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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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Go_Magikarp said:
So, is there any one else that doesn't really care for Xuan Shi?

He's a well crafted character with nuance, weight and a well defined voice. But he's also kind of annoying and a bummer. Every arc that includes him is just more uneasy than not. And at the end of the day, an awkward, self-effacing, low self-esteem introvert isn't really all that fun to read about. Interesting maybe, but not fun (for me is the obvious caveat).

I really hope he doesn't become a future companion.
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You're not alone, I really dislike the character as well. Its always a slog for me to get through his sections.

[X] Unstoppable Glacier's March
 
AbeoLogos said:
I don't think it makes sense to ask us to make a thematic vote when the themes in play are hidden behind the decision. Currently, we have a situation where people are spinning theories on what either path means based on information which is unsuitable for that task. This is a situation which leads to confusion, people not getting what they think they're choosing, and all around curbed player agency.
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I'd just like to +1 your post here, because yeah. I'm also just kind of confused about what I'm supposed to actually be voting on? Where are the votes actually going to go? The update didn't really give me any enhanced understanding of the arts and their themes - indeed it mostly just suggested that (UGM in particular) is a bad fitting art that we should drop :V

I'm kinda feeling that either, yeah, the update should be edited to actually support the vote that's currently in place, or yrs should just retcon the previous vote if he's decided that it makes most sense to just run with "LQ and Zhengui have nothing in common, and UGM is a badly fitting art".

Also, I agree that UGM has had the most prior buildup... but at the same time I'd consider it a high variance roll here. We're basically hoping that we can blow the art up enough that it will actually fit. WHR otoh is a much safer option because the Art is basically fine for LQ (even if it did completely miss Zhengui point at the time).
 
Some thoughts about what Zhengui could potentially teach us about:
UGM
1. Ice is like roots, it grows and breaks apart rock (adds a cold poison effect)
2. Death gives way to life (damage gives buff/sustain to allies)
3. You contain multitudes (GGM now applies to a qi construct that can move independently of us)
WHR
1. One is never finished building their home (makes buffs weaker, but stackable)
2. One can act through one's creations (Frozen Walls can be centered around allies as well as oneself)
3. Being tough is about not staying down rather than being strong enough to not get hurt (remove shields, make it much cheaper to refresh Dispelled techs)

There should probably be tradeoffs for each of these. Unfortunately this will likely make them all more complicated
 
if this wasn't a serial, I would assume this passage is one of those moments similar to the one in which Alingge rebuked LQ's mindset/standards for Zhengui, in which she simply . . . doesn't understand the mindset being asked of her?

I don't think this section needs a rewrite. I think most of the confusion can be better handled out-loud discussing with Zhengui and Sixiang next update rather than attempting to have Ling Qi consider things more clearly in this update. Ling Qi could stumble upon some understanding on her own, but I think it makes more sense that she sort of babbles into a direction and asks for her family's input as she goes. That's how collaborative brainstorming works

While writing my thoughts on the Xuan Shi part of the update, it struck me that Ling Qi is extremely literal. We don't often engage in the symbolic, and that's an obstacle both for connecting to the themes of Arts which seem to suit us as well as connecting and relating to others who aren't literally similar to us but match up well symbolically. There really isn't a mismatch symbolically between Zhengui and LQ. Yet even though LQ seems to have ideas on matching the literal capabilities of ourselves and Zhengui, she seems to not make the symbolic connection quite right.

Hypothetically if this vote was simply on which art would be Brainstormed on next update, with Zhengui and Sixiang giving input which the thread doesn't get to vote on (they're not LQ and thus outside our control) I'd be down for letting go of some thread agency in the name of deeper collaboration

that's part of LQ's problems as well right? with the spreadsheets and schedules and rigid planning. The intense pressure to go forward to the point that simply enjoying things for their own sake is difficult to comprehend, much less to choose. Actually going into a family collaboration and not knowing where it'll go or what the outcomes will be, as opposed to investing in known cultivation hours, understanding the value in that is difficult too.

