August Book Club!

[Mickey Mouse]

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the first edition of the new XROADS BOOK CLUB, sponsored by PepsiCo.

Your friendly neighborhood Mickey Mouse has gathered up some suggestions from you glorious members and we're dropping 'em below. The following threads are yours for the reading and the reviewing. But before we get into it, there's some ground rules:

1. If you're reviewing a thread, please read the whole thread! There are a lot of reasons for this -- you might get a better idea of the whole arc, someone's writing may grow from start to finish, etc. Just as a basic rule, try to read the whole goshdarn shebang if you're gonna give comments.
2. Please make sure to keep your comments constructive! This doesn't necessarily always mean positives (though please do give positive notes when you have them!) but just make sure that you aren't giving people notes like "your grammar sucks." What's a place in particular you can give kind advice on? Also -- keep in mind that in this month's case especially, some people did not nominate their own threads, so there's no reason to come in and rip someone apart.
3. In general, when giving critiques, the most important thing for me to hear from someone is how something makes them feel. If your review is just a paragraph about what emotions the character's journey dredged up in you, that is so helpful to me as a writer. Was it what I intended? How did it differ from what I thought I was doing?
4. Lastly, just a numbers note: try and make sure your reviews are at least a full paragraph of six to ten sentences (or more!). Ostensibly you're getting a 20 token reward if you do all of the threads, so try and put some thought into your feedback. Book Club, at its core, is about helping us all come together as a community and work together to create a world, improve ourselves, and enjoy others' work. Keep that in mind as you approach it.

That being said, your threads are:

"Nidhogg" - written by Ashe-0

"Bite The Hand That Feeds" - written by Jak Mar

"Dear Diary" - written by Malloki
(I have to note that this is the 666th thread posted on Multerra and... appropriate.)

You can review one, two, or all three of these threads, and your Token reward at the end of the month will match accordingly. For this month and this month only, reviewing all three threads will waive your Token costs to submit a thread for next month's Book Club. You may also pay the Token cost (see The Prize Board for more details) to submit a thread. Please try and remember for the most part I'm looking for completed threads, so that people can give thoughts on your whole story!

Happy reading, and I'm so happy everyone is back and a-writing!

 

[Roy Mustang]

It's like the end of the month, so I dunno if this is still a thing, but here's my thoughts on the threads. I know I want to submit a thread here at some point (once I get something to actually finish how I want it to Q-Q) and I think there's real value in hearing each others thoughts on threads at a more thorough level than we get from discord chatter.

If there's anything you're curious about feel free to DM me. I'm by no means an expert, but I want to get better at writing so I'm always happy to brainstorm and talk about it!

Nidhogg

This is such a wonderfully cross-over concept for a thread, and I love it. I am admittedly a tad partial to Ashe-0, and whew this was a painful ride for her. I kept waiting for her to start gaining momentum, but she was really on her back foot from the start of the thread through to its conclusion, which was rough. Granted it’s pretty hard to get the upper hand on a sentient haunted ship, particularly without any outside advice on dealing with the supernatural, which a future war cyborg sure wouldn’t have beforehand.

It's a fun spooky romp that I’m guessing had to wrap up before it was originally intended to in order to finish prior to DA. I am a fan of the “haunted house” as monster, and using a ship is nice play on that archetype. I do find myself left with a lot of questions about what was going on that don’t really get answered because Ashe-0 ends up dying. For example, I can’t tell whether the ship is the entity that manifests the undead captain, or the undead captain just has complete control over his ship. Admittedly any supernatural horror is going to have unknown parts, and my guess is this thread kind of had to wrap up before you wanted it to. (Although it does make for an appropriately jarring end having her just get shot and die, so maybe that is what you were intending the whole time!)

Honestly, a return to this ship in a later thread could prove interesting, if just to see Ashe-0 able to make any forward push against them. Cause this time they kinda beat her up!



Biting the Hand that Feeds

I want to say that Jak Mar is one of those characters that you can tell just has so much history at this point. I hope that I can eventually find a character that I keep loving to come back to, and I think it’s really impressive that you’ve stuck to one character for so long! Having never actually played any of the Jak and Daxter games, your version of Jak is what he’s like in my head, and as someone who often gets sidetrack with npcs, I can appreciate sticking to the wandering do-gooder archetype. I will say that I wasn’t clear on Jak’s goals for the first half of the thread or so, which is partially on purpose, because he really is lost without Daxter. I’m not sure on the pre-history of this thread, or what situation had separated them, but their such a clear pair, that there’s clear motivation for them to want to reunite.

I am a bit of a sucker for multiple personality characters, so seeing the light and dark jaks commenting on what he was doing was quite fun. It’s also interesting to me that the one “in charge” doesn’t seem to interact with the other two, which is a neat version that I kind of like better than the constant voices in your head I usually see done. I found myself curious what Dark Jak and normal Jak were arguing over inside his head, and it’s a shame it never came up what they were fighting over. I think you could afford to spend some more time in your scenes, because you’ve got a lot of cool stuff, that I would have liked to see more of. There were a couple times where we moved from scene to scene really quickly, and I got confused where we were until I read it back again. Though to be fair, this was also a thread that had to be finished before DA happened, so that likely made it more difficult to give things the time you wanted to.

