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chitoryu12 posted:But there's also the potential for something better here. A lot of people in the thread pointed out ways that scenes or plot points could have been done better, or said that they liked the setting and just hated how Cline wrote it. As the number of ideas for fixing the book piled up, the idea came up for trying to make the ultimate fix fic: rewriting the book itself. How about not writing fan fiction (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 5, 2018 20:15
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| # ¿ Apr 16, 2024 21:46 |
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Contribution: the fat Midwestern weeb character commits seppuku.
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Apr 5, 2018 21:22
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To fix Ready Player One we should embrace its potential for perversity. OASIS should be the kingdom of sexual fantasy and experimentation, the domain of kaleidoscopic anatomic possibilities. Most users of OASIS should be filthy freaks constantly engaged in cybersex or frantic consumption of pornography. Public masturbation is an absolutely unremarkable part of the scenery, and the real world has consequently grown sticky with semen and bodily fluids flung around by legions of uncaring onanists.
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Apr 5, 2018 21:52
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Halliday was not merely a nostalgist, but a visionary of absolute sexual liberty. He died before an audience of thousands, at the climax of a one-man sex show in which he mangled every part of his body through the most ingenious devices of pain and pleasure man may imagine, breaching new dimensions of ecstasy, unleashing such orgasmic energy that his body burst apart and scattered through the sheer force of climax. This image could be a recurring motif in the story, punctuating Wade's obsession with conquering ONANSIS.
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Apr 5, 2018 22:15
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They are brother and sister in a religious sense, and their religion is sadomasochism and impure seinen tropes.
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Apr 5, 2018 22:27
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chitoryu12 posted:I think we both agree on Sorrento's complexity and just disagree on exactly how inclined he is to turn to killing. The basic problem I'm seeing is that you're only preoccupied with plot content rather than form. Have you thought about the style of prose at all? Or whether or not his character will be a raging pervert?
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Apr 6, 2018 06:46
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I live on the edge every day of my unlife.
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Apr 6, 2018 07:22
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Starting to sound interesting... how's the prose?
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Apr 6, 2018 08:33
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The problem with this discussion is, again, that it only concerns plot content. How will the theme of queerness be handled in form?DC Murderverse posted:everyone knows the beginning of that song and it would be really funny to start a chapter with George Michael's cheerful voice saying Cline's excerpt, while not good, is better than your "improved" sample. I might point out some things, like how your sample is clearly written with the short-term in mind. It's too self-conscious about being funny, too immediate and front-loaded. Stuff like this reads like rejected entries from the Bulwer-Lytton contest: quote:a quick series of notes that had become all too familiar elicited a pavlovian response of jumping out of bed before he heard- quote:There was no room in his heart for boom-boom, not while he was feeling so alone. The shift to third-person is also undermined by the dip into internal narration. The strength of a third-person viewpoint is viewing characters from the "outside," so why immediately abandon that? This brand of limited, subjective third-person viewpoint is horrendously overused in modern genre fiction, so it only serves to make the writing more generic. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Apr 6, 2018 |
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Apr 6, 2018 16:29
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chitoryu12 posted:So let's take a quick vote. Wouldn't it just be easier to write the story instead of crowd-sourcing characterization? Art demands creative vision, not creative consensus. Just decide yourself.
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Apr 7, 2018 15:38
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chitoryu12 posted:While I'm maintaining the ability to just pick something and move on if there's no consensus, I do want to make something that people will like. Something like making a character trans is a pretty big, potentially controversial change that needs to be treated with caution. I very much doubt that you're going to stir the pot at all with your "fix fic" for Ready Player One, so why worry about adding a trans character? Why don't you just change all the character names, remove the sci-fi element, and sell it as your own original fiction a la E.L. James? You could actually make money off that. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Apr 9, 2018 |
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Apr 9, 2018 20:48
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Clipperton posted:
If you're going to write something as artistically and morally bankrupt as a Ready Player One "fix fic," you might as try to benefit yourself and your family. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 10, 2018 07:21
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@ captain bourgie over here
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nine-gear crow posted:Well then go make a thread that fixes all the problems you have with this thread and charge people money to post in it to feed your hungry family and gently caress off from this one. The enormous fortune that has been passed down to me from my ancestors - slave-traders and robber barons to a man - makes such things unnecessary. My ambitions are beyond the scope of fan-fiction. I will not attempt to fix Ready Player One. I intend to make it a reality. I will build ONANSIS.
