#concept and execution wise

[athrisen]

It's no longer a surprise, but here's the cover I illustrated for The Four Seasons Zine @wohzine! In case it isn't obvious, you're supposed to be looking at ZZS from WKX's POV.

I added the drafts- I always find it fascinating to see how a piece evolves from conception to completion.

Yeah I know this has been plastered all over socials for marketing purposes and y'all are sick of it, but I haven't actually posted it on my account so you have to suffer it again! Hohoho

Instagram | Twitter

[makerofmadness]

I swear I have something I've found something

From "the making of" (with the earthbound Halloween hack)

you know how sometimes people will take their old bad fanworks and remake it into something like actually good and also probably an original work? I've done that a few times. Anyway:

Can you see what I'm getting at here?

"Varik is almost dead, and yet he can't stop moving because you keep pushing those buttons."

[smorbsh]

a guy can be cringefail and a little meow meow at the same time, as a treat

[magnetic-dogz]

I have such mixed feelings about the Switch as a console honestly

[batemanofficial]

since we're all gonna die i have something to share with you all. i did not care for the mandela catalogue

[aq2003]

oh btw i get even more why brennan (like me) clocked sophomore year fabian as fucked up and sad even if some of the other pcs were like "what are you talking about dude" . it's because the basic core theses of fabian and leiland eftbk as characters are actually pretty similar

[mihai-florescu]

Madara angst time

[gothamcityneedsme]

arkham origins is so great because it really is just like. Here is what everyone was like and what the world was like before batman became the most important boy in the universe.

Like. joker is a crazy murderhappy guy but like hes totally on his way to getting himself killed for a joke and mostly hes just a crime lord. Bane isnt broken yet and has like a whole faction of people so loyal to him vs how alone he becomes in later arkham. enigma doesnt even call himself the riddler and doesn't even MAKE riddles. Hes like. Sane and has a slight moral focus to his work. He wants to destroy corruption (or control it). Ras is in the shadows, planning, which we see through the dignified but cruel Shiva. Sidonis is the old guard, old crime, being destroyed by the rise of the new 'supercrime'.

Anyways. Batman fucks up all these people and puts a wrench in the works that just starts twisting. Because of Batman, Jim Gordon gets more recognition (through Jims own efforts as well but tbh some of the people Batman takes down would 1000% have gotten Jim dead i think. Its a team effort). And Gotham itself will change so much too. Part of it was crime already shifting but the Bat is such a huge fucking effect. Alfred is right when he sees how important Batman is (THE TWO OF THEM ARE!!)

mvp alfred in this game for real.

[cantdanceflynn]

THIS BTW. IS MY PLAN FOR THE NYX FANDERG

[duke-daemon]

hazbin hotel redesigns wooooooooo

okay so. i'm gonna discuss my thoughts about them n shit, putting under a readmore bc it's gonna get long and rambley. sorry in advance for the shit formatting, i'm on mobile </3

just some general shit about how i would rewrite it. i think the premise of redeeming sinners is entertaining but is executed horribly. i also am a fan of the "heaven isn't great either" idea but again, executed horribly. i'd make the hierarchy of angels more accurate because it's cool as hell and i have autism about it. the characters from hell would swear still (albeit not as much), but the angels would outright refuse to swear or make vulgar jokes ever. this would be partially to further the gap between heaven and hell and make the differences more stark.

hell would also be more like dante's inferno (again because i think its cool). the ars goetia would get a full redesign and would be more prevalent in demonic society.

now for the characters!

---

VAGGIE VALTIEL:

starting off with vaggie, or Valtiel as i've renamed her because let's be honest her original name sucks. Valtiel (Val for short) was an aspiring power angel who wanted to be an exorcist. she looked up to lute and thought the idea of killing demons was really cool and badass. however when she actually was on the field for the first time she discovered how awful this actually was. she tried to help a few demons but lute figured it out and felled her right then and there. the rest of her story is relatively the same. personality wise she's more stoic and less prone to all-out aggression. she still get angry, sure, but it's in a quieter and more menacing way. you DO NOT want to fuck with Valtiel.

