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A Wallbanger is about a plot point so utterly stupid and ridiculous that it exceeds all thought. Many of the examples eventually became simple Fridge Logic and complaining about plot points they didn't like, no matter how insignificant.
-TV Tropes: Square Peg Round Trope. (Of course, the line between any of those is blurred. What fails to make sense to one person might make perfect sense to someone else or with sufficient understanding of its context, and there are also such things as Fridge Brilliance and misunderstanding what actually happened.)
I'll try not to be overly critical of anything. This is just an honest attempt to understand why people in general agree on certain maxims in regards to writing, such as abiding by characterization and/or world-building, avoiding ass-pulls, and not putting stuff in for no particular reason.
Before I begin, though, chronology was not the only thing I had brought up in my reviews that Blood told me off for (although he did highlight that), nor was it the only thing I listed under Wallbangers: Other (only the first. And yes, it does factor in, albeit indirectly, to the actual events of a given fic).
On that note, even though I linked to both post and thread just recently, here they are again in case I show this particular entry to him:
http://forums.luckystarshrine.com/showpost.php?p=230081&postcount=6 (World-building in general)
http://forums.luckystarshrine.com/showthread.php?t=4871 (The thread itself, for context)
And, here is a certain entry in which I had already talked about the concept of appreciation:
https://dmxrated.dreamwidth.org/555264.html
-----
With that out of the way, let's start with an example of something at its most primitive:
[M]ost early filmmakers chose to shoot boring real-life events, like people walking or a baby being fed[.]
-Cracked: 9 Terrifying Old Movies That Put Modern Horror to Shame
That was 1895, when motion pictures were a relatively new thing. While anyone could put such stuff up on YouTube or Facebook today, it would not be sufficient on its own even as a one-off joke in any newspaper comic or yonkoma manga. They have potential as building blocks, but on their own, they don't carry any appeal.
(Well obviously, people walking wouldn't, unless the focus was on anything they might be talking about. Feeding a baby could have appeal in cuteness, as would a one-off shot of Tsukasa opening her mouth to eat some toast (ep. 13, 7:30).)
Everything, from funny things people record in real life, to simple storybooks, cartoon shorts, or music videos, to full-length movies and multi-episode TV shows, is designed for people to follow along with and appreciate. Most of the time, what that is is a set of circumstances, stuff that happens, and what changes as a result. This, of course, needs to be much more than what you're taught in grade school as examples of cause-and-effect. We need to know who the characters are and how things work in order for things to unfold in such a way that we can follow along with and appreciate.
For some examples, Kagami and Konata are established to have a playfully rough friendship, and that's one thing we grow attached to them for. Miyuki stands out as the most reserved of the main four, and if she were to say something like "Far out!", unless for instance she was attempting to emulate someone else's speech pattern (which she and several others do for a game late in the manga), people would be like "Huh!?" Konata's mother is explicitly dead, and even appears one time as a ghost; it would not become of the show to re-introduce her as still alive and having been there the whole time. Tsukasa keeps texting Kagami incessantly despite both of them living in the same house, of course the latter's gonna get annoyed, even if she keeps her cool upon confronting the former. That's just basic cause-and-effect; no one with better things to do would appreciate such an ongoing distraction, we know her character isn't gonna allow her to just keep answering her, and she's too good friends with her to ignore outright (unless she were to persist even after the one approach, which itself would be OOC for her).
While minimal in Lucky Star, character development is a major form of cause-and-effect, while out-of-character behavior is an effect without a cause.
-----
One thing I take pride in about Starbound has particularly to do with time, and especially involving to its alternate-POV spinoff fic Birthday of Destiny. To start with, I like the day-by-day flow of events as the story progresses, with chapter 1 covering two days (though only one conversation on the first day), chapter 2 covers the remaining events of the second night in its first two scenes, the third day (which one can tell is a Saturday) is covered from there until early in chapter 5, and so on. Throw Birthday of Destiny into the mix, and you have the added bonus of figuring which events involving MCK-transplant protagonist Rokuna Hiiragi happen in relation to which involving anyone canon. And with Rokuna's birthday confirmed externally as November 8, a given school and year's arts festival taking place around Nov. 3, and even plans of mine for Rokuna to mention at some point having gone with her friends to Ryouou to see Akira Kogami, I've got myself one hell of a way to properly tie it all in with the anime and something to let readers actually put together. It's a challenge of their intelligence.
It is true that the anime was not very plot-oriented, but it is still cohesive in other ways, such as with its flow of events. Similarly to Birthday of Destiny, one can watch the OVA and follow certain clues in order to determine which events would fit naturally within the anime's timeline:
( Want them spelt out? )
The way episode 24 segues the events of Lucky Channel into the main show is also a great example here, although I did mostly stop watching LC at some point during my first watchthrough without ever coming back to it. Those events will also become relevant during Starbound, when Minoru ( spoiler )
(Never watched Miyakawa-ke no Kufuku in depth either (passively been meaning to), but I do understand that certain characters from the main series do appear in that show. Its two mains do have a planned cameo for shortly before the events mentioned above, though.)
