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Haledjian
May 29, 2008

YOU CAN'T MOVE WITH ME IN THIS DIGITAL SPACE
Well, that was eerily idyllic. I wonder where Gro-upp is.

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Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

Aw how cute, they got some puppies.

Roger Explosion
Jan 26, 2006

THAT'S SPECTACULAR.
Those song lyrics own.

JossiRossi
Jul 28, 2008

A little EQ, a touch of reverb, slap on some compression and there. That'll get your dickbutt jiggling.

Haledjian posted:

Well, that was eerily idyllic. I wonder where Gro-upp is.

Fortunately, but also unfortunately, if Gro-upp appears too often he'll lose his impact. So since he just killed someone people were really liking I imagine he'll be off the radar for a little while. Things aren't good enough yet for him to return.

Pidmon
Mar 18, 2009

NO ONE risks painful injury on your GREEN SLIME GHOST POGO RIDE.

No one but YOU.
Hooray, the invincible orc just got invincible-er. And I wonder why I stopped saying things in the thread (aside from the 4chan flood).

idonotlikepeas
May 29, 2010

This reasoning is possible for forums user idonotlikepeas!

Pakled posted:

Hell, I'd celebrate someone killing Cliff Racers too.

Jiub is not someone Kazerad made up. He's the first person you meet in Morrowind, and in Oblivion you actually do find out that he was made a saint for cleansing the cliff racer scourge from Morrowind.

Pakled
Aug 6, 2011

WE ARE SMART

idonotlikepeas posted:

Jiub is not someone Kazerad made up. He's the first person you meet in Morrowind, and in Oblivion you actually do find out that he was made a saint for cleansing the cliff racer scourge from Morrowind.

I remember him from Morrowind, though I didn't know he was mentioned in Oblivion until I looked it up after I saw the update. I'm still finding new stuff in these games after all these years. :v:

Raserys
Aug 22, 2011

IT'S YA BOY
Asotil will die horribly at some point. His existence improves Katia's life, and that cannot be.

Geomancing
Jan 8, 2004

I am not an egghead. I am well-read.
Ohohoho, good thing she didn't stop for ice cream. Anyone who played Oblivion and did the intro Mage's Guild quests for each town recognizes her.

Captain Oblivious
Oct 12, 2007

I'm not like other posters

Raserys posted:

Asotil will die horribly at some point. His existence improves Katia's life, and that cannot be.

Asotil's existence improves the Elder Scrolls universe :allears:

Dolash
Oct 23, 2008

aNYWAY,
tHAT'S REALLY ALL THERE IS,
tO REPORT ON THE SUBJECT,
oF ME GETTING HURT,


Pretty sure Asotil himself will be okay, if only because he's not unambiguously good for Katia - they merely align at the moment, and Katia is misreading this as something nice like friendship.

My bet is she'll do something wrong (or be framed) in the future that causes Asotil to turn on her without a second thought, underlining how he was quite clearly a psychopath all along and we were clearly warned about his crook-killing predilictions. Katia will feel betrayed, then later cry. Kind of like the Gro-Upp situation, but with a longer fuse.

Oh, but that panel of Asotil busting himself into a prison with a bag marked 'drugs' is just too dear. I can't stay mad at you, Prequel.

Zenzirouj
Jun 10, 2004

What about you, thread?
You got any tricks?
It occurs to me that naming that last update "Elsewhere" works as another joke at Katia's expense.

Herpus Derpus
Nov 9, 2010

by Ozmaugh

Zenzirouj posted:

It occurs to me that naming that last update "Elsewhere" works as another joke at Katia's expense.

Why, because of Elsweyr?

Rasamune
Jan 19, 2011

MORT
MORT
MORT
Is there anyone in this thread who can read sheet music and recognizes this song from several updates ago?

maltesh
May 20, 2004

Uncle Ben: Still Dead.

Rasamune posted:

Is there anyone in this thread who can read sheet music and recognizes this song from several updates ago?