CHARLIE:

next up is charlie! i had two ideas for her. the first one (unsettling drawing) has her as a mannequin/doll type demon. lucifer and/or lilith was unable to conceive and as such they built a kid from scratch. she's overall similar to og charlie personality wise, very kind and cheerful despite her unsettling appearance. she struggles with empathy sometimes but really does mean well. her motive for rehabilitating sinners is so they get to see their family again. being able to see heaven from where they are in hell must make them sad, so she wants to help make them happy again!

the second idea for charlie has her as an angel. specifically i casted her as a dominion angel due to their reputation as holy judges. she was once a demon but has been rehabilitated and has risen into angelhood! she now wants to help her former kin do the same and redeem themselves in heaven's gaze. again, similar cheery personality, but a bit more prudish in this rendition

tangent time!

as a side tangent, valtiel and charlie would have a different relationship in this rewrite. their relationship felt shoehorned in in the original show, like it was just there for the hell of it. we didn't see much development between them and it just felt kinda bland. so in my rewrite, charlie and valtiel are amiable exes. they tried dating when valtiel first fell (when charlie was still a demon in the charlie-angel version) but realized their feelings for each other were much more platonic than romantic. they ended things off on good terms, deciding they were much better as friends. they are still besties to this day! later charlie ends up with emily (or 'ellie' as i plan to rename her)

back to the characters

Alastor:

note: i made alastor mixed-race, which could be seen as bad by some due to vivzie saying he's black. however, as many have pointed out, he has no ethnic features whatsoever and i honestly wouldn't be surprised if she said that just to get away with using voodoo symbols (a closed religion) in his imagery/design. like viv, i am incredibly white and have little to no knowledge of voodoo, and even if i did i would not use it for something like this anyways due to the stigma the religion already has and (again) it being a closed practice. as such i removed it from his concept altogether, but made him mixed race (white passing) because.. why not i guess, i forgor my actual reasoning

with that being said...

alastor is by far my favorite of the redesigns and i'm honestly tempted to turn him into a legally distinct oc. i imagine he's somewhat reserved, along the lines of norman bates albeit a bit more extroverted. during his life he was a serial killer with a day job as a radio announcer. he took pleasure in reporting about his own murders on the radio, but that is eventually what got him caught (ie accidentally letting slip info that wasn't released to the public). as a result he was sentenced to death. upon arriving in hell, he quickly rose through the ranks to borderline overlord status and is a feared presence by demons and sinners alike. why is he bothering to assist in the hotel project? who knows... his motives are a mystery, like the rest of what he does

(he isn't actually alastair crowley i just thought the naming convention was ironic. however he may have also dabbled with satanic magic in lifetime..)

Angel Dust:

TW: brief discussion of SA

this is definitely my second favorite redesign. i loooove insect themes and wanted to do more than just Extra Arms, so he now has fucked up legs and a lot of eyes too! story-wise, angel used to be a criminal mastermind, hated by both the mafia and the feds. he was a gentleman thief, arranging massive heists under the cover of night while also partaking in the occasional drag show. he ended up a cocaine addict later in life, which caused his work to become sloppier. eventually he was killed in a heist gone wrong, specifically shot by the police.

i'm not gonna go too in-depth on the SA part of his story, but he is hypersexual due to being assaulted in both his life and afterlife. it would be something he'd be working on in the rewrite. his reason for coming to the hotel in the first place may have even been for help with this trauma. underneath his sultry exterior is a broken guy who really just needs someone to care about him for who he really is and not for what his body can do.

LUTE:

so lute and adam are some of the characters i have the most gripes about. the biggest one being why viv chose adam as the leader of the exorcists in the first place. if she wants a biblical figure tied to demon killing, Archangel Michael is RIGHT THERE, aka the one destined to kill satan during the events of Revelations. if she wants the first human to die, that would be Abel, not Adam. and i kinda doubt abel would want to do the stuff that HH!adam has been doing. if she wants an angel related to torture, Dumah is her guy! an angel that rules over wicked souls and tortures sinners every day except sabbath. so many better options...

with that out of the way, Lute is still the lieutenant of the exorcist, who are a specially chosen group of powers sent to purge hell once a year. think navy seals. she's pretty much the same as in the show, albeit more muscular and visually different from other exorcists (seriously why do they all look exactly the same?????) she's a very repressed lesbian who hasn't had time to work on that due to her duties

i also redesigned the exorcist uniform/armor because those LED purge masks are fugly as hell and their clothes don't even look remotely like armor.

