Hmm. So. Hmm. Not to throw a wrench in
everything or anything, but, uh,
@yrsillar there's been something tickling my brain about this vote, and I think I just figured it out.
The adventure we're voting for is
during the wedding trip north, but the art development we're doing isn't
for the wedding trip north.
So, first off, obviously we're having this vote now so there's time to plan out the arc that we pick in advance. Which makes total sense, but it took me a while to reorient it in the timeframe it's going to happen.
The wedding trip is already pretty busy. There's a bunch of characters waiting to be reintroduced to the story, like the 4 Bai buddies, Meng Dan, Sixiang, Diao Hualing, maybe Xuan Shi, and that's all before the actual wedding/politics intrigue stuff starts, with any characters that might bring, like Jin Tae, completely new faces, etc. It's also already starting to get crowded up with committed arcs. There's the ith talks with Diao Hualing and the ministries, the actual wedding itself, (re)intro arcs for characters. Sixiang's in particular kind of has to be meaty.
And this vote is adding on another side-arc, which is unrelated to the wedding trip as a whole.
And the specific. Our gains from it are targeted at the war arc, which isn't the major arc we'll be involved in at the time. The tools we pick up from our Shu Yue adventure won't even be applicable to the wedding stuff. So actually using those tools will be put on hold for months, waiting for the war arc. Where other major arts of ours, like FFS and MRE are already waiting in the wings to get their "real" debuts. None of that is ideal.
Structurally, it seems like a weird dynamic. Environments like the wedding are kind of where Thief of Names is particularly suited to operate; why is it going on this side-dip into tools that are decidedly unsuited for the wedding, and why is it doing so right before or during that arc? It seems strange. The art will then be in a traffic jam/knife-fight with other arts, as soon as the war arc starts. In the past, this has usually caused us to rapidly cycle through art focuses without much rhyme or reason, just to GET THEM DONE, to the detriment of everything. It's what happened during the summit arc, honestly.
There's a lot of leap-frogging around the place, in both the short and medium terms, and I just don't think it's well-conceived. It's a bunch of stuff getting in its own way, and in the way of the other things we're doing
along the way. This roadmap puts extra time/pacing constraints on the the wedding arc as a whole, denies and delays implementation of the Thief of Names development we'll be doing itself, and sets up unproductive art tensions for the war arc.
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Miscellaneous thoughts:
-Is the idea for Sixiang to join up with us for this Shu Yue adventure? Because if so, god damn did we need that information up-front.
-I think this analysis is pretty unfriendly to both options as a whole, but technically the Palace option at least leaves open the potential of
some of what we learn actually being used during the wedding arc, with the perception stuff.
-I had a third thought but I forgor
