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Hostile V posted:If you were gonna flip Shoto into Shoko, middle-aged/over-25 ex-salarywoman who sunk severance and funds into investments to retreat from Japanese society because she just can't take the stress and the hosed-up societal expectations anymore. Someone who was held to the metaphorical grindstone and was worn down and nearly broken and being the sidekick to Daito is how she's getting her life back in order and healing from it. Less "Wade becoming a super cool internet man" and more "I'm building a cocoon for myself until I can emerge healed". I saw this anime. It was pretty good. Let’s just hope chitoryu doesn’t turn out to be an insane neo-Nazi too.
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Apr 5, 2018 23:13
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For the record, I posted a bunch of stuff on giant robots and their storytelling possibilities in the other thread which might be useful.
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Apr 5, 2018 23:56
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Sorrento is a dangerously obsessed dude running a megacorp during a time of severe social breakdown, which is about as morally abrasive as positions come. He’s basically a postapocalyptic dictator. It would be more of a surprise if his security forces hadn’t merced a few people - dude likely has a lot of ‘who will rid me of this troublesome priest’ moments, and he’s not in charge of the kind of organisation that’s naturally suited to transparency and accountability, which means that their enforcement branch are going to attract an interesting collection of psychopaths.
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Apr 6, 2018 08:20
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Choco1980 posted:Speaking of butting heads, I'm kinda uncomfortable with how many are on board with Aech getting rid of his male identity as some sort of character resolution. You uh do realize that he's a transman and OASIS gives him an outlet for relieving his dismorphia besides painful and expensive surgery, right? Saying "The healthy turnabout from their online life is to stop being who they are and accept they're a pretty princess" is not a good look... I don’t think that’s the angle the text supports - her OASIS persona reads as as a socially-acceptable disguise for her sexuality and aesthetic preferences, not something she actually wants to be. Like, the fact that he’s not just a man, but a super-generic white man is a big clue there. Sorry, Rachel Dolezai, but racial dysmorphia ain’t a thing. So her development would be becoming comfortable with being a woman who isn’t interested in being a pretty princess or chasing after boys.
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Apr 6, 2018 11:07
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One thing I was thinking about was motivation. If we want Wade to be egg-hunting as a job and slowly, reluctantly fall in love with the nostalgic nerdery he’s immersed in, then we should give him a compelling reason for diving into the hunt in the first place, and for forming his various relationships with the rest of the gang. Luckily, Cline already laid some of the groundwork for us, and I’ve got a few ideas. When Wade was a child, his father told him stories of the man he’d been named after. Like him, he’d been born dirt-poor on an Oklahoma mountainside, dehumanised and belittled by the rich white folks who couldn’t be bothered to give him a real place in their world. He told little Wade about the time the original Wade Watts had gone round to a white friend’s house and been served a meal, only to discover he’d been eating out of the dog’s bowl. More often, though, he told him about what Wade Watts had become - a man who stared down the Klan, reintegrated public schools, and had audiences with presidents. They were nice stories, and Wade liked to remember them when things got bad. Wade grew up in the stacks, the trailer-park labyrinths created after the first of the great economic crashes, along with thousands upon thousands of others who America didn’t have room for any more - or, at least, that was how the party in government put it at the time. The first white face he saw in person was when an IOI security team broke in a neighbour’s door for running an unlicensed haptic rig. He’d been raised by his aunt and uncle. His father had died during a food riot when he was ten, and he never knew his mother, only her photographs - a pretty white girl with dark, empty eyes. His father had told him that she went into the OASIS one day and never came back. His aunt and uncle were kind enough to him, but he wasn’t theirs, only another mouth to feed that they could barely afford, and they all knew it. Like nearly all of his generation, Wade spent much of his life in the OASIS, when he wasn’t running errands for his family or playing football with the other kids from his neighbourhood. He’d been smart enough and lucky enough to get a scholarship to a good online school, and he applied himself well to his studies, but he never felt like there was much a place for him there - his fellow pupils weren’t terribly inclined to socialise with a kid from the stacks. His only real online friend was Aech, a boy in the same year who’d been the first to walk up and say hi when he transferred in. Aech was a cheerfully unabashed nerd, a disciple of the OASIS’s eccentric creator James Halliday with a sincere love of the ancient pop-culture the massive virtual universe was built on. He called himself a ‘gunter’, a quester for the holy grail Halliday had supposedly hidden somewhere within the OASIS’s depths. Wade didn’t honestly have much interest in all that quasi-mystical rubbish, only in getting the grades he needed to get one of the few decent jobs still going, but Aech’s sheer enthusiasm made him fun to be around. Then the posters went up. Stacks were questionably legal and definitely eyesores, which meant that when a company wanted to build over them, they didn’t have much difficulty. Wade’s neighbourhood was up in the hills, and IOI wanted to take advantage of the stunning views of the valley below for a new executive resort. The residents fought the impending demolition as hard as they could, even attracting the endorsement of the OASIS celebrity and social-justice campaigner Art3mis, but Wade knew that it would be only a matter of time until the megacorp got its way. Several of his neighbours had been relocated before, and he’d heard their stories. He knew that there were folks in his stacks who were too old or sick to survive it. He obsessed over ways to save his neighbourhood, to get revenge on IOI, to stop this hellish system altogether, but kept coming back to one - the Easter egg, the prize left by a madman in a maze of children’s toys that was rumoured to have the power to upend the world. One day, he bottled up his courage placed a few orders on OASIS’s online marketplace, and sent a message to his best friend. “Hey, Aech. What was all that you were telling me about the Tomb of Horrors?”
