri… but found that anything more complex than “wants the drops and to burn corona to the ground, because reasons” sucked oxygen away from the cass vs raps conflict and eventual reconciliation, which… yeah. so they gave zhan tiri the cardboard motives and didn’t really do anything with her other than trotting her out to give cass a good shove in whatever direction the plot needed cass to fall in every so often. 

that zhan tiri is a compelling character in s3 at all is a testament to the strength of her VA and the sheer potential of her established lore, in combination with the fact that she and cassandra are off screen enough to demand that the audience fill in a lot of gaps. but in, like, the actual text, she has all the complex personality of a piece of damp tissue paper and she is, for all intents and purposes, literally just Cassandra’s Brain. every decision, every single decision cass makes in s3 is because of zhan tiri. why take the moonstone? zhan tiri tells her to. why is she so mad at rapunzel? zhan tiri made her that way. why does she attack rapunzel? zhan tiri convinced her she had to. why does she go to gothel’s cabin in TOTS? zhan tiri tipped her off that rapunzel would be there. why does her fragile truce with rapunzel fall apart at the end of TOTS? zhan tiri interfered. why does she try to reconcile again in OAH? she found out zhan tiri was… zhan tiri. why does that reconciliation fail? zhan tiri. why does cass ultimately redeem herself? because zhan tiri stabs her in the back first. 

*deep breath*

this is what happens when you troubleshoot a broken narrative with plot devices instead of opening it up to fix whatever is wrong with the underlying structure. in this case, cassandra not knowing about gothel from the get go broke her planned villain arc… and the creators applied zhan tiri like a bandaid, molding this new character into someone who could railroad cass down the preexisting plan for her villain arc. 

what needed to happen instead was a wholesale reexamination and reconfiguration of cassandra’s villain arc, her reasons for going down that path, and her reasons for coming back. even if finding out the truth about gothel was still the trigger for it, it’s ultimately not about gothel anymore. gothel is just the last straw. 

and in order to work with the characters as-established in s1-s2, the events of s3 would need to be framed that way. if, after all the shit she goes through in s2, cass met zhan tiri, learned that gothel was her mom and abandoned her for rapunzel, and finally just snapped and went after the moonstone because fuck this, fuck you, and then zhan tiri came in with the compassion and emotional validation and the “your mother treated you as a servant and then discarded you for something she thought was better, and so did rapunzel, didn’t she? but i see you, i believe in you, i am your friend, and we can help each other,” and cass bought that because she’s desperate for emotional support and kindness and fuck it, she’s on team demon now, only for her conscience to eat away at her until she couldn’t take it anymore and broke away from zhan tiri for good… then it works, full stop. 

like, you don’t have to change a single plot event for the gothel twist to work. you just have to string those plot events along an emotional throughline that makes sense and feels connected to what happened in s1-s2. you can’t use zhan tiri to graft the s3 arc of evil-all-along proto-cass onto canon s1-s2 and call it a day because that doesn’t work! you have to write for the characters you have, not their early planning-stages iterations. if you make a decision early on that breaks your original plan, you have to commit to redoing the whole plan. 

and if you do that, if you fix the underlying structure, you don’t need a character whose sole purpose is to railroad another character down a predetermined path that no longer fits her characterization; cass and zhan tiri can instead both be characters, acting according to their motivations and goals, and not puppets pantomiming the ghost of a broken plan. 

(you do still have to accept that zhan tiri will pull focus away from the cass+rapunzel friendship, though. them’s the breaks. don’t use zhan tiris if you’re not willing to let them gobble up the spotlight a bit.)

TL;DR: to fix the gothel twist, set it up better in s1-s2 by making the question of cassandra’s parentage, or abandonment by her parentage, important to the narrative at all, or else by focusing more closely on gothel being a disciple of zhan tiri; then execute the s3 villain arc in a way that makes sense for canon cass and what she experiences in s1-s2, rather than using zhan tiri to railroad her down the path evil-all-along proto-cass was supposed to take. 

the problem is a structural one so at the end of the day the solution is to fix the structure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[wonhoemeup]

Okay it's time.

Why the events are slowly but surely ruining the gaming experience and push players away

I'd like to clarify first of all that this whole rant is based on my own personal opinion. These are not facts, but merely thoughts of mine, so feel free to disagree with me.

For newer players events might still bring a lot to the game for them. But for older players especially, this is a huge problem. Events genuinely ruin the game, and here's why.

Let's start with the probably worst part: the time span.

The entire game is based off of leveling up cards, for which you need certain materials in order to make them stronger, which then will help you progress further in the story line. The problem is, that a lot of these needed items are on hard levels, and you only get 3 tries a day, and aren't even guaranteed to get an item from those 3 battles at all.

In other words, leveling and ranking up cards already is difficult, but mandatory to further progress in the storyline.

Events will take that away because you spend all your AP on the event stages. That wouldn't be too much of an issue if the event was every now and then. However; events happen with barely even one week between each other.

That is not what events are supposed to be. Events are special occasions, but the way they time them in such a short frame makes them feel less special, and eventually just annoying.

Let alone that some events last half that time. Without VIP, spending real life money on the game, and a level above 200 at the least, Events are more a waste of time and patience than they are actually beneficial.

The reason I can confidentiality say that is because of the rankings. If you check the global rankings, skip to the first few, everyone has a membership, is 200+ in terms of level, and already has half a million event items by the second day of an event.

Which leads me to my second point: Events are simply nothing but a cash grab. They are not meant for players that don't want to spend anything on the game, they're meant for those that pay a lot of money for it (because the monthly membership stacks up, and it is expensive, considering that a majority of the audience isn't even a legal adult yet).

They limit the event time, the time in between, and set goals that are impossible to reach simply for the money it brings. The upsetting part is that the event "rewards" are always high tier cards that would help you a lot for the main storyline, and that aren't obtainable elsewise. The only way to get those cards is through lonely devil once the event is released there, and even then you have to spend a lot of devil points to even get to the third page and obtain those cards.

Of course most games of this nature are pay to win. But the problem with Obey me in particular is that there really isn't anything else to keep players interested, especially those that just started. The levels get so impossibly hard that it just isn't fun anymore.

Another point that I'd like to bring up is the poor execution of said events, and it only gets worse each time. The plots don't make any sense, there isn't enough explanation for it, the twists seem forced and just plain.

Characters are becoming a lot less appealing. We all know how dirty they did Simeon at the Angel event. It feels as if the characters we came to love are switched out and stomped all over.

Speaking of Simeon; ever since they made the side characters dateables, the events are just messy. They force everyone to be a part of it, which gives them even less time to really build up on a plot. Instead of making separate events, one focusing on the Brothers and one on the others, they cramp them all into the same event, which just feels forced and rushed.

We don't get to have chapters anymore where we bond with individual characters. The game is advertised as an otome game, but that aspect has really gotten lost over the past months.

Taking the last event for example: why did we not get to see them dressed up? Why is it only in cards that we can't even get? Why did we not get to have a moment with them where we help them out? The only moment was zipping Lucifer's dress up, and that was what? Less than 10 seconds?

The reason games host events is to draw people in, keep their interest. But these events really have the opposite effect.

I think they should spend much more time planning a single event, make that event last longer, work on a proper plot, the moments we always loved, bring the romantic aspects back, and really work with the characters rather than against them. And yes, you can just sit out events, work on your cards, and progress in the main story line, but that isn't how it is supposed to be. Players shouldn't feel this excluded just because we are given a week to work on the actual game mechanics.

Personally, I really do believe that events ruin the game. They take away time, and just feel forced. I do hope that in the future this changes, or at least a part of it. Up until then I don't know if I have the motivation to work on my cards or participate in events anymore, which sucks because I genuinely adore the characters.

[the-road-goes-ever-on86]

I don't know if part 3 of Fear Street is my favorite, but if not it's close! A very solid ending to the trilogy! (Ramblings below the cut)

If you watched the trailer/any clips from Part 3 before the film then I think Sarah Fier being innocent was pretty predictable, but it's still an incredibly sad yet satisfying story. Absolutely loved Sarah and Hannah together, and was honestly not mad about Sarah's initial plan to make a deal with the devil because she had nothing left and was desperate to save herself and her lover. Was it the right thing? Eh... Not really (😂), but I understand her motivation!

Sarah couldn't catch a break, could she? First she and Hannah were betrayed simply because straight white men can't take no for an answer, and everyone else easily accepted all the lies about them because of their own bias and fear and hatred of anyone different; because of what they'd been told was wrong. There was no actual proof that they'd hurt anyone, but here you've got half the town lying because they're ready to see two poor girls hang.

That's not even mentioning Solomon, and how all this started because he was tired of bad luck and wanted to prosper despite having to kill to do so.

Seeing the events of 1666 really hit home for me how much things change, but also stay the same. There are absolutely people in present day who will still look at a gay couple and think they've been tempted by the devil to sin. It's depressing. The 1666 part of the film was especially heavy, partially because of this.

What I did like about that depressing situation was Sarah sacrificing herself so Hannah could live. I have no idea why I didn't initially see that; I thought her confession was going to be that she loved Hannah (then they'd die together), but instead she took all the blame when she was at zero fault. Terribly heartbreaking and moving scene; excellent dialog in Sarah's speech! The Goodes deserve all the pain in the world, lol.

Speaking of Sheriff Goode... Thought it was going to be Will that was cursing Shadyside, so that was the big twist for me. I did think it was odd that Nick told Ziggy that he had a heavy burden to bear (which does not sound like something a future Sheriff would need to say; it isn't THAT serious), but still figured maybe he was the... Well, the good Goode? Clearly not the case, but it is interesting that he warned Ziggy... Suppose he still had feelings for her despite being a massive pile of shit.

The mayor of Sunnyvale is still alive, so I wonder if he was the one who took the book at the end? Or maybe one of their other family members? The second I saw Deena leave it I just knew it was going to come back to haunt them. Should've burned the damn thing. For my own piece of mind, Deena and Sam later went back and took the book to burn and will live happily ever after.

Love that no one major (and, well, decent) died in the 1994 part of the film! I was pretty scared for Josh for a minute, though didn't truly think he'd die. Wasn't so sure about Ziggy though; figured she might go out killing Nick, but I'm glad to be wrong. Martin was great too! His instant acceptance of the plan to kill Sheriff Goode was hilarious, as was his fear (understandable as this was some crazy shit, something horror film characters don't always acknowledge enough); I'm glad he did what had to be done and joined up with the others and didn't run away screaming. I probably would've.

The traps were great and the lighting and design in the final scenes in the mall were so visually stunning! There are some very pretty/cool looking moments in this film.

Honestly, I'm just pleased that even though the film is fairly straightforward, that it was well made, written and engaging. The cast was good, likeable characters... Overall very fun trilogy! And... Half the gays lived! 💗💗💗

Frankly, that in itself gives me some degree of happiness because Deena and Sam are so cute together, and Deena being 100% committed to saving her girl was beautiful. It was delightful to see them walk away together. (Though frankly, Sam was knocked out so many times I hope she doesn't have any permanent brain damage. If Ziggy can survive... All that in the second film... I'm just gonna assume Sam can take a fair amount of blunt force trauma to the head. Maybe Ziggy surviving had to do with Nick's wishes, but regardless... Sam will be fine.)

[im-the-punk-who]

Hi! I’m new to the fandom and I’m simply curious (not trying to start a feud or anything), why don’t you like Steinberg?