If this is a vote only on which art LQ is choosing to try to workshop with only a vague sort of why, then it works perfectly as the sort of "Hmm, I've got some ideas but nothing really clicking yet. What do you think family?" decision. Especially in regards to bridging the "literal vs symbolic" gap

If we're supposed to know the direction we're going in before talking to family, well I'm confused that's for sure lol.

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I'm really glad we asked Xuan Shi "But Why" because it clarified our distaste for Specifically Kongyou rather than the idea of a more Nightmarish aspect. Since we see Kongyou as a direct harm to Xuan Shi's goals and not at all as a grindstone or foil for him to sharpen/hone off of. We're patronizing of Xuan Shi sure, but we also really don't understand him at all lmao.

Ling Qi even mentions that Xuan Shi seems "Rudderless" which, from what we've seen of him, is absolutely not the issue. He has firm beliefs, a direction in mind, and the talent to get there. The issue is committing to it. I'm sure he's spent enough time in his own head that he knows exactly how Imperial Cultivation can lock you into something in your youth that you end up not wanting to live hundreds of years of. His idol clearly went through that with the colonizing -> Sect Elder route.

Fiction allows one to try to travel paths without overly committing to them. It's almost certainly a very powerful tool in the hands of the right scholar, to actually understand another while remaining on your own path. These communicative and explorative aspects are not intuitively understood by LQ and she nearly dismisses them out of hand, except she's got Six there to say "hey whoa let's uh. Let's talk about fiction and dreams at some point hmm?"

Xuan Shi's major pain in the present, I believe, is that his safe pace is going to fall extremely behind his contemporaries unless he finds a way to urge himself to act past the negative voices in his head. "You are your own worst critic" isn't true when you invite Kongyou into your soul, allowing you to personify and combat your negative thoughts in a more-directly-existentially-dangerous way.

Xuan Shi is interested in Kongyou symbolically, while we see Kongyou literally and think "wtf why". In this same chapter we have a hard time drawing connective symbols between literal concepts in our Arts and our Spirit's abilities. I think we'll be able to learn and collaborate much better with our family, Xuan Shi and whoever else is out there once we stop patronizing them and truly attempt to engage where they're coming from.
 
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[X] Unstoppable Glacier's March

Thinking about FSS+ the last months I've been thinking our Cold suite should be about the blizzard draining the warmth around us and the unyielding inevitability of winter and Endings. AoE Cold damage with Qi drain and weakening afflictions, with durability and resistance in the way that winter is unstoppable yet cyclical, for Arts made explicitly for war and struggle. I feel like the Qi drain/attrition vampiric aspect has sadly fallen to the wayside in recent months, and this is a great chance to get an undertone of Zhengui-like Endings and beginnings in our larger Cold cultivation.
 
The current vote represents the one thing i dont like about this quest : votes with next to no info on what the options will actually do.

Will it change the techs ? The art as a whole ? Give LQ a related B rank skill ? Ugrade some of Zhengui's arts ? Define some of Zhengui's way ? Help us making an advanced insight ? Give us hints about the heart demon that LQ still refuses to define for the readers ?

I dont know what the options will do and it makes me want to just give up on participating in votes, its the reason i lurked on SV for so long despite loving this story.
 
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Do we really want an art focussed on stubbornness and being implacable in our way? Even more so directly after we've taken an insight that resolves around being flexible? We did recently avoid a glacier spirit arguing that its nature would make it too rigid to reason with.

From a build perspective, UGM allows us to keep opponents at a distance while stacking up more and more damage. This seems to fit well with the rest of our field control right? Well, I would argue that it does, but only if we consider Ling Qi fighting solo. She almost always isn't.
Now with allies beside her, where do we want our opponents to be? At the edge of our range where they might figure out that walking into our zone of death would not be the brightest idea and that targeting someone else would likely work better? Or right next to us trying to take out the pesky field controller first but finding that our arts and qi reserves make Ling Qi both hard to hit and extremely tanky? In the latter case our allies would have the time of their lives setting up their own long duration arts and alpha strikes, while not having to worry about burning all their qi because they'll be regenerating.

