Faith In Superior Firepower: A Postmortem
Warning: The following contains my opinions on several fiction traits rather prominent on SV/SB. They may be presented as facts. Please take with a grain of salt - I'm not going to bother editing this or cleaning it up, so it's first take all the way down.
Also I'm two bottles drunk, and I make no promises regarding the third or forth. Whee!
Have you ever had one of those ideas that seems absolutely brilliant and without flaw at the time, and then looked back twenty minutes later and wanted to file a request to travel back in time and kick your past self in the back of the head?
Yeah, that was FiSF for me.
At first, I was having fun and people seemed to be enjoying it, or at the very least, not hating it, so hey, that was good. But as the story went on, I very quickly realized that I wasn't really prepared to write this kind of story.
Commander Faith is… well. First off, Faith is a self insert, and that's terrible. Not that I'm saying all self inserts are terrible - read any of Shadenight's more popular works (Bond Breaker, Noblesse Oblige, Knocking on Heaven's Door, et cetera) and you'll see that they can be done really well (although all three of the above are admittedly tinged with his typical angst/edgyness)
That said, it's kind of… difficult, to do well. I don't want this to turn into a huge rant about why most SI fics suck, so I'll try to skip over this quickly, but it's not exactly going to be short since this is FiSF's postmortem and FiSF is an SI fic.
First of all, there's the utter lack of reaction to the entire scenario. I could come up with all sorts of excuses for that - stemming mainly from ROB, which is itself something I'll get into later. Were I to rewrite this story (haha, no.) I'd probably skip entirely over that. It's… too big a thing to just explain away in a chapter or two, but at the same time no one likes reading chapter after chapter of self-pitying angst about being dropped in a strange situation. Timeskipping ahead to a point in the future where 'that happened, I freaked out, I got over it' is valid seems to me the best way to move the story past that - I find that, as with many things, it's more gunk on the beginning that just slows the story down.
The second issue is that Faith doesn't really act much like me as a person and in a way doesn't really act like a person at all, partly because it's hard for me to imagine actually having the power to devour planets and match the energy output of stars with a single shot, and partly because of the major time differential.
The Sanctum arc was written over a couple of months, and is set in a period of about a month. The FTL arc was written over an even longer time and represents about a week. The Red Faction arc represents a few hours and was written over a month, et cetera. Basically, as my mindset changed IRL the character's mindset changed as well, even though it didn't really make sense in the context.
See, Commander Effect arc. Faith zigzagged between 'okay doing nothing, that's cool' and 'holy shit why didnt we do this sooner' then back to 'ok no everythings fine' and then back to 'seriously serious mode lets stop fucking around' and then just escalates into tearing her emotions out over a stupid fight the likes of which I've had many of over the years, none of which ever made me even consider committing self lobotomy but that's what SI!Faith did anyway.
Add to that that character development is easily one of the areas I find I struggle with the most (and that's saying something, given how shitty my writing is overall), and you have a really stupid, crappy protagonist. See, most of the Mass Effect arc, where I was semi-purposefully taking actions in order to antagonise the others involved and then utterly failing to justify most of them anywhere near enough to meet even my own expectations.
Alright, done ribbing on SIs now. Time to talk about the second part of the protagonist I've come to hate. That being the Commander part.
Commanders are overpowered as fuck.
This is pretty much the main draw of Commander fics, but it's also the main flaw, because it kind of limits the number of stories you can tell. Either you put the focus more on the characters, their development and the interactions between them (which really should be a focus of any story) or you're forced to engage in some Skitter-level escalation if you focus on more conventional conflict. Or you can tell a story where a super overpowered OCP comes in and flattens everything that even looks at them funny, but those stories tend to get really boring really fast unless you happen to be focusing on the characters involved… making it the first kind of story I talked about above. Eh.
The problem with going the 'escalating conflict' method is that each time the Commander faces a bigger opponent and wins, they get more powerful due to stealing tech. Then they have to go up against an even bigger opponent. And then, when they win, they steal their opponent's tech, becoming even more powerful.
And so on, and so on, until you run out of places to go that are interesting to see. There are only a handful of universes that could even make a theoretical Competent!Faith flinch, at this point - even 40k would quickly devolve into 'everything is now Starfuckers, self replicating infinitely at an exponential rate', given even just a couple of hours to get the ball rolling, and that's a bit silly.
I tried to nerf this by having Faith make less intelligent choices regarding battles, but that just led to me rewriting battle scenes with stupider and stupider tactics each time until it came across as something other than 'Teleporter spam + Dox spam = win'. See, just about every pre-flip out battle in the Mass Effect universe. Hell, even the curbstomp I wrote in 105. It's silly and pointless. Faith knows where all the slave lairs are, why not just teleport units straight there? What even was the point of the Colossus? Was it worth pissing of the SA just to get Titanium-E early? (No.)
