Was asked to crosspost this from Discord, EJ asked a question and I wrote out a response of considerable size:
eaglejarl on Discord said:
Folks, I need to wrap it up for the night, but I have one question (? thought to share? thing, whatever). There's been a lot of variations on "team uplift are being ridiculous" in the thread lately, some of them seeming fairly heated, and I've been advised that the #Bitching thread is going hard around now based on the NPCs attitudes. Speaking for myself only here, I feel like the QMs have been doing our best to model everyone accurately, we've done our best to communicate, but there still appears to be a lot of discontent / misunderstanding.
If that's still the case then it would be great if someone(s) could give us a summary so that we have something to respond to.
The bigger picture of the attitude towards the rest of Team Uplift probably spans back to around the start of this mission, when we truly went missing with everyone. We've mentioned, and you've mentioned, that everyone involved here has doubled and tripled down, etc., on the stakes of this ever-important mission. We're all in this together, united by a burning passion to reject the course of the world, to deny Akatsuki their prize and to bring back our lost loved ones. There's a ton of deeply-felt emotions built into this arc and why we're here.
The way things feel like they've played out, from a reader's-experience perspective, is that it doesn't really feel like the rest of Team Uplift are on that same page as us. They're here, most certainly, they're committed to the mission, but the burning passion and other deeply-felt emotions that we know are there don't seem readily apparent. Instead they tend to come across as... the mental image that keeps finding its way into my head is a bunch of video game NPCs sitting around a campfire, who have unique dialogue for your quest but only if you up and talk to them first. That is to say, they feel passive, reactive, almost uninvested, even though we know that can't be true.
(Of course, there's that undercurrent where Mari says at the start that she doesn't expect to ever return to Leaf, only regaining a little hope when she sees our rift runes in action. To some extent this feeling is real, a manifestation of their despair, and that works out fine. But her despair, if I'm reading things right, is not supposed to be the norm among the group.)
As players making plans, the rest of Uplift has felt sometimes oddly obstructionist during this arc. Like, as if they waited for us to come up with an idea before having any of their own. A notable example is Kagome mentioning the other rift sites he knows to us, only after we started making plans to open a rift ourselves because we didn't think we had such an option. A common player sentiment towards that specific interaction is "Well, wish you'd spoken up about that sooner" and it's just a little puzzling to figure out because, like, it's no secret that rift stuff is relevant here. Wouldn't Kagome have come to the conclusion of his own accord that this would be useful for us to know?
That's just one case, so zooming back out, it often feels like we start charting a course based on the information we have, only for the rest of TU to hold up a hand and tell us to wait and reconsider. Oftentimes, they have good ideas and arguments, and we change our mind or at least adjust our plans. But again, isn't it a little odd that they wait for Hazou to make a decision before grinding it to a halt? It feels that way to us, at least. Hence the campfire mental image: the vibe that comes across is that they aren't really doing much of anything until we initiate something.
Now of course, a lot of this mission is downtime with nothing more complicated than "hide in a good spot and don't die", with our plans just revolving on efficient use of chakra and time. But there's still... I mentioned the burning passion earlier, right? It struck me, earlier today, a mental image of some other member of Team Uplift, maybe Kei, maybe Mari, whispering to themselves something like "We're coming, Jiraiya". I, personally, can't recall a scene like that in this arc, but it feels like the sort of thing that would've really tied things together. Even if they're not boldly expressing it, even if since it's long stretches of downtime there's no specific place to boldly proclaim it, well, we all know that they're here with the same ambitions as us, the same passion, the same emotions. The same hurt at his absence, the same longing to get him back, the same fear at the mad demigods in our way, the same determination to not let them have their way. And yet, throughout this mission it's been hard to see that, hard to see them care like we do. We're stuck taking charge, making plans and pushing forwards, and they only seem to act when it's to stop us and ask us to reconsider something. As a reader experience, they started feeling like obstacles more than companions.
And now, the specific recent buzz of the last couple chapters, this feeling tipped over into something more. They're doing that thing again, standing in our way after we've made a choice, trying to change our mind post-facto. They're again trying to convince us to change our mind, to do something different than what, from all appearances, we need to do for the mission to succeed. This is where the tonal miscommunication really hit hard, because... I'll outline it first through how it was supposed to be, and then how it came across as.
