Ever closer to the end.

bongbong?

I don't feel so good...

>>17096
I shitposted and voted, so I think I won
>>17097
>No you won't.
>spoiler
But I did

>>17131
You forgot Summerfield. Even if his thing didn't span the month, he still finished, and that's worth something.


In all honesty, I didn't care that much for a lot of what was happening. It would have been nice if we had more Pantomime of Youth, but I understand life is a fuck. At least Summerfield's thing was interesting, and I still like Moral's stuff for what it is. I'd be fine with Bee's thing too, but there's not enough to really pass judgement, even though I don't care very much about the porn parts.

>>17133
You can forget me; it's okay. You're definitely not gonna forget the next 5 months of winter, and that's comfort enough for me. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA LETTYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

I've been given a shove, so over the cliff I go, I guess.

>>/youkai/31590
A (Lion-)Dog Among Gods, or Lion-Dog for short.

I'll be blunt: I'm not looking to get stroked off here. I want some idea — even if I'm likely to not agree with its premises — where I've fucked up, because I know I've fucked up bad; if I hadn't, I wouldn't be stuck. If I can't figure something out, well, that's going to be that. It's the bare-arsed truth, grim as it is. No pressure, though.

I have basically no expectations.

>>17110

I was a fairly big contributor to the previous thread, and thought it went pretty well. It wasen't the best thread ever, but at least a solid 8/10. I'm curious to know what you found distasteful about it.

>>17114

Yooooo hol up. Green Eyes Online is a Project Moon crossover? Definitely going to have to catch up on that.

>>17123
I don't think it's a very productive topic to get into, particularly when it's not 'my' thread anymore. Let's just say "I believe the OP was in poor taste and set a bad tone for the thread as a whole" and let it lie where it rests.

>>17114
I'm not sure what the current OP's position is, but the intent of the original thread — which this one is presumed to copy — was solicited feedback. That is, responses to authors who have specifically requested feedback rather than spontaneous offerings of opinions.

If that's changed, then I suppose there's nothing to address, but it is something to note.

>>17090
>>17091

TL;DR : My story good. Your story bad.

>>17092
Eh, I at least agree with the assessment on my entry. Can't help what tickles my fancy, though.

No thoughts on the prize piece?

>>17090
I meant to respond some time ago, but I've found finding words for anything agonisingly difficult.

I'm glad you saw something to appreciate in my piece; I honestly didn't.

I'd say the closest thing to an 'intention' was along the same axis as yours: to be anti-porn. Much of what I wrote wasn't strictly appealing to me in any real sense, and it was more the result of detached, unemotional, mechanical stringing together of half-ideas, in part an act of desperation to produce something at all. But, I suppose there was also a want to distantly rile up the inevitable detracting voices, even if it just amounted to mild annoyance and dismissal. At best, I like writing with an element of eroticism. Written porn does precisely zero for me, so there was truthfully little for me in this contest.

So, well, by that turn, I enjoyed your entry most. You basically covered the majority of my reaction yourself, with much more eloquence than I could manage.

>>17065
Mm; circular.

Then I'm well and truly out. All I can appeal to is the possibility of broader interests; but I don't think I can convince you of it in a satisfactory way. I can only say that something has got to give for it to work out, and that that thing may well be the monotropism.

>>17066
I still don't even really get what you're talking about.

Look, I just want to write Touhou fiction at the end of the day. I can't change much about what I'm interested and not interested in.

Anyone have some recommendations for stories involving Touhou fisticuffs? Just realized I haven't seen a no-holds-barred, over-the-top action sequence since the dramatic conclusion of Gensokyoland Saga.

We purposely don't federate.

As mentioned, federation is disabled on purpose. That file is pretty much there as a placeholder.

Thanks anyways for your post.

>>17001
>Your standard dramatic adventure story draws its tension and drama from fear of the protagonist failing.
This was a fairly important thing to make explicit, I think. Oftentimes it's assumed that this is the only way a reader may be kept interested, and that simply isn't true. In fact I tend to check out of stories which sustain themselves primarily around the teasing of "stakes"; that is, bad outcomes that must simply be avoided; conversely, I tend to welcome stories that feature complex and proactive "play", or that effectively establish a world of moving parts outside the myopia of the "central conflict", even if it might undermine the plausibility of the "stakes".

