I've chosen to analyse the infamous main character, Vincent, from 'Pyre for the Heart', written by Fearblogger Malus. To give some background, Pyre is an not-yet-complete blog of our villain protagonist, who is putting a girl's diary up for the world to see after she scorns him. And they say women are the ones to beware, come the whole scorning-thing...
As he types up this girl's diary and he gives up glimpses into his own life, we start seeing some recognisable faces - hey there, Red Cap and Brute! - so it's shaping up to be an intriguing Fearblog. My focus, though, is on Vincent himself.
(Note: this analysis/review will be as spoiler-free as possible.)
From the get-go, we see a lot of evidence that Vincent isn't a character that we're meant to be cheering for. He's hurt, he's angry, and he's being quite petty about it. Vincent was spurned by a girl named Lois last semester, and to get revenge he starts putting her personal journal online for their entire school (and the rest of the Internet) to read. Already, I have to give kudos to Malus - there is a very distinct shift in the way both characters write.
Vincent will throw in his input as we read about Lois's accounts, and we get to see a bit more of his jerkass side. He's hypocritical, saying things out of spite that are completely contrary to the his initial self-portrayal; he claims he's on the high ground and ignoring the fact that he's wrestling through the mud.
As his posts continue to go online, he attracts the attention of some of our well-known (and lesser-known) Fearblog commenters, who proceed to leave cryptic comments (the way any good commenter would). There are two options the writer has, when this occurs: to ignore the comments for the sake of the plot, or have the character respond and let the plot proceed naturally.
Malus avoided the trap of having comments shape the plot by having the events Vincent/Lois documented occur last semester - that leaves Vincent plenty of room to talk to his commenters, and he does so in the style of any anonymous guy sniping back at the people seemingly trolling him. In fact, he takes an entire comedically-done post to snark at them.
The last bit of fact taken from the blog is this: one of the girls Lois writes about, Vivian, turns up in a post that's entirely Vincent's. Here's where I avoid the spoilers. The conclusion is - we see a glimpse into Vincent's life that doesn't involve him sniping at a would-be girlfriend or people who disapprove of him. Vincent has friends. He's liked by a group of people, in his life away from his keyboard.
So, my conclusions about this character?
I love that I don't love Vincent. When I say 'his life away from his keyboard', I mean that I can believe he has one. Vincent is flawed; an emotional, spiteful teenager who lashes out and hurts people in the way so many teenagers do. Over the Internet.
A guy like Vincent is believable. His actions aren't so monstrous that you recoil, and they never go beyond the capability of an angry teen - considering we've got Fear influence at play, any overpowered acts of spite could be hand-waved away. The way Vincent is written, though, such a thing isn't necessary.
He's a bully online, he has friends in real life, and he gets in trouble for his actions. He's a hormonal jerk - and weren't we all in high school? I, personally, can compare Vincent's attitude to my own when I was in ninth grade.
Boiling it all down, Vincent is horribly and beautifully human, and I look forward to reading more about him.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Monday, September 10, 2012
Lacuna Urbis: DJay's review
For reference, Lacuna Urbis was written by Funden and can be found here.
Lacuna Urbis was a 43-post blog(ella?) about "Benzene," a character who sets up an idle blog to talk about life and Team Fortress 2 only to shortly wind up in the hospital, where the story takes a significant turn down the rabbit hole, becoming a mystery/adventure story about exploring this strange new empty city and learning about a medical conspiracy. Benzene is a subject in what seems to be an experiment with "Herr Doctor's" eldritch medicine and an organization focusing on him. The blog ends as Benzene finds an exit to the city and uncovers information about the organization before being apprehended.
Admittedly, I don't know all there is to know about this plot. The medical experiments were detailed in textdumps throughout the latter half of the blog, and definitive answers were rarely given. This, coupled with Benzene's capture at the end of the story, leads me to suspect Lacuna Urbis to be either incomplete or to be expanded upon in a later blog. The current story is.. well, it works for what it's worth, but it's not particularly compelling. Personally, I found the most interesting and memorable part of the story to be the former half of the story, wherein Benzene explores the surreal and empty city. The idea of exploring an odd location, never sure of what or who you'll find, appeals to me. But I feel this section of the story didn't last long enough before switching to a lot of letters and documents with deliberately vague and cryptic messages.