Adam + Final Thoughts

i did start a redesign of adam but got bored of it. regardless, i think he'd be the head of C.H.E.R.U.B. instead of the exorcists. he doesn't want his children to make the same mistakes he and eve did, so together they started C.H.E.R.U.B. to help lost souls stay out of hell

final thoughts uhhhh i'm tired. show sucks, it had so much potential but viv ruined it by being a shitty writer and an even shittier person. the designs are fine i guess but they all look exactly the same and are in desperate need of variety. the humor is dogshit, saying dick and balls and penis over and over and over again doesn't make it any funnier than the first three times you made that joke. anyways that's it, i hope you liked my inane ramblings. gonna go vanish for another forty years or so, adios

[dduane]

Hope this isn't an ask you get all the time, but how do you track your progress when you're doing editing?

Everyone talks about word goals, and that seems fine for a first draft, but doesn't make sense to me when it comes to revisions. Do you have any kind of system for setting daily goals for your revisions?

Actually, I don't think anyone's ever asked me about this. :) So no sweat.

Briefly: I think you're wise in not attempting wordcounting in this phase of dealing with an MS—or trying to push yourself into a structure so rigid. ...There's this, too: there's a whole lot too much emphasis out there at the moment on trying to force yourself into other people's writing and editing paradigms—so many of them riddled with bar graphs and "demonstrable" daily progress. You need to find what works for you. More words dealt with in a day, sure, that's encouraging in its way. But are they the right words?

Today’s Writer Take that will probably strike some as Hot (and ask me if I care): Some kinds of writing progress are just neither graphically nor numerically quantifiable. And damned to the least TripAdvisorally-acceptable regions of [insert your preferred underworld here] be those who’ve tried to sell people the idea that they are.

(sigh)

Now, for what it's worth: here's how I do it. Which may be useful to other people, or not so much so. And that's fine, because I'm not editing their novels. :)

(Adding a break here. Under the cut: advice + advice = advice, and some images of text I shouldn't be letting y'all see just yet... but WTF.)

Revision for me is a fairly relaxed business—unless my editor has told me WE NEED THIS ON TUESDAY, which thank sweet Thoth on his e-bike is very rare.

It also helps that I like revising. (When I was a kid, I liked liver, too. And spinach. Just call me Miss Outlier and let's move on.) I really enjoy the feeling of the work’s rough edges being filed down and the sparse places being filled out.

And also: second draft/first revision draft is nowhere near as tense for me as first draft. Because, thank God, at least there's a book.

First draft is where I sweat blood and otherwise suffer. While I can see the story just fine in my head, it's not really real for me until the first draft, whole in narrative and action, is complete on paper/in the machine. And till it's achieved at least that level of reality, I can't relax.

But by the time I hit my second/revision draft, I can be confident that any really serious problems in the novel have already been solved—because I'm an outliner. In the outline stage, potential thematic or structural troubles will routinely have revealed themselves way long ago: before drafting even got started, as I first wired the story's bones together. The successfully-executed first draft acts as proof-of-concept for that structural wiring. By the time that draft’s done, it’s immediately apparent whether the skeleton can successfully stand up by itself. And gods is that a relief when it does! You’re tempted to jump around yelling “It's aliiiiiive!" as the lightning strikes around you.*

However, if after submitting that draft my editor's found something structurally or thematically troublesome in it that I've completely missed until this point, my first order of business becomes to fix whatever their notes involve and submit the fixes. Nothing further happens until the editor sees what I've done about those problems, and until I get agreement that whatever intervention I've enacted has now sorted the problems out.

After that, everything happens in bed.

(...casually noting that for a line to use somewhere else...) :)

But seriously: I do my best revision and editing before getting up in the morning.

