Ex3 Intro Fiction Critique and Discussion

[TheCountAlucard]

Because I can't like Ghosthead's post twice.

[Morangias]

Arcane Fate would have erased any Hard Evidence of this connection, am I right?

The only reason why I made the connection was there is this person named Suzu who seems to be important to the main character, yet is never mentioned again. Then this Sidereal is introduced and is trying to kill the Solar. The two friends/siblings who grow and try to kill each other is a pretty common trope. So, if it wasn't for Arcane Fate, then there would be more evidence for the past relationship between the two characters.

I try not to use Arcane Fate on the reader in addition to the characters in the story. But then I love Dramatic Irony. Probably why I like playing Sidereals.

That's all fine, but without any solid indication of the connection, this line of argumentation boils down to "the story gets better if we pretend it's better".

[Chejop Kejak]

Huh. Multiquote doesn't seem to be working for me, and when I try to just start posts and copy-paste the thread flips out my next attempt at quoting. So we're rolling with less context than usual here.

First off, I agree with everyone who finds the Sidereal theory insufficiently evidenced. It seemed clear to me on my first reading, and less so on subsequent ones. I still like it, but won't argue it to be text.

Second, putting fiction - or almost anything else - before the table of contents is a crime against THE VOI- um, I mean, readers. And common sense, good taste, maybe a few other things. It is, admittedly, a longstanding White Wolf standard atrocity, but that justifies nothing. Boo!

Third, similar discussions of the other fictions I'd be interested to read, but probably have less of an opinion on - I largely thought they did their purpose pretty well, without being either in awe or in anger. There are a couple of exceptions, however - I would join in a little ripping on the Antagonists one (which I am certain somebody likes, but I suspect will be far less controversial than most others). And (with all due respect to its many, passionate fans) I believe I am just as incensed at the Janest story as so many other people are by the opening.

[Stephen Lea Sheppard]

I think I love that story for all the reasons you hate it.

[Ghosthead]

TheCountAlucard thanks .

[TheCountAlucard]

thanks .

No problem. The fiction, I feel, does a good job of capturing how many people in Creation are simply too occupied with eking out their meager existence to look up and realize how many miracles surround them, and the way you phrased it was very in-line with my own thinking.

[Lucy Darling]

I think I love that story for all the reasons you hate it.

Same here. I tend not to come at fiction with my qualifications drawn like weapons either - for me the things I teach my students are for very specific situations and my aim is to get them to a point where breaking those rules is a conscious stylistic and creative choice. Moran is a writer I trust to have done that, so those 'errors' are deliberate choices.

[TheCountAlucard]

Same here. I tend not to come at fiction with my qualifications drawn like weapons either - for me the things I teach my students are for very specific situations and my aim is to get them to a point where breaking those rules is a conscious stylistic and creative choice. Moran is a writer I trust to have done that, so those 'errors' are deliberate choices.

Indeed; while Tropes Are Not Bad*, not adhering to a trope is also Not necessarily Bad.




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*Not linking there, because TVTropes has already been linked one time too many in this thread!

[kongurous]

The question, then, is do you want those choices to be in the first thing people will read in your book? This isn't polarizing based on the content of the story, but on the construction of it fundamentally, which is not an area in which I would want my first impression to be debatable.

[Kyman201]

Same here. I tend not to come at fiction with my qualifications drawn like weapons either - for me the things I teach my students are for very specific situations and my aim is to get them to a point where breaking those rules is a conscious stylistic and creative choice. Moran is a writer I trust to have done that, so those 'errors' are deliberate choices.

I get that at a certain point, the rules are more of what you call guidelines or suggestions. I remember reading a piece of fanfiction, and one particular chapter was a bit of a mess in its flow. It was choppy, the transitions were sudden and abrupt, I wasn't enjoying it... Until the very end of the chapter, when it's revealed that the viewpoint protagonist deliberately used magic to seal off her memories, and one of the memory crystals she watched was her talking to herself in a mirror saying "Okay, look, I know you probably looked at the memories already. DO NOT LOOK AT ANYTHING ELSE, we don't need someone reading your mind to see the plan!" And suddenly it snapped into place, and I gained an appreciation for the chapter.

