Alicornutopia

Shoal wrote:

PlainDealingVillain wrote:The kid and her dad are main characters through the whole thing, but 'no one knows what's going on, what's going on?' is the majority of the plot for the first two books.

two books is an awfully long introduction

It's not an introduction, the plot is the characters attempting to figure out what's going on. And the reader is only slightly more informed than them.

i guess. and i haven't read it so i don't know if my criticisms are wildly off base or not, but in most of the online fiction that i read characters trying to figure out what's going on is something that happens in lieu of plot.

Shoal wrote:i guess. and i haven't read it so i don't know if my criticisms are wildly off base or not, but in most of the online fiction that i read characters trying to figure out what's going on is something that happens in lieu of plot.

How does that even make sense? "Figure out how the world works" is totally a valid plot.

linkhyrule5 wrote:

Shoal wrote:i guess. and i haven't read it so i don't know if my criticisms are wildly off base or not, but in most of the online fiction that i read characters trying to figure out what's going on is something that happens in lieu of plot.

How does that even make sense? "Figure out how the world works" is totally a valid plot.

I'd link to some of the things I'm thinking of but I think it'd be mean to the authors in question if they happened to see it, though as far as I know none of them are users on this forum.

but vague examples taken from actual stuff I'm thinking of removing from my RSS reader:

entire chapters that are just:
* a character thinking and wondering about stuff but not actually doing anything
* setup and hype for a future story arc that will seem anticlimactic when it's finally written
* backstory and infodumps about worldbuilding

like sometimes an entire chapter is just a 2000 word essay on "i wonder what the next chapter will be about"

or to take this idea in a different direction: Prison Break. I started watching Prison Break on tv when it first came out thinking it might be a movie but it wound up being a series. ugh. and then i kept watching it for a few weeks but every single episode was:

* we almost got out!
* but then we didn't
* also the stakes are getting higher

and then they did finally get out and after that:

* they almost caught us!
* but they didn't
* also the stakes are getting higher and this conspiracy has more and more people in it DUN DUN DUN

and i just gave up. because it was like that. we don't know what's going on with the conspiracy thing and it just keeps getting more elaborate and complicated and unbelievable and every episode is the same and eventually I quit watching because it was boring. it was boring and stressful at the same time.

City of Angles does not have that problem. It's mostly structured like a trio of heists, actually.

Re-bringing up Gravity Falls because a Bell and Alex standing in for Mabel and Dipper, going to visit a relative in the Pacific Northwest, meeting a rich kid with shitty parents (Pacifica!Joker) finding a mysterious journal and encountering a bunch of mysterious goings-on sounds fun. Not sure what to do about the family situation - Charlie could probably stand in okay for Grunkle Stan, but then do you do for Ford?

Alternately, Alex stands in for Grunkle Stan, Bell for Ford, and they have some grand-niblings who do the Mabel/Dipper plot??

Oh my god. It totally doesn't work and I don't think kappa watches Gravity Falls but oh my god XD

:D it's just close enough to be so wrong :D

Someone please explain me the thing??? XD