-----
So, finally, here is where the school schedule comes in:
To "Americanize" the school year despite all that's been shown, is to do the opposite of what I described: To insult the intelligence of everyone reading one's work, and the hard work that the creators of the original anime and manga did to walk them and their fellow fans through something inextricably linked with everything that happened. Instead of building upon what's in place already, they dismantle it (or even tear it down) to build back up their own way. The original creators took the time to make the events correspond with the flow of time, reserving anything for a specific time of year for either said point in the anime or the OVA, when they could easily have created something timeless instead.
To be fair, though, I already described my own initial experiences before, and it's possible that, for all his references thereto, Blood actually only watched the anime in-depth once. On my part, I Was Kagami Hiiragi was the only fic of his I ever read more than once (and even with that one, I just skimmed through most chapters when it was up the first time, interested mostly in how Kagami meets her fate in the prologue), but I do remember most of the events of all his older fics on a superficial level, and a few of them actually stood out enough that I took the time to re-read them upon receiving copies of his stuff post-deletion. But, that's only a theory anyway.
It also helps that the events of canon are independent enough of one another that they could conceivably be rearranged to fit an Americanized school year. Such exactly was the case with certain events between the anime and the manga, the latter which came first and placed the main four in the beginning of their freshman year to start with, instead of in their junior year.
-----
Well, different writers and readers alike assume different priorities. I'm not trying to convince anyone to hate or abort anything. For all its faults, Blood's current fic does have appeal in other areas to make up for it, as did the manga adaptation of Mon Colle Knights and the season 1 finale of The Legend of Korra. What I pointed out before the shit hit the fan between the two of us was just for on the sidelines; my main interest until then was the big moment when the active antagonists actually get what's coming for them and whatever would have happened to everyone else involved. If you like seeing how a bunch of people's lives fall apart or such vile people as those responsible doing what they do to make their comeuppance that much more exciting, Cries Unheard might just be for you (at least if it were complete already instead of sitting at chapter 15 for over a year now). But, to quote Simply Hiiragi (who even dismissed time as an issue) from during an exchange I had with him in the events leading up to my own fic:
Everything happened way too easily and I just wasn't buying anything that was happening.
-TV Tropes: Square Peg Round Trope. (Of course, the line between any of those is blurred. What fails to make sense to one person might make perfect sense to someone else or with sufficient understanding of its context, and there are also such things as Fridge Brilliance and misunderstanding what actually happened.)
I'll try not to be overly critical of anything. This is just an honest attempt to understand why people in general agree on certain maxims in regards to writing, such as abiding by characterization and/or world-building, avoiding ass-pulls, and not putting stuff in for no particular reason.
Before I begin, though, chronology was not the only thing I had brought up in my reviews that Blood told me off for (although he did highlight that), nor was it the only thing I listed under Wallbangers: Other (only the first. And yes, it does factor in, albeit indirectly, to the actual events of a given fic).
On that note, even though I linked to both post and thread just recently, here they are again in case I show this particular entry to him:
http://forums.luckystarshrine.com/showpost.php?p=230081&postcount=6 (World-building in general)
http://forums.luckystarshrine.com/showthread.php?t=4871 (The thread itself, for context)
And, here is a certain entry in which I had already talked about the concept of appreciation:
https://dmxrated.dreamwidth.org/555264.html
-----
With that out of the way, let's start with an example of something at its most primitive:
[M]ost early filmmakers chose to shoot boring real-life events, like people walking or a baby being fed[.]
-Cracked: 9 Terrifying Old Movies That Put Modern Horror to Shame
That was 1895, when motion pictures were a relatively new thing. While anyone could put such stuff up on YouTube or Facebook today, it would not be sufficient on its own even as a one-off joke in any newspaper comic or yonkoma manga. They have potential as building blocks, but on their own, they don't carry any appeal.
(Well obviously, people walking wouldn't, unless the focus was on anything they might be talking about. Feeding a baby could have appeal in cuteness, as would a one-off shot of Tsukasa opening her mouth to eat some toast (ep. 13, 7:30).)
Everything, from funny things people record in real life, to simple storybooks, cartoon shorts, or music videos, to full-length movies and multi-episode TV shows, is designed for people to follow along with and appreciate. Most of the time, what that is is a set of circumstances, stuff that happens, and what changes as a result. This, of course, needs to be much more than what you're taught in grade school as examples of cause-and-effect. We need to know who the characters are and how things work in order for things to unfold in such a way that we can follow along with and appreciate.
