Troubled Production · 4:50pm Sep 23rd, 2020
So, it's happened again: Light Despondent hit yet another wall. Sometimes, when you're writing, you don't know you can't go forward. You think you are, but you're just spinning your wheels. See, it snows all the time where I live. And sometimes my car is up to the grill in snow. I can't move that shit forward.
You know what always works?
After some digging, you reverse the car a little. Move it back, just a little, so you have time to go forward again from a better start, with renewed energy. Seriously, this works. You don't have to dig a new driveway, reversing a little bit for more traction absolutely works.
That was this last chapter. I freely admit it - it's my fault it took several months to get to it, on account of playing so much Apex Legends and Warframe. I was talking with Jed about what to do, and we realized: This chapter was spinning its wheels. The solutions to the conflict I made were... not working. They did not work. I don't want to spoil the chapter, but... long story short, there was a lot of stuff that felt like character derailment, especially since a lot of Jed's HLF characters are in a precarious position with the readers thanks to a nigh-literal decade of you guys being conditioned to see them as the LAMOEs from the Zombie Survival Guide World War Z. I.E, a bunch of morons who fight and resist help during the apocalypse because of raisins.
Thankfully, Jed and I had an impromptu brainstorming session involving some Last of Us 1, and we think we've come up with something better. This means I'll have to discard a lot of earlier material for the current chapter, but... well. Working on it more won't make it less of a waste, less depressing, or less likely to stroke its own misery dick.
Hopefully you like the new version.
Misery dicks are the worst dicks.
… I know what I said. 😝
These things happen. I trust you guys to make a good quality chapter so take the time you need to make it!
5362254
You are the best kind of reader a fanfic author could dream of.
5362257
Thank you!
The Last of Us, the one with a retroactive "1" in the title? I take it you mean that one, rather than the sequel, because the sequel was the one which spun its wheels around all the misery porn.
But I understand your concerns with production troubles quite well, mate. Know that despite matters, I remain present if you ever have a wish to discuss where Light Despondent - Remixed is steering. It's still connected to the Spectrumverse along with the Reduxverse, after all. And if it turns out true that you're finding a way out of the rut, all the better.
Good luck,
~Vox
I mean, that was also part of the fun of the HLF, the organization that you could unashamedly hate because they were just that stupid and evil.
Well, I applaud you to having the will to discard material for the sake of the quality of the story. I, for one, am here no matter how long it takes. These stories earned their spot in my Favourites for a reason
.
I've been on this site for a nigh-literal decade, and I can safely say there's been a lot of progress, compared to the stereotypes we had.
5362420
Fun to read maybe. No fun to write.
5362442
Probably not, but at some point in the quest of making better HLF characters, you do have to sit back and ask "why would these guys still call themselves HLF?"
Like the crew Victor is with now. They work with ponies, are friends with ponies, have ponies as members of their crew and comrades in arms, heck the only reason they're not the same as the PHL is the lack of ties with the government. So why would a group like that willingly cling to a title associated -unjustly, in their case- with pony-hating mass murderers who will kill you if you so much as say a nice thing about ponies?
5362478
Probably because that’s not what the group was when they started. Bear in mind in both the original Spectrum thanks to the retcon of Yarrow and co, but more so in the Redux/SPECTRUM HLF (the first thing I did!), the HLF was started as “the government aren’t doing anything effective, so we need to”. Nothing to do with hating ponies. To them, they’re the HLF, and Lovikov and co are terrorist rebels - the equivalent of mutineers, to be dealt with as such within the constraints of what they work with. That idea didn’t work nearly as well in the original only because they were a retcon who were destined to fail because they were doomed by canon. It works better now because, in effect, it’s Lovikov and the mutineer/renegade HLF who are “doomed by canon” while Romero, the Reavers and co are still an operating force by the time you hit Redux/SPECTRUM.
What you’re describing is closer to if the HLF started out as “let’s murder all the ponies because we’re Teh Evuls”, and then some reasonable people who worked with ponies started calling themselves that too (kind of like how Anonymous went from being a bunch of dumb hackers to the sort of whistleblower/demonstration group they became). And to be fair, from the readers’ perspectives that’s probably how it seems because you saw the tail before the dog, but from a lore perspective, the dog is there first and still mostly wagging the tail.
5362380
If even you're calling something misery porn, that says a lot lmao XD And I'll keep that in mind.
Though I should point out the REAL reason I mentioned Last of Us - Jed was saying Kraber would be the Joel to Hope's Ellie, and I realized I had to do it because of one man: Damar from Spacebattles. See, Damar is actually Dutch. And Joel is VERY country. And according to Damar, Afrikaans sounds (to a natural dutch speaker) like Boomhauer from King of The Hill does to most people XD
So realizing that Kraber is basically the dutch equivalent to that made the comparison too funny to ignore.