The opponent would swiftly find out that the battlefield is no longer theirs, its ours. Because our friends are what is most important to us, and they'll be right besides us. We'll have made the battlefield our home.

[X] Winter Hearth Resounding
 
JowKeen said:
if this wasn't a serial, I would assume this passage is one of those moments similar to the one in which Alingge rebuked LQ's mindset/standards for Zhengui, in which she simply . . . doesn't understand the mindset being asked of her?

I don't think this section needs a rewrite. I think most of the confusion can be better handled out-loud discussing with Zhengui and Sixiang next update rather than attempting to have Ling Qi consider things more clearly in this update. Ling Qi could stumble upon some understanding on her own, but I think it makes more sense that she sort of babbles into a direction and asks for her family's input as she goes. That's how collaborative brainstorming works

While writing my thoughts on the Xuan Shi part of the update, it struck me that Ling Qi is extremely literal. We don't often engage in the symbolic, and that's an obstacle both for connecting to the themes of Arts which seem to suit us as well as connecting and relating to others who aren't literally similar to us but match up well symbolically. There really isn't a mismatch symbolically between Zhengui and LQ. Yet even though LQ seems to have ideas on matching the literal capabilities of ourselves and Zhengui, she seems to not make the symbolic connection quite right.

Hypothetically if this vote was simply on which art would be Brainstormed on next update, with Zhengui and Sixiang giving input which the thread doesn't get to vote on (they're not LQ and thus outside our control) I'd be down for letting go of some thread agency in the name of deeper collaboration

that's part of LQ's problems as well right? with the spreadsheets and schedules and rigid planning. The intense pressure to go forward to the point that simply enjoying things for their own sake is difficult to comprehend, much less to choose. Actually going into a family collaboration and not knowing where it'll go or what the outcomes will be, as opposed to investing in known cultivation hours, understanding the value in that is difficult too.

If this is a vote only on which art LQ is choosing to try to workshop with only a vague sort of why, then it works perfectly as the sort of "Hmm, I've got some ideas but nothing really clicking yet. What do you think family?" decision. Especially in regards to bridging the "literal vs symbolic" gap

If we're supposed to know the direction we're going in before talking to family, well I'm confused that's for sure lol.

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[snip]
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I disagree on a couple points.

This is taking place on the tail end of a fair amount of, albeit interrupted, collaboration where Ling Qi was purposefully trying to grasp Zhengui's mindset about things. It doesn't make sense that she's continuing to blunder around with comically out of touch takes. And even if it did, her introspection would be more relevant to the task before her; it's still written for a mindset approaching collaboration instead of thematic exploration.

Second, even if that wasn't the case, and you were right that it should be hashed out in conversation(much harder for yrsillar to do without establishing a baseline through narration, by the way), then the update should still be edited to add that discussion, so we can actually have information to vote here. It doesn't make any sense for Ling Qi to randomly jump to a firm commitment on a course to take and stick with it through having all the assumptions that went into that choice collapse in front of her.

Foursteps said:
Do we really want an art focussed on stubbornness and being implacable in our way? Even more so directly after we've taken an insight that resolves around being flexible? We did recently avoid a glacier spirit arguing that its nature would make it too rigid to reason with.

From a build perspective, UGM allows us to keep opponents at a distance while stacking up more and more damage. This seems to fit well with the rest of our field control right? Well, I would argue that it does, but only if we consider Ling Qi fighting solo. She almost always isn't.
Now with allies beside her, where do we want our opponents to be? At the edge of our range where they might figure out that walking into our zone of death would not be the brightest idea and that targeting someone else would likely work better? Or right next to us trying to take out the pesky field controller first but finding that our arts and qi reserves make Ling Qi both hard to hit and extremely tanky? In the latter case our allies would have the time of their lives setting up their own long duration arts and alpha strikes, while not having to worry about burning all their qi because they'll be regenerating.