Some of this is because, for me, the mind's nice and quiet and (theoretically) at least moderately well rested, right after sleep. I might take the briefest glance at my email first to make sure nothing urgent needs attention... but once that’s done, I refuse to let myself go any further down that hole. That early-morning calm is a mental state I'm glad to exploit, and one I jealously guard. On days when I'm forced to do without the working lie-in**, I use a different approach: when there's a pause, sit down and do nothing—no reading, no video, no music, no phone, nothing—for half an hour: then start editing. Routinely, the quiet I need will once more have fallen.

The in-bed-editing approach also works for me because (since I'm working in Scrivener) it's absolutely no big deal to finish a day's editing on a file by exporting a version of the file containing the day's edits to ebook format, and into my Dropbox. From there, in the morning, without ever getting out from under the covers, I can pull that .epub file into my tablet and read it as an ebook, making corrections and notes there.

This is what it looks like (on a page without too many corrections) if the app you're using is "Books" in an iPad. The second image is what you get when you touch on the marginal yellow square of the note to examine it.

Then, when I'm finished looking over the previous day's/evening's writing and adding notes to it, I go downstairs, get some caffeine in me, and make the changes in the main Scrivener file. (If I was running the project in question on the iPad version of Scrivener, I'd just make the change right there. But who knows when I'd actually get up, then? Better to do it this way.) :)

In the normal flow of things I'll attempt to deal with a chapter or two a day in this mode. (Always bearing in mind that my chapters in early drafts typically run long—often 10K or so—and I'm likely enough to rebreak them later.) This first level of revision is the easy one: catching typos and bad or clumsy phrasings, reworking character interactions that need smoothing out; adding better descriptive passages (with particular emphasis on staying in the visual, audio and tactile senses), etc., etc.

So again: no way I'd ever bother worrying about word counts, with these. What seems to count for more is giving yourself time to recognize, gradually, at a reader's pace, what's working in the prose and what isn't. Rush—or try to force the pace to a given number of words per day—and you run the risk of missing something vital. To me, at the tracking level, it seems sufficient to note which chapters have been dealt with, and which are still hanging fire. (I can change the chapters' color labels in Scrivener to make this status visible at a glance, if I need to.)

When everything's dealt with on this pass—which if I'm lucky will take no more than a couple/few weeks—I try to take a couple weeks off before dealing with the MS again. Sometimes that's possible: sometimes not. The longer you can leave the book alone to let your perceptions of it rest and reset themselves, the better. Distance—mental or temporal—seems to lend clarity.

In any case, for me, next comes another pass, tougher to describe. Casually, I refer to it as the "Missed Opportunities/Complications" pass. This is a thing that one of the very best writers I know, John M. Ford, used to do. One of his editors (I think it was) came across him working on an MS one time, and asked him what he was doing. "Complications," Mike muttered. "Removing them?" said his editor. Mike shook his head. "Adding them," he said.

In this pass you look for in-novel connections you've previously missed making. Some dramatic moments have their impact significantly increased if you've found a way to connect them, even casually, with previous events, situations, character thoughts, or dialogue. (The cheap and easy mnemonic for this kind of thing: "Say a thing twice, and it echoes. Say it three times, and it resonates.")

Equally, events (and people) may turn out to require more complex backstory than you've given them in your first draft; so this is where you take care of that. And of course there are almost certainly character and emotional interactions that can use attention; fewer words, more depth, more complexity. What things do these people, in this situation, need to say to one another that they haven't? And also, what drama got scamped or passed up on because you were just too damn tired in the last draft? —Because you too, poor baby, are human; and that state can, entirely logically, make you want not to deal with any more damn drama just now. Even though drama is the lifeblood of your narrative, usually, and tying a tourniquet around it really doesn't help. You are the conduit of power into your narrative, and your varying ability to conduct it is always an issue… so you need to keep an eye open for places where the flow may have temporarily failed.

This pass, ideally, might take no more than another few weeks or a month. And again, I'm not sure any attempt at wordcount tracking would do this work any good. Because, again... are they the right words? And to make the narrative more effective, you may wind up removing as many words as you added in previous passes.

Finally, with all things taken together, I usually reach a point where (by myself, anyway) I can't think of anything to do that'll make this book any better. That's where there then comes—and again, impossible to assign a word count to it—a time when you know you're as Done As You Can Be. If you've been doing this long enough, you may even hear a strange kind of sigh in the back of your head, as the book gives up and lets go...