Hello dear anon! And welcome to the fandom! 

Oof. That’s a question. xD 

I’m going to try and stay as uh. neutral as possible. Because I’ve already written the post I know I failed but, the intent in answering this is also not to start a feud or hurt anyone’s feelings. 

Okay, so I got fairly negative in this chilis tonight, so I want to start by saying that even in light of the opinions I’m about to express, Black Sails is one of, if not my number one, favorite TV shows of all time. Certainly in recent memory - I’ve been hyperfixating on this show for 18 months with no sign of stopping, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for everyone who worked on the show - even Steinberg. (The one exclusion is Michael Bay, he can go twist.)

AND I think Stienberg is an incredibly talented writer. Black Sails is one of my favorite shows because it does such a wonderful job of weaving stories, creating characters, and melding things in a way that is both unexpected and makes sense narratively. I have changed as a person because of the show, and they will have to pry James McGraw and Thomas Hamilton from my cold dead knives-attached-to-them hands. None of what I’m going to say is meant to detract from that.

I will also say that a lot of these issues are not particular to Steinberg and are in fact a systemic problem with American TV + Film. And I’m not leaving Robert Levine out of my criticism, it’s just that Steinberg had the biggest hand in the pot(he wrote a full half the episodes) and a lot of what I’ve heard as far as talking about the show comes from Steinberg. So, he gets the brunt. But it isn’t that I think Steinberg was the only problematic element of the show. 

Also, these are all my opinions and are colored by how I interact with my fandoms. I am not only a fandom veteran, but I work and pretty much live in the entertainment industry. I work in indie film and theatre and am surrounded by artists and creators of all walks of life, like, constantly. I know what is possible, and when I see something that can be improved, I want to note it because it is important to me to always be striving forward. Like Miranda says about Thomas, this isn’t out of malice, or out of hate. It’s because I genuinely love this show, and I love entertainment as a whole, and I think in order to get to a better, more inclusive industry we have to have hard conversations and look critically at the media we consume, and it is frustrating to me to time and again see the same faces in the room. 

But if that isn’t your cuppa, that’s fine! Fandom isn’t meant to be stressful and if all you want to do is watch a show about gay pirates that is your tomato and I applaud you. Have at it you funky motherfucker.

OH! One more. At some point I’m going to talk about Silverflint. When I do, it is NOT meant as a ‘you shouldn’t/cant ship this’ or ‘this pairing is bad’ or any negative attack on the people who ship that pairing. My criticisms in this post are exclusively about what it means for Steinberg as a writer and Black Sails’ representation of gay and mlm men. While it’s not my cuppa, this is a sail your own ship blog. 

OKAY! SO! 

My main criticisms of Steinberg & Co boil down to:

The homozygosity of the writers and directors shows a complete lack of desire to include marginalized people in the writing of a show that is about them. Which leads to:

The centering of white men while choosing a historical setting and time period that was in fact dominated by people of color and specifically a black woman, 

The gratuitous inclusion of violence against women, particularly sexual violence, and again, that the female characters are often sidelined for the central male characters. 

SO.

Black Sails is a show centered around queer, female, and black leads, and yet there were only two non white-male directors (one bi-racial man and one white woman) and only 7 female writers - one of whom was Latina. The entire rest of the major creative staff was white men. I’m not going to comment on sexualities but none of the writers or directors are out as queer according to a quick google search. 

Let me reiterate the important bit there. 

In Black Sails, where the last two seasons specifically feature around a real, actually-happened-in-history event that shaped black history in the Caribbean, there was not a single black writer on the entire show. 

This is the main difference between inclusion for inclusion’s sake, and actually centering marginalized voices. Black Sails has a ton of gay, POC, and female rep in front of the camera but practically zero representation behind it, which leads to storylines and implications that Steinberg and his writers, as white men, simply would never realize.

It’s like why Silver and Miranda never realized the true reasons James was waging war on England. They just did not have the life experiences to realize they were missing a piece of the puzzle, and so they filled in their own without even realizing they’d done so. 

Because no one in the room of Black Sails was a part of these marginalized identities, nuances get lost or mistranslated, motivations get muddled through a white man’s gaze(or a straight person’s) and implications that someone within those communities might think is obvious won’t even come up.

And again, because there were no writers or directors of color in the last two seasons (the biracial man directed episodes 2x02 and 2x04 - WHICH MAKES SENSE IMO) the entirety of the historical lore that the show bases itself on in its latter half is filtered through a white man’s lens. And so there is no discussion of how changing something changes the meaning, how leaving someone out or changing their role to be more minor might affect people for whom that is their heritage. How the entire story they’re telling might change with one simple exclusion or addition.

So, how does this relate directly to Steinberg, you ask? Well, simply, because it was his show. 

Steinberg(and Levine) were involved in every major decision about the show, from its conception, to the script, to choosing the writers and directors. They chose how they wanted the show to look, to think, what stories to tell and how they wanted to tell them. Their decisions(and the biases that formed those decisions) are woven into the show.

And look. I don’t for a second believe any of this was willful or malicious. I don’t think that John Steinberg and Robert Levine sat down one day and said ‘you know what would make the gays really angry? If we locked the only two canonically gay men up in a prison camp.’

But the decisions that were made in the show were based in ignorance in a way that shows more than just simple negligence or laziness(especially given the attention to detail in everything else). The things they leave out or change in the Maroon War plotline for instance are not small details easily missed. They are big, giant waving flags. They are things that are irreplaceable to still have the same events and stories and tell them respectfully. 

It shows an insane amount of privilege to, for instance, write a show airing during a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was at the forefront of the American conscience, include black characters and black storylines, and yet not include a single black voice on their creative team. 

In a show that centers a gay man’s love and his journey in attempting to process the horrible things done to him and his lover because of it, we are given just forty minutes of the entire show dedicated to their relationship - and just fifteen of those minutes actually feature the lover! 

(Relatedly, the entirety of the gay romantic rep is two kisses, and a forehead touch. That’s the entirety of your gay intimacy representation. And yet there are in the first two seasons alone - because that’s all I’ve clocked so far - something like twenty seven minutes of scenes involving a naked or half naked woman. Five minutes of that is explicitly wlw sex.

Again, I just want to reiterate this because it’s important in recognizing bias. 

There is fully twice as much female nudity in the first two seasons, as the entirety of the time the two gay characters have together on screen. )

Steinberg is a perfect example of how a lack of understanding why the diversity you are representing is important, matters. I dislike Steinberg because he, just like every other straight white cis man I have known, profited off of marginalized voices without including them or creating with them in mind.

Art does not exist in a vacuum. You cannot create something - especially something as back breakingly, intensely a labor of love as Black Sails - without putting several pieces of yourself into it. But those pieces color your narrative. They will expose things about you that you don’t even realize. And it’s in these places we are weakest, and why a diverse group of writers with a diverse group of experiences can help a piece be stronger. But for whatever reason, John Steinberg thought that he could make art with only people who looked and thought and experienced like him. 

The lack of representation behind the camera in Black Sails was evident in front of it and yet Steinberg is out here getting to pretend like he created the most inclusive groundbreaking show that ever existed. It is important to me, personally, to acknowledge that. And that it kind of makes my skin crawl in the way all media made by straight white (cis)men makes my skin crawl. I wish I didn’t have to feel that way about my favorite tv show just because it was created by a man of privilege, but here we are.

SO. I hope that helped? Feel free to take what you want and leave what you don’t! 

Below the cut is a more in depth look at things that I think show what I’m talking about, but that up there ^^ is the gist. <3 |D

SURPRISE!

The Maroons and the Maroon War

So the first thing I want to point out is that the Maroon War was a real thing that happened. It lasted ten years, and resulted in the most substantial victory the Maroons ever achieved against the British. Not only that, there was in fact a KICKIN’ badass female leader of the maroons named Queen Nanny, who is to this day honored as a national hero in Jamaica. While they weren’t able to drive the British out, the outcome of this war led to a mostly self-governing Maroon population in Jamaica from the mid 1700s on. This was a long term fight that had a very tangible and real outcome, even if it didn’t end in the destruction of colonialism. 

And what is this war turned into in Black Sails? A white ‘madman’s revenge’  that is doomed to failure after six months.

That, my dear pirates, is a problem for me. (And those familiar with my brand of spiceyness know that I do not ascribe to the ‘Flint is a Madman’ trope, but that IS what Steinberg ascribes to, what he seems to have written the show thinking.) 

There was no narrative reason to include the Maroon War in the narrative of Black Sails. The Maroon War didn’t happen until a decade after the Golden Age of Piracy, and aside from Silver’s wife being a black woman there is no mention of Silver ever having contact with them. To me, this feels like the choice of a showrunner who found a cool historical event and saw a chance to up the stakes of their white male heroes while getting in some sweet sweet POC rep. 

Except that they then took the major events of the Maroon War and gave them to their white characters, Flint and Silver. 

Here’s the thing. If you’re going to take a piece of culturally important history and use it for your show, you NEED to have sensitivity writers. You need to have people who are at least familiar with those events and who care about them to do them justice. Have an expert come in and read your script or go over your ideas. Or just like. Hire a black writer. Hire ONE black writer. As a treat.

The important Maroon figures, Nanny, Cudjoe, and Quao, all get sidelined or ‘sexified’ and then used as plot points for the white characters. Nanny gets split into two women - the older mother queen and Madi, the young naive warbent visionary. Quao(Mr. Scott is the closest, or Kofi possibly) gets killed off because the writers realized they didn’t exactly have a place for him in their writing. Cudjoe(Julius) gets a few scenes and one good speech but his entire role in the war gets given to Silver. And THEN. That sexy Queen Madi figure gets used as emotional bait for Silver and then has to learn he has betrayed her and destroyed the hope and freedom she had wanted to bring to her people. 

Gross, pirates. Gross.

Anne Bonny/Max/Mary Read - a heads up, this section includes a semi in-depth discussion of both Max and Anne’s sexual assaults. If that bothers you, the paragraphs talking about that begin with a ***

COOL NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT LESBIANS. Words my 20 year old self would never have imagined coming out of my mouth. 

Specifically, I want to talk about Max, and Anne, and their backstories both involving extreme sexual trauma at the hands of men. And then Mary Read and the once again sexification of female characters.

(Actually while I’m here another criticism I have of Steinberg is that his writing does not seem to recognize how queer people existed in the past - again, likely because he didn’t have any gay historians to be like ‘actually buddy that doesn’t make sense also why is Anne not dressing as a man? If you want to fuck with anything and insert modern day terminology and ideas into this show, make her non binary and REALLY piss off the hetties.’)

(This same ficitonal gay dramaturg who is definitely not me has also questioned John Steinberg repeatedly about where Mary Read is, unsatisfied with the answer ‘well we wanted her to be hot so we made her a sex worker and then had Anne have to rescue her but then we realized it would be weird not to include her actual character so we gave her a five second cameo at the very end of the series and also made her like 13.’)

Anyway! So my main point in bringing up Anne and Max is the sexual trauma they are exposed to in the show, particularly being that they are the two primary wlw in the show, who Steinberg has said he views as being completely gay, and what THAT whole unexamined idea looks like. 

***Max. My dear Max. There was literally no reason to have her be repeatedly r*ped(and for the love of god there was even less reason to make it that gratuitous and graphic). Max being assaulted like that did not add anything to the gravity of Eleanor’s betrayal. The traumatic event was being tossed aside by Eleanor, and that could have been just as emotionally damaging without the sexual assault. And the only reason for her to be continually assaulted was to bring her and Anne together. 