I have no idea what it is, but this is what it sounds like.

http://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/bb73f11ccad9cbdc13b975e5b5a990374ce1072b

Funkstar Deluxe
May 7, 2007

「☆☆☆」

Rasamune posted:

Is there anyone in this thread who can read sheet music and recognizes this song from several updates ago?



maltesh posted:

I have no idea what it is, but this is what it sounds like.

http://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/bb73f11ccad9cbdc13b975e5b5a990374ce1072b


I.. uhm.. think it's from My Little Pony.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tiynTPuUUM&feature=player_detailpage#t=50s

From 50 seconds in.

Also, new update! :haw:

http://prequeladventure.com/2011/09/893/

Raserys
Aug 22, 2011

IT'S YA BOY
Did someone say Sigrid?

Zenzirouj
Jun 10, 2004

What about you, thread?
You got any tricks?
http://prequeladventure.com/2011/09/916/

Way to ride that corpse wave

Dolash
Oct 23, 2008

aNYWAY,
tHAT'S REALLY ALL THERE IS,
tO REPORT ON THE SUBJECT,
oF ME GETTING HURT,


I want to say I'm surprised at how well she's riding those corpses, but then again we already know she slept with a skeleton! zing

Magnus Condomus
Apr 23, 2010

Haledjian posted:

I make rap songs. About a month ago I put one out about My Little Pony, as kind of a joke, and it quickly shot up to about 100,000 listens, between Youtube and Soundcloud. I was hoping people would stick around and listen to the less gimmicky stuff on my Soundcloud (I even tried to capitalize on it by including a "bonus track" in the pony song download), but for the most part that hasn't happened--my other songs are hovering in the mid-to-low hundreds.

I know this is ancient, but I actually really liked your non-pony stuff. I wouldn't have found it if not for the pony single. So take that as you will.

Kazerad
Aug 1, 2011

Unshamed by Koos
I'm beginning to understand a lot of what Andrew Hussie wrote about catering to "archival readers" versus "serial readers". Since I've been updating kind of slow lately, a number of the regular viewers are getting kind of antsy (e.g. "come on, finish walking already"). The people who just started reading through the archive, on the other hand, aren't really bothered. To them, Katia's only been walking for about four pages.

One of the more interesting things I've been learning is that doing a webcomic means writing something that simultaneously works at two separate paces. The archival readers are going to tear through the story at a speed pretty much determined by how much text they are given, while the daily readers read through the story as fast as you can write it and have time to speculate on details and stuff. Keeping the story pacing optimal for both groups is a kind of fun (if challenging) juggling act I didn't really anticipate when going into this.

Zenzirouj
Jun 10, 2004

What about you, thread?
You got any tricks?
I guess the biggest thing to make sure you're doing is resisting the urge to draw things out for longer than necessary. Possibly my biggest peeve with all types of story-telling (or all forms of writing, really) is when an idea, conversation, plotline, or whatever takes longer than is necessary to be expressed. You're probably at lesser risk of this since you're still on the "starting out" phase and don't have as much of a reason to have the story drag on and on instead of ending it and risking losing readers.

On this point, even thought this is a CYOA, do you at least have a general outline for important events in the story and an idea for an ending? I'm not asking what they are, just curious if you have them.

As for whether this part of the story is dragging, I'd say yes, a little. That's probably influenced by the delays, but I guess it would have been possible to condense what's happened in the past four updates. Just with a quick skim, it looks like these are the important parts and/or gags: Saint Jiub, big bag o' drugs, stabbin' and shroomin', Kvatch/Sigrid, and ghost-ride the corpse. That's not bad, mostly because this is a comedy webcomic and I primarily come for silly drawings of a cat lady, not plot. I think you're still fine.


