Tales of the Parodyverse >> View Post
Post By
HH

In Reply To
Anime Jason 
Owner

Location: Here
Member Since: Sun Sep 12, 2004
Posts: 2,834
Subj: Yes, it is.
Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 at 05:51:56 am EST
Reply Subj: Is it?
Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 at 09:34:55 am EST (Viewed 379 times)


> Before I took a risk and wrote something unusual, I re-read a few of the recent posts and tried to formulate the direction everything was headed in the immediate future. I came to the conclusion that it wasn't really headed anywhere immediately - most of them were build-ups or prompts, but there wasn't much cohesion yet. At least that's how it looked - like a story building up over a year rather than a few weeks.

This is the first time for quite a few years that we'd had such a story-driven rather than concept-driven shared narrative. Things like everyone getting de-aged to 16 or wandering through dreams don't require so much collaboration as this. The last time we had a tale of this kind was the Gold Coin Killer, and that time it was me who got the flak when people didn't like how I headed it towarda a resolution. In fact you might note that we haven't yet seen the conclusion to that story.

> I got the idea from them that quite a few posters were waiting for someone to glue all those tales together and tie up the plot. I wanted to take a shot at it, because with no new posts for a few days, I figured why make Ian do all the work? We've had talks about that before, about you having to determine the direction of each main plot on the board, and you've said you'd like to see other posters take initiative.

Traditionally we've left the person who launched the RR to end it, buut in a chat a few weeks ago Hatty was claiming he had just written a one-off and KS had made it an RR, and KS was pointing out that I was the one who'd written them all into an alternate future. We'll need to have some kind of out-of-story conference to bring about a satisfying ending that has popular appeal.

> I did that, but then I had a problem: I didn't want to dead-end some of the developing character pieces that were out there. So I developed a radically new scenario, the "what if it's too late" one. I figured all that would do is change the distant goal from beating the Moderator to a larger battle for power once he was dead. Later on I called that :"too anime" because of its tendency to take radical turns in direction while classic comics usually won't.

In this kind of medium there are some requiremnts which don't actually map onto either anime or Western comics.

> The irony of all of this is, for a story begun with a round-robin, it has some of the most tightly tied-together plots of any story begun here. It's very difficult to find an opening to play with.

Agreed.

> Anyway, I guess I was playing it to the wrong audience I'm a little gunshy about taking the lead again, now that I know my style of doing so is absolutely not appropriate for the board (except with World Class, which is entirely mine).

You seem to have managed.