***The reason imo that Max’s r*pe plot was added was because it was the only thing these white straight men could come up with that felt emotionally damaging enough to them. The act of betrayal itself wasn’t enough, the act of being thrown away, of having a lover put your life in danger because of her own ambitions wasn’t enough, they needed her to be r*ped to really drive home the point. 

***Anne, on the other hand, is never shown being sexually abused, but we are given an explicit account of her own traumatic history and how Jack saved her from this vile beast who was passing her around to his friends.

But here’s the thing pirates - that never happened. According to every account we have of Anne Bonny, she chose her husband, and married him against her father’s wishes. They were probably relatively happy until her husband started being a pirate spy and Anne started cheating on him with Jack. 

And yes, when they were found out. Her husband had her beat. That’s not fucking cool, and if they really wanted to go the damsel in distress route they still could have had Jack ‘save’ her from that. But at no point was she sexually abused by her husband(at least not in any accounts I’ve read.) 

You know who did likely sexually abuse her or at least manipulate her and Mary for his own benefit? If you guessed our Rat man Jack Rackham, you would be correct, because when he found out about Mary and Anne’s (supposed, but probably real) relationship, it’s implied he extorted both of them into fucking him to keep their secret from the crew. 

The addition of sexual abuse to Anne’s past isn’t done to be true to her character and was in fact explicitly untrue. Now of course I don’t know the reasons why they chose to do this, but I can guess. Just as with Max, the most traumatic thing a male writer can think of for a female character is for them to be sexually abused.

And the most disturbing part of this to me? The parallels it has to the real world of why straight men think lesbians exist. These characters who would be called man haters in present day are given these incredibly traumatic man-centered histories. It brings up something very uncomfortable in me about particularly wlw sexuality being viewed as a reaction to trauma at the hands of men. It’s just gross, I dont like it, and honestly there is no fucking excuse for it besides a room full of white straight men writing this bullshit. A room that Steinberg chose, because they fit his ideas.

In Fact heck, the women of Black Sails in general

***I honestly struggle to think of a single female character who I think was treated fairly in Black Sails. Miranda and Eleanor are killed for taking sides and not understanding their partners, Madi is betrayed in the worst way possible, Max is given a pseudo empowering ending but has that fucking terrible start. Idelle ends off fairly well, but tied to a man she may or may not have any actual feelings for, in what is essentially a political marriage. And Anne has her entire identity tied to a man who will be dead in two years as she is robbed of any agency whatsoever without him. (Oh, and the whole r*pe thing. And also her support for Max’s r*pe or death until she started having fee-fees. Who wrote this stuff. >_>)

Even though the characterization of each and every one of these women is PHENOMENAL - and again I will repeat that I absolutely LOVE these characters as they exist in a vacuum. I think they are well rounded, real, feeling people given motivations and drives and FEELINGS and they SHOW THEIR ANGER and i LOVE THEM. 

But the show punishes them for it. Miranda is essentially fridged to move Flint’s storyline along, and to make room for Silver. Eleanor is killed for the emotional damage it will cause Rogers. Madi is placed at the center of a conflict she explicitly says she is willing to die for and then not only is her entire cause taken from her, but when she tells Silver to fuck off he - in possibly the most predictable white man move ever - says ‘no i will stay until you change your mind. I will never leave you. I don’t care about your choice in this matter, I will wait forever for you. I’m your biggest fan. I’ll follow you until you love me. papa, - paparazzi.’ 

And I touched on this before, but I want to talk in more detail about what is possibly my hottest take to date, the sexification of Mary Read and Queen Nanny, as they are presented in the show. 

Max is to Anne what Mary Read is, historically. She is the lover that Jack Rackham discovers with Anne, and then he joins them in their bed. They form a triumvirate that upholds Jack at the expense of the women. But for some reason, Steinberg didn’t want to just include Mary Read as an actual character. For some reason he needed to make Anne’s love interest a sex worker who was in need of saving (and who, coincidentally, we never see working the brothel after she becomes lovers with Anne, because she is now a madam. :) Gross.)

And Madi. My dear sweet fucking Madi who didn’t fucking deserve any of this bullshit send tweet. 

So, historically, Queen Nanny was the Queen, spiritual advisor, and the military tactician of the Windward Maroons. She would have filled both Madi and the Queen’s character roles(and Flint’s, but who’s counting. A BLACK GAY LEAD? Inconceivable. I digress.) But, I guess, because they were wishy-washing with Silver’s sexuality or felt they needed to give him a female love interest because of Treasure Island, or because they were leaning a bit too hard into the gay shit and needed to backpedal, they took Queen Nanny and split her into a character who is for all intents and purposes powerless in the war and Madi, who is young and naive and does not have any real world experience outside of the Maroon camp.

Because that’s sexy, or something. They could have had the Maroon Queen be a fucking badass lady who works and fights alongside Flint and Silver and one ups them and teaches them shit and has her own ideas about where the British can stick it, but instead they made her into the perfect caricature of a female monarch, letting the big strong men handle the dirty work or something. Because white male power fantasies. 

Just let women be powerful and not nubile and let them have character arcs over fucking thirty and let them be CENTERED in their own. fucking. narratives. 

God damnit Steinberg.

James Flint, mlm extraordinaire

Oh, my love. My most amazing child. The light of my life. My purest cinnamon roll. 

~~And now we’ve come to the dreaded Silverflint criticism part of our programming. Please please know and remember this isn’t a criticism of people who ship Silverflint. As I said up top, Your Tomato Is Not My Tomato and that’s cool. Please don’t take this next part as an attack on Silverflint as a fandom ship.~~

My criticism of Steinberg as it relates to Flint is related to:

What a romantic/sexual relationship with Silver being the basis of the tension and plot means for Flint in particular as a gay or mostly mlm man. 

Refusing to confirm Thomas and James being alive at the end and honestly the whole finale in general but like I’ll try and focus.

The major problem I have with Silver and Flint being coded as in love with each other is the implications there in terms of gay men’s relationships to other men. 

From every corner, men are inundated with the idea that any close relationship between them must be gay. That intimacy cannot exist unless there are sexual feelings involved. That a relationship cannot be close, deep and soul shattering and life altering, unless one guy secretly(or not so secretly) wants to bone the other dude. That two men cannot value each other as partners or friends or truly know each other unless they are gay.

Seeing both of the meaningful relationships Flint forms with other men be sexually coded feels a bit the same way as Anne and Max’s sexual assault plotlines does vis-a-vis being wlw. (Even with Gates, Flint never spoke about Thomas or his plans - Silver is absolutely the closest person to Flint besides Thomas and Miranda.) And this is just as true for Silver. Having both Flint and Madi - the two people he trusts - both be people he’s in love with also just feels. I don’t know. 

It feels like a confusion between male intimacy and male love that is so so familiar to me as a gay man I could choke on it. Where they wanted these men to have a deep and really lasting connection, but could only figure out how to do it if they were in love. Friendship wouldn’t have been enough - only romantic and sexual love is enough for the gay man(or men, at all).

Just because it isn’t queerbaiting doesn’t mean it’s good rep, and I would have liked to see truly deep male friendships that did not center on sexual attraction - particularly for Flint as a confirmed mlm(and Silver too, if you’re counting him. The same arguments for why I dislike Flint being paired with Silver are also true in the reverse.) 

Even if both Flint and Silver were confirmed mlm I still would have LOVED to see a platonic relationship between them. In fact I would have loved that EVEN MORE. Men! Who fuck men! Not needing to fuck each other to be important to one another! Who made this. Very delicious. 

But because there weren’t any queer writers on the show, writers who understand this kind of struggle that gay and mlm men face, they thought ‘oh, let’s also have them be in love with each other. More gay rep is better gay rep, right?’ False. THOUGHTFUL gay rep is better gay rep.

Okay and here’s my last thing. The fact that Steinberg refuses to say whether or not the explicitly mlm men are alive at the end of the show - that the words he specifically uses are ‘up for interpretation’ is. Fuck, it’s gross, okay? It’s fucking gross. 

I have been around enough men, enough people in power, enough people with leverage who also know how to play the field, to know that when someone wants a group’s support but does not agree with them, their go to phrasing is that it is ‘up for debate’ or ‘up for interpretation.’

Say the gays are alive. Steinberg refusing to acknowledge the reality of the ending of his show to maintain his own sense of artistic integrity is what, honestly, really sets me off about him and I don’t care if this is a nuanced take.

Like yes, death of the author. I honestly don’t care if he thinks they’re dead or alive. What I care about is that he thinks he can get away with being clever and leaning hard into a story is true/untrue’ - doesn’t realize what the implications of that are, and didn’t when he was writing, and didn’t have anyone else in the room who would think about it either. 

ANYWAY. So this is....my long drawn out explanation for why I do not like Steinberg. Uhhhhh tune in next week for more of my totally unpopular opinions!

[jaynovz]

sleepover questions: S4 black sails vs. S3 hannibal (final seasons)? In terms of vibes/ overall anticipation/ emotional investment/ finale?

Okay first off, wow, thank you for this question. Also, it is a Big Fucking Question, so imma ramble a lot.

So if we want to compare the seasons as a whole to each other, Black Sails is the better written show, just in general. As much as I love Hannibal, I think it falls too far into purple, abstract or otherwise overly metaphoric dialogue and uhhh sequence of events. And character motivations. There are many times it goes off rails as far as making any kind of sense, even viewing it from like, a fairytale pov. Like listen I love the aesthetics, the over-the-top artistic high concept-ness of it all. It’s weird and pretty and violent and I love it. But. The story meanders a lot lol. There are very few moments like that for me in Black Sails, it's a tighter written story.

Example: Jack Crawford's and Alana Bloom's motivations/decisions at the end of s3. They know Hannibal and they know Will very well at this point. The idea of letting Hannibal go for the purposes of baiting the Red Dragon, even if they’re hoping Hannibal will die in the process? Not a gamble they should take. They’re not shown to be stupid characters so like. Why? Well cuz we have to for the plot, but yeah. That’s just one example. Also, like, let’s level here. Some of the dialogue in Hannibal is an exercise in a headache. It sounds pretty and deep but at times, it doesn’t actually mean anything, or it just makes very little sense for the current topic of discussion. Perhaps unpopular opinion. I’ve been mulling this for six years and have two English degrees and there are plenty of lines that I cannot contort into something that makes sense.

The best example of character motivations making little sense but needing to happen for Plot in Black Sails-- Billy Bones in s4 siding with Rogers/turning on his brothers. Yeah Silver makes them all betray him and he’s angry. But fucking off would have made more sense at that point. The Billy who says “they don’t see us as men or even animals," that guy then making the decision to team up with Rogers (the representation of the civilization that wants to exterminate men like Billy) and like literally picking his former brothers off with muskets in the water??? Anathema to his previous character. Perhaps we can argue that the destruction of his previous self, twisting inside out to become something opposite is the point. And I can see that. But also, it’s very “for reasons of Treasure Island, Silver and Flint have to have a falling out and Billy teaming up with Rogers is how we get there.” That is another perhaps unpopular opinion. -shrug-

As far as pacing-- Hannibal s3 had to shove so much time (there are two time skips, one after the end of Mizumono and another in the middle of the season after Hannibal is arrested)/content into its last season b/c of the cancellation. We have the first half as the Italy arc and the second half as the Great Red Dragon arc as well as the End of the Whole Show. You can tell the story wasn't really ready to end and had to be rushed. I still think the ending is pretty damn good considering, but you can feel how crammed it is.