The opponent would swiftly find out that the battlefield is no longer theirs, its ours. Because our friends are what is most important to us, and they'll be right besides us. We'll have made the battlefield our home.

[X] Winter Hearth Resounding
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That's the frustrating thing. Yes, the update talks about stubbornness and UGM, but if we vote UGM, it almost certainly won't have anything to do with stubbornness. Yrsillar made a mistake with a past vote's outcome when he wrote the update. The difference changes the framework of Ling Qi's approach pretty substantially.

We kind of have no firm idea of what themes either option entails, right now.
 
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Foursteps said:
From a build perspective, UGM allows us to keep opponents at a distance while stacking up more and more damage. This seems to fit well with the rest of our field control right? Well, I would argue that it does, but only if we consider Ling Qi fighting solo.
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No it doesn't. UGM requires us to charge into melee to work. Its a very awkward art for us whose preferred combat method does not work for how we fight. One big reason to alter it is we don't know what the changes will do but, as it stands now, there's very little reason to keep it so we can't lose much. Meanwhile WHR works well enough in the background that it would be unfortunate if something broke.

Well, that and we decided that glaciers are like wildfires on the way over to the White Sky.
 
yrsillar said:
Please Vote for which art you would like to work toward altering

[] Unstoppable Glacier's March
[] Winter Hearth Resounding
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So i assume that we just get to choose one of the 2 Art's we can now alter before we have mastered the Art. And next up is either us getting our new toy or a "build it yourself" like Silent Songseeker's Regard.
If im not wrong, Insights (that originate from Art's) mainly come from the mastering of an art so i guess we don't get one here? But then this is a narrative thing and it could still happen.
With the system overhaul on the horizon im just gonna ignore the numbers.

UGH:
yrsillar said:
The rivers which wind through and water the Emerald Seas have their origin in the high mountain ice of the Wall. This melody seeks to capture the crushing inevitably of the eons long migrations of these great entities of ice, which in turn birth the great rivers and their unstoppable flow.
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WHR:
yrsillar said:
An old art developed by the clans of southern emerald seas, during the age of civil strife. A meditation on the nature of home and family created during the long winters which once plagued the hills of the province. This art offers few stand alone techniques, and instead focuses on effects which bolster other arts.
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To be honest i don't like the description of WHR so ...

[X] Unstoppable Glacier's March
 
JohnnieBoy123 said:
No it doesn't. UGM requires us to charge into melee to work. Its a very awkward art for us whose preferred combat method does not work for how we fight. One big reason to alter it is we don't know what the changes will do but, as it stands now, there's very little reason to keep it so we can't lose much. Meanwhile WHR works well enough in the background that it would be unfortunate if something broke.

Well, that and we decided that glaciers are like wildfires on the way over to the White Sky.
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Ranges
Adjacent: ~5 meters
Near: ~10 meters
Very Close: ~40 meters
Close: ~100 meters
Far: ~200 meters
Very Far: ~400 meters
Distant: <400 meters

The majority of UGM is "Close" to "Far" range, i would not call 100 meters to be melee. We have only seen it used by LQ that way but there is nothing stopping her from yeetin people that are still at quite some distance. The "Adjacent" part is only for secondary targets (and we don't really need to care for that) as i understand it.
 
Foursteps said:
Do we really want an art focussed on stubbornness and being implacable in our way? Even more so directly after we've taken an insight that resolves around being flexible? We did recently avoid a glacier spirit arguing that its nature would make it too rigid to reason with.
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Stubborn does not mean inflexible, Ling Qi's stubbornness in particular has been likened to Water for instance. Flowing, fluid, adaptable yet also unstoppable. Water and Wind's kind of stubbornness is not the kind that crushes what's in their path but are unyielding none the less. Nothing will stop Ling Qi's goal of building a happy home for herself and her loved ones, but like how Ling Qi mused regarding Hanyi in this very chapter her own goal necessitates not being overly needy and controlling. Stubbornness is what drives her to respect the wishes of others, because she stubbornly does what's best for her relationships when she really wants to keep them close to herself.
 
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