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Apr 7, 2018 14:39
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I think I prefer Aech being a cis lesbian because I don’t like the assumption that having masculine hobbies and being into ladies necessarily means you’re trans. Seems a bit... uhh... Iranian. ‘Sides, I legit can’t remember the last time I saw a positively-portrayed butch lesbian in a story who made it to the end without dying unpleasantly. Art3mis being trans is an interesting idea, but I’m not wedded to it if we wanna skip it.
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Apr 7, 2018 14:56
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Ottermotive Insanity posted:Because of their relationship with Wade, I think Aech still needs a hyper-masculine Avatar; someone he admires, and kind of relates to. It wouldn't be much of a reveal if Aech was a trans man, since Wade can still relate with the desire to be what Aech wants to be. I think the only issue with giving Art3mis a massive, serious disfigurement is that it leans into the book’s whole thing of ‘seemingly-perfect girl turns out to be secretly flawed, putting her within the league of lovable loser who Accepts Her For Who She Is’. That’s a pretty creepy approach to relationships. If we’re going to have a romance, I think that we should make absolutely, positively sure that it isn’t about Wade and Art3mis ending up together because he’s the one dude who’ll settle for her real self.
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Apr 7, 2018 17:09
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I think Art3mis being trans is interesting because it puts her as a contrast to Aech - while one is using OASIS to hide her true self so she can do what she wants and enjoy what she wants without getting a shitload of harassment for it, the other is using it as a way to express her true self and try out an exciting new life as she transitions in the real world. One’s operating out of fear, the other is doing so out of aspiration. If we decide to make Wade black (and I mean, it would give that name a less uncomfortable purpose) with a basic, unmodded avatar that looks pretty much like he does (maybe taken from his school, because he can’t afford a personal account?), then he’d occupy a third role - someone who can’t disguise himself and has to deal with the standard background unpleasantness of the Internet head-on.
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Apr 7, 2018 17:28
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Ottermotive Insanity posted:Isn't making Artemis trans effectively making her another "Wade accept her regardless of her real world self?" Whether she's handicapped, overweight, had a birthmark, or is trans, it's all the same, plotwise. Artemis doesn't accept herself, doesn't think anyone will, but Wade falls for her regardless. I think that being trans is a bit different because it signals an aspiration she’s also working on in real life. It’s not a flaw she’s hiding, it’s a new life she’s embracing. It’s not uncommon for someone to practice living as the opposite sex by presenting as one online. It marks a striking contrast to Aech, who actually is hiding herself in an unhealthy way because she fears being ostracised and rejected. I like it because it covers a broader range of the online experience, rather than giving us two characters with pretty much the same problem. It also lets us pull away a little from the whole ‘Wade accepts her despite her flaws’ thing and turn it into another expression of her drive and ambition (and serves as an obvious point of tension with the folks who want to shut down the OASIS, because it’s been very positive and helpful for her and people like her in this regard).
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Apr 7, 2018 18:52
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chitoryu12 posted:If you make your protagonist a goony rear end in a top hat that nobody likes, who's going to want to keep reading about their misadventures in stalking women? Hey, A Confederacy of Dunces was pretty fun.