Just artificial limits that served no real purpose and didn't make sense.
With the amazing power of hindsight, I probably should have taken some of those suggestions to visit fantasy or modern supernatural worlds - limiting the upgrade prospects of the Commander SI, given the natives an advantage in the form of whatever magic or supernatural powers they possess. But I didn't. Ah well.
Anyway, to summarize the last three paragraphs, purely conflict-driven PASI (or equivalent) is somewhat infeasible. Not to say it can't be done, but it's quite beyond my paltry skills, I believe. I realized this quite quickly after I began writing FiSF - a short time into the FTL arc, specifically. At that point, I tried to take the main conflicts of the story away from actual violent conflict and into different areas, such as politics. I mean, trying to change the direction of the story so rapidly like that was already a bad idea, but...
Well. The less said about the politics of the FTL arc, the better.
But I'm going to talk about it anyway, because fuck me, right? So I don't know much about politics, honestly. The Australian education system has many flaws and a seemingly complete inability to teach useful life skills in the majority of courses is amongst them. This manifested in FiSF with a number of painful and incredibly cringey chapters about attempting to do politics-y stuff.
Faith failing at politics is entirely in character. The rest of the universe failing at politics is shitty writing on my part.
So I quickly gave up on that, and after a quick jaunt to Red Faction for some fun gizmos whilst I waited for the Commander Effect to start (and that's its own thing which I'll talk about later) I turned to trying to focus more on character development, for which introducing the other Virtues was mildly useful so I had a larger number of characters (and would also set the stage for later development both plot and character wise).
In hindsight, it would have been much, much better to just grab some existing characters from the Mass Effect universe, or any other universe, to serve as Faith's foil. Instead I used… more SIs, which was just fucking stupid on so many levels I don't even. Whatever past me spiked her cruisers with, I want some now.
It was at about this point I realized I had no real idea how to write character development, or just actual characters in general, either, which is why every character-driven scene in the Mass Effect arc was absolutely fucking terrible on my part. I tried to set the stage for the various Virtues all undergoing their own brand of madness but that was really hamfisted and dumb and poorly implemented all around which makes it look like Faith suddenly stopped caring about everyone else's opinions and Hope became a limpet to whichever non-Faith characters were in scene.
Joy, Charity, and the others who would have been introduced later were, on reflection, much the same, according to my old written plans, with their one dumb gimmick and nothing else going for them - certainly not enough to retroactively validate my past failures. Realistically, if I'd kept writing I probably would have done more to differentiate them but you know what? I don't want to keep writing. Fuck it.
Overall, the choice to write a PASI fic seemed really smart at the time but basically just turned out terrible in every sense of the word - I failed to really hit the points I wanted to hit, Faith had an idiot ball basically glued to her hand from chapter 20ish onwards that only got worse over time, and I just generally lost interest in writing because it was becoming such a huge fucking mess just to try and put words on the page.
This problem was only made worse during the Mass Effect arc, because the long periods between collab chapters made it even more difficult for me to maintain my interest. Now I'm not going to blame the other writers involved for that - we all have lives and responsibilities and shit like that (except for Drich, who actually is a hyper advanced AI, except instead of conquering universes she got bored and started churning out fanfic at a lightning pace[/i]) but that whole thing was shambles all around.
In hindsight, how we did the collab was stupid - throwing all the Commanders in at different time periods seemed like a smart and interesting idea at the time with plenty of opportunity for conflict and shenanigans, but in the end it just killed any and all hope of keeping a decent pace up. We started planning… what, late November 2015?
*checks*
Okay, the first time we actually decided 'hey, let's definitely do this thing' was on Christmas eve, 2015, but we kicked the idea around a little before then. SI!Fusou and Faith didn't meet in-story until the end of June, 2016 (that's 6 months later, for those who don't want to bother counting in their head) and it took even longer to get Tiki and then Drich involved - Tiki wasn't in until Christmas Day 2016, a whole year after we started planning it. At the time of FiSF's ending, Drich still isn't really involved.
We really should have had all the characters drop in at the same time. It would have been a fuckton easier to coordinate and might have resulted in stuff actually getting done, instead of SI!Fusou and Faith both suffering the forced idiot/lazy ball treatment so that the people coming in later actually had stuff to do.
Plus, the reaction of the galaxy at large to a bunch of giant death machines all showing up on the same planet at the same time, fighting for a few seconds, and then all being eaten by blue crystals could have been entertaining.