...into the next stage of production. But even then you keep an eye on it… because in my experience it’s rare that any book's ever that easily just finished. Even in page proofs, something may happen to surprise you.

Anyway, that's when I throw the book the hell out of the house—because no matter how much I've loved it previously, by that time I'm usually seriously tired of it—and wait to see whether the editor feels it needs one more draft. (Disclosure: this has never happened. There might be a few notes that need to be handled. But another full draft? Never yet.)

Anyway: hope this is of help to you.

But the heart of it all? Find your own way, and screw the bar graphs.

*That line, too, is an indicator of trouble to come. "It's?" Not "he's"? Tsk tsk.

**Usually sort of 7-9 AM. Sometimes way earlier, depending on the time of year. Dawn comes real early in the summertime in Ireland…

[callmearcturus]

The Video Gaming Major Arcana

The latest patron episode of Into The Aether/@intothecast asked the boys to decide a video game for every Major Arcana card. They ran out of time on it and only got 2/3s thru

my ass was like "Challenge Accepted"

0 - The Fool - Dragon Quest (The Fool is infinite potential and is at the start of a long journey. DQ as a series is a long-running, is a bedrock of the medium, and has done its own takes on everything from pokemon to minecraft, and it either did it first or did it better.)

1 - The Magician - Metroid and Zelda (The Magician is the first person the Fool meets and is a guide for the journey. The Magician is associated strongly with teaching and with tools. Metroid and Zelda both are foundational works and they revolve around gating player process through tools.)

2 - The High Priestess - FEZ (The High Priestess is another guide, but sits before the veil, keeping guard over arcane, hidden knowledge and deciding when to share the secrets of the universe. FEZ is one of the Big Games that hide under layers and layers of mystery.)

3 - The Empress - Stardew Valley (The Empress presides over growth and cultivation of her kingdom, sitting in a field with wheat in hand. SDV is chiefly about taking care of your own domain, the farm and the wider village.)

4 - The Emperor - Civilization (The Emperor is the firm hand of government and can be an important navigator in chaos but also is angered by lack of obedience and losing control. Civ is all about steering every aspect of a nation and protecting it viciously.)

5 - The Hierophant - Pokemon (The Hierophant is a cultural, societal leader that gains power from people who believe similarly but subsequently is very set in their ways. Pokemon is a huge phenomenon that unites people of all ages, but also struggles heavily with innovation and progress.)

6 - The Lovers - Journey (The Lovers aren't necessarily smoochy-smoochy, but represent a Decision, joining hands with another person and striding into the future together. It's Journey. If you know, you know.)

7 - The Chariot - Bethesda's Catalog (The Chariot is a tumultuous, potent card. They hold onto the reins of powerful beasts and drive forward, blazing a new path. But if they lose grip, everything goes to hell. Bethesda's works tend to have this incredible ambition to them, and when they hit, they HIT, but when they miss, it's dramatic.)

8 - Justice - Dark Souls (Justice is the system and its enforcement of its rules, whether they feel fair or arbitrary. I feel DS fits it well-- it relentlessly follows its own rules and is firm in them, which can either draw players in or seem cruel and unwelcoming.)

9 - The Hermit - Immortality (The Hermit is a wise person who gained specialized knowledge but through great personal sacrifice. They find it difficult to share their knowledge because they essentially traded that ability to communicate easily for the wisdom. Immortality has some deeply complicated concepts to communicate, but its methods and the basic mechanics it uses are to some people impossible to understand.)

10 - (Wheel of) Fortune - Spelunky (Fortune is the card of pure luck and the whims of fate and how you survive being caught in its spokes. Spelunky is a pure Rogue-like as opposed to a Rogue-lite and there is no knowing what the procgen will give you.)

11 - Strength - Undertale (Strength is specifically about emotional control and fortitude. It's not about slaying the lion, but holding it, keeping it from lashing out. Undertale is a game that asks the player to endure emotional struggles both against the mechanics and against their own inclinations.)