Also there's a new update in case anybody missed it: http://prequeladventure.com/2011/09/katia-loot/

idonotlikepeas
May 29, 2010

This reasoning is possible for forums user idonotlikepeas!
J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5, had a few things to say about the topic of serial writing. He was comparing television with books, but the issues are actually quite similar. He said he'd known writers who did a gag where they wrote a short story one page at a time, in front of an audience, and slapped each page up on the wall as they were done. He said writing for TV was a lot like that, and I'd say writing a webcomic is a similar experience. Really, it means all of the following:

1) If you're doing anything that lasts more than one "page" (episode, issue), people are going to only see half of it and judge it immediately. That's endemic to the form; it's tempting to say "don't worry about that, it'll be awesome in five hundred pages when you see what I was setting up", but the reality is that nobody is really going to believe that but you - they see the story you've created so far, not the plans you have in your head, and simply asserting that those plans exist won't change their minds. That's something JMS had some trouble with, and I see Hussie having it too. To them, and to you, I would say: people get confused and annoyed because "it'll all turn out right later" is something that people who are committing legitimately bad writing will say as well, even genuinely talented people. I still remember Star Wars fanboys defending The Phantom Menace on that basis; just wait for episodes two and three! They'll even make Jar-Jar Binks okay if you give Lucas a chance! It's perfectly fine to do things like this - hell, in some cases it's great - you just have to be aware that some people aren't going to wait five hundred pages to see how it all turns out. This is where your archival readers come in - some people aren't following you the whole time and get all the pages at once. This is also why DVDs are a huge winner for TV series that plan things out in advance (and can seem a bit schizophrenic for series that are making it up as they go along).

2) You can't take anything back. (Comic book writers in particular suck at this one.) The fact is, you put the page up on the wall already. Everyone has already read it. You can't just go back and edit part of what they've already read, like you can if you're publishing a book all at once. It's tempting to try to fix broken things by going back and recasting the events or having actual time travel that alters them, but unless you really know what you're doing that's just going to leave people feeling cheated and unsatisfied. The more you do it, the more you disconnect people from your story - if they can't trust that the story they've already read will stay put, why will they trust you enough to keep reading what you're writing now?

3) You have to keep putting pages on the wall or the audience will get bored. This is something else you're probably running into right now. People like regularity, or at least frequency, and with the web providing them a large number of entertainment options, their attention tends to drift quickly. Normally people like a regular schedule, because then it becomes part of your habitual behavior. "Oh, it's Wednesday! Time to go read Penny Arcade!" That said, Hussie has actually tapped into a different human behavior - a variable interval reward schedule. Basically, if you provide a reward (new content) frequently but irregularly, people will be trained to perform the behavior (checking the site) frequently and not to be disappointed when they find nothing (since it is normal to go for some period without reward). The trick there is the initial training period, where rewards have to be fairly frequent. Once it's happened, though, people will be pretty tolerant - imagine what the fan reaction would be to most comics taking a month off to work on something that they'll probably spend five minutes watching!

100 HOGS AGREE
Oct 13, 2007
Grimey Drawer

Zenzirouj posted:

I guess the biggest thing to make sure you're doing is resisting the urge to draw things out for longer than necessary. Possibly my biggest peeve with all types of story-telling (or all forms of writing, really) is when an idea, conversation, plotline, or whatever takes longer than is necessary to be expressed. You're probably at lesser risk of this since you're still on the "starting out" phase and don't have as much of a reason to have the story drag on and on instead of ending it and risking losing readers.
See: The loving castle plotline in Girl Genius. :v:

I think it's going along at a good clip. Personally, I'd prefer smaller updates more often but that's just me.

idonotlikepeas
May 29, 2010

This reasoning is possible for forums user idonotlikepeas!

100 HOGS AGREE posted:

See: The loving castle plotline in Girl Genius. :v:

I was a bit curious, so I did some looking. The first GG comic is dated 11/04/2002. The most recent is 9/23/2011. So a total of roughly four hundred and sixty-odd weeks. I'm going to be generous and say that the "Castle Plot" starts when Agatha enters the castle (although theoretically you could include some of the Mechanicsburg stuff as well). That happened on 12/21/2007 (well, that's when she changed clothes to go in, which is close enough), roughly two hundred weeks before the current strip. That means that the Castle Plot is now more than FORTY PERCENT OF THE ENTIRE STORY. No wonder people think it's dragging.

LtStorm
Aug 8, 2010

You'll pay for this, Shady Shrew!


idonotlikepeas posted:

I was a bit curious, so I did some looking. The first GG comic is dated 11/04/2002. The most recent is 9/23/2011. So a total of roughly 465 weeks. I'm going to be generous and say that the "Castle Plot" starts when Agatha enters the castle (although theoretically you could include some of the Mechanicsburg stuff as well). That happened on 12/21/2007 (well, that's when she changed clothes to go in, which is close enough), roughly two hundred weeks before the current strip. That means that the Castle Plot is now more than FORTY PERCENT OF THE ENTIRE STORY. No wonder people think it's dragging.