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Apr 10, 2018 08:10
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chitoryu12 posted:Wade's #1 problem in Cline's writing is that he's extremely unlikable. While you can make a protagonist with severe flaws (even bad enough to be an antagonist) that you still want to root for, it's difficult. A protagonist does not need to be a character you "want to root for". Characters don't need to be anything. How a reader approaches them is completely up to them.
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Apr 10, 2018 14:06
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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? Someone interested in that kind of story. "Rooting for" a character is immaterial. Also, A human heart posted:*banging knife and fork on table* what style are you going to write the book in? what style are you going to write the book in?
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Apr 10, 2018 14:25
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What a bourgie, unlike me, who wants to seize the means of fanfiction
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Apr 10, 2018 15:58
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Again, the problem here is that you're spending too much time on plot outlines instead of the prose.
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Apr 10, 2018 16:55
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Darth Walrus posted:I don’t believe anyone’s stopping you from offering advice on prose-styles that might be used to enhance the story. You first need to have a prose style before I can offer advice on it.
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Apr 10, 2018 17:09
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chitoryu12 posted:I laid out in the very first post that we were going to start by figuring out how the plot and characters would actually progress as a whole and then start on prose once we had decided on the basic skeleton. I even said that we'd be ready to start on the first chapter in the middle of the week. That's like saying you'll draw up blueprints for your new home, and then figuring out afterwards if you know architecture, can build a house, and have the money to do it. If you merely think of prose as a way to deliver a plot, you've already failed.
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Apr 10, 2018 17:16
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chitoryu12 posted:The entire point of this thread is a collaborative effort. I'm acting as a sort of moderator and doing the actual prose to ensure a consistent voice, but it's still one in which anyone can contribute their own ideas. You are treating prose merely as a vessel for the ideas, which is a recipe for bad genre fiction. The truth is that prose is the ideas - the medium is the message. Merely treating the medium as a receptacle for other people's ideas degrades art. e: Moreover, what do you think about my suggestions for ONANSIS? BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Apr 10, 2018 |
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Apr 10, 2018 17:37
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I think we need know about the setting's sexual alt lifestyles. What's the BDSM scene like in a world of immersive virtual reality?
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Apr 10, 2018 18:28
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Samizdata posted:A main character HAS to be able to be identified with by the audience. There HAS to be some reason for the reader to give two fucks about what happens to the protagonist. Otherwise, there's no point to the book. The problem here is that you imagine the audience as some narrow-minded dullards who only care about characters they identify with and apparently in whom they can "self-insert". e: Testekill posted:I think it is more refusing to engage with someone that exists only to argue in bad faith. Pointing out that prose is vitally important in a long-form prose work is apparently arguing in "bad faith". BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Apr 11, 2018 |
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Apr 11, 2018 05:15
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Crimpolioni posted:hey op consider that since you apparently nod along with this dumb crap then turn around and dismiss advocacy of good prose as a boring troll, maybe you're absolutely not qualified for this and heck, just as bad as cline or worse imo It's amazing how it doesn't make sense on a artistic, escapist, nor a commercial level. There's no need in art for audiences to find protagonists "likable". If you want to just entertain people, there's no obligation for audiences to root for the protagonist. And the runaway success of Ready Player One shows that audiences don't actually care if a protagonist is "likable" or not, and that identification probably has very little to do with "likability".
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Apr 11, 2018 05:52
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Samizdata posted:How about you actually quote me correctly, asshat? Did I say I had to "like" the main character? Nope. But don't let your trolling be interfered with by reality. You just toddle on off to your dream world where you actually make sense, and I hope you feel better after your mom changes your diapers and burps you. I said "identify", BTW, which means understand why a character chooses what they choose. Which is impossible with a random monkey cheese chucklehead like yourself. Have a great life and welcome to ignore. This is a very normal response.
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Apr 11, 2018 07:11
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That the opposite of an "identifiable" character is an "rear end in a top hat" just shows that it's a synonym for a likable character.