For some examples, Kagami and Konata are established to have a playfully rough friendship, and that's one thing we grow attached to them for. Miyuki stands out as the most reserved of the main four, and if she were to say something like "Far out!", unless for instance she was attempting to emulate someone else's speech pattern (which she and several others do for a game late in the manga), people would be like "Huh!?" Konata's mother is explicitly dead, and even appears one time as a ghost; it would not become of the show to re-introduce her as still alive and having been there the whole time. Tsukasa keeps texting Kagami incessantly despite both of them living in the same house, of course the latter's gonna get annoyed, even if she keeps her cool upon confronting the former. That's just basic cause-and-effect; no one with better things to do would appreciate such an ongoing distraction, we know her character isn't gonna allow her to just keep answering her, and she's too good friends with her to ignore outright (unless she were to persist even after the one approach, which itself would be OOC for her).
While minimal in Lucky Star, character development is a major form of cause-and-effect, while out-of-character behavior is an effect without a cause.
-----
One thing I take pride in about Starbound has particularly to do with time, and especially involving to its alternate-POV spinoff fic Birthday of Destiny. To start with, I like the day-by-day flow of events as the story progresses, with chapter 1 covering two days (though only one conversation on the first day), chapter 2 covers the remaining events of the second night in its first two scenes, the third day (which one can tell is a Saturday) is covered from there until early in chapter 5, and so on. Throw Birthday of Destiny into the mix, and you have the added bonus of figuring which events involving MCK-transplant protagonist Rokuna Hiiragi happen in relation to which involving anyone canon. And with Rokuna's birthday confirmed externally as November 8, a given school and year's arts festival taking place around Nov. 3, and even plans of mine for Rokuna to mention at some point having gone with her friends to Ryouou to see Akira Kogami, I've got myself one hell of a way to properly tie it all in with the anime and something to let readers actually put together. It's a challenge of their intelligence.
It is true that the anime was not very plot-oriented, but it is still cohesive in other ways, such as with its flow of events. Similarly to Birthday of Destiny, one can watch the OVA and follow certain clues in order to determine which events would fit naturally within the anime's timeline:
( Want them spelt out? )
The way episode 24 segues the events of Lucky Channel into the main show is also a great example here, although I did mostly stop watching LC at some point during my first watchthrough without ever coming back to it. Those events will also become relevant during Starbound, when Minoru ( spoiler )
(Never watched Miyakawa-ke no Kufuku in depth either (passively been meaning to), but I do understand that certain characters from the main series do appear in that show. Its two mains do have a planned cameo for shortly before the events mentioned above, though.)
-----
So, finally, here is where the school schedule comes in:
To "Americanize" the school year despite all that's been shown, is to do the opposite of what I described: To insult the intelligence of everyone reading one's work, and the hard work that the creators of the original anime and manga did to walk them and their fellow fans through something inextricably linked with everything that happened. Instead of building upon what's in place already, they dismantle it (or even tear it down) to build back up their own way. The original creators took the time to make the events correspond with the flow of time, reserving anything for a specific time of year for either said point in the anime or the OVA, when they could easily have created something timeless instead.
To be fair, though, I already described my own initial experiences before, and it's possible that, for all his references thereto, Blood actually only watched the anime in-depth once. On my part, I Was Kagami Hiiragi was the only fic of his I ever read more than once (and even with that one, I just skimmed through most chapters when it was up the first time, interested mostly in how Kagami meets her fate in the prologue), but I do remember most of the events of all his older fics on a superficial level, and a few of them actually stood out enough that I took the time to re-read them upon receiving copies of his stuff post-deletion. But, that's only a theory anyway.
It also helps that the events of canon are independent enough of one another that they could conceivably be rearranged to fit an Americanized school year. Such exactly was the case with certain events between the anime and the manga, the latter which came first and placed the main four in the beginning of their freshman year to start with, instead of in their junior year.
-----
Well, different writers and readers alike assume different priorities. I'm not trying to convince anyone to hate or abort anything. For all its faults, Blood's current fic does have appeal in other areas to make up for it, as did the manga adaptation of Mon Colle Knights and the season 1 finale of The Legend of Korra. What I pointed out before the shit hit the fan between the two of us was just for on the sidelines; my main interest until then was the big moment when the active antagonists actually get what's coming for them and whatever would have happened to everyone else involved. If you like seeing how a bunch of people's lives fall apart or such vile people as those responsible doing what they do to make their comeuppance that much more exciting, Cries Unheard might just be for you (at least if it were complete already instead of sitting at chapter 15 for over a year now). But, to quote Simply Hiiragi (who even dismissed time as an issue) from during an exchange I had with him in the events leading up to my own fic:
Everything happened way too easily and I just wasn't buying anything that was happening.