You know. I honestly thought the entirety of Girl Genius was meant to take place in the castle. 2007 was probably around when it was first mentioned to me. I never looked into the archives because I was turned off by the art style, but I had a friend that kept linking me to strips from then on. And every time I'd look at it, see them in the castle somewhere, and then not read anymore.

e: Also, I like that more panels of the more detailed Kat (as opposed to the bobblehead style) are being used. She's adorable in them.

LtStorm fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Sep 25, 2011

the holy poopacy
May 16, 2009

hey! check this out
Fun Shoe

LtStorm posted:

You know. I honestly thought the entirety of Girl Genius was meant to take place in the castle. 2007 was probably around when it was first mentioned to me. I never looked into the archives because I was turned off by the art style, but I had a friend that kept linking me to strips from then on. And every time I'd look at it, see them in the castle somewhere, and then not read anymore.

Girl Genius is literally about the protagonist getting stuck in castles. Volumes 1-3 were about Agatha getting stuck in one castle, then Volumes 4-6 were about Agatha getting stuck in another, different castle, and then the current castle comprises Volumes 7-11 and counting with no signs of getting over anytime soon. C'mon Foglio you were supposed to find her a new castle to get stuck in two chapters ago :mad:

It's an interesting case study in how not to manage a large, complex cast with a lot of intricate subplots going on, because Phil Foglio absolutely can't resist the urge to show what every member of the sprawling cast is doing at all times. Just imagine what Homestuck would be like if Andrew Hussie operated on the same principle.

Nick Buntline
Dec 20, 2007
Doesn't know the impossible.

Gabriel Pope posted:

Just imagine what Homestuck would be like if Andrew Hussie operated on the same principle.



alternately: i guess it would be like Homestuck, considering he pretty much already does?

seriously, someone please tell me I'm not the only one who finds the whole "as the author of an MSPA-inspired comic, you should protect the pacing of your story by not randomly dropping plot threads or switching the viewpoint character" thing inherently amusing.

(which is not meant as criticism of prequel - I'm rather liking it so far, and Kaz seems to be going into this with the right sort of mindset to keep it up, so here's hoping you do!)

the holy poopacy
May 16, 2009

hey! check this out
Fun Shoe

Nick Buntline posted:

alternately: i guess it would be like Homestuck, considering he pretty much already does?

Except... not really? I'm not trying to hold up Andrew Hussie as some kind of paragon of pacing--I meant my comment in the sense of "think of how much worse it could be." We did get a preview of sorts early in Act 5.2 where there was one round of conversations between all the kids and all the new trolls, but the fact that I can point to this as being a distinct blip in the story's mode of delivery kind of illustrates my point.

Thinking back a bit further, though, Problem Sleuth pretty much does embody the problem I'm talking about--no background characters, everybody gets all their actions shown in the spotlight--so yeah, Hussie is certainly no stranger to Foglio's storytelling methods.

Considering the last alternate protagonist in Prequel died after half a dozen updates, though, something tells me this is not a problem Kazerad will spend much time wrestling with.

vvvvv

EDIT: I apologize for bringing this up. I was just trying to highlight a very specific storytelling problem that Girl Genius epitomizes, since it came up as a subject of comparison (using Homestuck as a throwaway example of other, different distinct pacing flaws that I assumed most readers would be familiar with.) I did not mean to open a debate on the merits of Homestuck's pacing.

the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Sep 25, 2011

Magnus Condomus
Apr 23, 2010

Gabriel Pope posted:

Except... not really? I'm not trying to hold up Andrew Hussie as some kind of paragon of pacing--I meant my comment in the sense of "think of how much worse it could be." We did get a preview of sorts early in Act 5.2 where there was one round of conversations between all the kids and all the new trolls, but the fact that I can point to this as being a distinct blip in the story's mode of delivery kind of illustrates my point.