The thing is, I feel that in the case of this one story, the breaks to the rules actively hurt my enjoyment of the overall work. So yes, I always felt like these were deliberate choices. And these deliberate choices did not make the story feel richer or more enjoyable to me. As I read the work, the choices actively inhibited my ability to enjoy the story.

Which is why I don't really begrudge people enjoying this, and why I never tried to make this personal. It doesn't help anybody if I go "This is bad and those who like it are bad with no taste", because taste is weird, man.

But I'll almost never say that someone is wrong for enjoying something, and the 'almost' mostly covers 'People who think that Twilight and 50 Shades are examples of good romantic literature'.

That's why I was so adamant in my first post that this wasn't anything personal towards Jenna, and by extension I want to make it clear that I didn't want this to seem personal to anybody who enjoyed it. I just wanted to discuss it, openly, and compare different opinions.

[BrilliantRain]

No problem. The fiction, I feel, does a good job of capturing how many people in Creation are simply too occupied with eking out their meager existence to look up and realize how many miracles surround them, and the way you phrased it was very in-line with my own thinking.

Just like real life, really. When you stop to think about it, we live in a world of wonders. Wonders we've made, magic mirrors that can so ever so much more than tell us whether we're better looking than someone else, vehicles that can take us beyond the sky, instruments that can probe the fundamental nature of the universe. Wonders that simply exist, nanotech self-replicating factories that create food out of nothing but dirt, water, and air, giant fusion engines that power star systems, a heat engine that cleans and recycles all the water on our planet.

And if we spent all our time marveling at this strange and glorious universe, we'd get nothing done and starve to death. So...ok. But, really we should all try and take some time out of our day to just appreciate that even a mundane pig is a wonder of self-replicating nanotechnology that we are only beginning to understand, even as we kill it in order to have bacon with our toast.

[HighPriest]

Yikes. Reading this for the first time makes me appreciate my long-standing policy of not reading fiction chapter breaks in RPG books.

Though I do find it funny that a man named "Toad Rat" comes off as the most professional of the four Exalts involved. He usually seems to be paying attention to the situation at hand, which is more than can be said of the others. If anyone here is a secret Sidereal, I think it's more likely to be him than Star - Toad Rat sure sounds like a cover name to me.

[Kyman201]

Though I do find it funny that a man named "Toad Rat" comes off as the most professional of the four Exalts involved. He usually seems to be paying attention to the situation at hand, which is more than can be said of the others. If anyone here is a secret Sidereal, I think it's more likely to be him than Star - Toad Rat sure sounds like a cover name to me.

Well to be fair, if you DO get stuck with a name like Toad Rat, you kind of probably have to be better than your friend named Jin in order to be taken half as seriously.

[Ghosthead]

The thing is, I feel that in the case of this one story, the breaks to the rules actively hurt my enjoyment of the overall work. So yes, I always felt like these were deliberate choices. And these deliberate choices did not make the story feel richer or more enjoyable to me. As I read the work, the choices actively inhibited my ability to enjoy the story.

Though maybe for future critique, I would say if you don't tell us that you know where a writer is using a technique that breaks normal practice deliberately, we don't know that you know.

Like here you mention that run-on sentences are exhausting and confusing, and I think that you also know that we can probably infer Jenna is using this technique deliberately to convey that it is exhausting to fight a Solar goddess of war and to convey Jin's feeling of everything happening at once, and it being hard to understand. Now, you probably don't feel that using this technique was a worthwhile or effective way to achieve what she was going for, which is OK, but reading your critique I didn't really know that you knew it was a deliberate choice for that effect.

[Morangias]

Though maybe for future critique, I would say if you don't tell us that you know where a writer is using a technique that breaks normal practice deliberately, we don't know that you know.

Like here you mention that run-on sentences are exhausting and confusing, and I think that you also know that we can probably infer Jenna is using this technique deliberately to convey that it is exhausting to fight a Solar goddess of war and to convey Jin's feeling of everything happening at once, and it being hard to understand. Now, you probably don't feel that using this technique was a worthwhile or effective way to achieve what she was going for, which is OK, but reading your critique I didn't really know that you knew it was a deliberate choice for that effect.

Did Death of the Author fall out of favor when I wasn't watching?