Wait, it's an active request? Damn it all...
[X] Plan: Eyes on the Prize, Week 2
I really wish Nemona wasn't picked as our Rival. Our situation would be so much more stable without that own-goal.
I've come to embrace a sort of tao of questing.
Everyone wants something different out of a Quest. Some of us want the main character to "win" and play optimally. Some of us want to tell a particular story and choose options that lead to that. Others just want to see what happens. Often, people have different priorities at different times. And you can persuade and cajole and lobby, but ultimately the votes of others are out of your control, and ESPECIALLY past votes cannot be controlled or changed.
After some reflection on this, I think that this is what makes quests fun.
Past decisions and the preferences of voters we don't necessarily agree with create the terrain of the quest, the friction that gives weight to present and future decisions. For someone who considers themselves an optimizer, like me, votes that make things "harder" in the future make the optimization more challenging, and rather than regretting that I'm choosing to perceive it as an added fun factor as I lock in to "how do I make Mariana succeed in this more tense situation?" And by the same token, I hope that people more concerned with a particular narrative have more fun when voters they don't necessarily agree with throw curveballs and twists into that narrative. I hope so anyway.
I've definitely gotten unnecessarily heated and whiny over votes going in a way I didn't like or with consequences I would have preferred not to deal with before, in this quest and others, and I should probably take the opportunity to apologize to my fellow questers for some of my attitude last year. But speaking from this perspective, I want to encourage you and everyone to embrace votes you don't like as a challenge in this cooperative game we're playing, and not a permanent millstone around our neck. If nothing else, the story potential whether we succeed OR fail looks amazing from here, and I'm looking forward to seeing both.
