A false alarm that (at least in this recent example) almost caused an outcry at the quest´s seeming overflowing grimdarkness and could have seen scores of followers abandon a "sinking ship"
Yes, but the root problem there
wasn't the Discord. It was the false alarm. If you want to get upset with someone for willfully taking a joke throwaway line out of context and asserting their misinterpretation as fact, that's fine... But the exact same thing could have happened if "death by inhaled cheez" had been the subject of a joke in the thread.
It might have been not so bad in the end, but always brushing off uncomfortable concerns as "not worth the hassle" isn´t the right way either.
I admit that I am being rather heavy-handed about this topic, but I just can not stand the inherently callous nature of expecting people to always be on the hunt for crucial info in a medium as fluid as Discord channels - especially while accounting for different timezones.
That is fair, but at the same time, it is at best
discourteous to condemn people for things that didn't happen, or that are not their fault.
Regardless, this story, despite being a "Villains Won" interpretation, is light-hearted enough to not trigger that response. The main antagonist that would turn the world into such a thing is Doom, so I want to focus our efforts on our Greatest Enemy sometime soon.
I think that the catch is that we have a fairly realistic chance of
beating Judge Doom, or at least collapsing his fortunes as badly as we collapsed Syndrome's.
Then again, maybe you're concerned that if Judge Doom goes down, someone else will just muscle in on his territory?
My favorite way to introduce dark themes...
Authors Note: While this is meant as answer to the post above it also fits neatly into my perspective. The best ways to introduce darkness into a setting naturally is to look at what the setting has implied but maybe not outright stated yet. For example if toys can feel pain or not does that make the incinerator scene worse or better? Relevant to this quest is if we ever get the means to hold seances and ask questions what secrets do we re as all want to know vs which questions are we better off not asking?
How about we just stop going out of our way to introduce additional dark themes into a setting that
doesn't belong to us, that we didn't create, and that a QM is trying to actively manage and cultivate so that it won't be too dark for most of the audience to want to participate in?
Like, if adding more dark themes to a work of fiction is just your one big hobby that you
gotta do... could you maybe do it somewhere else? DVV Doof Quest is not the best place for it.
After him it´s either Syndrome or Belllwether, depending on whether we reach out to Supers or Preds next. I´d advise taking on Syndrome after Doom because a) his Domain directly borders ours, B) we stand a good chance at securing Shegos support (or at least her not stabbing us in the back while us and Syndrome duke it out) against the fucker, c) he is still trying to get back up after the Sands fiasco and d) he might get wise on where exactly our Normbots got their heightened competence from and take countermeasures.
I think Syndrome might actually be on the way down no matter what we do, as others move in on him in his time of weakness.
Also, note that we have a strong inherent disadvantage when it comes to reaching out to supers, because Shego is already doing that and is better at it than we are. We might be able to reach out to the 'predator' anthropomorphic animals of Zootopia, but... I'm not really sure we should push into that too much; I don't think it'd be especially advantageous.