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Apr 11, 2018 09:14
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chitoryu12 posted:If you want an example of how it'll look, try something like Jim Butcher Oh dear. Jim Butcher's prose is banal and inexpressive. The passage you quoted is garbage, and that you apparently think of it as an ideal to strive towards does not bode well for your "fix fic". Just look at the puerile hook that opens it: quote:The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault. Or a device as idiotic as the hero apparently trying to save a bunch of puppies. The whole thing is crippled by sensory overdescription that doesn't express anything interesting. It's the author rushing through a near-indecipherable scene in an attempt to simulate excitement, signifying nothing. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 14:01 on Apr 11, 2018 |
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Apr 11, 2018 13:57
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chitoryu12 posted:Do you have any sample of your writing to show us what it should look like? Sure. Here's the preface to one of my serialized works: quote:As the Manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards, and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing, and fiddling: there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen on the look-out, quacks (other quacks, plague take them!) bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind. Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy. Look at the faces of the actors and buffoons when they come off from their business; and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits down to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvass. The curtain will be up presently, and he will be turning head over heels, and crying, "How are you?" e: Darth Walrus posted: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? Can you actually write anything "campy, playful, high on moment-to-moment action and spectacle"?
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Apr 11, 2018 14:13
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chitoryu12 posted:Okay, William Makepeace Thackeray from 1848. I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt to see if you were serious about actually contributing anything, but I was wrong. 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. Darth Walrus posted: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? Can you write fiction at all?
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Apr 11, 2018 14:22
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chitoryu12 posted:Honestly I'd just quit replying to him at this point. He's not doing any of this in good faith. How is pointing out that Jim Butcher is a bad writer not arguing in "good faith"? Darth Walrus posted:I’m not really seeing why that’s a relevant question, given the bolded. You do need to still need to able to write fiction in order to write fiction.
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Apr 11, 2018 14:34
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chitoryu12 posted:Yeah, way ahead of you. I tried one last time to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he would do anything constructive, but.... I am offering you simple advice: focus on your prose, consider writing an original work, and avoid poor literary influences. These are all constructive things. What do you want to accomplish with your "fix fic"? You mention potential for something better, but what is that "something better"? Why lavishly detail every aspect of the plot and setting of the books if you want to be creative?
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Apr 11, 2018 14:48
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Everyone my age remembers what they were jacking it to when they first heard about the contest. I was a forty year old man watching Tijuana Looney Tunes.
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Apr 11, 2018 14:59
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Mel Mudkiper posted:And then I was there. Every inch of my body was caressed by silken hands. Every hair was erect and tingling with the ecstasy of it. My mouth began to feel the gentle sensation of lips, of oval office, of cock, all at my command. My penis enjoyed the wet agility of a human mouth, the warmth of a pussy, the suction grip of an rear end in a top hat, in a harmony of pleasure. My anus felt the warm tickling of a leathery and muscular tongue entering it, preparing it for greater insertions yet to come. Scintillating, arousing, harrowing. This is what literature should be.
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Apr 11, 2018 17:48
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nine-gear crow posted:Some guy literally pissed in a jar and it won an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. What are your thoughts on that in 50,000 words or less? Piss Christ? More please.
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Apr 11, 2018 17:55
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Honestly, not looking forward to Westerners writing about how bad Japan is, unlike their progressive and open-minded society ( why "over-25"?).
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Apr 11, 2018 19:35
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Art3mis and I moved to the center of the dance floor. Soon we were surrounded by onlookers, each of them diverted from their own pleasures by the the site of us under the red glow of the spotlight. Her fingers gracefully skimmed the warm and loose flesh of my testes as they reached towards my oiled rear end in a top hat. Her hand gently breached the crevice of my lower buttocks, and slowly her finger wormed its way into the clutched muscle of my anus. She breached it, and slowly sought out my prostate. At the same time I explored her quim with my hand. My middle and ring finger pried apart the twitching hole of her vagina while my thumb found its way through the ring of her clitoral piercing. Each time I explored deeper into her wet hole, I tugged hard upon the ring. I wanted to train her to find no difference between pleasure and pain. Excellent. Caligula: Divine Carnage is giving me ideas about the kind of spectacles you might see in the fix fic. It's a fascinating book. Ancient Romans would mark the end of a gladiatorial battles by collectively ejaculating onto the arena. That would fit right in into this orificecracy.
