#in my multiple rereads i am conducting im going to really get this all down. may or may not share my notes with others if ur curious

[orcelito]

also THIS,,,

from the Big Fall. 20 million casualties, 60 million missing (could be assumed now residents of Gunsmoke?)

802 ships destroyed. 74 emergency landings. 124 ships missing.

these are some fucking statistics.

we know that there are 7 main cities: April, May, Jeneora Rock, July, Augusta, Octovern, and December

but then there are other locations like November, New Miami, Valdour, Carcasses (in South Cornelia), Ripmela, Meldreck, Nouve Town Muncipal, & New Santiago...

there are mentions of ships being the center of towns, like Nouve Town Muncipal Ship (the location where Knives kills Everyone in the location). & we see these ships being the center of so many towns

im going to need to make a comprehensive guide for all these locations bc GOD there are so many locations. and if these stats are to be believed, then there are at LEAST 74-124 ish (maybe up to 198??) potential locations for ships that people could have built residences around. this could be as big as the giant ships that act as the basis for the main cities, or as small as the tiny little gas station we see built around one plant bulb that fell from a ship.

there are so many potential cites around this planet, & i'm taking note of every place that is mentioned. im Going to build a comprehensive guide on all the locations of Gunsmoke Yet.

#speculation nation #fanny reads trigun #fanny's trigun analysis #trigun spoilers/ #?? i guess #a lot of this is spitballing. i highly doubt there would be that many established places #but who knows. there's a world's potential out there. so much we dont see. #it takes at times Weeks to travel between places. or 5-6 days of constant biking. #this place is Big. largely unexplored. so much that could happen here. #i want to sink my fingers into All of it. what were you thinking Nightow? I want to Know. #whether any of this is thoroughly mapped out or not. im GOING to map it out. not quite in a literal map sense lol but just #conceptually. im going to at least know what all the places are. #in my multiple rereads i am conducting im going to really get this all down. may or may not share my notes with others if ur curious #like i Guess i might as well share? idk. i dunno how much other ppl would care. #i care bc of fanfic purposes. that's why i do such thorough analysis. im trying to figure out all the secrets for a 20 years old manga #and i WILL find them out. Mark my Fuckin words.

[fanficaficionado]

this post was not one that was very premeditated. when i made this blog i had no intentions on criticizing any specific writers on their styles outside of individual works. however, one writer has a specific writing style that prevents me from finishing any of their stories more than once. so, i decided to tackle it all in one go instead of trying to trudge through three whole multi-chapter fanworks, one of which is honest to god over a million words. i had a word-for-word plan for what i was going to say in this post at one point, however due to the fact that i am the only one i've ever met with impeccable timing i got a call from my girlfriend right as i was gearing up to sit down and write this post and forgot every fucking thing i was going to say, and then when i finally wrote it i proceeded to procrastinate on editing it for half a year, so this post is literally so unplanned that any plan that might have existed has been consumed by the void. but!! i'm doing it anyway, and not even i can stop me!!

This is the thing about Unda

featuring M.C. Escher that's my favorite MC, Dayhve's Broken Diamond Club, and Alternate Universe by Unda

((spoilers, obviously))

The thing that all these stories have in common, besides being written by the same person of course, is that at some point while reading i got sick and fucking tired of them and couldn't push myself to keep going. For mc escher, it was during my reread when new characters with new relationship dramas were presented right at what i thought would be the climax, causing the story to drag on for longer after i thought that the story would be wrapping up. For DBDC, it was when sollux made a stupid decision during a confrontation with the FUCKING condesce, which i knew was going to delay the ending of the story for even longer, because he was obviously going to get captured, which would probably lead to a decent amount of the rest of them getting captured and then whoo dee fucking doo time for jailbreaks/rescue attempts. I then attempted to reread it, only to stop right when dayhve finds out about the mutant chucklevoodoos because this story is genuinely so long that prolonged amounts of time reading it has effects on my mental health ((i honestly will not blame unda for this one, it's just proof that they're good at writing emotional turmoil and mental health struggles)). For AU it was fairly fucking early, when the dramatic scenes with satan himself popping out of the actual fucking moon and then karkat confronting aradia who is literally the embodiment of death about getting sollux back all lead to a goddamn roadtrip at the end of the world. This was where i drew the line because i could just fucking tell that it was going to drag on into infinity.

These stories are fucking LONG, okay?? They are incredibly, beautifully, wretchedly long. When i first read DBDC i had a game going with my parents where we'd guess what chapter we thought i was on and compare it to where i actually was, and every time it was under ten despite the amount of words i just read leading my tiny little brain to believe otherwise.