Thinking back a bit further, though, Problem Sleuth pretty much does embody the problem I'm talking about--no background characters, everybody gets all their actions shown in the spotlight--so yeah, Hussie is certainly no stranger to Foglio's storytelling methods.

Considering the last alternate protagonist in Prequel died after half a dozen updates, though, something tells me this is not a problem Kazerad will spend much time wrestling with.

Homestuck did spend a huge amount of time on a confusing "What could have been, but ultimately wasn't" section that was more or less pointless to the story.

RickoniX
Dec 4, 2005

A human or elf?

NO NOT A BADGER YOU GOON

Magnus Condomus posted:

Homestuck did spend a huge amount of time on a confusing "What could have been, but ultimately wasn't" section that was more or less pointless to the story.

It's recently become apparent that it wasn't as irrelevant as it once appeared

Nick Buntline
Dec 20, 2007
Doesn't know the impossible.

RickoniX posted:

It's recently become apparent that it wasn't as irrelevant as it once appeared.

idonotlikepeas posted:

1) If you're doing anything that lasts more than one "page" (episode, issue), people are going to only see half of it and judge it immediately. That's endemic to the form; it's tempting to say "don't worry about that, it'll be awesome in five hundred pages when you see what I was setting up", but the reality is that nobody is really going to believe that but you - they see the story you've created so far, not the plans you have in your head, and simply asserting that those plans exist won't change their minds.

seriously, this is all some sort of weird ironic joke, right?

I mean, I'm not trying to say that Homestuck's pacing couldn't be worse - I don't actually think Hussie is going to die from heart disease before he ever gets around to wrapping up half the plot threads he's started - but if the average reader finishes a chapter in your story and thinks "I have no idea why time was spent on any of that, but maybe it'll somehow become relevant in some theoretical future chapter", you really are doing something wrong. Everything in a story should have a reason for happening where it does; if it happens to have other reasons for happening that become apparent later, then that's fine, but that shouldn't be the only reason.

To keep the thread slightly on topic, I guess a good example from Prequel would be the dinner party: the immediate reason was the conflict over Katia's fears and desire to prove herself, which provided the driving force for nearly all the events in the scene, while the delayed reason was the introduction of several characters and plot threads that have and will likely continue to come up in the future. If the former wasn't there and it was just fifty pages of fancy dinner party and random names and places until Asotil showed up, then people would be perfectly right to ask why the hell you didn't just cut to the chase and have him show up on the third page.

Fudge Handsome
Jan 29, 2011

Shall we do it?
I still have this lingering feeling of dread in the back of my mind that everything is going to go completely wrong for Katia and the last page will end up with a great big middle finger directed at us, the readers. Every good thing that happens to her just makes me think that the Bad Thing that fucks it all up is going to be that much worse, that all the little good things are just build-up to this Big Awful Thing.

It's making it kind of difficult to read the comic and get invested in it. :smith:

Magnus Condomus
Apr 23, 2010

Fudge Handsome posted:

I still have this lingering feeling of dread in the back of my mind that everything is going to go completely wrong for Katia and the last page will end up with a great big middle finger directed at us, the readers. Every good thing that happens to her just makes me think that the Bad Thing that fucks it all up is going to be that much worse, that all the little good things are just build-up to this Big Awful Thing.

It's making it kind of difficult to read the comic and get invested in it. :smith:

I kinda get the same feeling. The way the characters are engineered, you really really want her to succeed, but the way the story keeps going it seems like that is never an actual possibility.

Kazerad
Aug 1, 2011

Unshamed by Koos

Gabriel Pope posted:

It's an interesting case study in how not to manage a large, complex cast with a lot of intricate subplots going on, because Phil Foglio absolutely can't resist the urge to show what every member of the sprawling cast is doing at all times. Just imagine what Homestuck would be like if Andrew Hussie operated on the same principle.

Personally, I think the problem with Girl Genius isn't the size/handling of its cast but the fact that almost every character looks and sounds exactly the same. Like, I think there's supposed to be some kind of love triangle between Agatha, Gil, and Tarvek, but Gil and Tarvek are so similar that I really don't care how it turns out. Also, there's like a dozen different guys trying to take over and/or destroy the Castle right now?