There was a subplot regarding Benzene entering the city with a group of other travelers, but he leaves them early on and finds them dead later. This could have worked with a bit more effort; the story didn't give us much reason to care for these characters, especially not considering Benzene was so quick to leave them. Their deaths had no significant impact on the story, which doesn't say much when they're the only characters who aren't antagonists or the narrator.
Regarding the antagonists, there was a "Beakman" character who was seen from time to time and actually provided a nice antagonist for the early posts. He seemed just ambiguous enough to pose a threat to the group of protagonists, but then Benzene left and the threat of being in close quarters with an ambiguous menace was dropped. The rest of the story didn't even have much of an impact, as the antagonists were almost entirely conveyed through letters and documents left behind.
There wasn't that much of a conflict here, I suppose is what I'm trying to say. Benzene is lost in a strange city, but we find out that the city he's in isn't even much of a threat; it's the doctors experimenting on him who are. But he doesn't seem that threatened by them for most of the story; the focus is on exploring and reading documents that have been left behind. The ending of the story, where Benzene finds himself in a facility of the antagonist doctors, probably has the most suspense of the whole story, as he is legitimately threatened and in enemy territory there. But he's apprehended in a matter of a few posts, ending the entire blog.
This sort of exploration-focused story can definitely work, but Lacuna Urbis didn't feel as if it was written to work that way. I think it needed to be longer, to spend more time on the exploration and the antagonists. Where there's no conflict, spend some time using descriptive imagery to immerse the reader in the mysterious environment. Where there's a conflict, keep it going.
On the positive side, the blog's design is very easy to follow and the background is creative enough to make the blog stand out on its own. I felt almost compelled to keep reading simply because it looked original and accessible! Funden did a great job with that.
I did not dislike Lacuna Urbis. Funden seemed to have been trying for some interesting things that he simply fell short on. Writing isn't the kind of thing you get perfectly every time; it takes patience and persistence, so I have faith in him as a writer. Hopefully we can see more from him in the future, and hell, I'd love to see him work more with the "exploring mysterious locales" concept, where the focus of the story is on the location rather than anything else.
Lacuna Urbis was a 43-post blog(ella?) about "Benzene," a character who sets up an idle blog to talk about life and Team Fortress 2 only to shortly wind up in the hospital, where the story takes a significant turn down the rabbit hole, becoming a mystery/adventure story about exploring this strange new empty city and learning about a medical conspiracy. Benzene is a subject in what seems to be an experiment with "Herr Doctor's" eldritch medicine and an organization focusing on him. The blog ends as Benzene finds an exit to the city and uncovers information about the organization before being apprehended.
Admittedly, I don't know all there is to know about this plot. The medical experiments were detailed in textdumps throughout the latter half of the blog, and definitive answers were rarely given. This, coupled with Benzene's capture at the end of the story, leads me to suspect Lacuna Urbis to be either incomplete or to be expanded upon in a later blog. The current story is.. well, it works for what it's worth, but it's not particularly compelling. Personally, I found the most interesting and memorable part of the story to be the former half of the story, wherein Benzene explores the surreal and empty city. The idea of exploring an odd location, never sure of what or who you'll find, appeals to me. But I feel this section of the story didn't last long enough before switching to a lot of letters and documents with deliberately vague and cryptic messages.
There was a subplot regarding Benzene entering the city with a group of other travelers, but he leaves them early on and finds them dead later. This could have worked with a bit more effort; the story didn't give us much reason to care for these characters, especially not considering Benzene was so quick to leave them. Their deaths had no significant impact on the story, which doesn't say much when they're the only characters who aren't antagonists or the narrator.
Regarding the antagonists, there was a "Beakman" character who was seen from time to time and actually provided a nice antagonist for the early posts. He seemed just ambiguous enough to pose a threat to the group of protagonists, but then Benzene left and the threat of being in close quarters with an ambiguous menace was dropped. The rest of the story didn't even have much of an impact, as the antagonists were almost entirely conveyed through letters and documents left behind.
There wasn't that much of a conflict here, I suppose is what I'm trying to say. Benzene is lost in a strange city, but we find out that the city he's in isn't even much of a threat; it's the doctors experimenting on him who are. But he doesn't seem that threatened by them for most of the story; the focus is on exploring and reading documents that have been left behind. The ending of the story, where Benzene finds himself in a facility of the antagonist doctors, probably has the most suspense of the whole story, as he is legitimately threatened and in enemy territory there. But he's apprehended in a matter of a few posts, ending the entire blog.