In my personal opinion?? These stories cannot and should not go on for longer than what one would think to be the final climax, for the sake of their own lifespan. Because at some point one of these false climaxes are going to make people really fucking overwhelmed, really fucking tired of your shit, and/or really fucking pissed. These stories are primed and ready to collapse under their own weight and it is a sad fucking sight, like that video of the morbidly obese chiweenie i saw. They drag on for so long that at some point you stop forgiving the characters' idiotic decisions and just want things to get to the fucking point.

Now i didnt come here just to rag on unda's writing, believe it or not despite their overwhelming nature i genuinely really like these stories. They just drag on and on and on, and get more convoluted and confusing the longer they go.

But doesn't that sound familiar?? Haven't you read a story in the past, written by someone else, that did the exact same thing??

That's right baby, we are getting meta up in this bitch. I didnt come here just to talk about unda, no, i came here to use unda as an example. We're talking about fanfiction as a whole and the problem with a whole lot of fics. Namely that they just do not know where to stop. These crazy trains have no fucking breaks and everyone is scrambling trying to build some. Then they get half welded on before the conducter says "oh no, that's not right." So they just keep welding on more and more parts and sometimes it works, but at other times it completely breaks under itself, and at other other times it becomes a whole entire goddamn computer inhabited by a fully sentient ai before anyone can figure out how to stop the fucking train.

A lot of stories are like this, in that they drag on and waffle about. This is often caused by people taking a writing formula that works better for slice of life, where things just happen and the characters are just along for the ride, and applying it to big overarching stories. They try to make the plot with a big bad and extremely high stakes fit into this type of pacing, and it starts feeling like each arc is incredibly disconnected. You aren't done with your characters, and you have more ideas for conflicts, so to keep things going you have to keep cranking the stakes higher and higher. Then your reader starts wondering how we went from supernatural college au to Let's Go Kill The Devil, and why the fuck we're spending extra time and attention on a roadtrip when the literal devil just showed up and committed at least three separate war crimes. It's a constant rising and falling of the momentum, big crazy climactic things happen and then suddenly we're slowing down again to build up the next Big Thing.

The problem with this is that eventually you get to a point where no ending you come up with will feel very satisfying, because your reader has been strung along for such a long time that they'll probably feel more like they just ran a marathon trying to get away from a hoard of angry snakes than like they read a story. Unda is a more extreme example, because their standard chapter length and the sheer amount of chapters poured into each story makes a task that is normally kinda frustrating feel like pushing a boulder up a mountain for eternity. These sorts of stories are hard to keep up with when they're delivered in fairly bite sized chunks, but when you deliver your story in four course gourmet meals it just gets actively draining watching a character make another decision that leads to more plot and more relationship drama and more development and always fucking more. There's no ceiling on creativity but this stuff makes me wish there was sometimes, because then maybe these stories would get to a point where they didn't have anywhere else to go and so they'd end sooner on a more satisfying conclusion.

I think the solution to these sorts of conundrums would be splitting these stories over multiple works. Conclude one plot, finish the story, move on to the next using the same characters and premise from where the first work left off and keep going. It might lead to some cliffhangers every now and again but cliffhangers arent so bad when you know there's more to come, and it'd help people not get completely fucking lost.

I know it sounds like im getting on unda's case with all the vitriol of the literature version of Ego from ratatouille, and i know that some people write for fun and others write for practice. I don't know which category unda falls in, but either way when you post something on the internet it's gonna be perceived. I treat both types of writing the exact same way because examining a for fun story with the same analytical eye as i would use for a story that was written with the intent of receiving constructive criticism leads me to find examples of things that work and things that don't, which i can then dissect and share on the internet for people who want to improve to learn from. Experimentation is the root of progress after all, and stories written for fun tend to be full of that sort of stuff, so taking a closer look helps progress storytelling as a whole!! It's a learning experience. Above all, it's fun to tear stories apart, and fanfiction is especially fun because you don't have to spend the emotion to get invested and judge new characters that you've never seen before. I am in no way saying unda should upheave their entire style of writing, or that their stories are shitty. I am actually a pretty big fan of unda's work!! I hope to see more writing from them, in whatever form it takes, and i will gleefully dissect it all the same.

#homestuck #homestuck fanfic #fanfiction #fanfiction critique #the thing about writing #<- made a tag for whatever the fuck this is because i know damn well its gonna happen again #i had a characteristic ramble in the tags but it disappeared and i dont remember half of what it said #something about why i havent posted since last year #honestly im sick of looking at this because im starting to get the urge to rewrite it completely #and i do NOT want to do that #so im just sending it out into the world as is #i hope my points come across well and that my overuse of my weird humor doesnt come off as too mean spirited #godspeed my shitty tumblr post. godspeed.