Moonfeather
"We solidify ourselves everyday."
- Location
- Neverland
Damn. Ya'll made me read this quest again. This is the best piece of avatar fiction I've read.
Deep Red (Avatar: The Last Airbender)
- Thread starter kosm
- Start date
- Location
- Leeds
And we will continue to make you re read it, until our demands are met.
- Location
- Location Location
And we will continue to make you re read it, until our demands are met.
I for one demand that you write this as a story, except akane is Taylor reincarnated (bonus points if Azula is Sophia!)
I'll pay you £100 if it turns out Zuko is Greg Veder haha.
Moonfeather
"We solidify ourselves everyday."
- Location
- Neverland
Am I still only known for my worm work...? I have much better stories..
Regardless worm hasn't interested me for a while. If I were to do anything regarding Taylor it would be to continue my naruto cross or perhaps a bleach reincarnation. My original stories take priority however.
I flirted with the idea of asking kosm to continue her quest but her style is a bit different, even if she accepted idk if I could do it justice.
- Location
- Location Location
more like I know you for your worm work, having only read valhalla. Honestly though id take an si style story with this premise any day. Anyone up for the challenge?
Dai
May be a robot
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I don't really understand that. I feel like if she had a good idea she should have just wrote it straight up as a normal story, she obviously has the talent. Quests can be nice for discussion but in terms of quality they are often far below what a good author can do with a well thought out plot and some skill, especially after the 'quest' part is over. When there's no more voting and anyone reading it afterwards are left with a lower quality piece of fiction.
Its honestly amazing that the story itself is as high quality as it is when it is basically a D&D campaign that you're playing with a hundred strangers that you are trying to keep on the 'right' path. EVERY choice in a quest needs to be valid, even the horrifically dumb ones.
I mean it's a quest because fiction.live(/anonkun) is a platform for doing Quests, not plain creative fiction, and it was (presumably) being ran there because she was part of the community over there
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- She/Her
This is not a universally-held viewpoint. I'll grant that there are many quests which suffer narratively as a result of their questhood, but it's entirely possible to make the quest medium work better for a given story than a rendering of the same story in pure non-quest prose would, even once the interactive period is over, just by way of the knowing that the story was once interactive. It's like TTRPG session-logs, in that regard: yes, it's easy to write them awkwardly such that they end up worse than a traditional-prose rendering would have been, but it's also possible for them to have narrative impact that a traditional-prose rendering wouldn't be able to have. In both the quest case and the TTRPG-session-logs case, the byplay between the players and the author becomes part of the text, such that it can contribute to the narrative as an additional layer of interestingness above and beyond the in-character goings-on.
In Ruby Quest, for example, there's an enjoyable object-level story about Ruby and Tom trying to escape the Metal Glen. But then there's also an enjoyable meta-level story, about a group of players getting increasingly invested in the story and ultimately managing to steer things towards a surprisingly-happy ending. If you were to take away the quest layer and re-render Ruby Quest as a pure linear webcomic, something valuable would be lost in the conversion.
Now, it might still be reasonable to say that making this particular story a quest was unwise, if the author had specific places she wanted to take it and wasn't prepared for the audience to pull it in the sorts of directions they did their best to pull it in. And it would definitely be reasonable—if true—to say that, for you personally, quests are consistently less enjoyable than counterfactual renderings of the same ideas in traditional linear narrative structure would be. But I don't think the jump from those points over to blanket condemnation of quests as a medium is well-founded; there are things that quests, even as finished works, can do which traditional linear narratives can't.
Last edited:
- Location
- UK
Personally the big thing that well done quests can add to a story that I've not seen captured in your non-quest writing is the sense of real world chaos that sometimes shines through.
Between choices from players and dice rolls there's something more authentic to the world. It might just be the knowledge that the author doesn't have complete control of the world and narrative, because whilst reading a non-quest (or TTRPG or similar) you know everything written is done at the direction of the author, and the real world doesn't act like that. Ignoring philosophy, the real world is a complex interaction between many people that's often difficult to predict, which is also often exactly what a quest is.
This also means that when something awesome does arise from the chaos there's additional weight behind that awesomeness because it didn't have to work out that way. Even if realistically we know it was largely planned and definitely interpreted by the author; managing this chaos is a lot of work and takes real skill, and I don't mean to detract from them in any respect.
With regards to Deep Red, I loved this fic, but the parts I loved it for I'm pretty certain didn't rise or were especially helped by the quest aspect of it, maybe because it felt like they were at the direction of kosm anyway (in which case still kudos, she made something great). Maybe it would have been better given more control to the author then.
Between choices from players and dice rolls there's something more authentic to the world. It might just be the knowledge that the author doesn't have complete control of the world and narrative, because whilst reading a non-quest (or TTRPG or similar) you know everything written is done at the direction of the author, and the real world doesn't act like that. Ignoring philosophy, the real world is a complex interaction between many people that's often difficult to predict, which is also often exactly what a quest is.
This also means that when something awesome does arise from the chaos there's additional weight behind that awesomeness because it didn't have to work out that way. Even if realistically we know it was largely planned and definitely interpreted by the author; managing this chaos is a lot of work and takes real skill, and I don't mean to detract from them in any respect.
With regards to Deep Red, I loved this fic, but the parts I loved it for I'm pretty certain didn't rise or were especially helped by the quest aspect of it, maybe because it felt like they were at the direction of kosm anyway (in which case still kudos, she made something great). Maybe it would have been better given more control to the author then.
Tyran
Blatant Product Placement (pro bono)
Under that concept, then wouldn't a quest need multiple player characters and a far smaller player base? I can see that concept working if you only need to manage half a dozen players, each one controlling their respective character, you know like a normal RPG campaign.
It doesn't work if you have dozens or more players fighting for the control over one protagonist.
It doesn't work if you have dozens or more players fighting for the control over one protagonist.
AzureShogun
Tanks are better than Mechs
- Location
- United Kingdom
Recently re-read this, unlike last time I stopped soon after the Agni-Kai with Zuko. Just really hate chat's decision to go through with it, absolutely couldn't muster up a will to continue reading after it.
Still, I really enjoyed most of it. Obviously the characters make it great (when akun isn't making them mutilate each other) but one of the things I like about this among ATLA fics is definitely the pseudo-Avatar approach to bending, really liked that.
On that note, does anyone remember which story it is where someone figures out how to 'merge' air bending with firebending to do something like smoke-bending? I thought it might have been this one at the start but it seems I'm getting my ATLA fanfics jumbled up.
Still, I really enjoyed most of it. Obviously the characters make it great (when akun isn't making them mutilate each other) but one of the things I like about this among ATLA fics is definitely the pseudo-Avatar approach to bending, really liked that.
On that note, does anyone remember which story it is where someone figures out how to 'merge' air bending with firebending to do something like smoke-bending? I thought it might have been this one at the start but it seems I'm getting my ATLA fanfics jumbled up.
Dai
May be a robot
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I believe "Giving Up" had something like that, where Zuko starts learning airbending teachings.
Invadingcat478
Certified Homophone
- Location
- Nekoneko town
Okay am I the only rare unicorns who actually liked the direction? The face mutilation, the gaslighting, the unjustified hate, the Imperialist and Fire Nation's Burden mindset, the blunderous decision, the environment that keeps bringing down the protagonist and guiding her into a fucked up person, I actually quite like them.