Whereas BS had everything planned out, the creators considered a 5th season and decided ultimately that it could adequately play out in 4th one. I think s4 of Black Sails is a nearly unassailable tragedy. It’s a lovely spiral into the end, where each decision puts another nail in the coffin. Parallels create multilayered meaning, plot points interweave beautifully, and pretty much all of the loose ends tie up wonderfully.

Okay so as for the finales/endings--I've previously talked about how both finales are ostensibly tragedies, both can ostensibly be interpreted multiple ways.

So for Hannibal we're shown the cliff dive so it's like, did they survive? Well the show gives us evidence that they perhaps did by showing Bedelia with her cooked leg on the table and two empty chairs. We don't see Hannibal and Will there, so I've seen arguments against their survival, that she did it herself maybe. (that seems like it might be impossible to pull off, but honestly, the show is all about impossible murder tableaux so -handwave-) But she grabs the oyster fork as if to stab somebody so that seems unlikely. It is left open-ish, but I think the interpretation that makes the most sense at that point is that one or both of them survived to chop off Bedelia's leggy.

The Black Sails finale is also left open and there's less indication than in Hannibal as to which is the True ending. There are good arguments for both Flint lives/goes to the plantation being true and Silver killing him in the forest being true. On the one hand, Silver tells Madi what “happened” in Savannah, so y’know, he’s Silver, the quintessential Storyteller, so it could all be an elaborate falsehood. Just another story that’s true b/c he says it. But, on the other hand, outside of that, the Flint lives ending is supported if we take Treasure Island as a continuation of the tv show. In the book, Billy Bones needs to go get a map to the treasure from Flint, so that assumes he lives at least til then.

However, I think the show as a whole is implying that perhaps Treasure Island is itself not a trustworthy tale, that it’s just the “distorted narrative that ppl tell their children” as per Dragons Speech. So like, Treasure Island was the real fanfiction all along? Can we trust anything? We get the direct cut from Silver telling Madi what “happened” with Flint to Rackham’s “a story is true, a story is untrue” speech. It’s very very deliberate that we’re supposed to question.

Flint dies is supported by a lot of things, as mentioned. The last time we actually See him that isn’t Silver’s narration of events, it’s standing in the forest on Skeleton Island with Silver pointing the pistol at him. And Flint seems very much intractable, like, he really doesn’t seem in a state of mind to surrender. As many fics as I’ve read where we see the missing scene of Silver saying “Thomas Hamilton is alive,” that’s not canon, yknow? It’s ambiguous. And uh. The birds. There’s a direct cut from Flint and Silver standing there, the gun pointed at Flint, to Hands, Ben Gunn, et al looking over towards where they were, as we see some birds spook and fly away. We don’t hear a gun shot, the birds could have been spooked by anything, right? Not necessarily a gun shot. 😔

So yes, moreso than Hannibal where I feel like the “ambiguous” ending is actually fairly clear, Black Sails really does turn us for a loop. You can go in circles trying to figure it out. But really just choose your own adventure, as Rackham says, it’s the stories we want to believe aight.

Okay, next part. As far as like overall anticipation-- I had a very different experience with Hannibal than I did with Black Sails. 

I watched s3 of Hannibal as it aired whereas I binged Black Sails s1-4 in like... a week. So I had my fucking hand over my mouth watching the Hannibal finale live as it aired, I was right there with everyone else, and there wasn’t a huge fan finale reaction ready-made for me to dive into. 

For Black Sails, y’know, it was Dec 2020, three years since the show had finished, and there was TONS of post-series content to help me process. I dunno if you can say I anticipated Black Sails b/c I watched it so fast. Honestly after I watched the first time I was in a stupor trying to process it. I really would recommend new-comers to consume it uhhh slower. But yeah, I was forming my own thoughts kind of after wading through existing fanfiction, fanart, meta for Black Sails. For Hannibal, it was very different and I had to kind of process in a vacuum, if that makes sense.

Talking more about the final seasons comparatively--we knew where Black Sails was going (as far as Silver and Flint) from the very beginning, it’s a prequel to Treasure Island (again, make of that what you will, the real fanfiction all along). And whereas THEORETICALLY Hannibal begins as a prequel to the Red Dragon book, it zooms past that point and starts forging its own path, using elements from the book Hannibal as well as Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal Rising. Therefore it ceases to be a prequel and becomes more like a transformative adaptation. Thus the ending was a big question mark and it came as more of a shock, for me at least.

For Silver and Flint, I knew the betrayal was going to happen and though I was like, hoping against hope it might be different, it was more like bargaining than any real doubt.

I would say I’m emotionally invested in equally intense amounts for both shows and both ships. Hannibal is a long burning favorite and I criticize it so much because I fucking adore it. Black Sails is the new hotness, but I know already that it has staying power. I do think I like Black Sails a little more now, which is something I never thought I’d say. But again, it’s a tighter narrative. It has beautiful symbolism, dialogue, and its own artistic vision but it doesn’t sacrifice the plot to see it through. 

But honestly, it’s a hard question. I really do appreciate them in very different ways. As much as I like to compare them, they have different strengths. 

Okay, well, that’s all for now! Thanks for asking!

[skzloona]

White Entitlement and Doctor Who: AKA Why I Like The Timeless Child

TW: Discussion of real life racially motivated medical abuse, general racism. This may hurt sensitive white feelings.

At the end of series 12 of the British sci-fi show Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker's Doctor discovers that she has a secret past she was unaware of. Erased from her mind by her own people, the Gallifreyans. In a series of flashbacks we see a young Doctor. She's a little Black girl, standing alone below a portal that presumably leads to whatever Universe she called home. She's lost and alone. We don't know if she was abandoned by her family or simply separated from them by an unfortunate accident. She's then found by Tecteun, an adult white woman who was one of the earliest inhabitants of Gallifrey, the very planet the Doctor believed to be their own. She adopts the child Doctor and becomes a sort of mother to her. This seems, at first, like the act of a selfless person. She's taking in a child she doesn't know, who would most likely die without her. A happy ending.

But that's not where the story ends. As the Doctor plays outside with another child on Gallifrey she falls from a cliff. Instead of this being fatal she regenerates, just as the Doctor and other Timelords have been known to do throughout the history of the show. Her body is remade into a young Asian boy. Tecteun sees this and her first thought is to solve this mystery. We see The Doctor, now a little boy, sitting in a chair in a lab as his mother does tests on him. We're shown a montage of various regenerations of the Doctor, many of them children of color. It wasn't until after the episode ended that I thought back and wondered "how did this child end up in so many lethal situations while Tecteun remains alive and well?" which suggests that this might not be a series of accidents but purposeful results of the experiments being done on the Doctor by their own mother figure. What seemed to be a miracle before has turned into a nightmare that evoked in me the memories of similar events in real world history. 

Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who, in the 1950s, was being treated for her cervical cancer. Some of the cells of her tumor were biopsied by Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. These cells went on to create the HeLa cell line, the oldest and most impactful immortalized cell line in history. Without getting into too much medical jargon, the effect this had on the medical field was immeasurable. The problem? Lacks never gave her consent to have these cells taken, nor was she even informed that it happened. She was also never compensated for it despite the cells being used shortly after to craft the Polio Vaccine. Henrietta died in 1951, never knowing about these cells or what they did for world medicine. Her family wasn't even made aware until 25 years later. Henrietta's story is not unique. Countless black and brown people in history and in the present have been subject to experiments by medical science. Most of them without consent and without compensation. 

In 1932 the United States Public Health Service conducted a medical study called the Tuskegee Study. They told 600 African American men in poverty that they would be receiving free health care from the federal government. 399 of these men had latent syphilis. They were told this study would last 6 months. In reality it was 40 years. These men believed they would be cared for by medical professionals. Instead they were left uniformed of the disease they had (they were merely told they had "bad blood"). None of them were treated with penicillin, despite it becoming the common treatment for syphilis by 1947. By the time the study ended in 1972, 128 men had died of syphilis or related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected with the illness, and 19 babies were born with congenital syphilis. 

These stories were at the front of my mind during the course of this episode. After finally unlocking the secret to the Doctor's regeneration, Tecteun uses it as the foundation for all of Gallifreyan society, giving them all the power to regenerate. The ability to evade death. This power is what leads to Gallifrey being the most powerful and formidable race in the Universe. And what becomes of the Doctor? Their memory is erased. The Doctor's very DNA is used to build a dominant society, without their consent, without their knowledge, and without gaining anything in return. The Doctor becomes who we know them as; an outcast and a misfit. Someone who doesn't fit in with everyone else they know and doesn't know why. Everything about this story connected with me. It connected with my family, with my ancestors, and with the knowledge I have of what other people of color have gone through.

It wasn't surprising to me that some others wouldn't enjoy this plot change. After all, a large subset of the fan base already dropped the show simply because Jodie Whittaker, a white woman, was cast as the 13th Doctor. They thought it was too "PC" and "pandering" even then. I had already decided to pay those people no mind. What was surprising was that many of my supposedly "woke" friends also hated this finale. I saw countless tumblr posts, tweets, and messages declaring that the Doctor was officially "not relatable" anymore. They felt personally hurt that the Doctor was no longer what they saw as a normal person. They called it a "chosen one" story or even a "Mary Sue" (a character with so many things that are special about them that real people can no longer relate their experience to them). This entire concept was frustrating to me. Here I was, feeling connected to this character as a person of color for the first time in its entire 50 year run and other people were treating this as universally and inherently bad. They were calling the Doctor's history of abuse and memory loss,  things that happen to children in real life, "special". Many were saying it should be left ambiguous, that it should never have been stated that these mostly nonwhite people were actually their beloved character. Effectively saying that people should be able to decide whether or not the Doctor has ever been black. 

In no way am I saying everyone must enjoy or love this plot twist. Afterall, it's a big change. But to me, it screams White Entitlement to throw a blanket over the whole thing and say nobody could have enjoyed it. Nobody could find this new plot relatable simply because they couldn't. What they fail to realize is that not everybody will relate to every story and sometimes that's the whole point. This story was clearly created to be something more people of color could relate to than white viewers. To put them front and center for the first time in a show that is half a century long. It's okay if you don't personally connect to one major plot line of a character after all those years of them being made precisely for you. It feels reminiscent of the one spoiled, rich kid who's birthday you went to as a child who cried because instead of getting all 30 cookies in the box, they had to give one to each of the 10 other kids and had a mere 20 left to call their own. I assure you you'll have more Who stories to relate to next time around. It was just our turn, after waiting for so long without one. Perhaps it's time to share your cookies with the other kids who never got to taste them before. You don't have to love the idea of sharing them, but it might not be very kind to complain loudly about how much you wish you had gotten them all. Like the Doctor said, remember to always be kind. 

[nanowrimo]

5 Tips for Finishing Your Novel

April’s session of Camp NaNoWriMo is drawing to a close, and you might find yourself nearing the end of your novel. If you need some tips on writing and polishing the ending of your story, author Derek Murphy is here to share a few! Plus, you can check out the rest of our novel-finishing resources on our #NaNoFinMo page. 

You won NaNoWriMo and have a 50k collection of scenes and sentences, but how do you clean it up and get it done? How do you make sure it’s finished, satisfying and enjoyable? Here are 5 powerful strategies for finishing your novel and some helpful writing tips that will push you past the finish line.