12 - The Hanged Man - Signalis (OH BOY ITS MY FAVE CARD. The thing about the Hanged Man is that it's a test, a gamble, a deal. The Hanged Man is not hung from the neck, this is not an execution, they are inverted. They choose to be inverted in the hopes of gaining some Insight into the universe, but in doing so risk madness or obsession or doom. Signalis is both a game about a protagonist going through this and also a game that will put the player through this if they aren't careful.)

13 - The Nameless Arcana - Braid (I'm not even personally a fan of Braid, but I believe it is one of the handful of Original Indie Games. The very existence and popularity of Braid and its contemporaries showed that games outside the big studios could hit big. Braid (or Cave Story for the PC crowd) altered the landscape.

14 - Temperance - Yakuza (Temperance is the melding of disparate elements that should not go together into something grand and new, and maintaining that balance. Yakuza manages to be genuine and profound not in spite of its strange mixture of tones and mechanics but because of them.)

15 - The Devil - Genshin Impact (I don't feel the need to elaborate on this one.)

16 - The Tower - Shenmue (The Tower is total upheaval and where it all comes crashing down, where ambition crumbles and brings an institution down with it. Shenmue is not solely to blame for the failure of the Dreamcast and Sega's exit from the console arena, but it contributed to it and is emblematic of that seachange.)

17 - The Star - Mass Effect (The Star is a beacon in the darkness, a distant light that indicates not so much a goal, but that the journey will continue. Mass Effect is a landmark title that maybe didn't execute on half the things it tried, strangled by its own scope, but it still showed what games could do, broadening the possibility space. It is hope for greater experiences and art.)

18 - The Moon - Metal Gear (The Moon illuminates the path through the darkness, but creates illusions in the reflections, demanding the querent move forward with care or they will go astray, go mad. Is Metal Gear really deep? Is it the closest triple-A games get to arthouse? Does it have meaning? Or is it a mess? Is it too Problematique to justify it's big ideas? Is it all just really, really stupid? Or is it genius?)

19 - The Sun - Tetris Effect (The Sun comes at the end of a long, arduous journey. It is the sigh of relief, the tears of release, the light to finally see how far you've come. Tetris Effect is the latest iteration of one of the oldest formulas ever, and it's brilliant and celebratory and invites everyone to take part in its joy.)

20 - Judgement - Pathologic (Judgement is all-seeing and all-knowing, the final tally and the reckoning. So is Pathologic. Few experiences demand so much from the player, and few games are so brutally honest in answering the player's decisions. In Pathologic, you will get what you deserve.)

21 - The World - The Outer Wilds (The beginning is the end is the beginning. Completion and totality and holistic understanding of Everything. It's gotta be Outer Wilds.)

[queenlua]

i like to think the random Fox executive who cancelled Firefly actually did it b/c he heard Whedon at el talk frankly about what their plans were for future arcs in the show & the exec was like "oh fuck, i'm as much a fan of this concept as the next nerd, but these future arcs are NOT GOOD, better to kill it now so people can just fondly remember the good parts and never find out how off-the-rails it was gonna get"

and then that random Fox executive had to listen to angry nerds hate on him for the entire next decade of his life

tragically misunderstood man. did a mercy killing to save us all from "whatever the fuck Whedon was planning with Mal & Inara." may we all be so wise

[showtoonzfan]

So you are aware that a lot of the same criticisms that are frequently leveled at Viv can also be brought against Brandon Rogers right? His videos have bestiality, incest, racist sterotyping, misogyny (find me a single female character he plays that isn't a screaming harpy), and excessive swearing amongst countless other forms of tasteless humor.

And he's also one of the main writers for Helluva Boss who clearly adds a lot of his own humor to the script (the video he did with the Blitzo and Moxxie puppets really highlights this), yet no one ever blames him for how HB is written. It's always Viv that catches the blame, Viv that gets thrown under the bus.

Why is that? Why does she get held to different standards than Brandon Rogers does?

For me personally, I do mention Brandon frequently when I talk about how bad the show is. (And I won’t speak on his personal content cause I have no desire to watch it so don’t take me as a legitimate source if this stuff is true) but I will say the reason why Viv gets blamed the most is….well…she’s the creator, and in charge writing wise. She has the power over everything because it’s her show, so even if she wasn’t the one to write an episode, she’s still the one who decides what to keep in and what to take out cause it’s her story. She’s the one who goes over the scripts and decides “yes, let’s publish it like this”- and she’s the one who makes the decisions.