A lot of people criticize Andrew Hussie for the troll typing quirks, but I think it was a really clever way to simultaneously introduce 12 new characters. For example, when you see 2ollux typiing liike thii2 (in yellow), it instantly tells you that he's the yellow guy, he's the duality guy, and even that he's the guy with the II symbol on his shirt. If Phil Foglio had some system like that for reminding us what each character's deal is, I think GG would read a lot smoother.

idonotlikepeas posted:

J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5, had a few things to say about the topic of serial writing. He was comparing television with books, but the issues are actually quite similar. He said he'd known writers who did a gag where they wrote a short story one page at a time, in front of an audience, and slapped each page up on the wall as they were done. He said writing for TV was a lot like that, and I'd say writing a webcomic is a similar experience. Really, it means all of the following:

And then IDNLP proceeded to list what it means
Oh man, these are all really great observations. I never thought about the parallels between TV serials and webcomics but you're right, a lot of the same stuff seems to apply.

Well, I guess a few things are actually a lot easier for online stories. It's really easy to start reading a webcomic since all the old episodes are readily available, and - like you said - there's also more reward schedules that can be used. Variable Interval is the second-most powerful, and I'm still working on ways to deploy something stronger.

the holy poopacy
May 16, 2009

hey! check this out
Fun Shoe

Kazerad posted:

Personally, I think the problem with Girl Genius isn't the size/handling of its cast but the fact that almost every character looks and sounds exactly the same. Like, I think there's supposed to be some kind of love triangle between Agatha, Gil, and Tarvek, but Gil and Tarvek are so similar that I really don't care how it turns out. Also, there's like a dozen different guys trying to take over and/or destroy the Castle right now?

That's part of what happens when cast compartmentalization breaks down. The first two acts were managed tolerably well by keeping the supporting cast almost entirely separate between the two, which meant introducing some redundant roles; Tarvek was originally there to fill Gil's shoes when it wouldn't make any sense for Gil to be around. The main reason the current arc has broken down so badly is that it has its own, third set of supporting cast members plus most of the cast of the first two arcs combined. So even disregarding the sheer enormity of the active cast and Foglio's inability to understand the concept of "background characters", you have a lot of overlapping roles between the three sets of cast members that are now colliding.

ArfJason
Sep 5, 2011

Kazerad posted:

A lot of people criticize Andrew Hussie for the troll typing quirks, but I think it was a really clever way to simultaneously introduce 12 new characters. For example, when you see 2ollux typiing liike thii2 (in yellow), it instantly tells you that he's the yellow guy, he's the duality guy, and even that he's the guy with the II symbol on his shirt.

Yeah, I always thought the same. It helps identify characters easily, especially when there are 12 of them, and their nicknames are all comprised of GTCA. The horns too. Also the zodiac thing was very smart. You can look up mythologies and usual interpretations and base personalities from them.

On this topic, you ever gonna do characters that are a parallel of something else, like say, the midnight crew being a Card analogy?

Nick Buntline
Dec 20, 2007
Doesn't know the impossible.

Kazerad posted:

A lot of people criticize Andrew Hussie for the troll typing quirks, but I think it was a really clever way to simultaneously introduce 12 new characters. For example, when you see 2ollux typiing liike thii2 (in yellow), it instantly tells you that he's the yellow guy, he's the duality guy, and even that he's the guy with the II symbol on his shirt. If Phil Foglio had some system like that for reminding us what each character's deal is, I think GG would read a lot smoother.

Or you could not simultaneously introduce 12 new characters, or at least not try to introduce them all as primary characters at the same time (Honestly, "that's the one whose dialogue is in yellow, right?" sounds like the punchline to some joke about a self-important author or a misunderstanding grandmother or something). I've no doubt I'm preaching to the choir somewhat given the silhouette studies you posted earlier, but characters should be differentiable based on appearance in visual mediums (body shape, gender, clothes, etc.) and personality in all of them (speaking style, behavior, interests, etc.). Things like dialogue color and word/letter substitution are the text equivalent of wacky quirks and "ethnic" accents: they're certainly better than not being able to tell anyone apart, but if you've expanded your active cast so far that they're the only way to do so then it's probably time to go back to the storyboard and rethink things a bit.