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Apr 11, 2018 20:07
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Well you haven’t really succeeded in your primary objective, because your rewrite of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is not any better written. Why make the opening line a reference to the opening line of a bad novel? Referencing the only line people remember from the novel even makes it seem like a superficial reading – so is it supposed to characterize the protagonist as ill-read? quote:I didn’t see it much, even when looking out the laundry room window. The other stack across the way filled up most of my view. When I actually left my unit, I kept my head to the ground and on a swivel for anyone coming out of an alley (which was often, since alleys were the only thing separating stacks). And when I was inside, I had more pressing things to pay attention to. Here your dystopic imagery is vague and inexpressive. Why not start with describing one of the most important images in the books, which is “the stacks”? quote:The date’s easy to find, though, if you Google it. December 2nd, 2090. According to weather.com, Oklahoma City was cloudy that day with a high of 39 degrees Fahrenheit and a low of 27 degrees. At the moment his heart made its final beat, the wind was 6 miles per hour and blowing northwest. Brain cells begin to die after 4 to 6 minutes without blood flow, so I suppose the humidity was around 24% when James Halliday ceased to exist. Give or take. This is superfluous, and using Wade’s inability to recall the colour of the sky to wring out some Post-Information Age poignancy only merits an eyeroll. “Technology can tell us anything, but can it REALLY??!?” quote:What I remember is that I was 14 years old when the school day was interrupted by a window that appeared on everybody’s visor. I think it might have been my US History (Basic) class, but a lot of these OASIS teachers look interchangeable so my memory is a bit fuzzy then. I remember that even he stopped mid-sentence, which is how I know that “everybody” meant everybody. Why the emphasis on everybody when this “everybody” is already so indistinct and irrelevant? Why not describe the scene first? The most important part here is the satirical image of a virtual classroom, but you stop short of saying anything interesting about it. quote:The window was black at first, with the title bar along the top simply reading “Anorak’s Invitation”. It piqued my interest; just about every announcement from the CEO came from Anorak, but usually in the form of emails. Stopping everything to force people to listen? Now that was something. quote:Instead of Wade just dropping all the details about OASIS on the very first page, I think it flows a bit better to integrate chunks of knowledge for the reader into the narrative. I It’s a rather bad idea. You’re trying to accomplish genre “world-building,” but the reader actually needs to understand the imagery at work. Why not first describe what the OASIS virtual reality experience so that the reader can understand what’s happening? quote:The first sound we all heard in our headphones was a distorted guitar, just long enough to get us interested. And then it seemed like every instrument possible struck at once. “All dressed up and nowhere to go….” Again, who is ”us”? We have no idea what the classroom is like. Also, why retain the asinine pop culture references? In general your prose is occasionally functional. The basic problem with your fanfiction is that you’re just rewriting passages to be blander rather than addressing any formal problems with the text. Why keep the first-person narration, for example? It’s not as if the protagonist’s internal narration is ever very interesting. It would be far better to see him from the outside, as more of a type.
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Apr 18, 2018 20:33
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chitoryu12 posted:I'm referencing one of the most famous early cyberpunk novels in a quasi-cyberpunk book that's structured around 80s references. This isn't hard. It's advisable to begin the story with something good and interesting instead of references to cyberpunk and "world-building". chitoryu12 posted:Not only is that not how the text is meant to be read It doesn't matter how the text is "meant" to be read. If these details are irrelevant to the character, they would not be recounting them at all, so there's obvious contradiction. A virtual classroom being interrupted by the latest social media buzz is an extremely satirical image. If you manage to write out a scene like that without realizing you're writing satire, there's probably something wrong. chitoryu12 posted:One of the worst parts of the original is that it assumes the readers are idiots who need to have every single detail about OASIS, the current state of the world, and a full biography of Wade Watts and James Halliday explained in multiple chapter-long info dumps occasionally interrupted by a few sentences of story. Why not simply rewrite those "infodumps" to be more interesting? Long-winded explanations are not some kind of problem. Quoting something is still referencing it.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:16
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Why would it be important that the protagonist doesn't remember what colour the sky was? If the point is that he didn't care, why would he even bring it up?
BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 21:26
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Having an ordinary person's ability to recall things does not seem particularly alienated.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:42
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The picture faded in. It looked like some kind of gymnasium, packed wall to wall with young men and women violently loving each other. It was grainy and blurry, like an old snuff film, not like OASIS hyper-porno graphics. And the beauty of it all! Massive belts were the only accoutrement for many, revealing beneath them massive bushes of styled pubic hair. There were cock-rings that could contain Priapus, there were thick black plastic gimpsuits. And up on the stage was a band of eight burly men in a train, fronted by a redheaded man with an impish grin, a white wife beater, and nothing else. Even in the blurry footage, you could see the sweat and cum of the crowd evaporate into mist.Mel Mudkiper posted:Botl and I are co-authors of the ONANSIS project. I'm more of a filth ideas man.
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Apr 18, 2018 22:06
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