*groan* :smallyuk:
Okay, you win.
Also, I agree with your assessment of how to criticize/praise the comic.
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Are you sure it wasn't...True Ressthumbrection, seeing as how it is not undead? No, wait, that doesn't work...Quote:
Create Greater Thumbdead
(also, your spell wins the thread).
Since you asked, I can show an example of the right and wrong way to criticize. Here are two quotes saying almost the same thing: That strip #901 shouldn't have been the way it is.
Do you see the difference between these two quotes? The first acknowledges that I must have specific reasons germane to the larger story being told for wanting a certain outcome, and then is critical of the path that I took to that outcome. The second dismisses any such concerns and instead says that I the path I took should be rigidly determinative of the outcome based on someone's idea of what's the most probable next step from each point, and that if that means that I don't get the outcome I wanted, well, tough.
That's a complete misunderstanding of the creative process.
Writing begins with the scenes that I want to have happen, and then I develop stuff around them to make that seem reasonable. Or, as in this case, the scene I didn't want to happen: A confrontation between OOTS and Team Evil right now. That battle? Was never going to happen. Sure, I wanted the audience to think it was a possibility, but here was never any chance that I was drawing a battle between them during this book. It's not thematically appropriate for the heroes to fight the final villain (inconclusively, for a third time) at this point, and this book was intended from the beginning to focus on the Linear Guild and Tarquin as the main adversaries.
So when someone looks at the fact that Xykon and the OOTS are in the same area and says, "Xykon should have attacked," that's missing the point. That wasn't on the table. The potentially valid criticism is, "There should have been a better reason why Xykon didn't attack."
And there are a few different ways I could have done that. I could have made Xykon decide to leave solely on his own initiative, without any sort of nudge, but I felt that would have felt contrived. By making the MITD plant the idea, I felt like I was rewarding O-Chul's previous effort, and proving that showing kindness can have unexpected rewards down the road. It also allowed me to take one more step along the MITD's own personal character arc, and provided a nice bookend to his earlier scenes of worrying about O-Chul.
I could have also simply not had Redcloak notice the OOTS at all, which would have given Team Evil no reason to even consider staying in the first place, but that also felt lazy. We would have all been getting into arguments about why didn't they take ten minutes to search the area instead.
The bottom line is, I considered all of the options that would allow the plot to have the shape that it has now and chose the one that had the most opportunity for characterization and future resonance. That I may have executed it below my own standard is unfortunate. But one way or another, no matter what went on that page, it wasn't going to be a throw down between Team Evil and the OOTS.
And if one doesn't understand that—if one doesn't get that the way I'm able to write a story that is this complex is by planning out the major plot events and then working toward them, not by leading the plot in whatever direction is the most "probable" based on calculating moment-to-moment likelihoods—then I don't think that person really understands enough about the craft of writing to be making criticism at all.
So there were people who would rather read two pages OotS than three? Cretins :smallbiggrin:
No, seriously, this is a complaint I wouldn't have thought of, or heard. Surprising, what can i say? :smallcool:
I'm sorry that you (Rich Burlew) have to take such trash talk all the time. I guess it is a side effect of being the author of a very popular comic which is therefore known to many people, I guess. I couldn't say for sure, but for an author, complete neglect of the audience, or rather no audience at all, would be a worse problem than some people from the audience who are complaining about lots of stuff (even when some of these are idiots and/or impolite).
Just to add to your perspective: I think maybe many people just read the comic and don't bother to post. When I first read the comic, I laughed a whole day while doing archive binge. And then I chose to follow the story. Then I bought some of the books. And later I paid money in the kickstarter. But until recently, I didn't bother posting in the forums, because forums can be huge waste of time. But I still enjoyed the comic a lot!
What I am trying to say: Many people might read and enjoy the comic very much but don't bother to post in the forum! So the forum might not be overly representative for the whole readership.:smallsmile:
Thank you, Rich. I'll think on what you have written and endeavor to be constructive in my criticism. Also, a lot of stuff there on the craft of storytelling that may assist me in my own endeavors.
