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Nov. 28th, 2017 04:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmxratedTreated Brian and Marie to Toast yesterday. Brian led us afterwards to this pawn shop just down the street from there, before we drove back home.
Played a round of Monopoly when we got home, got off on a bad start, but my luck changed ever so gradually that I wound up driving Marie out of the game. She was already dying for a nap by that point anyway, and Brian also decided just to cut his losses and let me win.
Brian and I had several walks down Masem Court during the rest of the afternoon, where I brought up certain concerns about Unwilling Service. Mainly, how do I make something like that more interesting than the Pokemon anime, character-wise, especially given what Jake said before about how hard it is to be enthused about what's mostly just a rehash of the games' plots?
Then again, real life does no more than Lucky Star or Sgt. Frog to revolve about storylines and personal growth. The Pokemon anime was kinda flat in storytelling and had only token character development, but it never did need to be anything like Adventures, Digimon, or Avatar: The Last Airbender; it's still a worthy storytelling accomplishment in its own right. Unwilling Service is, primarily, the story of three specific Trainers, their relationships with the ones who appointed them against their will, the aftermath they share of their service to the lake guardians, and more generally, the world that they live in and how much more intricate it would really be than what the games depict. That it just so happens to be Pokemon is just a happy coincidence. Or rather, the real coincidence to start with, is that I so happened to be playing one of the (first) games at the root of its actual inspiration, when Jake came along to take up something fandom-neutral that I asked for on AdultFanFiction back in 2005, and that he, too, was into Pokemon.
I already mentioned storytelling priorities before, and that's exactly one of the reasons I wish Jake hadn't bailed out of the project, for reasons not even fully related to his current situation, after he already suggested treating Pokemon as actual characters (instead of just cards to be played in combat) and emphasizing the Pal Park event that will eventually take place after the Sinnoh League. (If we can eventually work something out after all, though, I might let him gamma-write from where he had long left off, and host everything on AFF and The Fanfiction Forum as he goes along, like with his abandoned version of Starbound, even though he'd probably have quite some reading to do first.)
Played a round of Monopoly when we got home, got off on a bad start, but my luck changed ever so gradually that I wound up driving Marie out of the game. She was already dying for a nap by that point anyway, and Brian also decided just to cut his losses and let me win.
Brian and I had several walks down Masem Court during the rest of the afternoon, where I brought up certain concerns about Unwilling Service. Mainly, how do I make something like that more interesting than the Pokemon anime, character-wise, especially given what Jake said before about how hard it is to be enthused about what's mostly just a rehash of the games' plots?
Then again, real life does no more than Lucky Star or Sgt. Frog to revolve about storylines and personal growth. The Pokemon anime was kinda flat in storytelling and had only token character development, but it never did need to be anything like Adventures, Digimon, or Avatar: The Last Airbender; it's still a worthy storytelling accomplishment in its own right. Unwilling Service is, primarily, the story of three specific Trainers, their relationships with the ones who appointed them against their will, the aftermath they share of their service to the lake guardians, and more generally, the world that they live in and how much more intricate it would really be than what the games depict. That it just so happens to be Pokemon is just a happy coincidence. Or rather, the real coincidence to start with, is that I so happened to be playing one of the (first) games at the root of its actual inspiration, when Jake came along to take up something fandom-neutral that I asked for on AdultFanFiction back in 2005, and that he, too, was into Pokemon.
I already mentioned storytelling priorities before, and that's exactly one of the reasons I wish Jake hadn't bailed out of the project, for reasons not even fully related to his current situation, after he already suggested treating Pokemon as actual characters (instead of just cards to be played in combat) and emphasizing the Pal Park event that will eventually take place after the Sinnoh League. (If we can eventually work something out after all, though, I might let him gamma-write from where he had long left off, and host everything on AFF and The Fanfiction Forum as he goes along, like with his abandoned version of Starbound, even though he'd probably have quite some reading to do first.)