This sort of exploration-focused story can definitely work, but Lacuna Urbis didn't feel as if it was written to work that way. I think it needed to be longer, to spend more time on the exploration and the antagonists. Where there's no conflict, spend some time using descriptive imagery to immerse the reader in the mysterious environment. Where there's a conflict, keep it going.
On the positive side, the blog's design is very easy to follow and the background is creative enough to make the blog stand out on its own. I felt almost compelled to keep reading simply because it looked original and accessible! Funden did a great job with that.
I did not dislike Lacuna Urbis. Funden seemed to have been trying for some interesting things that he simply fell short on. Writing isn't the kind of thing you get perfectly every time; it takes patience and persistence, so I have faith in him as a writer. Hopefully we can see more from him in the future, and hell, I'd love to see him work more with the "exploring mysterious locales" concept, where the focus of the story is on the location rather than anything else.
Monday, September 3, 2012
Notes from the Condemned: DJay's review
For reference, Notes from the Condemned was written by MesserTod and can be found here.
Notes from the Condemned is the 79-post tragedy of Thomas Blake, a man with a confusing life. He starts the blog out complaining about hearing noises in his home, only to discover evidence of an eldritch horror known as The Choir affecting his perception. Posts are spent performing tests to document the pattern and behaviour of the phenomenon, to better help Thomas remain sane as his senses are obfuscated, and many posts later on are commented on by the enigmatic figure "The Advisor," who does not give much information about himself but claims to have methods to help Thomas out.
Over the course of the blog, Thomas descends into insanity, comes back out of it, uncovers hints of a link between The Plague Doctor and The Archangel, and is hunted by The Eye before going on the run and killing himself, thinking The Archangel's afterlife would be the best choice. The Advisor takes over the blog for the final stretch, vowing to avenge Thomas by staging several assaults on The Archangel's cults while posting documents from The Plague Doctor's servants in keeping with the blog's focus on research and few kept secrets. The blog ends with a eulogy for the late Thomas Blake, as given by the Advisor.
As a Fearblog, Notes from the Condemned has some interesting plot points. The complexity of the Plague Doctor/Archangel alliance is fascinating, and the way that the blog is told means that the majority of confusing questions given earlier on get satisfying answers by the end. Though the details of the Advisor are not part of the answers, it feels like that fits well; this blog is about Thomas, and thus it ends when he is avenged properly. The revelations given by the documents in the endgame are all relevant to him and him alone, giving an appropriate catharsis to the mystery-filled story.
On another note, the character of Thomas's girlfriend was incredibly likable. She was an admirably generous woman, often supporting Thomas even when he was at his lowest point and listening to him and assisting with his tests. As a result, her death felt like one of the most significant turning points for the story. By that point, it just made sense for the blog to end with Thomas's death. So this was well done on that part.
But now we come to my criticisms. I will allow this blog's heavy focus on comments, as that was established as early as the first post and remained fairly consistent throughout. But as a result, the progression of the story felt awkward. Thomas learned of The Choir alarmingly fast, between two single posts early on. I feel there could have been a better introduction to them rather than just a link in a comment. And a lot of the comments directly lampshaded hidden text during the more confusing bits, which is all well and good, but Thomas's replies often bordered on narm. I know it's more realistic to have a blogger reply to a comment if he doesn't remember writing a post or a passage, but I really think it would have been more effective simply to not have Thomas respond at all. At the very least, to the ones regarding the hidden text. The writing, itself, made it fairly clear that Thomas did not consciously write it; lampshading that is spoonfeeding it to us.
Furthermore, the subplot featuring The Eye towards the end felt, frankly, like it had no place in the story. It just came out of nowhere; there was no mention of The Eye in the blog before this, no hint that The Eye might possibly want to observe and punish Thomas, and it really just came out of nowhere. It lasted for such a lengthy period of time and featured, from what I recall, the death of Thomas's girlfriend, so it was clearly a significant plot point, but it came out of nowhere! There was no precedent! It was, as it were, anticlimactic.