1. Give it a satisfying resolution.

In order to have a powerful story, your book should probably focus on a main character’s change or transformation. There’s an inner war, a.k.a. the character’s emotional healing, and an outer war: the conflict that forced the reckoning. If it’s a purely symbolic internal realization, you can mirror that with actual conflict in the real scene: the breaking of a dish, a fit of rage, a sudden ray of sunlight (or a storm… this should not be pleasant; It’s a breaking point and spiritual death/rebirth).

You can clarify the moment of change by setting up an illustrative contrast, a before and after, that shows how those internal changes have resulted in real-world consequences or benefits. Each character’s unique challenge will match their personal weakness or fear. The price for victory is the one thing they have so far refused to do, or something they cannot give up or bear to lose.

Make sure your protagonist has gone through a transformative struggle to arrive at deep insights, knowledge or awareness. Find a way to deepen the incidental scenes so that they become instrumental to a deeper purpose, leading towards an identity-shifting event.

The plot is what happens, and it’s important. But you can make it more dramatic and meaningful by making sure you demonstrate how hard it was and what it cost. It matters, it is remarkable, because it forced your protagonist to change.

Your conclusion might include:

Physical tension as allies perform a tug-of-war battle against resistance, that shows how difficult this struggle is, and how much force is required.

The consideration phase, as characters are tempted last minute or the price for victory is revealed: the sweet memories that give them awareness that this fight is worth the cost or risk (you need to show them making the choice, knowing what they will lose).

The final flashback, as the full backstory is revealed so we can see exactly why this conflict is so difficult or meaningful for the main character.

2. Add (unresolved) conflict.

Your story is made up of the events and scenes, where something happens. Each new event will push the characters further into the plot. Slow scenes where nothing is really happening can be red flags, so the first thing to focus on is increasing conflict, drama, suspense and intrigue. This is what creates urgency. The full reveal, demonstrating why THIS challenge is so difficult and powerful, should happen just before the final battle or resolution.

You want to make sure every scene, especially in your conclusion, has enough conflict. I recommend these three:

Outer Conflict (threats): Challenges or obstacles that prevent the character from achieving goals.

Inner Conflict (doubts): Moral struggles, decisions, guilt or shame, anger.

Friendly Fire (betrayal): Strong disagreements between allies or supporting characters. 

You want to extend and deepen the potential conflict, without resolving it too easily. The biggest destroyer of conflict is conversation: when your characters just sit around and talk to each other. Most conflict involves a lack of information, and a desire for clarity. A lot of conflict is perceived or imagined.

The most important information needs to come last, and come at a great price. The information that has an emotional impact, and influences their actions and decisions, should be big reveals at dramatic peaks. A surprise or twist should be treated as an event: each scene is leading towards a change or new piece of information that provokes the protagonist to respond.

3. Fill plot holes with character motivation.

After you’ve made sure that “what actually happens” is intriguing (opening questions and raising tensions without resolving them) you can focus on making sure the plot holes are filled, and characters are properly motivated – these two things are usually adjacent.

You can find and fill plot holes by asking:

Why are the characters doing this?

Why does any of it matter?

Basically, readers need to respect the main characters enough to care what happens to them, so their choices and actions need to make sense within the given information. If there’s a simpler, easier solution, readers will get stuck up on “why didn’t they just…”? To fix plot holes and gaps in logic or continuity, or make the story go where you need it to, you can add urgency, fix the mood of the scene (bigger stakes require bigger justifications), show characters in a weakened mental state, or raise concerns but have them dismissed, with an excuse or justification.

You need rational characters to make plausible choices that lead to dire consequences. You need show why they don’t do something easier, or nothing at all, or why they face clear challenges, despite potential obstacles.

They’ll also require a deeper motivation, for why they’re willing to put themselves in identity-destroying conflict, rather than just giving up or running away. Why do they stay in THIS fight, when they’ve run from similar ones? If they weren’t ready at the beginning, why are the ready now – what changed in them, as a result of your story’s journey?

Your protagonist needs to have a strong, consistent internal compass, and it needs to be revealed through incidents that establish their character. This is who they are. Without this reliable core identity, we won’t be able to tell a story that forces them to change. 

4. Let readers picture your story with detailed description.

In the final stages of revision, you can begin improving the description with specific details.

It’s smart to start – or end – a chapter with a vivid, immediate scene. You want to leave readers with an image they can see in their minds, hopefully connected to the feeling you aim to evoke. You can close a chapter with a reference back to a motif or image, with a deeper or more reflective context; applying meaning to the metaphor. This will help readers feel engaged, be moved, and leave a lasting impact.

Vivid scenes are mostly a matter of detailed description, so add the specifics about the story environment. Be precise, not vague. Instead of “she put a plate of tea and snacks on the table” you can write “she gently placed an antique porcelain teapot on the table. I could smell it was Earl Grey from the scent of bergamot. The half-sleeve of Oreos and can of onion-flavored Pringles seemed incongruous with the fancy dishes, but I knew she was making an effort to welcome me.”

Focus on the sensations and feelings; but also zero-in on any potential sources of conflict or internal emotions or states of mind. In my example above, the host might be nervous or ashamed of her spread; or perhaps she has a degenerative brain disease and doesn’t notice the incongruity. Tensions are unspoken, potential sources of negative feelings. They hover in the background of your description.

Readers will remember the pictures you put in their heads, not the words on the page.

Description should serve and be bound to the story, not distract from it.

It should be squeezed into and around the scene action, when the protagonist is using or exploring.

Show what’s different, not what’s the same.

Leave space for readers to fill in the gaps, but get them started in the right direction so they aren’t surprised later.

Sidenote: be careful about your metaphors, analogies and similes. Each one will put a picture into readers’ minds, and it can quickly get overcrowded with imagery. You’re asking them to ignore your real scene and think of something else. Use them to confirm and amplify the scene you have, and limit distractions.

5. Prepare to publish.

Typos are bad, but perfectionism will ruin you. This section is about editing and proofreading, but I don’t have time for all that, and you don’t either. The real problem with a story is rarely the number of typos. A very clean book isn’t better if people stop reading.

You can solve a lot of common writing problems, with my big list of 25 common writing mistakes, and self-edit your manuscript to make it as good as possible. After that, a copyeditor or proofreader isn’t always the best investment (and it can also be the biggest publishing cost).

Instead, use an editing software (I like Grammarly) to root out obvious mistakes, but don’t dwell on the small stuff like perfecting every word or rearranging the commas. Spending a very long time wrestling a poorly-written manuscript in shape is less effective than getting something (actually) done to the point where you’re comfortable sharing it.

This may be difficult at first, but you can’t learn and improve without genuine reader feedback (from people who aren’t your mom or best friend; nor the short-sighted opinions of a self-proclaimed literature enthusiast). You need to find readers who enjoy your particular genre, and the sooner you find them, the more valuable feedback you can get.

Shorten the feedback loop: Get over the fear and focus on learning by getting feedback early and often. However, this doesn’t just mean joining a writer’s club: writers are brutal and might focus on trivial things. The safest bet is to make it public, on Wattpad at least. Or get a cheap cover and throw it up on Kindle, Draft2Digital or even your own blog.

Making it public is scary and vulnerable, but it’s better than letting the fear of messing up keep you from the brutal, necessary experience of allowing readers to tell you what they liked and disliked about your writing. Will some people be critical? Yes! But guess what, you’ll get negative reviews even if you’re a brilliant, famous writer. Those are inevitable. And the first negative reviews may teach you more about writing than 10 years attempting to self-edit, afraid of putting your book out into the world.

PS. You can use resources, like my 24-chapter plot outline, as a way to spot story gaps in your manuscript and improve the structure (especially if your book suffers from a “soggy middle.)

Derek Murphy has a PhD in Literature, writes urban fantasy and is the founder of the alliance of young adult authors. More recently, he’s started sharing writing tips on http://www.writethemagic.com

Top photo by Adegbenro Emmanuel Dipo on Unsplash.

[gamer2002]

Super Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair - Review2002

Super Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a sequel to Danganronpa that focuses on a new cast that, this time around, is trapped on a tropical island. The game is an improvement when it comes to writing, mechanics (mostly), characters, and executing own premise. It’s pretty much a perfect sequel that is a genuinely good game.

Like in the first game, we have a set of cases where one of participants of the killing game commits murder and tries to frame somebody else for their crime. This time around, our main character is Hajime Hinata, who doesn’t remember his own Ultimate Talent. Hajime is much better main character than Makoto, not just because of an intriguing mystery about him, but also because of being a better character with a better story. Sure, since Makoto was a painfully generic goodie-goodie, it isn’t saying much. And, Hajime isn’t really an outstanding character. But he is relatable, sympathetic, and funny, as the only sane man in the cast. He does a good job as a protagonist, while going through his own journey. He actually experiences far more hardship and Despair™ than Makoto did in his game. Which is why, at the end, you really want the guy to overcome it.

The gameplay also has improved, mostly. I like new blue statements in the Nonstop Debate. I like new trial minigames, though Rebuttal Showdown is more a neat idea than a good execution (you can’t really focus on what the characters are saying). I like that now, from the start, there is some logic element in the rhythm minigame. The so-called Improved Hangman’s Gambit is an overcomplex crap, though.

Outside of trials, the game also has improved acquiring new skills. Now you gather skill points from Free Time events, and you can spend them on buying available skills from a list. You can also unlock characters’ skills, by maxing out their Free Time events. It’s a much better system that gives you more control over gaining new skills. And you also have more control when it comes to getting presents, as you can buy few from a vendor machine, or spend coins on rolling random ones. Acquiring coins is also improved. Now you don’t need to examine same locations all over again, you just hunt hidden Monokumas. You can also get coins from taking care of Tamagotchi.

Music is pretty much the same, with just few new tracks. Island is much more interesting environment than the school. Direction is also more interesting during the trials. And also, we have better characters, but I will elaborate on that later on. There is still meme writing with hope and despair, but it is twisted into something far more interesting.

There are flaws, tho. I say that finale, while it had great last third, was exposition-heavy and also was relying on pretty heavy retcons. The world lore is expanded on, but is pretty unimpressive. But I still say - it’s a good game. A ridiculously animu edgy shonen that relies on selling underage waifus and a shock value, which can be not to your tastes, but a good one. The previous game was just fun, which means that you could enjoy it despite its flaws. The sequel fixes quite a lot of flaws, and also improves its strengths. And one of such strengths is its set up that allows to experience brutal treatment of likable kids. Yeah, the kids actually earn that they can be called likable, this time around.

It is an 8/10 game, even though I maybe should have given it a half point lower. I enjoyed it a lot more than the original, and also was more moved by it. I think that sequels that strive to improve the series deserve recognition.

But now, to expand on my review, I’m going to tell more why Danganronpa 2 gives us better cast than the first game, and why it is such a good sequel. In the spoiler section, I’ll be focusing on the new, much better, villain, and expand my thoughts on the game’s finale. So, let’s start with the characters…

Prepare them likable before the slaughter

In this game Danganronpa finds its strength as a series, which lies in its set up that allows building up likable characters, before brutally killing them off. While the new cast is still is mostly a bunch of two dimensional ridiculous stereotypes, they are more likable and useful to the player. Because they actually try to be.