Not to mention that…let’s be honest, Brandon seems to be REALLY absent in the writing department, especially for season 2. Viv wrote episodes 1, 4, 6 and 7, while Adam Neylan wrote episodes 2, 3, 4, and 5, all of season 2. Throughout this entire season so far, Brandon hasn’t gotten anything but a story credit. He hasn’t written a single episode that was purely him or even collaborated with Vivzie or Adam to. The last time he had a writing part was back in episode 6 of season 1, and so far in season 2, all we’ve been getting from Brandon are mere ideas and concepts, while Viv and Neylan are responsible for the dogshit execution and writing.

Brandon handles the comedy aspect of the show, (or…at least he did in season 1) so don’t get me wrong, whenever I talked about season 1 episodes I always shitted on the humor, cause it’s really bad. Like…REALLY bad. But while Brandon isn’t a perfect writer either, people are pinning the blame on Viv and Adam recently cause they’re the ones writing season 2, not Brandon.

[sloshr]

After watching through Side Order... I have a Few Thoughts.

[Spoilers ahead]

My Review of the Side Order DLC - Its little more than Gameplay.

Initial Opinion

- - - - - - - - - -

Overall; I like the gameplay mechanics initially, but the story absolutely feels lacking to me, imo. It feels like they were really banking on Side Order being Hard but... multiple of my friends finished it on their 2nd or 3rd run through the Spire.

That in itself isnt a problem! But... everyone felt sort of unsatisfied? There were no developments in the story, as we, Agent 8, were just assigned the task to Get to The Top of the Spire -> The Player Does That -> You beat a Boss -> Credits Roll (?)

On my watchthrough I literally said Please Say Sike 😭 because, dont take this poorly, but they were advertising Side Order as;

• Difficult (stated Multiple Times in basically every Trailer)

• Story Driven (You Uncover things as You Climb)

• Character and Lore Intensive (as shown by the trailers with all the concept art as well as promo art)

I dont feel like it was wrong to expect more based on how it was advertised.

But... if you complete the DLC in 1-2 runs, which is Very Much Possible, no buildup happens at all. The story was banking on the player struggling, and putting all the content behind repeat runs, which falls through and Doesnt really work/feel satisfying if the main goal is achieved in such a short time. I Feel like anyone who regularly plays Salmon Run will likely have a similar experience. And I feel kind of cheated? Because what we got was something that was Tell Not Show rather than the Show, Not Tell formula. And in my opinion, it really doesn't work as well at all. It puts all the major lore that the game has set up behind repetetive climbs (which never change btw, despite each climb being generated differently, its the same after a while) and you get about 1 Sentence of Exposition, with a Modlog from Marina if you are Lucky.

Side Order was (to me), after watching it all;

• Not Difficult, But Repetetive Gameplay (This easily runs people down, which would be fine if the tower had more than 1 setup or phase)

• Inital Story Setup with no complexities or stages. You climb the first Tower, Save Marina, Climb the Second Tower, Beat Order, and the credits Roll. In its most complex, you could fit what Side Order's Story is in 2-3 Sentences. Rather than Lore being revealed During the story, it feels Pushed to the Side as all of it is either in Text the player may never see (different climbs) or care to read (Marina's Mod Log)

• Use of Character Drops with no explaination / mention (The Agent 4 Boss, Anyone?) (This felt very Bait-y, with No Payoff)

Rating

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If I had to give Side Order a Rating

4/10. At Best.

I am a bit disappointed with this as I feel like I was promised more, Storywise, and honestly a bit gameplay wise. I think it fails where other DLC has succeeded Due to being Built in such a way where anything engaging is stuck behind barely changing gameplay. It is not built in a way where the experience cant fail to show you whats important to the characters and the worldbuilding. It relies too much on telling you whats happening rather than the world showing you. Its too Simple, and It Doesnt Work, personally, in a series that contains Octo Expansion.

