#i've been meaning to revisit this thread for months especially as i now have the personal experience to project onto robin here lmaooo

[utilitycaster]

I've been thinking about this since watching the C2E2 panel but Marisha said something about the value of coming in with other characters and having pre-existing relationships and actually? I somewhat disagree for longform campaigns.

I think for shorter stories, it really doesn't matter because in a very brief game, you have to come to the table with a very complete character idea. Candela, Thresher, and the Calamity/Downfall/Divergence trio have all managed to have consistently excellent character work regardless of whether people have known each other since literally before time (Downfall), whether they have a longstanding but not infinite pre-existing relationship (several relationships in the Circles of Needle and Thread or Tide and Bone; Calamity; Fiedra and Crokas in Divergence) or whether it's something relatively recent or even a first-time meeting (some Candela relationships; some of the Divergence relationships; Thresher). A nebulous "yeah, we've worked together" also works well for lighter series (ESO Blackwood, Wildemount Wildlings, The Menagerie) in terms of quickly getting to the story.

For longer stories, a longstanding pre-existing relationship can be strong; but it can also keep those characters from branching out and mixing, and unless that's explored it can really limit the story. I think the CR fandom especially tends to put a certain degree of weight on how good the twins were without realizing that they work not because they are twins and family, but because a big part of their story is realizing that they have people other than each other now. [I keep thinking about this actually w/r/t my thoughts about Veilguard - there are a number of reasons I consider my first run to be the "canon" one for me, but a big one is that romancing someone out-of-faction made me feel more integrated into the team because I suddenly had two really strong connections rather than just one.]

Part of why the Mighty Nein, in my opinion, are so compelling is that everyone ends up with an interesting and deep relationship with everyone else. And a big part of that is that we don't come in with any relationships longer than about 8 months, and indeed, that relationship barely ends up influencing party interactions because Molly is very outgoing, Yasha is frequently absent, and then Molly dies. So we have Caleb and Nott/Veth, who are also very much a story of people realizing they have more than each other now (and that neither of them really knew each other that much going in!); and Fjord and Jester, who have known each other for like 6 weeks and who spend some significant time apart (and both of whom are also fairly outgoing and quick to interact with other people). Beau and Caduceus being free agents did quite a lot as well. We don't just see an existing relationship continuing; we see relationships grow and change onscreen as the players find not just the relationship but the characters themselves, and that's what makes it compelling.

As mentioned with Vox Machina, the twins are great, and so are Pike and Grog; but Pike's absence means we see a lot of Grog and Scanlan (who don't have a very longstanding relationship prior to Vox Machina's formation), and the romances are all between people who didn't know each other well beforehand. Even the conflicts are ones that grew from people who met relatively recently (Keyleth and Percy's friendship and arguments being a prime example).

I think the twins were great and you should revisit Campaign 1 if you want that again, but as someone who felt Campaign 3 really struggled in terms of mixing up the pre-existing relationships to the detriment of party cohesion/conflict and an interesting dynamic, I'd much rather see strangers or near-strangers in longform campaigns, and save people coming in together for shorter works.

(I also, iirc, think this came up in the context of session zero, and that might be a factor because again the main campaigns seem to not do the same level of session zero as the shorter ones, and if they did that might fix the issue and make a pre-existing relationship better; part of why the twins work so well is that Liam and Laura essentially did their own mini-session zero on their own.)

[kooldewd123]

My New Year's resolution this year was to read more. I'm sure a lot of people around here can relate to this, but I was a massive reader as a child who started to fall off as I grew up. I barely read anything new at all throughout college and the latter half of high school. At the start of this year, I was suddenly hit with a massive urge to try and return to my roots again, and for probably the first time ever, I suddenly had a New Year's resolution I actually intended to follow through on. Still, I knew that my attention issues would make this hard for me unless I gave myself some sort of structure.

Enter Animorphs. Not only was this a beloved series from my childhood that I had been wanting to revisit for a long time, but it happened to fill my needs perfectly: with 54 mainline books total, I could easily pace myself at a book a week, and with each book only taking about an hour or so to read, it would be a nice, low-commitment way to ease myself back in. And for an added kick in the pants, I started a reread thread to hold myself accountable to.

Although revisiting the series that genuinely shaped me into the person I am today has been a magical experience, it was never the main goal. My hope in starting this project was that by weaning myself back in with a weekly diet of quick, digestible books, I would get myself back into the proper headspace of wanting to read more often. And now that we're nearly at the halfway point of the year, I'm so glad to be able to say:

It fucking worked.

Not counting Animorphs, I've read more books this year than I have since... probably middle school. And it's not just me going over the collection on my bookshelf, either - most of them have been entirely brand new to me, some of which I hadn't even heard of until I grabbed them off the bookstore shelf and thought "huh, that sounds neat." It's really thrown me back to childhood experiences and overall been a fantastic refresh of my mental state after stagnating a bit in some of my media-consumption habits. This has been a much longer preamble than I anticipated, but I wanted to make this post to go over the books I've read so far this year and some of my thoughts on them! So here we go, in no particular order:

Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan: This is the reason I said "most" of the books I read this year were new. The Riordanverse is my second favorite book series after Animorphs, and I've also been meaning to reread it at some point as well. The Disney+ series earlier this year really gave me a strong urge to revisit the books, but I wanted to wait until after the show was over so it didn't skew my expectations too much. And, yeah. It's been just as great a series as I remember. I've only finished up through Battle of the Labyrinth so far, but I want to go through the whole Riordanverse eventually. HoO are some of my most-read books ever, and ToA has been itching at the back of my mind for months. The Kane Chronicles and Magnus Chase never captured my interest as well as the Greco-Roman stuff, but I'm excited to take another look at them and see if my feelings have changed.