The first cast wasn’t really good at giving us reasons to like or respect them, with two or three exceptions. Especially if you didn’t happen to make free time events with them. Most treated Makoto like a pushover (albeit deservingly), or plainly neutral at best. The motives, while understandable, were just realistically understandable, not sympathetic. Most of those that didn’t end up being killers still mostly focused on self-survival than improving anybody’s else situation. It wasn’t a group of people you’d be happy to live with, let alone be locked with. It wasn’t even much of a group. Even in the final case, after everything that survivors went through, Monokuma still could make them turn against one another with a rather unimpressive trick. While it’s realistic that kids in such situation would be self-centered, even if they didn’t end up becoming killers, such characters’ deaths rather can’t make you feel devastated. Not you can feel glad over their survival. Even if you happened to like their personalities, which is subjective anyway.

Hajime has better relationships with his cast. Only Fuyuhiko and Hiyoko (after her personality has shifted from killer of little animals into a foulmouthed shortie) ever treated him like crap, but they were like that towards everyone. And one of them had proper character development. Everyone else was neutral towards Hajime at worst, not best. One character has noticed Hajime’s reliability, and asked him for help with keeping security of others. Other character wanted to watch girls on the beach with him. I also don’t remember the first cast to mourn the deceased ones as much as the second cast does. Neither I remember them trying much to be supportive to those that were feeling down. The motives that are meant to be understandable are also more sympathetic, so even the killers are more likable.

And the usefulness? Let’s do a spoiler-free comparison of both first cases. In the first game, everyone, but one person, falls for the set up that framed Makoto. During the investigation, aside from the most reliable person in the cast, nobody really was much of any help, excluding one person witnessing something helpful. During the trial, Makoto had just one ally to count on, until he managed to clear himself from wrongful suspicion. But even afterwards, the trial was still carried by just two people. It doesn’t help the mystery wasn’t really complex.

The second game? The situation isn’t better just because nobody is wrongfully accusing Hajime. Excluding the two smartest characters in the cast, three Ultimates use their talents during the investigation, and each provides us with useful information. There are also two others that were screwing around, but still accidentally allowed us to learn something of use. During the trial, everyone tried to be involved, and just one character was briefly idiotic about it. Other than that, mistakes happened, but they were understandable due to the crime’s complexity.

The difference in the first impression is pretty self-evident, and that was just the start. Needless to say, 2nd game’s emotional peak is higher than the 1st game’s. Actually, more disturbing and sad things are happening in the 2nd game. And that’s where Danganronpa can shine. While this game can turn people off for being a ridiculous animu nonsense, when you get past that, you do get likable and pretty useful characters that experience terrible things. This is what this series has to offer, with the writers realizing that in their second game. Because, let’s face it, most of the first game’s cast were either caricatures, or had no proper chance to shine. 

But this game isn’t just what the first game should have been. It is also what its sequel should be.

How to sequel

There are three kinds of sequel: betrayals, cash-ins, and genuinely good ones. Danganronpa 2 is the last one. An example of a cash-in sequel is second Ace Attorney game, Ace Attorney: Justice For All, which is my least favorite game in the series.

JFA is pretty much everything you’d expect from an Ace Attorney sequel, and that’s simply not good enough. While it’s always nice to be able to follow the story further, long-runners are popular for a reason, good sequels are more than that. They are supposed to do more than just deliver another set of cases that are rather similar to the previous game. They are supposed to give us a better rival than just watered down amalgam of previous ones, but with boobs and a whip. Expansions are more of the same, sequels are meant to have a game-changing aspect to them. And it’s not supposed to be only used as the final case’s main gimmick. An example of good sequel is Virtue Last Reward, because it uses the concept introduced as a final twist of 999, as the core element of the game. Even Zero Time Dilemma, the disappointing finale of the trilogy, does add an interesting twist to said concept.

Danganronpa 2 is a good sequel because it improves a lot from the previous entry. The main character actually has an interesting story that isn’t just “an optimistic guy tries to remain optimistic, so he does”. A new setting allows for more different murder mystery set-ups. Ultimate Talents are frequently used during crimes and investigations. And, like I’ve said earlier, many game mechanics are improved. And there is also a game-changer.

Years before Among Us becoming popular, I was playing with my friends Battlestar Galactica board game, which is also about managing a space ship with a traitor, known as Cylon, among us (hah). In a way, Danganronpa series is similar to those games, with a killer being a hidden withing the group traitor, that will doom everyone, if remains undetected. Anyway, an expansion to Battlestar added new characters, new environment, and also a game-changer – Cylon Leader, a character that is a known Cylon, but at the same time may be not, due to own mysterious agenda. While regular Cylon players wins when Battlestar Galactica is destroyed, and human players win when they reach their destination, Cylon Leader player was a wild card. At the start of the game, Cylon Leader randomly draws its own secret victory condition. And it not only could go either way, but also had special requirements. A Cylon Leader could want Cylons to win, but only after specific game phase. A Cylon Leader could want humans to win, but only after specific losses of resources. Other players didn’t know Cylon Leader’s exact agenda, only that he could shift sides depending on situation.

That being said, Cylon Leader was a controversial addition to the game, and not every fan liked it. But regardless, it was a game-changer. Which is what Danganronpa 2 offer, by quickly introducing its own Cylon Leader. But that’s for the spoiler section.

The superiority of Hope Man over Despair Thot

Nagito Komaeda is a superior villain to Junko, and this is simply an objective fact. Like you could tell from previous paragraph, he is this game’s Cylon Leader.

When I started the sequel, I’ve already been spoiled that Nagito is a psycho. What I expected was him being the sequel’s hidden in the plain sight Junko, a nice guy that befriends us just to be revealed as the mastermind in the finale. Well, I was wrong about that. In the very first case, Nagito tries to kill somebody, but this is all part of his plan to drive somebody else to murder, because he has no interest in his own survival. The killer was executed, but Nagito remained, declaring own readiness to aid anybody who wants to kill him and escape, at the cost of everyone else. And this put the new cast in a situation the old cast never was.

Some people say that Nagito has Byakuya‘s role from the previous game. But Byakuya was just openly outspoken about wanting to accomplish what every other killer wanted, until he was hit with character development, before delivering anything as an antagonist. Fuyuhiko is more similar to Byakuya. Meanwhile, Nagito delivers, first early, and then later on, after his character development goes wrong, orchestrating the most twisted and personally devastating crime in both games. He successfully forces us to sacrifice the Ultimate Gamer Waifu, how can you get more personal than that?!

But doing twisted and devastating stuff is what Junko is all about, so what makes Nagito better? First of all, even though he has literal good luck superpower, he doesn’t pull things out of his ass. Nagito doesn’t have Junko’s unexplained endless resources, he just finds opportunities in what is available to everyone. Even in case 5, where he has ton of crazy tools, we know that he obtained them during case 4.

Nagito also does have his twisted philosophy. For Pate’s sake, Junko herself admits that causing despair is nothing more than main characteristic of her one-dimensional character. He also does have a past (if you complete his Free Time event), even if it is the Joker-style multiple choices of past. Maybe he lied to Hajime about being terminally ill. Maybe he lied about lying, to motivate Hajime into killing him and escaping. The game never tell us, and this makes it more fascinating.

There are also opinions that Nagito ultimately plays into hand of Junko, nearly delivering her 15 bodies to control. I don’t agree with that. In the event of Chiaki being the sole survivor of her trial, she wouldn’t have a reason nor intention to graduate and allow Junko to take over bodies of the deceased. Neither Makoto and co. would have a reason anymore to risk themselves getting trapped in virtual world. Wrong and twisted as it was, Nagito plan would’ve neutralized Junko, forever trapping her with Chiaki in her virtual prison.

In the end, Nagito is a highly dangerous enemy, a highly useful ally, and a highly unpredictable wild card. He is an interesting character and he actively makes the game more interesting. Did I mention the sequel has Junko again and it is same old, same old? Ok, Junko/Monokum is slightly better now, but she still has many of her old issues.

The good and bad things about the finale

Overall, I liked the finale better than the first game’s, but it had some issues. One problem is that the investigation is an lazy exposition dumb. The first game was better at handling its revelations during its final investigation, as we were receiving more vague clues, not fucking walls of text. Not to mention, there were emotional moments, like Kyoko visiting her father’s office. Here, we are hit with a wall of text after wall of text, and there isn’t any meaningful scene. The only exception was meeting Alter Ego and receiving message from Makoto, but that was it. And those weren’t really strong scenes. The final investigation of the first game did much better job at handling its reveals. Even the final trial was better in the original, until the confrontation with Junko.

Also, retcons. The sequel wants us to believe that Junko, who was easily defeated, was constantly screwing herself over, and whose successes at driving people to murder were more attributed to weak opposition than anything, was the one responsible for the world’s collapse. When I played the first game, I saw Junko as a part of Ultimate Despair, whose task was to infiltrate Hope Peak Academy and broadcast a killing game to lure the groups’ opposition. A high and mighty Doctor No that only works for SPECTRE. But her being a manipulative genius that has turned the entire cast into her devotes? Have you seen her doing that in the first game? Where she could left Aoi devastated and resentful towards everyone, after the 4th trial, but she blew it so hard that fucking Byakuya had a change of heart? Where she was ultimately beaten by Makoto like it was nothing? Please.

That being said, Junko/Monokuma are better in this. Because the game is set in simulation, there is no problem with Junko being able to do whatever. Because the cast has stronger morality than the previous one, she does have to be more cunning with driving them to murder. Junko also sticks better to the rules, even if she is forced to. Her plan and the final dilemma she has for the cast is also actually a good one. But that actually wasn’t Junko anyway, just Junko-based Alter Ego. If I was writing this, I wouldn’t try to retcon a turd villain into something she never had been, I’d just state that Hajime/Izuru was behind everything in the first game and he has used Alter Ego to recreate Junko and lure Makoto and co.

One last complaint about the finale I have is that they retcon Kyoko’s father into a doctor Mengele, without her even reacting to it. The twist itself with the Academy fucking over Hajime was good, but they shouldn’t just carelessly (and without noticing it) turn a character that wasn’t evil, but good-intentional albeit flawed, into a monster that was experimenting on children. Or, at best, a detective family’s failure that had no idea what was happening in the Academy he was running.

After all that complaining, what is good about the finale? Well, things have slowly picked up since it was revealed that Monokuma/Junko wanted the cast to graduate. Everything related to Hajime was also good. The dude really went through a lot, starting from doubts about his lost talent and Nagito’s betrayal, through the revelation that he never had any talent and the loss of Chiaki, up to learning that the Academy has altered his very identity. The idea of everyone from the cast being part of Ultimate Despair was also a good twist, a much better one than “lol, the world is already destroyed”.

Besides that, the last moments of the game have masterfully used gameplay for storytelling. Movies and books can make us feel two things – pain or pleasure. Alternating between those is how stories have impactful twist and turns, causing them to be engaging. But in video games, we can experience a spectrum of feelings that other mediums cannot provide. In games, we can also feel power or powerlessness. And the game’s final gameplay segments put us at start in a state of powerlessness, in form of a choice between bad and worse, then letting us slowly regain power, culminating in a satisfying beat-down of helpless Junko. The point of that section of the game was death and rebirth of Hajime into SSJ Chadiyan, and the game makes you experience all of it.

Also, unlike the previous game, this one makes a proper statement. In the bad and worse situation, where you can either allow the devil to triumph at cost of other people, or become a martyr to stop the devil, what you say is “screw the devil, there’s a chance we will still survive, and we are risk takers!”. This is exactly the statement that the first game should have made. You can’t fall into despair and give up in face of overwhelming hardship. But you can also be betrayed by a false hope of everything working out. But not much can be accomplished without facing the risk and taking your chances, even if you odds are desperately small.