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Apr 10, 2018 14:25
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chitoryu12 posted:I think we should scrap the thing about nukes. One of the things that doesn't really make sense about the original setting is that OASIS is able to stay running perfectly and billions of people can afford to keep playing despite microtransactions charging for even just getting off the starting planet (and OASIS public schools can send out thousands or millions of free VR rigs to virtual school students), while America has collapsed so bad that the countryside is a wasteland of highwaymen and cities are getting nuked so often that it's not even surprising on the news. A big, long recession works fine enough for having Wade be dirt poor and living in a trailer park, using his technological prowess to jury rig a cheap OASIS setup running on junkyard solar panels. There’s an easy explanation - IOI counting coup causes Wade to run away, turtle up, and isolate himself from the rest of the world out of fear that they’ll come for his friends and family. Art3mis assumes he’s done some digging on her and cut and run, possibly like other boyfriends have in the past, so she just goes ‘eh, gently caress it’ and moves on. Obviously, Wade can’t exactly correct her on this, because she’s a big OASIS celebrity and if he gets anywhere near her, IOI will know.
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Apr 10, 2018 16:46
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, and Art3mis suggests that she doesn't want to get attached when she has a personal drive to gently caress up IOI. It was a crappy plot point, but it might work in modified form for Art3mis. As our current outline goes, Wade is the outsider to Egg hunting while Aech and Art3mis are longtime hunters. Maybe she starts having second thoughts about her relationship because of her drive to win the competition, while Wade ends up getting pushy?
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Again, the problem here is that you're spending too much time on plot outlines instead of the prose. I don’t believe anyone’s stopping you from offering advice on prose-styles that might be used to enhance the story.
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Apr 10, 2018 17:06
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:You first need to have a prose style before I can offer advice on it. This work is a derivative of Ready Player One. If, as you say, the medium is the message, then what is good about how RPO employs its medium, and what medium might suit it better? If RPO contains interesting ideas, how might the prose, as opposed to the plot, best convey them? Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Apr 10, 2018 |
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Apr 10, 2018 18:30
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Oh dear. Right, but we’re evidently going for a pulp aesthetic, in itself a callback to the old-school media the story is based around - campy, playful, high on moment-to-moment action and spectacle. Any better authors and better passages you’d suggest?
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Apr 11, 2018 14:09
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Sure. Here's the preface to one of my serialized works: Is that in the general sense? Because it’s what airport fiction, comic books, and so on rely on. It would make sense for a work about a particular kind of pop-culture to speak in the language of that pop-culture, no? Also, you’ve said that the medium is the message. Why is your excerpt what a rewrite of RPO should look like? How does it enhance the story? Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Apr 11, 2018 |
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Apr 11, 2018 14:19
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Just a tip: responding to criticism with "I'd like to see you do better" is absolutely useless. You don't need to actually be a writer of fiction to point out that some fiction is badly written, no more than you need to be a painter to be able to evaluate a painting. I’m not really seeing why that’s a relevant question, given the bolded.
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Apr 11, 2018 14:24
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:How is pointing out that Jim Butcher is a bad writer not arguing in "good faith"? Still not seeing how that’s relevant.
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Apr 11, 2018 14:40
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A human heart posted:If you wanted to use pulp fiction as a model why wouldn't you read some actual pulp written by a guy who could write, like raymond chandler or someone, instead of third degree warmed over contemporary stuff that looks like an outtake from a marvel superhero film? I mean, that’s not a bad suggestion, but one of the better airport novelists from the Eighties seems more fitting. Any thoughts?
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Apr 11, 2018 14:48
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chitoryu12 posted:Something that just came up in the book thread made me think about the extra life Wade gets. Depends. It’s heavily implied (deliberately or otherwise) to be a reward from Halliday for people willing to go out of their way to explore his world and re-live his life, just like the other super-powerful artefacts like the shield, Daito’s Ultraman capsule, and the Cataclyst. So if we want to stick with that, the challenge to get it should probably tie into what our version of Halliday wants people to learn from the OASIS. Do note that this does not necessarily have to be a good, healthy lesson. If I remember rightly, Wade gets the quarter after separating from Art3mis and going on the run from IOI. If he manages to pass Halliday’s test due to being in that kind of mindset, it could give us an interesting and disturbing insight into the creator of the OASIS. Kind of like if Daito got the Ideon through a willingness to punish himself, or through a sincere desire to tear down the world (which Halliday would read as OASIS) so it can be reborn anew. One thought - there’s a potentially-usable parallel between the spare quarter and Halliday’s rebirth within the OASIS as Anorak.