Which is Sad to me!! It had so much wasted potential and I really hope this isn't the last we're going to see of the concept, we get to see ideas actually built into the story, and... maybe find Agent 4.

Conclusion

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Tldr; Side Order had a good concept, but failed in execution for being simple and gameplay dependent, which was ultimately disappointing due to it being advertised as something more for all involved.

It was an alright attempt. The experience will just be known to me as... well. Baby's First Rouge-like. Nothing worldbreaking.

(PS, this isnt meant to be mean spirited or overly critical, I just love the Splatoon Series so I give it Tough Love. This is just my personal view on the DLC)

Thank you for Reading! Feel free to share or add any thoughts!

[currentfandomkick]

Fan concept to incorporate however you want:

In comics i’m pretty sure there’s a lazarus pit in the batcave, and others in gotham. A high concentration of lazarus water per square foot. Add to that gotham’s various contaminated waters from various toxins and gases on top of usual run offs, and there’s a high chance everyone in gotham is contaminated by all of this.

Add in the popular head cannons and partial fanon of lazarus water = (in some form) contaminated or corrupted watery ectoplasm.

And if we go ecto contaminated enough = liminal…

Then gotham city is full of liminals, the most notorious being a handful revenants with questionable cores (Solomon Grundy and Red Hood off the top of my head), with Damian’s Robin a liminal bordering on halfa if you go the ‘raised next to and put in the Pitts’ route.

Hell if you want, most of the Batfam can be partially ecto contaminated if not liminal (minus Duke, i feel like he’s the only starting to) but no one notices because its gradual and they assume its side effects from the 10,000 + polluntants in gotham.

You can have anyone from Amity Park enter Gotham and go ‘huh, edgy aesthetic Amity.’ Then go ‘oh, sick liminal… which dork back home knows how to fix this?’

If you want Tucker can be sending Sam updates on Gotham’s liminals (including Rogues) which Sam is helping the ecto terrorist (League of Assassins in a lot of older portrayals) and Danny vibing working for (DC bigshot or group of your choice) as an engineer who says he’s bad at coding when no one has broken his code yet as ‘its standard back home’ and baffles his employer

Dani can see Gotham and just. Vibe as a feral child who tries to help the other sick liminals with mixed results. I say let Harley snag her as her sidekick during her anti-villian days.

Jazz can be attending university and has to explain drinking filtered ecto to her dorm, only for a lot of them to start managing things better emotionally and combat wise, but now have the urge to Kick Ass as a way to Make Friends. Batfam investigate her a s a cult leader when really all she’s doing is using a clean ecto filter and teaching her classmates to do the same. Even teaches them how to make them thanks to Danny breaking down his rigs to her and leaving her repair instructions in case hers breaks early.

If you go baby Ghost King Danny, he can find out about Gotham and do a ‘oh, a fucked up version of Amity Park. Neat!’ see the Joker and go ‘Fuck this guy,’ and appear by pulling Joker into the ghost realm for his trial with a note that reads “sorry for missing another Liminal City. I’ll do better as king and handle those breaking Ghost Ettiquette myself. My bad. Still new to the ‘King of the Infinite Realms and all bonded to it. So liminals fall in, didn’t think there were more besides Amity. A branch of the Council of Observers will be sent to evaluate which liminals are sick, which are dealing with unsustainable or harmful obsessions, which liminals need relocation to handle their obsession in a better suited environment, and which ones are uneducated on liminal health.

Don’t worry, I stole some time to make sure i did all the paperwork before taking this guy. He’s the type of ecto entity who consumes attention, fear, and souls, which is Pretty Bad and that last one is an auto-execution. So i should manage the normal ‘visiting of the realms and introduction to’ spiel after we can make sure you won’t be in danger from ghosts that forget mortals dont shrug off being dropped off a few cliffs and having a two ton rock dropped on them. I may send some ambassadors from Amity to help you adjust since it was a pain for us too. Fyi if anyone tries summoning the Ghost King and expects Pariah, i win by conquest ten years ago and only JUST got to looking into liminal areas. With cheating by stealing time. If you have any questions, look up the Manson family, Amity Park, Ohio. Sam can explain better than me, and her parents somehow ended up on the mortal side counsel.