As it was, SI!Fusou pretty much took a job as a secretary sitting in the same building as the series' ultimate villain… and did shit-all about it for several in-story years, even though killing the Starbrat and assuming direct control of the Reapers should have taken all of like thirty seconds, SI!Faith and Hope spent years slowly nudging a rebel group into a full blown war of revolution whilst bitching about how slow it was going and generally doing nothing, and SI!Tiki played Galaxy of Fantasy whilst his subordinates did all the work (although that is kinda his thing, so… well played, Tiki. Well played.)
Anyway, yeah, that whole thing was shambles, and that's a pretty major contributing factor as to why I wanted to end the fic.
That said, in case anyone still cares (one response between 104 and 105 on SV, and it was Tiki. So i guess not) I'm going to quickly skim through what I had planned for the rest of the fic, and also smash those plans to pieces, because they were written very long ago and are very dumb.
First up, we would have had a combination Achron / alternate timeline arc where Faith and Hope get indoctrinated, fuck shit up in Mass Effect, and die, and then Joy is left to pick up the pieces, travels to Achron, steals time travel tech, sends an antimatter bomb back to kill the Leviathan of Dis (remember that shitty 'twist' lol) et cetera et cetera, thus averting Bad End.
It was stupid is all you need to know about that.
Next would have been the Warframe arc. The baddies of the Warframe universe have the exact same 'fuck it, we have reserves' rationality that Commanders have, and the stupidity to not change tactics when that fails, and then the Tenno are the complete opposite, being small groups of elite ninja pirate space wizards from hell who would have been able to ROFLstomp the shit out of Faith whenever the two forces met, leading to a lot of Faith's 'easy' missions falling to pieces.
I wanted this to be her comeuppance arc, so to speak - after all the stupid shit she did in Mass Effect, everything abruptly stops going Faith's way, and due to the mistakes she made in the Mass Effect arc none of her 'allies' come to back her up.
In addition, it was also going to be host to the long-plotted arrival of the Evil Council, and Faith subsequently running from the Origin System having well and truly confused and enraged the shit out of everyone, with a fistful of blueprints and a plan shot full of holes.
I wanted to introduce the ECoE here, in the original draft, because I thought that this point made the most sense for Faith to be getting complacent, after 4 universes of nothing interesting happening. This kinda falls apart when you consider that the Commander Effect (planned after the Evil Council of Evil, obviously) crossover was very much out of left field, but I never got around to updating the general story plot sheet I had so I dunno what I would have done in place of that.
And speaking of the ECoE...
Basically the entire concept of the Evil Council was stupid, and whilst it was supposed to tie the whole story together as the endgame drew near, it actually probably would have just kind of got everything hopelessly tangled up, in my opinion. Plus how the hell are enemies Faith was already able to beat once going to pose a threat the second time? They ain't, that's what.
Ah well, missed opportunities is practically my middle name at this point.
Following that would have been Faith getting mindfucked by ROB for her own good and a very quick timeskip past it to avoid having to actually deal with the relevant characterisation, because badly written angst is either boring or outright painful and I'm not a good into writing, as evidenced by… uh, the entire fic, lol, so yeah I just wanted to skip over that.
Then I would have had brief snippets of the Virtues doing their virtues things. Hope builds things with AI, Joy does MAD SCIENCE and creates pokémon for basically the purposes of a single shitty reference, and Charity sells cookies to space pirates because she's nice like that. This arc would have been to solidify the idea that the Virtues are not Faith and they have their own things going on, but looking back it just begs the question of 'why the hell did I split one SI into four SIs only one of whom acts like an SI when i coulda used OCs'?
Good fuckin question, is what. But honestly I don't really remember what i was thinking when i planned this bit out ahead. I didn't write down any of the actual reasoning for stuff I wanted to happen, just what I wanted to happen. In hindsight that was also dumb.
All the missed opportunities. All of them.
Then Halo and Endless Space, i think were the next worlds. I don't actually have notes for them, either because I never got around to actually writing them or because they got deleted at some point, probably when i was having a dumb hissy fit about not being able to write this fic or something stupid like that.
The Evil Council of Evil would have kept reappearing, still ineffective. They were never really meant to be powerful enough to actually pose a threat to Faith - because of ROB's own plots for the endgame - but in-story it would have made no sense that they keep trying to stop Faith even though they get stomped every single time. I could have made them a little smarter by making them start fighting and destroying the universe's natives to stop Faith getting their tech, which is what I had written down, but idk. Seems like it might have been a case of too-little-too-late.
Not like it's much relevant now.