Also, aside from that, from a personal standpoint as a reader I can't possibly agree that randomly or consistently adding irrelevant characters to a person's dialogue could make it read "smoother". It's like writing through a hideously overthick accent - if the dialogue scans so poorly that I have stop and consciously translate every third word, then I'm just not going to bother reading it.

Android Blues
Nov 22, 2008

Nick Buntline posted:

Or you could not simultaneously introduce 12 new characters, or at least not try to introduce them all as primary characters at the same time (Honestly, "that's the one whose dialogue is in yellow, right?" sounds like the punchline to some joke about a self-important author or a misunderstanding grandmother or something). I've no doubt I'm preaching to the choir somewhat given the silhouette studies you posted earlier, but characters should be differentiable based on appearance in visual mediums (body shape, gender, clothes, etc.) and personality in all of them (speaking style, behavior, interests, etc.). Things like dialogue color and word/letter substitution are the text equivalent of wacky quirks and "ethnic" accents: they're certainly better than not being able to tell anyone apart, but if you've expanded your active cast so far that they're the only way to do so then it's probably time to go back to the storyboard and rethink things a bit.

Also, aside from that, from a personal standpoint as a reader I can't possibly agree that randomly or consistently adding irrelevant characters to a person's dialogue could make it read "smoother". It's like writing through a hideously overthick accent - if the dialogue scans so poorly that I have stop and consciously translate every third word, then I'm just not going to bother reading it.

You're missing something important - Homestuck is mostly text, but doesn't have any description auxiliary to the main body of its dialogue. That is to say, we don't have descriptive language telling us how people speak, or the direct circumstances of their speech. It's not even comparable to most comics because we generally only get one picture to what might be a huge ream of conversation that covers various moods and themes. The typing quirks pretty much serve to fill that role. It doesn't work great always, but on the whole I think it's pretty much the most useful, credible way you could replace description of manner/mode of speech in a text medium made up entirely of chatlogs.

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Nick Buntline
Dec 20, 2007
Doesn't know the impossible.

Android Blues posted:

You're missing something important - Homestuck is mostly text, but doesn't have any description auxiliary to the main body of its dialogue. That is to say, we don't have descriptive language telling us how people speak, or the direct circumstances of their speech. It's not even comparable to most comics because we generally only get one picture to what might be a huge ream of conversation that covers various moods and themes. The typing quirks pretty much serve to fill that role. It doesn't work great always, but on the whole I think it's pretty much the most useful, credible way you could replace description of manner/mode of speech in a text medium made up entirely of chatlogs.

I'm aware of that, and honestly I consider it to be the comic's biggest flaw. Condensing all the dialogue into chatlogs gets rid of everything you said it does, reducing the information available to the reader and hitting the cap of when you need "quirks" that much faster, but it doesn't seem to do anything. It doesn't add anything to the story, there's no real change in people's interactions (by which I mean they more or less still talk as if they're face to face), it's just seems to be an artificial limitation placed for no real reason. If you're going to make a structural decision like that, I feel like there should be some reason or benefit to doing so that outweighs what you lose. I'm trying to come up with a good example here, and the best I can think of right now would be comparing Satoshi Kon's films, which tend to have confusing abstractions of reality and causality as part of their overarching themes, and Videodrome, which had confusing abstractions of reality and causality because the film was an unsalvageable mess (Cronenberg's other films are fine, but that one...)

Again, I don't think the methods Hussie uses are inherently bad, I just feel like he doesn't think through why he's using them (schizophrenic viewpoint switching was somewhat understandable in Problem Sleuth due to fan-submitted actions, but when he's writing them all himself...). I will say that I thought the one character's quirk of typing out actions was fine and possibly even a good idea because it a) provided an alternate form for the information the chatlog was missing and b) was an actual use for the chatlog format. I should probably also state that it has been some time since I last read the comic, so he very well might have gotten much better about some of this since then. If so, then please free feel to point out anything indicating such that I might not be aware of.

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