As a quest, FoD is fantastic. As a story, there are some major holes. Some are due to the format of quest updating vs story writing (as a QM you start losing details - e.g.: Li Suyin mentions inviting Ling Qi on an expedition at the end of Forge of Destiny and then acts surprised when Ling Qi wants to come along during Threads of Destiny - like, Li, you literally mentioned this last week, don't act so surprised when Ling Qi wants to come along), but others are due to the fact that minmaxing and questing brings about some weird story results.
Ling Qi having such fantastic reserves of qi is pretty much first commented upon by CRX, I think when they go flying together: 'good, you're confident in your reserves' but I'm pretty sure it comes across as something distinctly weird in-story when Shen Hu says: 'wow, you just never run out of qi, do you?' because Ling Qi has literally never bothered to cultivate her qi even once. It's all down to her medicine and pill use and no one else has really noticed that her reserves are as enormous as they are.
What would actually make more sense is if she was just born with ginormous reserves or happened to have some sort of trait that allowed her to really take advantage of medicinal energy or if, idk, the fact that she had bonded to a super special spirit beast known for its overwhelming staying power supercharged her ability to cultivate qi. You... kind of get away with it by saying that Ling Qi just never stops cultivating, but at a certain point that excuse gets a little weak. It just doesn't make sense because the reality is there is an overmind directing her medicine use and training schedule to be optimized.
A better story would probably have her qi reserves be low relative to her power. Why? Because her style doesn't actually require a lot of qi. She uses arts to drain qi and her signature offensive art is self-sustaining and requires little enough of it. Having an actual 'well, that's kind of ridiculous' reserve of qi to top that off... it's kind of extraneous. Why keep it? It's the sort of doubling up on strengths that antagonists generally get.
Now if Ling Qi made it an explicit goal... maybe. But she didn't. It kinda just happened that way.
There's a lot of stuff like that. Why does Ling Qi pick up and then just stop using her bow? Like what is that trying to communicate, story-wise? What's the theme? Same with her throwing knives that just kind of disappear never to re-appear. She never really used the capstone to her wind art despite being described in-text. And why did she go exactly once to that creepy treasure island..... and just never go back? Why was there this huge push to grab all the secret argent arts from the various trials... and then she just kind of lost interest in them? Why did we try all of once to build our little spy skeletons and then, despite being hired to be a spy-mistress, never actually employ them to do spy-work? Wait, how did we get good enough to build our little spy skeletons in the first place? We didn't spend a lot of time on formations... and why was that awesome skeleton mech mentioned once and then never again?
There are too many story hooks because this is a quest, not a story.
The story of FoD and now ToD is kind of being defeated by the open, sandbox nature of its own gameplay. Every other characters have a much more coherent build and story because they didn't go : OH THAT LOOKS NEAT at everything they saw. It probably would have made for a much better story if Ling Qi... weren't actually as lucky as she was. If, there were, say, months of a slow, grinding slog that could be skipped over with a simple:
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And then it was winter.
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Boom! The parts where nothing happen you skip over and briefly summarize because story is king, not gameplay, but priorities are reversed in a quest. Every week has to be somewhat interesting because that's the format.
Idk what the solution is besides 'don't write a quest, write a story,' but if you want a story with this amount of freedom and resolution, you are going to have to acknowledge that there will be tradeoffs.
Tradeoffs that I will talk about in my next post because, controverisal opinion time, I do not believe that Ling Qi needs to be defeated more.
Also, not to kick over a hornet's nest, but remember this?
Man I just can't win can I. You guys haven't taken more than a minor loss the entire quest, and the things I do just to keep Ling Qi from trouncing everything when I go overboard on her powerups have people complaining about how weak she is.
Like what. Your competitive or superior to literally all but three people in the outer sect.
Frankly, this is the story the thread asked for, not the story yrs wanted to necessarily write. It's a testament to his skill that the story is as engaging as it is. And as a guy with a patreon, yrs is more bounded to your opinions than usual so do not rag on him for giving you what you wanted rather than what the story deserved.