Loki's Ring by Stina Leicht: A space captain travels to a mysterious pathogen-infected planet to save her AI daughter... is what the blurb on the back of the book says. Truthfully, I think the marketing on this one is a bit misleading. I picked it up expecting to get a sci-fi mystery thriller set on a spooky planet, but what I got instead was a more political piece about the crew trying to negotiate between all the different parties laying claim to the planet. It's not a bad book by any means, but just not something that appealed to me personally and I couldn't help but feel a bit burned by the description.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman: I've heard a lot about Gaiman's work, and about this book especially, so this was one of the books I was most excited to start reading. And there was a lot I enjoyed here: Shadow was an interesting protagonist, I loved this take on modern gods, and Gaiman's interpretation of Americana as a concept was fascinating. But for some reason... I dunno, this one was just a slog to get through for me, despite how much I felt like I should have loved it. I hate to admit it after how highly I've heard him recommended, but I think Gaiman's writing style might just not be my thing. I'd be willing to give him another shot if I was in the right mood (the idea of checking out Sandman has crossed my mind a couple of times), but sad to say I probably won't be delving into his works like I was hoping to. One of the biggest disappointments I've had with a piece of media in a long time.

Eye of the Sh*t Storm (The Frost Files #3) by Jackson Ford: Now this one was a surprise in the complete opposite direction. I grabbed this one on a whim, completely missing the fact that it was the third book in a series. The Frost Files follows the adventures of Teagan Frost, a reluctant government agent working in Los Angeles with psychokinetic abilities (or as the book puts it, the ability to move sh*t with her mind). The opening to this book nearly lost me, leaning into some drug humor that's not really my taste, but what followed was a frantically fun adventure with zany humor, strong tensions, and characters that bounced off each other perfectly. I was sold on the series pretty quickly, but by the time I decided I wanted to read the other books, I was already too invested in this one to stop. I have the first book ready on my shelf to read at some point, but I need to search some local bookstores for #2 and #4 first so I can read the whole thing straight through.

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins: Can you believe I've never actually read these books before? For some reason, my mom took a super hard stance against these books in particular and never let me read them, and when my dad told me she was being stupid and gave me the entire trilogy himself, I just... put them on my bookshelf and never actually got around to reading them. I admit I was a bit worried going in. I don't often enjoy romance in stories, especially since figuring out I'm aro, and these books have a reputation for kickstarting the entirely overdone dystopian YA love triangle trope. I was very pleasantly surprised, then, that the romance wasn't actually as major a part of the story as I expected, and the extent to which it was used was entirely in service of the story's themes and message. In that vein, one of the most interesting parts of these books to me was being able to see the origin point of so many tropes of the genre. It's clear why this trilogy is a masterpiece, and finally being able to take it all in illuminated all the ways that Collins inspired the YA writers that came after her. Katniss is a remarkable protagonist, and the story resonated in ways that are even clearer to me now than they would have been to me if I had read it back then. I feel like I got a surprising amount out of these books. I downloaded the movies to compare, but never worked up the motivation to actually start watching them.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: At one point, I decided to try and go back to some books I read in school to see what I would get out of them now that I'm more educated on the subject matter they're tackling. I was actually looking for 1984, but couldn't find it (I guess Barnes & Noble must have gotten rid of those look-up computers during COVID or something so I was basically just wandering around blindly trying to figure it out myself) and ended up with Fahrenheit 451 instead. So how did I feel about this one? Weirdly ambivalent. Censorship and the preservation of information are two of the issues I'm most concerned with in the world today, but for some reason this book just did absolutely nothing for me and I can't really say why. Nothing about it really stuck in my brain the way I expected it to. I did eventually find 1984 and Animal Farm, so hopefully those ones give me more to think about. I actually never even read Animal Farm in school, so that'll be a new one for me.

The Arc of a Scythe Trilogy by Neal Shusterman: I'd heard this trilogy come up a couple of times before as the big new YA series. For the uninitiated, these books take place in a utopian future where all of humanity's problems have been solved: crime, poverty, corruption, racism, disease, even death itself. The only arbiters of death left in the world are Scythes, an order tasked with taking the lives of others in order to maintain the value of life and curb overpopulation. And let me tell you, this series is absolutely a new favorite of mine. I brought these with me on a road trip and chewed through Thunderhead, The Toll, and Gleanings on the bus in a way I didn't even realize I was capable of anymore. The world is well fleshed out in an incredibly elegant way, with boundaries loose enough to provide for amazing twists yet firm enough to still provide stakes. The differing philosophies the Scythes each have on death and duty in a post-mortal world are an absolute delight to see unfold. And the story plays its cards excellently, slipping in details at just the right moment for them to slide under your radar before suddenly exploding into prominence. Thunderhead and The Toll in particular use the medium of text in much more interesting ways than anything else I've read recently, leading to some amazing scenes I couldn't stop myself from flipping back to and reading all over again. I'm gonna be thinking about this series for a long time, and I really hope we get another companion book like Gleanings as an excuse to take another plunge back into this world.

Lore by Alexandra Bracken: Every seven years, the Olympian gods are turned mortal for a single week, and anyone who manages to kill them takes their power. if i had a nickel for every book on this list about gods in the modern world- I haven't really gotten that far in this book so far, so it's only here as an honorable mention. It hasn't hooked me yet, but I feel like I'm only just starting to get out of the intro section and into the action, so there's plenty of time still left for it to pick up. Plus, I got distracted with life stuff and couldn't give it my full focus for a while, so I'm probably not giving it as fair a chance as I should.

It's been fun reading them, it's been fun talking about them, and here's hoping I can keep having fun with them in the future.