I'm just kind of amused by how mortifyingly embarrassing she'd find the idea of taking out this new high performance machine and then being killed by the mecha equivilant of two forklifts with pistols taped to their arms.Indeed, Gloriana has survived the potentially fatal encounter with the Enemy POV Character despite Amani's giving away her personal info. I am greatly pleased by this.
Although I would have been more pleased to see Lori nail the bitch through the chest with that cutter.
Look, I've never heard of a murder attempt involving two lightly armed forklifts that failed, so I assume that this was just a once-in-a-lifetime fluke in favour of Lori.I'm just kind of amused by how mortifyingly embarrassing she'd find the idea of taking out this new high performance machine and then being killed by the mecha equivilant of two forklifts with pistols taped to their arms.
As a lurker, I'm honestly finding myself in agreement with this sentiment.Ugh, why am I even being drawn back into this, despite the plot arc remaining more of the same.
Hrrm.As a lurker, I'm honestly finding myself in agreement with this sentiment.
Putting aside more generalizations about how poor narratives keep hammering the negative tone non-stop or the unrealistic approach of putting a minority of military service into the spotlight, the thing that's been getting to me is... how often the protagonists' sister just seems to keep dodging death and ultimate consequences time and again. It's been made clear at times that her skill isn't saving her butt, which she has as much as the noble girlfriend to be fair, it's sheer luck that is responsible. And from how I've been keeping track, luck is outweighing skill by a noticeable margin. Unless this is the leadup to the setting having Newtype-esque psychic BS, in which case boo. Her character development potential's at an end, her narrative use is over, anything else would just be a rehash what's already been said and done. The sister's trapped, so if this ends with anything other than her getting shot or imprisoned, my SOD is pretty much done.
Frankly, if there was an in-character option to just shoot her now, I'd take it.
Then the entire point of the cutaways to the perspectives of the pilots would be a total failure, as their point is to show what the pilot side of the world is like in select doses.I think the problem is this is *Supposed* to be a Fighting Mecha Anime on some level right? Only because we're say, a Bridge Bunny versus one of the Pilots, we don't get to truly see what seperates the AWESOME HERO PILOTS from say, a run-of-the-mill pilot or our own side-character MC inside a Mecha.
And the trend continues with you seemingly deciding that the best way to dismiss tripping over a rope is to proclaim that's what the rope is there for.Plus, because 'the eternal grimdarkness of war' is something that's universal in this verse, and we're not seeing say, people fawn over the amazing Perbeck's awesomeness or treating Ito like the star of the ship, it just feels like a very very dark Wartime story, rather then the significantly more light-hearted tale Gaze is seeing (Yes I meant that ;D)
In regards to tone, I'm going to paraphrase Bennett The Sage on End Of Evangelion: "If you have nothing but bring the tone down without having it go back up, the audience becomes numb to what they're seeing".
The old adage of "war is 90% boredom, 10% combat" is always accurate. This is an anime, so the 90% of our tour where we're not in combat is given only partial screen-time. The screen time is does show are relevant things to the later fight scenes and what the batch of characters are up to. Even the supposed shore leave has more screen-time devoted to the plot to sabotage the defenses than the dedicated character development. The clue is in the title: "Mecha setting". This is the "Hollywood got it wrong every damn time" depiction of war.
As a lurker, I'm honestly finding myself in agreement with this sentiment.
Putting aside more generalizations about how poor narratives keep hammering the negative tone non-stop or the unrealistic approach of putting a minority of military service into the spotlight, the thing that's been getting to me is... how often the protagonists' sister just seems to keep dodging death and ultimate consequences time and again. It's been made clear at times that her skill isn't saving her butt, which she has as much as the noble girlfriend to be fair, it's sheer luck that is responsible. And from how I've been keeping track, luck is outweighing skill by a noticeable margin. Unless this is the leadup to the setting having Newtype-esque psychic BS, in which case boo. Her character development potential's at an end, her narrative use is over, anything else would just be a rehash what's already been said and done. The sister's trapped, so if this ends with anything other than her getting shot or imprisoned, my SOD is pretty much done.
Frankly, if there was an in-character option to just shoot her now, I'd take it.
Doesn't help that the Questers keep going 'but this makes for a good storyyyy' instead of trying to pick a 'smart' option that's more likely to not bite us in the butt. You want the drama you don't get to opt out.
...Of course, I'm pretty sure as a QM I'd ALSO be liable to lie to Questor's faces about how meaningful the decisions they make actually are
I think the bolded statement and these lines of mineNot all stories need to be that way. You are using your preferences to ignore entire swathes of literature which plumb deeply depressing depths of the human soul. There is no real happiness at the end of many Russian novels, or even throughout. That doesn't mean that Devils isn't a good piece of literature. You are repeating a preference and declaring it to be a universal standard required of writing. I suspect that Petals will have a pretty bittersweet ending, but not an overtly depressing one.
"If you have nothing but bring the tone down without having it go back up, the audience becomes numb to what they're seeing
Are where the heart of the matter lies. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say there's a related point I didn't go into since it wasn't directly relevant in that post: That a story that overall carries a dark and depressing tone must carry something to prevent the reader from being burned out. The primary, and admittedly overused, example I turn to in such things is Worm. Whether its the characters or the world, the reader has something to hold their attention when the deaths and torture would otherwise turn them away. The Russian novels you cite, the tragedies of Shakespeare, the works of Edgar Allen Poe, they're all works of philosophical introspection, a gaze into the human character. Stories of the Gulags, Death Camps, and other atrocities are meant to give otherwise detached numbers a human touch, so that the current generation may prevent them from occurring again. It doesn't necessarily have to be happiness or positivity, but something has to give the audience a break from the depressing tone.