Overall, the finale did drag and relied on retcons, but its climax was truly enjoyable and worthwhile.  

[ramblings-of-a-mad-cat]

I don’t know why but I enjoyed this years Halloween side quest. A lot more than the previous ones at least. Anyways, I wanted to know what your thoughts were on it.

It was a lot of fun! It had a very spooky atmosphere, a very "Halloween" like aura to it, if that makes any sense. I enjoyed it as well. Not sure if I would call it my favorite of the Halloween quests, but it may simply be by default - unless we're counting Lone Wolf. After all, we didn't have to deal with Cecil in this quest, we didn't have to deal with Erling the Great...the source of frustration in this one was....Merula. Who, as everyone knows, I am a fan of. Maybe that's why I enjoyed this one a little more? It has it's problems and I've talked about them with my anons, but by in large...yeah, it was fun.

The fact that they added a new location, and even made it permanent rather than temporary - is a major score for this quest. I loved what this game did with the Burrow and it's such a shame that we can't return whenever we like, because we know it's programmed into the game - but now we can visit Godric's Hollow and considering that people may very well head-canon their MCs as being born there like Harry was - that's a superb addition. It looks terrific, everything about it does, and it really sells the atmosphere. Actually, that's just a general compliment I can give to this quest. It looks fantastic, the colors and set designs are top notch. Only things I don't like are...eh, I guess I don't like that they reuse that creepy art style from Portrait Panic for Godric's Portrait, and Merula's "cursed" look is kind of goofy. Like, the goggles are just kind of an "lol what" moment, but they don't look bad themselves.

The story is well paced and things never feel too fast or too slow, though there is a lot of running around, back and forth to Hogwarts and Godric's Hollow. Character wise, Bathilda does basically disappear from the plot until the final moment but her role was pretty much over anyway - it's far less noticeable than when Ismelda vanishes in the middle of the Sphinx Club TLSQ. From a plot perspective I think this one is pretty concise with the events and reveals, though the actual content of those events and reveals may be controversial, especially if you dislike Merula. Actually, whether or not you like this quest will probably come down to her.

The plot is divided into two Acts. In the first act, Merula is the villain. The goal is to stop her from stealing the sword, pretty straightforward. Our plot twist occurs in the middle with the reveal of Ragnuk, the villain of the second half. I quite like him and felt like he was handled well, but Merula's role in the second act is questionable. She becomes the victim that needs saving, but what she needs saving from is her karmic punishment for her actions in the first act. This kind of plot works for MCs like Luca, who are merciful to a fault and/or in love with Merula...but if you feel like she deserved what she got, you might be questioning why you're spending so much time and energy to help her.

This is somewhat handwaved with the overarching motivation MC has, that being to save the Halloween Feast. I suppose this could feel like a greater reward if they made a bigger deal about the feast at the end. We do get to attend, which is good, but it doesn't feel that different from any other feast - short of the Pumpkin carving coming full circle, which I absolutely loved. Still, if you don't care that much about the feast or feel like it's important in the grand scheme of things (which I kind of didn't) or you resent the authority figures in question for threatening to cancel it needlessly (which I did) this will fall flat for you. Saving Merula was enough of a motivation for this simp™ but that won't apply to everyone. Especially since it’s just a standard Merula story: Where her ego and desire for power lead her astray, and the ending does the bare minimum to suggest that she’s learned anything. Quests like that are a dime a dozen. 

PENNYPENNYPENNYPENNYPENNYPENNYPENNYPENNY - Akemi Stormborn, 2021. Okay no, but seriously, Penny is freaking everywhere in this quest, to the point where she's not even acting in character. I know it's a tired meme at this point that she's overused, and I'm a broken record for saying that she's used in place of Rowan, but...what was up with that hyper-appreciation for the library? The scene with Penny in the library literally felt like Rowan dialogue. There was no reason that she needed to be in this quest as much as she was. Ben had a little bit more reason to be here, as he is a Gryffindor and all...but it's not like they do much with that. No, let's be honest - he and Penny are here because they're Year 1 characters and it's easier to implement them without conflicts. But even if I get why this is done, I'm still getting quite tired of it.

One thing I do like is the use of the potterverse lore, and I wish they had expanded on it even further. Though I can understand being reluctant to involve the Goblins too heavily, considering the controversy...if you're going to tell a story about the contested ownership of Gryffindor's Sword, and you're going to feature a Goblin character...just go with it, you kind of have to. To an extent, they do, but I think this quest might have benefited from a little less Merula Nonsense™ and a little more playing around with exploring Goblin culture and Ragnuk's relationship with Godric. Imagine if the ghost and the portrait spoke to each other, or a comparison was drawn between those two, and MC x Merula's rivalry. In the end, I'm not sure if this quest has a particular message or theme. The idea of legacy is brought up at the end, and it was a very clever way to appease Ragnuk...but how does that relate to Merula's quest, and the Snyde family tradition? I feel like there might be a connection here, between Ragnuk embracing his legacy and Merula rejecting her own? Or starting her own, in place of her family’s? Am I looking into this too much? Either way, maybe there’s a seed of an idea here, but it’s not entirely fleshed out. 

It’s a solid quest, it’s a lot of fun. But I feel like this is largely going to be one of those quests that some will enjoy, but others will hate, based on their feelings about Merula. 

[cynwritess]

My Outlining Technique As A Pantser

I despise outlining with every fiber of my soul. I don’t care how much people persist you need an outline, I will put it off to the very last minute and do it very half-assed. Even in school, its straight to the first draft. Outlining requires a very precise skill of breaking things down as small as possible and my mind simply does not function that way. It’s literally all or nothing. Unfortunately while this may work for writing school essays, it’s not exactly a good idea when it comes to a book. Writing a book requires structure and precision because you need to carefully place information, have an idea where your characters are going, tedious yet necessary things. Fortunately, I’ve come up with a way to outline without completely frying my brain.

Characters. 

I almost always start with the characters first and build the world, other characters, and plot around them. If you have a name in mine, perfect! Go ahead and use it! If you don’t have a name, don’t dread scouring through dozens of baby name websites. Give them a place holder name or better yet, give them a role/title. I’m going to use one of my current characters (steal anything about her and I’ll send demons after you). When I first created Selina I only had a vague aesthetic and the idea that I wanted her to somehow be attached to spirits. Her name didn’t come to me until 25k into the story, but I had to refer to her as something so I used a conjunction of a place holder name and calling her “Reaper of Souls”. This way I know exactly who I’m referring to. Also, this helps me know what path my character needs to go down. Reaper of Souls is who she’ll become, but its definitely not who she is when the story begins. It makes me thing: What steps do I need to take to get her there? This is where you can start brainstorming character arcs and give them trauma. 

Another essential part of creating characters in my opinion is giving them “role models”. Personally, if this is a brand new character I’m creating off the top of my head its hard to write them because I know nothing about them. I don’t know their sense of humor, who they would and wouldn’t get along with, their inner monologue, etc. Now you have to be careful with this and make sure to mold them into their own unique characters at the end of the day, but you can use other already existing characters to help begin the process. When creating Selina I knew vaguely she needed to be connected to spirits. What characters do I know like that? Jodie from Beyond Two Souls is a good one and Zelie is a bit of a different twist to it but still the same general idea. But wait! Selina’s vibe doesn’t match either of them. So in this case I might look at Jude Duarte for inspiration for her personality. Nitpick all your favorite things about different characters and use that to your advantage! It gives you the jolt you need to really begin to explore who your character is. 

Always do the main character first, then follow with the supporting character or villain. In my opinion, the main supporting character and villain should be foils of the main character in order to get the most out of each one, because you’ll be able to see different aspects and different arcs they could’ve/will have. Once you have those three characters you can create the others as you progress with your story.

Setting.

This can either be really simple or your worst fucking nightmare. For me, it’s a mixture of both. If your story is taking place in the real world then this can be relatively simple even if you’re creating your own town/city. If your town has a very specific location like a town square or maybe there’s a river running through it, then just google “towns with a river going through it” for a start. If you have a specific town in mind you can also google the map and start dissecting different aspects of the town and incorporating it into your own. You can even use your own town for inspiration! The town my story takes place in is made up, but my hometown actually resembles it quite a bit so I’ve been using it for references. So far, its been working out pretty good.

Now if you have a high fantasy setting... I wish you the best of luck. I’ve only written one high fantasy story when I was twelve and... well clearly its never seen the light of day for a reason (partially because I deleted it, partially because there was absolutely zero world-building). I’m sorry to say my skills have no improved much since then. I’ve dabbled with the idea of high fantasy worlds and honestly my only advice is to look at other fantasy maps and draw inspiration from that. Narnia, Ravka, the ACOTAR world, the shifting isles of Elfhame, the Avatar universe, Orisha, to name a few. You’ll also have to look at some basic geographical stuff like the climate, but overall you have pretty much free reign over how your world looks. This is the one part I feel like you can’t bullshit if you don’t want your story to seem halfway. Really go in with the details even if its just for you. The more fleshed out your world is, even if its set here in the normal world, the better.

The main issue. 

This is pretty much a given but you do need to have some sort of idea who the main antagonist is/what is the big issue your characters are fighting. If you’re writing a series then chances are book one will probably focus on an entirely different issue before the big one is revealed. There’s not really much advice I can give for this because it’ll be tailored specifically to your story. I don’t think your antagonist has to be fully fleshed out if you’re going to be introducing them very late, but do have a general idea who or what it is, their goal, and why your character feels the need to stop them.

Usually you’ll notice the problem in the beginning of the story isn’t the ultimate problem, its just a gateway to it. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a subplot but I guess technically that’s what it is. Think of Percy Jackson. The main issue of book one is him being accused of stealing the lightning bolt, but the ultimate issue was the war with the titans. Or The Cruel Prince. The main issue was Jude feeling helpless and wanting to create a place for herself in the faery world, but the ultimate issue was those attempting overthrowing the entire Greenbriar family from the thrown. 

This kind of goes without saying, but there has to be a strong motivation for the character to stop them or it just won’t work. You don’t see characters going after the antagonist because nothing in their life isn’t threatened. There’s always a motivation, something to fuel them even if done so reluctantly. For example, Zelie from Children of Blood and Bone was sick and tired of constantly fighting and being the hero, but she did it anyways because she was the only one who could truly help the maji. Or you can take a slightly antagonistic approach and look at Kaz from Six of Crows who did what he did out of greed for money, power, and revenge. Usually when I begin my stories, I only have a vague idea as to why my main character is joining the fight, which is perfectly fine. As long as you have some sort of idea and begin to build on it as you write, you’ll be probably be fine. 

Brainstorm.

I cannot for the life of me sit in front of my computer and write a bland summary of what it is that is going to happen in my book. Sorry, but I am simply not built that way but it also makes writing your books ten times harder as well. I’ve found a bit of a cheat. For one, brainstorm. Get a general idea what some of the main events you want to happen are. Do you want a character death? Does a specific location need to be mentioned? Is there subplots or character arcs you would like to explore? Is there any themes you’d like to explore? Jot them all down, along with your word count goal. You probably won’t be able to incorporate all of them in one book, but at least you’ll have an idea what path you’re going to head down in terms of your story.