ETA: So what I'm taking away from this is that you have been planning the OOTS story line for years now. Your day-to-day work involves taking that broad outline and converting it into a strip. So your biggest concern from criticism is to know what "works" or doesn't. If you intend for a happy moment and you see everyone talking about how sad the scene was , you know you've presented in the wrong way.
So you'd already determined that Team Evil and the OOTS were not going to have a throwdown in this strip, and it follows from that you must find some way to present it A) in as few strips as possible B) with some nod towards plausibility C) satisfying for the audience, D) funny.
900-905 is your answer to that problem.
Could it have been done better? Possibly. But it's not as if you make up the story on a moment-by-moment basis, like an actual game session, where the story is directly dependent on the actions of the players in the session.
So criticism which recognizes that the main story is already set and concentrates on presenting it as effectively as possible is of value to you. Criticism of the story itself ... well, even if it's right there's nothing you can do about it now. You can't just throw away years of planning and introduce a rapid change which will mean rewriting everything that comes after it.
However, I have to make one quick comment to another poster:
Not I. That was originally made by TheSuccubus . If anyone wins the thread based on that joke it is he.
Respectfully,
Brian P.
This whole conversation is a good deal above my pay grade as someone who can't write to save his life, but I'd like to just butt in about the wordy complaint. I'd just like to say that the wordiness is fantastic IMO. I love how there's so much dialogue to parse - it's what's allowed the comic to grow and create such complex and nuanced characters. Hell, most TV shows that I watch don't come this far in that regard.
So, when people complain about "wordy" being an issue, I personally feel like it's less of a complaint about the number of words, and more of a complaint about placement. For instance, this is basically nothing but words. Xykon just doesn't shut up. And yet, it's one of my absolute favorite pages in the comic. It's fantastic writing, pure and simple. In a battle scene, lots of speech feels kind of unnatural (free action notwithstanding), and any feeling of over-verbosity (overbosity?) that I've gotten usually comes from those scenes. However, that's more about where the large dialogue chunks are placed as opposed to whether or not they exist at all.
Anyhow, just chiming in to say that there are at least some of us who really do enjoy the amount of words. Pictures make things look nice, and help tell the story, but words are what usually show us who a character really is.
Much of the criticism here comes from the fact that you're way more accessible than, say, George RR Martin or someone like that, and people think "hey, if the author actually reads this stuff, then why not put in my two cents about how to improve things!" That makes complaints much more visible, but they're (almost) all coming from fans who are excited to discuss with the community and maybe even have the author read what's on their minds.
Keep rockin' on, Giant. And FWIW, I think your comic is one of the best long-running stories I've ever followed. Like, on the same level as famous big-budget shows and novel series and such. When you're frustrated by restless forumites, just let your success speak for itself. Looking forward to the next years for OOTS!!
Which had better occur.
Yes, this is pretty much on the mark.
Just to give an idea of how much the plot is planned, here's a story that will likely end up in the commentary for the next book in a different format:
One of the things I may have mentioned in Dungeon Crawlin' Fools is that while strip #1 was always the first comic, strip #4 was actually the next one produced. Before I posted it, however, I produced another strip that has never been posted; we'll call it #A.
The events depicted in #A can be summarized as follows: Elan and Haley walk on stage to where Roy is waiting. Looking sad and crying, they inform Roy that they met some undead, and Durkon turned undead. Roy is confused, they reiterate. Roy gets annoyed, says that Durkon's a cleric, so of course he turned undead, stop being so stupid. Haley and Elan walk back to the left where V and Belkar are restraining a Durkon that is a vampire—he literally turned into an undead. They make a crack about how Roy took it really well. Ba dum bump.
I did not post this strip; instead, I went back and decided that rather than one-off gags, I wanted each strip to feed into the events of the next. So I wrote #2 and #3 to get from the already-posted #1 to the already-finished (and now renumbered) #4. But that left me with #A, which if I posted it, would derail my fledgling sense of continuity, because I had no way to undo Durkon's vampirism. In the end, I tabled the joke and drew #5 instead.
