#48: Reader Census. Please read critical for story advancement **update** · 2:12pm Feb 6th, 2015
Since it flew under the radar in blog #45, I'm going to post it up again. This post with be related to Kindness' sequels: Rarity and Rainbow's to be more exact.
So if you want to see another Nymph story I urge you to please do some friendly voting with the links below.
Which story do you want to read first?
Does the "good" and "bad" choice branch matter to you?
Do you want to see more of Remnant/Remedy or Zerene?
Are you interested in more risque kinks?
Optional:
Which ending did you get in Honestly?
**Edit**
So the consensus in the straw polls atm say:
You like having multiple choice... (good and bad options)
Yet you don't want Zerene in the story (bad choice)
It's split between "finishing" Honestly and publishing Dash's.
You want more risque kinks,because there's just never enough kinks
Also got 0 PMs on what kinks you'd like to see.
So once again the straw poll is a giant seesaw.
You like this part, but don't like the part that makes the part you like an option,
You want me to finish a story I thought was done, and some of you just want to hop into the next story,
And you want more kinks, but shed no light on what kinks you'd like.
HNNG *ded*
Oh
My
God
That picture it the best!
Was the story originally intended to take this form? While I understand alternate endings, the story didn't exactly have a choose-your-own-adventure feel. This type of story is very difficult to pull off even normally due to the level of immersion the reader must have with the character. This is why second person, despite being so problematic to write, is ideal.
While I did like the effort that was put into organizing the story, at some parts the writing felt… sloppy. This combined with how short the individual routes were led to a rushed feel. The timeskip to the children spreading with only a short summary felt jarring and the three endings I read to ended without so much as a "to be continued."
You would be much better off just writing what you want, going whatever route you want. Wile a third-person choose-your-own-adventure clopfic is ambitious, it's not nearly what could have been accomplished had you stuck to one route.
Ew.. Moths.
2774725 derpicdn.net/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTMvMDUvMjAvMDRfNTdfMDVfODA5XzMyOTM1NV9fVU5PUFRfX3NhZmVfcGlua2llX3BpZV9ub3RfYmFkLmpwZyJdXQ/329355__safe_pinkie%2Bpie_image%2Bmacro_caption_not%2Bbad.jpg
I've never received such insightful critics. what I had envisioned in all honesty was only supposed to be three stories. This would be big, big four to five triple branched paths that would include two of the main six in every story. Fluttershy's would sync into Applejack's, Rainbow Dash's would follow along Rarity's and Pinkie Pie and Twilight in another story.
I however love to jot out big story ideas. I can flesh out the why and how very well, but not the when and where. So I decided to break up each story into 1 main character and 1-2 noteable ponies, and a main nymph to be the foil. I wanted to make the chucks easier to digest and keep to reader interested with how each main character turned out and also hint at where the other stories fit in the nymphverse.
I guess I've failed in some aspects.
When my idea for Kindness was ready for typing I had two ideas for and ending. Neither stood out as better to me,and no one at the time was interested in giving advice than "pick the one you like the most" I liked both of them, so i made Kindness have two endings. Since then I've revised Kindness to reflect how I'd the series to be portrayed. I want the series to be about a big bad that doesn't look bad, doesn't have 100% bad motives and provides a small amount of my head canon to show through without feeling forced. But this blog is more or less evidence that I'm not sure how my reader are interpreting the series. is it good? bad? trying to hard?
I had no clue, so I stopped publishing chapters to it.
2775799 couldn't find enough flutterpony pics of mane six, so I opted for this.
2775975 *forgiven
2775968
Putting the effort into making a choose-your-own-adventure story and several surveys might count as trying a bit too hard.
There's nothing truly wrong with alternate endings, but just be sure that they all have a good amount of work put into them. While there's no doubt that effort was put into Honestly, it appeared to have a lot of the work in areas other than the actual writing. Stories in that format require far more writing than traditional stories and give little return to your reader other than a sense of control. This sense of control is then almost negated if the reader doesn't feel in line with the protagonist, something difficult to do in second person, and almost impossible to do in third person.
The story wasn't bad, but I would have enjoyed it more in a traditional format.
2776595 Interesting.
I might take another look at Honestly... make a re-edit edition/progress the endings further. As for the future of the series I'm a bit lost now.
Direct it the way you intended, whichever way that might be. One good ending is worth a dozen bad ones. Put your time into what you want to write and you're bound to turn out something good. Readers be damned, it's the ones that try the least to please the masses that turn out the greatest things.
2777687 well I intended it to be...wait am I going through deja vu here?
I thought I explained why i didn't doing the way i first intended... I've always been under the assumption that you should give a shit what the readers want, even more so when you are writing clop .
ITCoTS doesn't have nearly the same amount of views and, with little to do fan pandering in comparison to Kindness ... I don't want to seem vain or overly analytical here but I'm sure the numbers mean something.
2778244
I don't have any hard statistics, but it's been generally observed that clop is likely to receive more views and is more likely to be featured than clean stories. As for giving the fans control… I've never observed a writer attempt to involve the reader to the level that you are, so I have no idea how that affects ratings. Honestly's less positive ratings were likely from it still needing a lot of work.
Kindness didn't get attention because it gave readers a choice, it got attention because readers it gave them some well written clop. Fan pandering is fairly rare on Fimfiction, authors will sometimes ask readers for suggestions or possibly ask them to vote on what direction to take a story. I'm assuming that in Honestly you wrote it in that particular format to give the reader a sense of control. It didn't. The format of choose-your-own-adventure is meant to provide readers with a sense of… adventure! It's about them exploring and experiencing things, not them taking a story where they want. Given that the Applebloom hug ending thing was a bit of a failure-type deal this may not be the case, but otherwise the former seems to be your (possibly incorrect) motive for choosing the format.
I liked the two-endings thing you had in Kindness and if you're going to stick to the multiple-endings format, try to make sure that all possible endings are fully fleshed out.
2778378 Mmmm. Okay. It seems like anything I have said has either been answered or ignored. Thank you for your advice and critics.
2779059
Sorry, I wrote that at 3 AM so I might have missed some points.