Like I said before (I think?) the Evil Council of Evil was initially supposed to help tie together the whole plot and maintain a connection between the story and the ROB, because nothing irks me more than a ROB who appears, sets up a thing, and then vanishes into the aether never to be seen again ever. What's the point of that?
So anyway, yeah, they were supposed to be setting up this whole Chekov's Gun thing with ROB which didn't turn out too well, I guess, because ROBs are actually shitty and why did I bother. Ah, well. The whole idea of ROB was going to be sort of like this:
Everything the ROB did was very specifically set up to motivate FAith to go to this one random demi-verse plane of reality or w/ever and destroy a fancy pylon and 'break his shackles', which would… let him flex even more omnipotent powers? I don't really know where i was going with this. Again, I didn't write the whys in the plan, just the what and how. That was dumb, if you're reading this and looking for writing advice (lol) don't do that. Always write why you want things to happen.
The reveal that ROB was the ultimate antagonist all along probably would have fallen flat though because it was kind of obvious from that one intermission I wrote way back before Commander Effect - the appropriately-named 'Troublemakers' interlude.
Anyway, despite having some pretty serious issues and me losing interest a couple times, I did quite enjoy writing this story, overall (which is to say, I think I enjoyed writing more than I did not enjoy writing it). As far as non-serious writing goes (and it's kind of obvious that's what this was always going to become, really), Commander fics are great. Just make up whatever crazy shit you want for fight scenes, it's legit. Have units with all sorts of bullshit capabilities, it's legit. Dropping asteroids on a planet to wipe out a squad of scouts? Sure, why the fuck not.
That said, there's a lot of idiot ball holding that looking back, I just don't like. I mean, SB/SV Hypercompetence aka reading three pages ahead in the script is one thing but one or two displays of minor competence wouldn't have hurt Faith that much.
More importantly than having fun, I think I also learned a lot, writing this. Not just random trivia about laser weapons, orbital mechanics, and all sorts of other stuff that cropped up in the thread/s for whatever reasons, but about writing in general. Which is kinda why I wrote this big wall of text, I guess.
Firstly, I think, I have some better ideas about how to do world-building. I mean, feel free to disagree, but I thought that the FTLverse worldbuilding was fucking abysmal in just about every way. In future I'd like to aim for exposition and worldbuilding that's less hamfisted in its execution and only as extensive as it needed to be for the story, with some extra sprinkling on the side for flavour.
Secondly, characterisation. Jeez. I write snippets for established universes a lot - not that I publish them, - and I think they've kind of ruined me in this regard. I think I'm just so used to taking for granted that people will know who the characters are that I never bothered really learning how to introduce and develop characters myself. Something to work on, I suppose. My next project caters rather well to that, I feel, but I'm not sure how well that's going to turn out.
Finally, the plot. Such as it may be called. I'll be honest, it's basically an excuse plot - just like most(all?) of the other PASI fics (and non-PA derivatives, obviously) - for a giant robot to go stomping around the multiverse stealing technology and doing silly shenanigans. Gotta work on that. Well, I mean, for some works an excuse plot is all you need, so it's perhaps more correct to say I'd like to work on it.
Actually, no, one more thing. Pacing. I don't mean in terms of how the story develops (although I certainly do need to practice that) but how often I put out chapters. Earlier on when I managed a consistent two/three a week it was fine, but, especially during the Mass Effect arc where various factors conspired to make a mess of update schedules, it was just difficult for me to keep up. Longer breaks made me lose interest in the story, which made me put off writing the next chapter, which made me lose further interest, and so on and so on in a vicious cycle of shitty writing.
Note to self: Next time, consistency. Gotta keep that schedule on lockdown.
*sigh*
So, anyway. That's basically my post-production review and final author's note, I guess.
As for what I'm doing next - I mentioned it in one of the threads, I forget which, but the current worm in my brain is a story about eight internet friends who play a game together. Whether that ends up becoming my next 'main' project is up in the air right now, but we'll see.
Thank you to everyone who's read, commented on, and critiqued this story. I know it sounds like trite bullshit but it really does mean a lot to see so many people even slightly care about my writing. Frustrating as it may have been, posting a chapter before bed only to wake to a several-page discussion on the merits of various starship-based weaponry is kind of encouraging. Warm fuzzy feelings for all.
If any of you have anything you'd like to add, anything on the Post-Mortem you'd like to comment on, any questions you'd like to ask, et cetera, then by all means go ahead. If not tonight, I'll try to get back to you tomorrow.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got one hell of a headache, so I'm going to go have a nap. And more panadol.
Bye!
~Faith.