The truth is that Team Uplift are desperate, they know we only make choices like this with strong reason behind them and that it takes an equally strong argument to overturn it. And yet try they must, because surely there must be a better way than this. They highlight the costs, the risks, and do their best to come up with alternatives. But instead of a knockdown argument, they grasp at straws instead, feeble alternatives that wouldn't actually win us the mission, and they seem to know it. Resigned to the idea that we'll simply not be persuaded by them, they start closing off and giving up the effort. We proceed undaunted.
The experience is that, after standing in our way for this quite necessary choice, Team Uplift tells us a lot of things we already know. The risks of the operation, the things Orochimaru could do to us, facts about his character. We know all this, knew it when we chose this course, and frankly they don't seem to have a very sophisticated model of Orochimaru to begin with, so overwhelmed by fear that everything rounds off to terror. This would be annoying on its own, spending a plan repeating old arguments, but this is where the tone miscommunication became a real problem. Instead of "they're desperate, they can't see a way forward but refuse to accept that this is the only way", it read as "they think Hazou's being an idiot again, and want him to shut up and listen while they tell him how stupid his plan is". A key distinction being that the way they came across to us implied they were confident in their position, that they firmly believed their alternatives were better.
Instead, as we ask for these alternatives, we get non-viable options, from them grasping at straws. The contradiction emerges: why were they standing in our way like that, ready to call Hazou an idiot yet again, if this is all they had? Why would they think these options sufficient? Do they not take this mission seriously? It really felt like that, when they offered up the notion of not using any of our runes.
And this compounded in two ways. The first being, as mentioned, the apparent trend across this arc of Team Uplift being reactive and obstructionist, seemingly uninterested in the mission unless it's to tell Hazou to stop and reconsider something. The second being how the "it's pointless to argue with Hazou" bit came out. There's a certain absurdity, I saw it pointed out, in the idea that they would say that Hazou's arguments are always too good and convincing, and that as a result they can't afford to listen to him or they'll end up convinced. This is most specifically what Kagome said a little bit ago, and yeah he's eccentric, but seeing it repeat here with most of the rest of Team Uplift going "guys it's pointless, he won't listen" added a sense of "despite knowing our arguments are logically sound, they don't want to hear it". Surprising, for intelligent characters such as them.
That's all very in-the-weeds stuff, a full breakdown of everything I can think of that's significantly contributed to this feeling. Taken as a whole, the overall story here is that frustrations started building up since the beginning of this arc, creating an unintended narrative that majorly clashes with their characterization, which came to a head with these last updates and the tonal miscommunication in them seeming to ratify and bolster this narrative. "Do they really care?" we asked. "Have they not realized the stakes? Are they even
thinking?" A campfire of NPCs, only showing their quest dialogue when interacted with, content to otherwise sit around the fire in their idle animation.
This is, of course, not the truth, nor what you were trying to depict. It's just... it leaves it all feeling muddy. Like muck is clinging to our legs as we try to move forwards. This arc, from a high-level description, has so much room to feel epic in various ways. Bold gambits, wondrous moments, dire risks, and an ascending heroism as we turn to face our objective. Stuff like that. It just seems that most of the time what we end up experiencing is the pushback, the arguments amongst the team as they try to convince us to do something else. The team as the muck around our ankles, holding the tone of the story back from what it could've been. Is this the famed Clan of Guts? A stubborn mule to be dragged along as we head towards our destiny? Why does it so often feel like Us and Them, with the rest of Team Uplift rallying to try and convince us that we're stupid for the umpteenth time? Is this what such a bold arc should've been?
At the end of the day, it's a complicated issue. Quite a lot of the above is unavoidable from the confines of the quest medium. Others are unfortunate miscommunications or coincidences, and so on. But the general opinion on Team Uplift as a whole has soured, because it's started to feel like they get in our way more than anything else, breaking our stride to offer wisdom of dubious quality. Rather than working with them, pooling ideas and talents, it feels like we work against them, fighting our way through their challenges, only able to do anything after facing down a sizeable helping of disdain from people who constantly call us stupid. With friends like these, even Orochimaru is a breath of fresh air.
That's the overall vibe, as best as I can depict it. I hope it all came across clear, and I hope there's a route in there to improving how this all feels for everyone. I have no doubt, after all, that you enjoy feelings of excitement and boldness just as much as we do.