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Apr 13, 2018 18:38
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For the record, I reckon this project is interesting because of what RPO is - an experimental attempt at a story that draws nearly all of its appeal from harkening back to a bunch of other, successful stories, either through references as sensory description or through cobbling a plot out of elements taken from them. And we’re basically taking it apart to see what works, what can be improved on, and what should be discarded. In other words, this is a really great opportunity to have a look at the mechanics of storytelling - how all the stories that served as ingredients for RPO became beloved enough that an author thought he could tell his own story using them as a language (or come to terms with what he was already expressing), the opportunities that an inept writer missed to better express himself in that language, and what made such a direly-written book so interesting to so many people. Like, this is literally a story about storytelling. It’s why I don’t mind that we’re taking it slow - there’s a lot of poo poo going on here, and trying to understand it before we start tweaking it is really interesting and useful.
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Apr 14, 2018 01:09
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The other option is to make Wade a tragic hero, a young wannabe-artist in love with what he sees as one of the greatest works of art still in existence. He lionises Halliday without truly realising what he was, a man who couldn’t appreciate art, only use it as social currency to create an exclusive bubble for himself and the people who Got It until he died disillusioned and alone. Over the course of the book, he stripped away all that was good and healthy about himself until he finally claimed his throne, leaving behind his better-adjusted friends who still had some attachment to the world. Years later, Aech and Art3mis pulled him out of the last OASIS haptic chair. The massive virtual world shrivelled around him as he first booted out IOI, then everyone else who he felt could not share his and Halliday’s vision, until it was simply an impenetrable, masturbatory shell around the last gunter. He watched Transformers: The Movie one and a half million times, mouthing ‘Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost’ around the smooth plastic of his feeding tube. He fought Amuro Ray, Connor MacLeod, and the Punisher twelve thousand times - not to win, but to die exactly as he was supposed to. He had sex with Valeria, Casca, and hundreds of other women, pumping watery semen into the waste disposal chutes in precise harmony with the characters he had seen so many times before. When the power finally cut off, he felt the relief of Rin when she learned that Bat lived. He looked up as the women brought him outside. It was dusk, and the sleek skyscrapers of a post-OASIS world glittered with hundreds of lights. The sky above was all deep purples and fiery oranges, almost as beautiful as the binary sunset from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
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Apr 16, 2018 21:27
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In case you’re wondering, this is what BOTL was getting at about prose as explained by someone actually trying to be helpful and informative. It’s actually quite interesting.
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Apr 18, 2018 13:07
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I suppose one thing - which you’ve already touched on slightly - that might help the medium be the message is to incorporate this culture’s obsession with an Eighties wonderland into the prose. Similes and phrases from ancient TV shows, speeches in the cadence of Claremont X-Men comics (god help us) - art is the language of culture, and we could really delve deep into how such a stagnant culture expresses itself through that language. That does rather depend on how all-enveloping we want the OASIS to be, though.
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Apr 18, 2018 14:15
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Think I might have a go at an opening. Not to do better, per se, but to do different. I’m not sure why the curation process matters, or why people are being put off by it - everything we do will be available in plain text on a public forum for anyone to read, and if we want to pull the bits we’ve done together into a single story, there’s nothing stopping us from making an index post with a bunch of links. Just write poo poo out, and don’t worry about any sort of judging process or external quality-control that might erase what you’ve already put out on a public forum, and if someone does start with some heinous poo poo, just report ‘em and move on. The mods will edit that out. Write, get feedback, grow as a writer, have fun.
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Apr 18, 2018 23:00
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chitoryu12 posted:One of the biggest complaints about the initial opening was that it doesn't tell enough about Wade, compresses the time too much, and doesn't give enough establishment of the setting to make what was going on clear to the reader. I could have prose good enough to make you cry and it still wouldn't solve that complaint. The prose in a first-person narrative is the way that the viewpoint character communicates with the audience, which will help tell us who they are and what their world is like. The prose is also how you convey the setting and the passage of time - the way you structure your paragraphs and pick your words can make the characters’ situation clear or confusing. It’s not just about what you do - it’s the clarity with which you describe it.
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Apr 19, 2018 19:38
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chitoryu12 posted:Mel spent virtually all of his posts on weird sex stuff until the move to Creative Convention made that actually against the rules. Eh, I’m not going to rule out weird sex stuff as a valid literary reinterpretation of a work as masturbatory as RPO. Shying away from the dank depths of the goon psyche may be the same option, but I can’t help but be a little curious about what the unshackled imaginations of this forum would do to this book.
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Apr 23, 2018 21:46
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