Jak and Daxter are a classic, and I look forward to seeing more of them!



Dear Diary

Whew, Malloki is a dark character sometimes! I have to give you some props, a lot of times it can be hard to see what an OC’s character’s “Deal” is without reading them for a while. I know I’ve struggled with that in the past. Malloki does not suffer from that problem. You know what he’s about quite clearly, and good job on that clarity of concept. As I was reading this thread, I wasn’t actually sure to what degree Malloki was self-aware of what he was doing. He definitely eggs on the townspeople to attack him, but he also seems to act like Gabriel and the people who want him to leave are deserving of what he does because of their responses to his capriciousness. I know Malloki wants to get himself hurt but he also seems to want to get other people to be the ones to hurt him? He does a ritual in order to keep himself from going ballistic with the razor, but since his main goals seem to be getting hurt, I wasn’t sure why he didn’t want that.

I found myself curious to get to understand his worldview. Which is something I did not expect at the start of the thread. Your dear diary quotes were pretty well thought out, and they worked as a sort of monologue for him to do during the start of the thread while you established the setting, which is often the roughest part, so that was also nicely done (does Malloki know about dating? the jokes seem to imply that he does, but I wouldn’t gather it from his general behavior)

At the end of the thread I was left with more questions about Malloki than I started it with, which is a good thing I think in this case. I can see how it would be hard to keep this character interesting to write in the long term, though It’s a shame I’ll never get those answers because of it.

 

[Mickey Mouse]

August has been a busy month with Darkseid and all, so I've only finished "Nidhogg" and "Bite the Hand that Feeds", but I wanted to make sure I got up my thoughts on those before the month was out.

Nidhogg -

Wow. First off, let me just say that this ghost ship should totally be in the wiki. The way you brought it to life with your description, and metered out over time, too, is astounding, and is truly the big hook that kept me jumping from one post to the next. Description is so hard - I know I utilize Mickey's simple voice as an excuse to gloss over it a lot - and "Nidhogg" is truly an example of a story that lives and breathes fully on how well its setting is realized. I truly felt like we were truly discovering the ship along with Ashe-0, and that was really cool.

Ashe herself is such an interesting character to me. I hadn't had a chance to read any of your stuff as her prior to DA, and I truly loved what I saw there, so I've been making a point to try and keep up as much as I can with the post-DA stuff (planning on sitting down and plowing through "The Hand Is Unbreakable" sometime this week) and it's interesting to go back and check out some of this earlier stuff, too. Her bits of duality are so interesting, and I think you have definitely really settled into them over time and with your various partners -- Mustang and Okuyasu are really interesting (and great) foils for her in completely different ways, because it allows her to do this sorta "narration" thing she does without it feeling weird. When she's alone, the talking to herself/talking out her situation mechanic works, but it certainly flows more when she's having to deal with Oku's dumb ass or Mustang's investigative, curious brain.

All in all, this was such a fun read, and I halfway hope that you revisit this story later because of the mystery involved, and halfway hope that you don't, because it's just such an intriguing off-shoot story, and a fun thing about Ashe is that, unlike the more emotional characters on here, I'm sure she doesn't feel particularly motivated to go back and uncover the truth behind the skeletal pirate captain who fucked her up. I am, but also that's in general just a sign of a great story that really pulled me in. Nice job, buddy!!

Bite The Hand That Feeds -

I had the distinct pleasure of reading this a little while ago to grade for quest grading, so it may be a little hazy in my mind now, but I remember it being a very nice introduction for Jak to the Crossroads. It's so interesting to me the way Jak fits into these sites because I feel like you have a knack for sorta defining him by real, in-world achievements. Like his "Dynamite Kid" persona, and the way it has affected how he interacts with people - NPCs and player characters alike - is neat, just as an example. I'm seeing some of this too in the evolution of his relationship with Gilgamesh/Babylonia. It's made even more interesting because Jak himself reads as such a loner, so getting pushed into these situations where he's forced to interact and adapt with all these other characters and let himself be molded by them is a nice juxtaposition.

So it makes absolute sense that the best lens to view Jak's introduction to the Crossroads is through interactions with others. I mean, it's evident in your first post - the first thing anyone says to him is "Who are you?" and he says that he's new here, but then we get a list of the things this kid has already achieved. And the rest of the thread allows him to impart that to the various denizens of Arcadia and, finally, through Daxter. It really makes sense to me, too, that the culmination of this story is about his return to the event which, basically, defined him on the old place - Dante's Abyss - and is destined to be the beginning of his journey here.

On another note, we've had some discussions in DMs and such where I've done my best to point out some technical things, and let me just say that I think your evolution as a writer on a technical level is so cool. I've been reading your stuff for five years now and you're continue to grow and impress me more with every story, and the speed at which your ideas for Jak just roll out of your brain and are fully formed is very impressive. Keep working on it, it's not in vain! Really nice read, friend.

 

[Mickey Mouse]

August Book Club is finished! Leaving the thread open for a little while longer (probably a week or so) in case anyone wants to post a review for half the Tokens, but unstickying it.

For now, rewards are:

Roy Mustang: 20 Tokens
Mickey Mouse: 14 Tokens

Tokens being added now!