10/30/12-11/2/12

Untitled Smut (DD, PI)

Huh. I think you should decide if you want this to be straight or humor – currently it seems more humor but with moments that aren’t, which, given the subject matter is rape, is somewhat dissonant.

Snowfall (Snowman (Jack, Deuce, BK))

[ instead silently filtered all of her anxieties into ruling with unforgiving stringency. If it was a warning she was going to make goddamn sure to take advantage of it. She would ensure the survival of her people if it killed her.

She knew that her people resented her, felt the fear and anger radiating from their bodies when she spoke to them]

This doesn’t really seem to match up with anything we see, and her being extra concerned doesn’t work well with being confident enough to take the ring off when the game begins.

[She hated wearing the thing, but the day’s inspections had to be done, and no one could know she’d made a habit of taking it off. ]

From what we’re told, she takes it off for good and secludes herself. If she was putting it on regularly, she’d probably keep it with her rather than locking it in the vault.

[Why in the name of Skaia did that bitch have to prototype a frog of all things…]

That’s not really how she talks. The queens tend to be formal and to refer to players by their title.

The confrontation doesn’t address a key point – Jack wants the ring itself, and Snowman has to direct players in order to prevent him from getting it. If Deuce could steal the ring outright, why wouldn’t Jack have put it on by now? I mean, there could be a reason he’s holding off on it, but it’d have to be a good one, and here there’s no sign of any reason.

[ “I received a recent tip off that you may be harboring sympathies for Prospit, and sure enough today we recovered your ring en route to the White Kingdom.]

…that doesn’t make much sense. If she wanted to support Prospit, she could just defect wearing her ring.

[“I think you’ll find that taking off the ring in and of itself is very much illegal.”]

If that’s enough to get her exiled, then why invent other crimes and risk getting caught in a lie?

[“I’m sorry, but you are hereby banished from the kingdom. The ship to The Badlands will be here in an hour.”]

Exile isn’t leaving the kingdom of Derse, it’s leaving the Medium itself. And I really, really don’t think they’d call the place that.

I wish there was more thought given to how her exiling would have worked. It seems to always go this way, and generally people seem to forget various key features: exile largely doesn’t seem like an organized punishment, Jack was after the ring and somehow kept away from it, the plan to remove the queen was apparently complex and required extensive help from the trolls. When it comes up it mostly seems to be “Jack accuses the queen, exile happens.” If she was exiled as punishment, that seems more and more unusual the more we learn, if she wasn’t, how the hell did she get exiled? One pretty elegant idea was that she was exiled with the help of Vriska’s mindcontrol abilities, but that leaves the question of why Jack would need an extensive plan to remove her. Or possibly she fled because she’d have been killed if she stayed. I’d just like more variety, really.

Snowfall Ch2 (Snowman (Vriska, Terezi)

[3 hours]

Write out numbers with letters.

[She wanted so badly to lie down, but even with her practically nonexistent survival skills, she knew she could get lost in an instant without leaving some kind of marking of the direction she was going.]

Uh…but wouldn’t the sun’s direction be enough for that?

From Snowman’s bit about tearing up Derse in retaliation, I don’t think a major motivation by this point was getting back to help them out.

[It felt strange to be sleeping through the darkness that she’d lived her whole life in, and being out and about in the light, but the nights here were really too dark and the desert to vast to make navigating it practical. Even with the light of the two moons, she didn’t want to risk getting turned around on accident and expending precious energy wandering in circles.]

It’s not that hard to use stars to navigate when your only goal is to walk along without turning around completely and walking over the same exact area. She doesn’t even need to worry about much about going in circles – given the size of the area, at this point in her travels it’s finding her way back to where she started that’s practically impossible.

Also, Alternia isn’t particularly dark at night – the trolls are completely nocturnal. And it’s going to be murderous during the day. Why not just say she traveled at night?

[The exile of a royal was a relatively rare occurrence in the game, so their bodies were ultimately designed more for the purpose of looking intimidating and fighting effectively than survival.]

Of the two sessions with exiles we’ve seen, both involved a queen. It seems like it’s normal for them to end up guiding the players, so it doesn’t make much sense they’d be designed to collapse early in the desert.

[She wasn’t going to expire after a single day in the desert-she wasn’t quite that fragile-but it was a serious concern. Another 3 or 4 days out here and things would start getting grim, and as of yet there was no sign of civilization or supplies.]

Honestly, that’s not much better than a human. The carapaces are supposed to be incredibly tough and that’s why they can be dumped into the wasteland and do something other than die. Given WV can eat uranium with no ill effects, even if the queen was less durable than a regular carapace she should still last quite a while.

[“THERE WAS A PLANET FULL OF PEOPLE HERE ONCE!” she screamed to the silent wasteland. “THEY MUST HAVE LEFT SOMETHING BEHIND! ANYTHING!”]

She seems to be really struggling with the entire concept of her surroundings. The carapaces all seem pretty familiar with what lies beyond the Medium. Even if she was never expecting exile, she should know that it’s going to be a planet with every inch smashed by meteors and then turned into a desert. Shouting at nothing just because the sand dune she walked up is sand is absurd. She isn’t even doing anything to search for things left behind, she’s just walking.

[For all she knew there might already be people taking shelter inside, and she had a feeling that if she ran into any Dersites she had exiled, they would be less than pleased to see her. ]

There’s not actually any sign that either kingdom deliberately exiles people.

If WQ is anything to go by, the queens at least know about the exile terminals. Possibly it’s standard knowledge for all carapaces, given that there’s a big point made of the fact the rest of the group has forgotten almost everything by the time they reach a terminal.

Exile terminals only talk to a single player at once, although it may be possible to switch between players. We know this because we’ve seen the screen when Snowman was typing and only one was one.

Snowfall Ch3(Snowman (Doc Scratch))

BQ is the one who created Scratch, she shouldn’t be totally baffled by him.

Scratch also doesn’t sound right. He’s not saying the right thing to convince her, either directly or indirectly, he’s just being aimlessly smug.

[“If I do this…” she started. “Will I be able to save my kingdom?”]

Why does she think they’re in danger in the first place?

SPerl

Caught up with this! Sadly still haven’t even gotten Maka to meet her Black Queen.

100 Ships to Sail (PM (WV))

[Wait, what was she saying? In the exile desert, you were supposed to be alone. You weren’t supposed to have anyone, love anyone, or even just come in contact with anyone! She shouldn’t miss him, that wasn’t what the punishment was about.]

That has nothing to do with how it works in canon.

It seems like whenever other sections of fandom write the exiles by request, you get all sorts of weirdness. I wonder what they think the point of the exile sections even is.

Next up is a loooooooong fic I’m not sure if I should try to get through, since it looks to be the annoying sort of AU and to be almost entirely humans and trolls. Author did express interest in me reviewing it, though.

DD, PI
Snowman (Jack, Deuce, BK, Vriska, Terezi, Doc Scratch)

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Wordcount: 40832