Ooh, one or two more replies like this and I may well have empirical proof FFN readers are smarter then Serebii ones.
(And I'm actually not sure what Lucki is. Whatever the opposite of "anti-hero" is, I guess. Anti-villain?)
Anyway, I'm glad you saw and understood the transitions, as well as the eventual denouncement - I was wondering if I'd been too subtle with a lot of it, but didn't want to go into unrealistic parody territory to get it across. Responses like this make the whole long setup worth it.
Well, to be honest, I had the distinct advantage of being familiar with your work (mostly the Unoriginalities, the various species-centric one-shots, and the meta(?)-fics, like Emerald Perspectives and Waiting), so I knew at least to expect something. XD; Had you posted this under a pseudonym on FF.net (as impossible as that would have been), I might not have had the patience to work through the first chapter.
Too subtle? Maybe in the first half (but then again, I didn't exactly take my time when reading the first few chapters, and missed out on some very key details early on), but the latter half was spot-on. I loved how everything eventually comes back to hit the reader upside the head- those were the type of revelations to make the reader double-take and re-read the first few chapters, and to show everything that happened before in a new, startlingly unpleasant light ("Why did you choose me?!").
That's... not an effect that's easy to pull off, OR to pull off well. At all.
On another note, 'anti-villain' reminds me of Jessie and James-caliber characters, those bumbling, sorta-good-at-heart crooks that you can't help but cheer for. XD; Lucki was... certainly clueless, but frighteningly effective at what horrific deeds she DID manage to pull off under a cold-blooded veneer of hate.
^^ Massive planning. I'm glad it paid off. The endings of the story were worked out in advance, so the setup is written afterward, in a way. For all icemew babbled and pretended to ask for advice, it was pretty much a complete story that happened to be posted serially. (Although there were problems I'm cleaning up on the repost.) Which is weirdly fitting, considering regular OT fic is about as far from planned as possible.
Hm. Perhaps the best word is "antagonist", for all that's impossible. She's the technical main character, yet in terms of both the overarching plot and the individual characters, she's the negative force. And since she is her own destruction, protagonist-antagonist isn't such a contradiction. Really a new word needs to be created, though.
In a way, she's frighteningly effective the entire time. She doesn't care, even when she does realize. Early on she seems like she's just unaware, but by the end of the story when she knows, her behavior hasn't changed at all. She's pretty sociopathic - the kind of person who's clueless about hurting others, then you tell her and she says, "So what?"
Really, maybe a new word shouldn't be created. I don't think this is a character type that should be popular enough to be a fiction mainstay.
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farla
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Date: 2007-05-05 07:13 pm (UTC)(And I'm actually not sure what Lucki is. Whatever the opposite of "anti-hero" is, I guess. Anti-villain?)
Anyway, I'm glad you saw and understood the transitions, as well as the eventual denouncement - I was wondering if I'd been too subtle with a lot of it, but didn't want to go into unrealistic parody territory to get it across. Responses like this make the whole long setup worth it.
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Date: 2007-05-06 02:25 am (UTC)Too subtle? Maybe in the first half (but then again, I didn't exactly take my time when reading the first few chapters, and missed out on some very key details early on), but the latter half was spot-on. I loved how everything eventually comes back to hit the reader upside the head- those were the type of revelations to make the reader double-take and re-read the first few chapters, and to show everything that happened before in a new, startlingly unpleasant light ("Why did you choose me?!").
That's... not an effect that's easy to pull off, OR to pull off well. At all.
On another note, 'anti-villain' reminds me of Jessie and James-caliber characters, those bumbling, sorta-good-at-heart crooks that you can't help but cheer for. XD; Lucki was... certainly clueless, but frighteningly effective at what horrific deeds she DID manage to pull off under a cold-blooded veneer of hate.
... yeah, I still don't know what to call her.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-07 10:50 pm (UTC)Hm. Perhaps the best word is "antagonist", for all that's impossible. She's the technical main character, yet in terms of both the overarching plot and the individual characters, she's the negative force. And since she is her own destruction, protagonist-antagonist isn't such a contradiction. Really a new word needs to be created, though.
In a way, she's frighteningly effective the entire time. She doesn't care, even when she does realize. Early on she seems like she's just unaware, but by the end of the story when she knows, her behavior hasn't changed at all. She's pretty sociopathic - the kind of person who's clueless about hurting others, then you tell her and she says, "So what?"
Really, maybe a new word shouldn't be created. I don't think this is a character type that should be popular enough to be a fiction mainstay.