It's interesting that you mention the Lord of the Rings, because I seem to have enjoyed it for quite the contrary reasons when I first read it a few years ago. As menacing as the War of the Ring may have been, it ultimately struck me as a last gasp of sorts; immense in the present moment but itself dwarfed by greater strokes of history long past; and it was this tremendous tapestry of grandeur and decline everywhere in the background - some of it even, like Tom Bombadil, still infamously blithe - that gave the necessary dignity to this world that was to be placed under threat. And though, again contrarily, I'm typically unmoved by "character stories", I found Theoden in particular among the most compelling that I've ever read; serving almost as a microcosm of the books as a whole.

Maybe it's telling that the poem that sticks out most in my mind is rather the Rohirric, nearly identical in its opening line with its Old English inspiration:

>Where now the horse and the rider?
>Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?

Both are elegies; foregone conclusions, in other words. Yet they compel m

>>17002

>It's interesting that you mention the Lord of the Rings, because I seem to have enjoyed it for quite the contrary reasons when I first read it a few years ago. As menacing as the War of the Ring may have been, it ultimately struck me as a last gasp of sorts; immense in the present moment but itself dwarfed by greater strokes of history long past; and it was this tremendous tapestry of grandeur and decline everywhere in the background - some of it even, like Tom Bombadil, still infamously blithe - that gave the necessary dignity to this world that was to be placed under threat.

This is actually another point I loved about Lord of the Rings. The fact that in-universe, this isn't even the greatest threat, it's just a shadow compared to past threats, makes the universe seem even bigger. The way the elves are portrayed as wonderful, fair, and yet simultaneously so far diminished from what they used to be... Middle Earth is full of these points of context, and I think it really adds to the world. For those less familiar:

-) Most of the elves have already gone West, and those that remain are only really hanging on because of the three rings. No matter how the third age ends, the time of the elves goes with it. When the books finish and the third age ends, the bearers of the three rings of the elves sail west. Which, not coincidentally, include the leaders of both Rivendell and Lothlorien.

-) Gondor used to be a much larger nation, with the capital of Osgilath and two towers. One of those towers was captured by Mordor, and Osgilath is now a ruin and a battleground. Now it's a much smaller nation centered around Minas Tirith. On a similar note, Rohan actually used to be part of Gondor, but they gave the land away because they couldn't politically keep hold of it, and better to have it as an ally nation than conquered by barbarians.

-) The ents are also in decline. They were never many, they had not increased, and they straight up lost the ent-wives, so barring a major change, there's never going to be any more of them.

Let's talk a little about characterization. This is an important topic, simply because people are willing to forgive the plot meandering around if they like the characters involved. But if people dislike or worse, don't care about your characters, it doesn't matter how interesting the plot might be, few readers will stick around to see it through. In short, the vast majority and stories live and die by their characterization.

There's a lot that goes into making a character. I think you can roughly divide the details of character creation into five sections: Background, personality, goals, appearance, and abilities.

It's important to note that while these are all separate categories, they're also all interconnected. To take a simple (if cliche) example, a tragedy in someone's past (background) could very well have given them a scar (appearance), lingering trauma (personality), landed them in a wheelchair (abilities), and given them a strong desire for revenge (goals). This doesn't need to be the case for every detail, obviously. If you decide your character should have freckles, the freckles don't need an origin story! And a lot of times these connections never get explored on-screen. The main character will probably get all of his stuff pulled into the light, but there just isn't time to explore why your twelfth side character's childhood trauma made him hate clowns and always sleep with a nightlight.

(It's worth noting that Worm is a good example of this interplay. Part of the setting is that in order to get superpowers, you have to have some terrible tragedy, called a trigger event, in your backstory, and your powers depend in large part on the nature of your trigger event, addressing the cause in sort of a monkey's paw fashion. For instance, one kid's father was dying of cancer, and he desperately wanted a little more time with him, so he got the power to temporarily freeze objects in time. As such, by the nature of the setting, most of the characters have that connection between their powers, background, appearance (through their hero/villain costume) and often their personality as

You can't legislate good behaviour, but you can have reasonable rules-of-thumb. I had a few thoughts about things in our outer communities, so I decided to share some of those.

N.B. This shouldn't be taken as a do-or-die pronouncement by moderation. Just take it all into consideration and otherwise continue acting like a decent human being, okay?

https://www.tekitou.moe/posts/2023-03-31-ontopic.html

Did you know THP had a birthday yesterday? Happy fifteenth, THP. I'm sorry I couldn't do anything.