However, as a result of that comic, it has always been true that someday, Durkon was going to turn into a vampire. At first, I was just going to save the joke for a day when they would have access to the means to undo it, and then later, I decided to drop the punchline and really make it a major part of what happens. But as a plot element, it literally predates the existence of the Snarl, or the Gates, or any other aspect of the plot—even Xykon himself! All of Durkon's characterization and plot, since 2003, has been leading to him becoming a vampire and the story that would spin out of that. It has influenced hundreds of decisions going back ten years of comic.
So when I post the comic where Malack kills Durkon, and then raises him as a vampire, it is not a valid criticism to come here and say, "You shouldn't have done that, you ruined the comic, Durkon should have won." The comic you're reading is the way it is for the purpose of turning Durkon into a vampire! Malack was created for the purpose of turning Durkon into a vampire! There was no possible scenario where you would be reading a Malack vs. Durkon fight scene that didn't end with Durkon getting vamped.
That's what I mean when I say that the big plot points are not really open to criticism. At a certain point, that's just the story this happens to be, and we can argue about execution, but it's still happening one way or the other.
Naivety.
666
I wonder how much the format of a webcomic, which means we get the story in small chunks spread over the years as opposed to receiving it in books every year or however long it would take to complete in a normal comic format, affects the assumption that the story can just be changed halfway. I think it does, because there's a sense of it unfolding right in front of us, plus some webcomic authors do make it all up as they go. In a regular comicbook, we get a bigger part of the story at a time, so there's less incentive to think how it could go instead. I could be wrong, of course.
Rich, if the file for #A still exists at all, is there any way you can put it in the print version of this book along with that explanation? Because, be still my beating heart, that would be just plain amazing.
Seconded. I also really appreciate the explanation of just how long plot points take to develop. I get really annoyed by people who post "X only happened as a response to forum speculation!" without considering that X was likely planned way, way before the forum started speculating it at all...
Wow. I really hadn't expected Rich to reply any further to this particular thread, but the last few posts have been very interesting to read. Thank you for sharing, Rich. In about a week I'll be getting my copies of SoD and the print compilations thus far and I'm looking forward even more to reading the commentaries in those.
Wow, that's really something. It feels kind of odd to realize that Durkon was doomed right from the beginning.
One has to wonder if there are other plot elements which have not happened yet but which were thought of before the main plot was. If so, I can't wait to hear about them when they happen. Keep up the good work, Giant!
Poor Durkon. :smallfrown: V's got nothing to complain about when it comes to the universe being out to get him compared to that story!
Confirming this statement. I read the forums every once in a while and almost never post, but I feel the comic itself is one of the best-written stories in any form of media out there today.
The few posters who complain are like the drunk guy at a concert yelling 'Freebird' while the rest of us are too busy enjoying the show. It's unfortunate that the nature of the internet gives the invalid criticism disproportionate exposure, but hopefully stuff like the Kickstarter success (and the fact that a significant amount of people here, including myself, are going to buy the next book within 10 minutes of it being available) will balance that out.
Damn Rich, I had no idea! And that settles it. The moment I start getting my tutoring paychecks again, I'm buying at least some of the actual books.
So this would fall under the category of 'Irony' then.Quote:
All of Durkon's characterization and plot, since 2003, has been leading to him becoming a vampire and the story that would spin out of that. It has influenced hundreds of decisions going back ten years of comic.
Or a creator tormenting his creation. Both fit, I suppose. :smalltongue:
Rich, I just want to say how heartening it is to hear that you struggle putting pen to paper at times.
I can only speak for myself, but - with this comic's writing being at such a consistently high quality - it's easy to forget that you don't (to quote another author) "**** gold."
That must seem obvious to you. As someone who would like to try his hand at writing more often, though, I'm very glad to have stumbled into the conversation here.
Thank you.
That's very nice of you to say.
Whoa, that revelation has just about blown my mind. I'll admit, I had my doubts about Durkon being vamped (my opinion was along the lines of "Wow, this is what Rich had to do to give Durkon any character development?"), but this casts a new light on everything.
...I need to go back and reread every comic featuring Durkon now... :smalleek:
Mind = Blown
It's entirely possible the Mitd just has a high int score with low wis, a trait commonly attached to children (which is something the monster might actually be given his reference to his fathers size and how much he ate).
That should atleast narrow down the mitds race quite a bit.