And now onto my actual cheat. Because I’m a pantser who hates outlining, I usually jump into my stories without knowing what direction they are going. Recently I’ve discovered that I can outline the first five chapters, write them out, and give myself complete free reign. I’ll explore all sorts of character personalities, different beginnings, different writing styles, different scenarios, different relationships, anything I can realistically include in the first five chapters of my story. Then I’ll go back and edit it. Don’t completely delete anything, always save it in a separate file! I’ll go back and decide which characters are unnecessary at this point, what plot points can be introduced later on, what writing style suits this story, things like that. Then from there, I’ll go back to my outline and make any appropriate changes before proceeding to write the rest of the draft as normal (WITHOUT GOING BACK TO EDIT). The reason why I do this is because I need a solid base to begin my story, otherwise its so easy for me to go off track and begin to tell a completely different story. This way I’ll know exactly what I’m going after, I’ll be able to explore and get to know my characters and setting, and it’s enough chapters that I can even begin to incorporate the main issue at hand. 

[forgottenluck]

So I am finally caught up on Arise. I’ll admit, going into it I was apprehensive, and I know very little about how the game actually plays so i can’t judge it on a gameplay point....

So what follows is my Personal opinion on it, and if you don’t like it, then that’s your fault. I’ll post it under a readmore, but i’ll try to avoid spoilers...will still tag it as spoilery though, since i know many haven’t finished the game.

Beware, this got a lot longer than I expected.

I personally believe that Arise is one of the weakest of the tales games. I can’t say much for the mobile games, and i”ve heard good things about them so i may go and try to look into them....but from the games that I’m familiar with, Arise has the weakest plotline.

I’ll start with what I liked about the game though.

It’s story had genuine moments that surprised me. They were well written moments, that stood out in a positive way. I think some of the characters have extremely good character growth, and very real situations. One of the most surprising was Dohalim. I’m genuinely impressed by how he grows through the game, and the ending result. They handled him extremely well, and he’s by far my favorite character. 

There were also a few moments in the story that actually caught me off guard. Like I knew there would be a twist, but the twist that actually does happen is...not what I expected, and is done in a really interesting and integrative way.

The villains were well thought out, at least Lords wise.

....but that’s...about where my praises end.

It’s hard to put into words just everything that....disappointed me about Arise, but i’m going to try.

My first biggest issue is the first few hours of the game. I know i’m not the only one who does this, but I try to connect with the Main Character, in as many ways as I can....but it’s incredibly hard when the character only has a vague personality and literally no face. This was a cause of great unease, and disconnect for me, which put me off the game almost immediately. I’ll admit, i grew even more critical of the game after spending almost 3 hours watching a character I couldn’t connect with interact with a character who made it impossible to like right off the bat. And I do understand why they did things this way....but it was a huge turn off for me.

The characters themselves felt flat and forced, the motions didn’t exactly link up with their emotions, and felt stiff. I’ll go over these in detail, trying to avoid spoilers as much as I can.

Alphen is a character that...well, I actually like the least. He’s supposed to be the main character, but I honestly don’t really care for him that much. I feel he’s a lot of wasted potential, but at the same time, extremely overbearing. He has no rhyme or reason for his sense of purpose and justice.....other than “slavery bad. need to free.” That’s literally what his personality boils down too for the majority of the game. When he does get his memory back, it’s all of a sudden “omg i’m a horrible person” which is entirely contradiction to his character building up until that point. Granted this was meant to represent a mental breakdown, but it just....wasn’t handled well. I’ll admit he gets more tolerable around the ending but all of his speeches were the clique of clique. I get that nothing’s really unique anymore...but it just takes the cake on how clique you can get. 

Shionne is....a complicated mess. She’s supposed to be prickly, and unlikable at the beginning. I realized this and didn’t pass judgement until a good ways in to the story, to give her time to develop. I do like what they tried to do with her. But I don’t think they managed to get what they wanted across. She’s very unlikable at the beginning, and only gets a little better by the middle of the game. She only truly develops towards the point of the Last Lord, and a little after. Especially towards the final battle, when she finally opens up....but even that feels...forced. A lot of the characters final growth feel extremely forced and rushed, like they accept everything at that moment only because the plot forces them too. Shionne is no exception, though her situation is the least jarring. (On the topic of Shionne though, I will admit that the romance plot between them is one of the more natural ones in the Tales series, it does develop over time, but I think the ending is still very much rushed.)

Rinwell is my next big issue. She would be my favorite character by far if it wasn’t for the major fault in her personality: her racism. It bothered me a lot, and it felt so very forced. Of course, Rinwell has plenty of reason to hate, but there was just so much of it in that tiny little body that it didn’t come across as natural. And she doesn’t get better through the game, even when traveling with two Renans for a while. She has a very real and understandable trauma, however it felt unrealistic especially when it was revealed her past. The only time she gets better is towards the end, when it’s like a sudden revelation hits her and she’s suddenly nice and happy. It was a dramatic shift to me that didn’t seem to fit with her personality.

Law is a character...I actually don’t have a lot of issues with. My main issue is how he was sort of forced upon the player out of nowhere. He’s a good, well balanced character, that really doesn’t need a lot of growth to him. Sure he has a lot of hate built up in him, but he does his job; which is the comic relief. he’s the natural born airhead, and he does a good job at it. There are a few out of character deep moments, but his tendency to just say whatever comes to him is what moves the plot along at times. I just hate how he was kind of forced upon us in the early game due to what happens with his father.

(Zepher is a character i am very conflicted about because on one hand I really liked his character, it was one of the best ones in the game in my opinion, but his speech during the second Lord’s domain was super forced in my opinion. I felt what happened with him just was very forced and quickened to make the plot go further.)

Dohalim is by far my favorite character. I actually don’t have a lot to say negatively about him. I feel like he’s the best, well written character of the group. His wants, needs are very realistic, and his desires and actions compliment that. If anything I think he takes the ‘atone for my sins’ thing a little too far at times, but he’s the character that has the most realistic growth of them all.

Kisara....I don’t have a lot to say about. It’s not that I didn’t like her. I did. She was a good, motherly character to the group, who keeps them in line for the most part. But...that’s it. I feel like she got past her anger and hate too quickly, accepting what had happened as if it was just daily life and moving on. It didn’t feel natural, but I assume she’s just the type of character to keep her worries and feelings to herself so that she doesn’t worry those around her. Which matches her motherly character.

Those are my feelings on the main characters. I won’t go into the villains for obvious reasons, but I will admit i found that the villains were well written for the short amount of time they were on screen.

I’ve seen a lot of praise for the story line.....but I don’t....really see what’s praiseworthy about it. I realize i went in extremely biased and critical, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it.

I’m not exactly a fan of how Bandai has ‘reworked’ the Tales formula. I was extremely put off with no buildup to the first baddie, I felt like I had no way of knowing what the character that was in front of me was like. Not only did he have no face, but he felt so flat, mold-able....that it was off putting. To be thrown directly into the heart of a dark, devastating world was jarring enough to me to make me think.....which normally wouldn’t have been a bad thing, but with the combination of the lack of connection with the main character, I was just....lost. I wasn’t exactly interested in the story at that point. Which to me is a failure in writing. The first few hours of a game are critical in keeping someone interested enough to keep playing. If there’s a lack of connection, a lack of understanding, and a general sense of unease, followed by no real interesting reason for the characters to be doing what they’re doing that doesn’t boil down to “slave bad must free”, players are likely to put the game down. And I’ll admit, this put me off the game real fast. (But again, this is my opinion, please keep that in mind.)

As the story goes on, and we meet more characters, I did start to get interested, but it was then I noticed a lot of glaring flaws in the story itself. The first thing was that it was extremely predictable. I predicted what happens to Zeypher really fast....like only a few minutes after he was introduced. I figured out what was wrong with Shionne and her motives relatively quick. I figured out what Alphen was, or possibly was within the first boss fight. Things like this kept happening, i kept being able to predict the next big event in the game and....that sucked the interest out of me. If i can predict the game, what’s the point of me keeping going? I will admit, there were moments that I didn’t predict, like what happens in Menecia. and within the Valley of the Four Winds. But for the most part, the game was so predictable that I just felt bored more than half of the time. Tales games are usually masters of storytelling, able to put twists and turns, and turn your predictions on their heads to an extent. Of course, I understand that no story is going to be unique....but i just feel appalled that no one looked at the script and said “maybe this is a bit too predictable?”.

The second thing I noticed was that parts of the story felt extremely forced. Like it was rushed, unnaturally so. Cyslodia was a main contributor to this, the whole time was extremely forced and rushed, especially with Zeypher and Law. Later, the whole issue with Shionne and her Thorns just....bam, suddenly it’s ‘lets talk’ and it was just....not good. A lot of the skits felt like this as well. Rinwell and Law’s skits were usually not too terribly forced, but a lot of Alphen and Shionne’s skits felt forced and unnatural, mainly because of Shionne’s character flaw of not opening up. they felt awkward and again, unnatural.

By the end of the game, I realized something big, as well. Now, I understand, as I’ve said, that no story now is going to be unique.....however I feel like this story line takes the cake on a whole new level of ‘rehash’. The similarities to Vesperia and Graces are uncanny. Arise took the “planet eating world ending entity, with a child heralding the end of times (estelle, child of the full moon)” of Vesperia and the “There’s a whole nother planet out there and oh, by the way it wants to kill us, along with an entity made of energy that just wants to live” of Graces and combined it into one story. And it’s not even that well done in my opinion. Sure, it threw in a few curve balls like Renans, Dhanans, and the Heganquil.....but....at the end of the day, it’s just....a cross over of the two series with new characters? At least that’s what it felt like to me. Taking the two major plot points of previous games, one of which was recently re-released, and putting them together in one game? I wouldn’t call it lazy, but it’s definitely not the best decision i’ve seen.

Finally, I’ll talk about the ending.....while trying to avoid as many spoilers as I can. Tales games have been known for their clique “good conquers all, everyone wins in a heartfelt tearjerky way”....but it seems like that Arise took all that they could, all the cliques in the book, and put them in their ending. As well as doing things in a completely unrealistic unreasonable way. Sure it’s a good ending for the game, and it’s a happy one, but it leaves a LOT of unanswered questions. Mainly my question is ‘how the fuck is everyone still alive after that?’. (if you haven’t beaten the game, wait until you have, you’ll know what I mean then). It’s just....a confusing clusterfuck if you think about it, and have finished the game and know what I’m talking about. Most Tales games end with at least a definitive ending, that answers the questions of the game....but this one just felt so out of left field to me that it was unnatural and jarring.

Please keep in mind that these are my opinions after analyzing the story and characters, and watching an in depth play-through. You likely will have different opinions if you’ve played/watched the game yourself. I admit again, I probably was overcritical of the game, but this is the first Tales game since Abyss that i did not enjoy for the most part. It definitely has it’s good points, the characters are well designed, even if their personalities and stuff fall flat. It genuinely surprised me at times, which is a good thing. I just feel like the cons of the game outweigh the pros, in a serious way. It’s not a great game, it’s not a bad game, it’s simply....mediocre in my eyes, which is something that very few Tales games can be ranked for me. This is just my honest opinion on the game, and if you like it and disagree with me, that’s fine! I’m not gonna force my opinion on you in any way!

And that doesn’t mean I will not roleplay with characters from Arise! I want to see how people change, improve and characterize these characters! Everyone will see them as something different, and I can’t wait to see how people play them, because I felt that while there were definite issues with the characters, they were definitely the strongest part of the game.