Then there's the issue of the blog's design. A default layout, not exactly giving the blog bonus points, but at the same time I can easily forgive this, considering Thomas doesn't strike as the sort of character to put that much effort into designing his blog. So it's.. a design. Neither good nor bad.
Notes from the Condemned was far from a bad blog, I stress. It had some great points to it, some well-written characters and some events that I found thematically excellent. But it still had too much of the "average blog" feel to it, by which I mean there was such a clear focus on realism and comments that often stood dissonant to the plot itself. As this was MesserTod's first Fearblog, this doesn't speak anything bad for him! Notes provided a good read overall, and if he should choose to release further blogs, I'll be glad to read them.
Notes from the Condemned is the 79-post tragedy of Thomas Blake, a man with a confusing life. He starts the blog out complaining about hearing noises in his home, only to discover evidence of an eldritch horror known as The Choir affecting his perception. Posts are spent performing tests to document the pattern and behaviour of the phenomenon, to better help Thomas remain sane as his senses are obfuscated, and many posts later on are commented on by the enigmatic figure "The Advisor," who does not give much information about himself but claims to have methods to help Thomas out.
Over the course of the blog, Thomas descends into insanity, comes back out of it, uncovers hints of a link between The Plague Doctor and The Archangel, and is hunted by The Eye before going on the run and killing himself, thinking The Archangel's afterlife would be the best choice. The Advisor takes over the blog for the final stretch, vowing to avenge Thomas by staging several assaults on The Archangel's cults while posting documents from The Plague Doctor's servants in keeping with the blog's focus on research and few kept secrets. The blog ends with a eulogy for the late Thomas Blake, as given by the Advisor.
As a Fearblog, Notes from the Condemned has some interesting plot points. The complexity of the Plague Doctor/Archangel alliance is fascinating, and the way that the blog is told means that the majority of confusing questions given earlier on get satisfying answers by the end. Though the details of the Advisor are not part of the answers, it feels like that fits well; this blog is about Thomas, and thus it ends when he is avenged properly. The revelations given by the documents in the endgame are all relevant to him and him alone, giving an appropriate catharsis to the mystery-filled story.
On another note, the character of Thomas's girlfriend was incredibly likable. She was an admirably generous woman, often supporting Thomas even when he was at his lowest point and listening to him and assisting with his tests. As a result, her death felt like one of the most significant turning points for the story. By that point, it just made sense for the blog to end with Thomas's death. So this was well done on that part.
But now we come to my criticisms. I will allow this blog's heavy focus on comments, as that was established as early as the first post and remained fairly consistent throughout. But as a result, the progression of the story felt awkward. Thomas learned of The Choir alarmingly fast, between two single posts early on. I feel there could have been a better introduction to them rather than just a link in a comment. And a lot of the comments directly lampshaded hidden text during the more confusing bits, which is all well and good, but Thomas's replies often bordered on narm. I know it's more realistic to have a blogger reply to a comment if he doesn't remember writing a post or a passage, but I really think it would have been more effective simply to not have Thomas respond at all. At the very least, to the ones regarding the hidden text. The writing, itself, made it fairly clear that Thomas did not consciously write it; lampshading that is spoonfeeding it to us.
Furthermore, the subplot featuring The Eye towards the end felt, frankly, like it had no place in the story. It just came out of nowhere; there was no mention of The Eye in the blog before this, no hint that The Eye might possibly want to observe and punish Thomas, and it really just came out of nowhere. It lasted for such a lengthy period of time and featured, from what I recall, the death of Thomas's girlfriend, so it was clearly a significant plot point, but it came out of nowhere! There was no precedent! It was, as it were, anticlimactic.
Then there's the issue of the blog's design. A default layout, not exactly giving the blog bonus points, but at the same time I can easily forgive this, considering Thomas doesn't strike as the sort of character to put that much effort into designing his blog. So it's.. a design. Neither good nor bad.
Notes from the Condemned was far from a bad blog, I stress. It had some great points to it, some well-written characters and some events that I found thematically excellent. But it still had too much of the "average blog" feel to it, by which I mean there was such a clear focus on realism and comments that often stood dissonant to the plot itself. As this was MesserTod's first Fearblog, this doesn't speak anything bad for him! Notes provided a good read overall, and if he should choose to release further blogs, I'll be glad to read them.
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