The success of books like We Were Soldiers Once And Young and its movie adaptation makes your claim that the wars of reality are not "narratively viable" completely inaccurate. Given you also claim I'm writing out entire genres, the wording... well, that could've been phrased better. I am sure you did not mean to come across as doing the same error I supposedly have. Or should I be taking the "what's allowed here" to mean that if one were to write something akin to With The Old Breed, it could not be posted due to its graphic content? And under the grounds of 'it can't be put here' it undermines the narrative?The fullest depiction of war would be far more grim than what's allowed for here, and would have ended the quest very early on. If you cannot stomach it, that's fine. I can't stomach a lot of stuff. I've also written deeply optimistic, very silly fiction. That doesn't mean this critique is reasonable. I think it's demanding the author to change their tone to suit your preferences because you simply don't like the way the story is going. But a story can't please everyone.
I don't think it's fair to complain about it not getting war right when the war you're demanding isn't actually narratively viable. Just because something is a war story does not mean it has to be entirely accurate to war. It can say important things about war without being some kind of intense replication.
I... think I may have to double-check how much of Mosi surviving pre-station was down to player choice. If true, that would require a whole restructuring of my argument. Quest narrative takes a whole new lens compared to traditional narrative. Similar points, but the most immediate level, player interaction, trickles down to influence everything else.Well actually, in this case, it's not luck but PC choices that led to Mosi's survival (which I suppose is "luck" from her end but only kind of, in that it was a result of the same encounter with Amani that left her in this bad of a situation to begin with). If we hadn't told Mosi about Perbeck, she wouldn't have had that card to play and may well have died then and there.
Offering a point of clarification, pre-station Mosi was involved in two onscreen battles with risk of death.I... think I may have to double-check how much of Mosi surviving pre-station was down to player choice. If true, that would require a whole restructuring of my argument. Quest narrative takes a whole new lens compared to traditional narrative. Similar points, but the most immediate level, player interaction, trickles down to influence everything else.
That's what it looked like to me too, but thanks for the confirm.Offering a point of clarification, pre-station Mosi was involved in two onscreen battles with risk of death.
A fair sentiment, as Mosi getting the mission blown or the entire team spaced over the first or second screw-up would've ultimately resulted in little difference for the family character dynamic than her getting smacked in the first fight. However, there's the limit to how much... causality one can tweak before it gets plausibility bending, as my initial post elucidated.These are not outcomes affected by votes so much as like, me not arbitrarily killing off a major named antagonist in act 1 of a story without resolving plot threads related to her that I had invested a significant amount of words into. It is true that by the point of writing the recent updates I have a lot of trickle-down effects from earlier votes I can cash in on, though, sometimes repeatedly. "Oh right, you told Mosi about Lori" being one of them.
Petals Of Titanium at this point in time cannot fully separate that which should function as the attention-holder from the elements which eventually deplete a reader's interest.
A fair sentiment, as Mosi getting the mission blown or the entire team spaced over the first or second screw-up would've ultimately resulted in little difference for the family character dynamic than her getting smacked in the first fight. However, there's the limit to how much... causality one can tweak before it gets plausibility bending, as my initial post elucidated.
Am I the only one who doesn't find the story that dark and depressing? To me, it feels like a pretty standard lighter-grey versus darker-gray war story tonewise.
Like, the only thing I can think of as substantially more dark than a standard real robot anime was Ito dying, and even that is only due to it happening relatively early in the story.
Nothing happened that didn't already happen in Gundam somewhere!Am I the only one who doesn't find the story that dark and depressing? To me, it feels like a pretty standard lighter-grey versus darker-gray war story tonewise.
Like, the only thing I can think of as substantially more dark than a standard real robot anime was Ito dying, and even that is only due to it happening relatively early in the story.
Actually, I have something somewhat solid to point to in gaging broader interest: Likes and ratings. Since we don't have a recorded 'viewed' count akin to YT, and there are more people reading this than who decide to chirp up, this is the closest thing we have to an objective measure of interest. Now, there is 'growth over time', that is to say the number of likes picked up after a certain period of time past the update's posting. This inflates the count of earlier posts, and there's no exact way to be 100% certain of the specific rate other than the author going back through their alerts and doing the number-crunching.The fact that a great many people do appear to be remaining engaged with the story seems to undermine your assertion of a supposedly fact-based failure to hold the reader's attention. I'm inclined to agree with Cetashwayo that this may just not be to your personal taste.
Actually, that's completely false. I never claimed that the Mosi shootout was the big breaking point for me. We are, after all, discussing her after she's killed purpose-built combat units in an unarmored, clunky mech armed with the equivalent of a nailgun and blowtorch. Then survived a crash landing to escape restraint in crowded station on lockdown from combat and known infiltrators.Okay, but again, this latest incident - which you seem to be suggesting as the straw that broke the camel's back - actually was the result of a player-made choice (namely, "tell Mosi about Lori"). It is also worth noting that the expected outcome of that choice, while not necessarily manifesting in this exact manner, was in fact that Mosi would fare better than she otherwise would have in a future confrontation with Lori. So insofar as plausibility was distorted at all, it was at worst in pursuit of honoring the consequences of player choice appropriately - a concession which quests must generally be prepared to make, at least to some extent.
I am fine with all of the above. I have no objection to it. But anything further like it, I would.The sister's trapped, so if this ends with anything other than her getting shot or imprisoned, my SOD is pretty much done.
There is actually, most quests shed 70% of initial playersNow, unless there's some metric for quest participation drop-off I'm not aware of, and I'd be very interested in seeing site analytics like that, it does seem like there has been a slow decline in interest.