Anyway, I started this post a while back and meant it to be something of a long 'user's manual' sort of thing, but that got pretty tiresome. I ended up retooling it to be a lot more concise, mostly because I didn't feel it needed to instruct as much as bring attention to things. With any luck, I'll have brought some previously unnoticed things to someone's attention.

https://www.tekitou.moe/posts/2023-04-02-keepingup.html

Here's a quick little piece about a long-time daydream of mine. It's idealistic and perhaps unfeasible. Hell, maybe impossible. I'd still like to see it happen someday.

https://www.tekitou.moe/posts/2023-04-18-tuhupike.html

So, as a writer, I personally love write-ins, as they're a sign of viewer interactions. Granted, I haven't had anything I'd consider a particularly silly or unwarranted write-in, so I might be a bit biased. I have had a few that have been fairly off-the-rails, but they've still been legitimately good (or at least reasonable) ideas based off of the information available at the time.

As far as writer interaction with the readers go, that's tricky. See, the thing is, I actually love talking about my story. I could easily throw several paragraphs in almost per update about what might have happened, or could have happened, or my thoughts on something. But I don't. I'll throw stuff in as an end-of-part coda, perhaps, but I fear to say too much.

Two reasons for this. The first is that I don't want to bias the readers with my personal commentary. Author's notes are fun, but the story must stand on its own without them. If someone who doesn't read any of the notes about what I intended comes to a completely different interpretation of the characters than what I intended, then I've screwed up as a writer, and that's a real risk if I keep outright telling the viewers what I intended after each update.

The second comes down to vanity. There was a previous community I wrote in where I got in trouble for self-advertisement, and I had a bit of a rant about how my story wasn't getting the attention it deserved compared to other, worse stories. It's not something I'm proud of, and pretty much ended my involvement in that community, as well as the story I'd been writing at the time. (Which is honestly a shame, as I wouldn't mind finishing or maybe rebooting that some day.) Because of that, I try to take a hands-off approach to commenting. It's easier for me to avoid attention seeking if I minimize my interaction outside of the updates. Or, as is increasingly the case these days, apologizing for updates being late. Alas.

Speaking of apologies, I'm one of the anons who floated the idea of participating and never did anything. So... sorry about that, I've just been busy lately. Even finding time t

>>16931
>If someone who doesn't read any of the notes about what I intended comes to a completely different interpretation of the characters than what I intended, then I've screwed up as a writer
I mean, that's going to happen no matter how much footwork you put into stage managing reader perception of things. You can outright directly tell people that things are one way or another, yet they'll still come to head-scratching conclusions based on inherent biases or whatever. I've had it happen time and again in my own writing to the point that I long gave up trying to correct people. Dunno, though. Maybe it depends how much investment people have in your story. Nobody around here really has the same experience writing, for better or worse.

As to actual book club matter, well, no real need for apologies. There was hardly a call for strong commitment. The pacing that so annoyed certain people was chosen with the assumption that people would probably fall in and out. If things go on and you happen to only find time to get involved every once in a while, that's fine enough.

Very belated in getting my thoughts in.

>>16920
>Did the story make you feel anything?
Hesitation, mostly, or a sense of "waiting for the other shoe to drop". I get the feeling in the end that it was mainly supposed to be a fun adventure focusing on personalities rubbing off on each other and which wouldn't get super into it, but it really was hard to tell because I still felt like that could have changed at any moment.

>What did you think of the writing style?
I think the author is a fair hand at scene-setting and has a good sense for personality as external affect, but could probably stand to get a little deeper into a character's psyche, past, and whatnot in order to get them to really stand out from the page as fully-developed people. Of course, I haven't seen them write any characters in extremis, so maybe they were simply keeping it up their sleeve, but the keystones-and-chicken-twine analogy from earlier still strikes me as salient.

>Was there any passages that stood out to you?
Hobo silence

>Would you recommend this story?
I don't think I could, in good conscience; but then again I pretty much have to have liked something nearly unreservedly in order to be able to recommend it to anyone else without a whole bunch of caveating. Besides, it just didn't get far enough.

>>16673
Looking forward to the eventual /at/ spinoff, Lust Market.

>>16700
Is that anything like Lust Bees, the porn companion to Lost Bees?

>>16701
When the Last Bee is gone, and the Lost Market fades...