Evangelion/Exalted: Cast in Gold Discussion Thread Whelp, I got a beta reader, and have started redoing most of the existing chapters and have been fleshing out other things as they come to me. Much like Gregg, I'll be using this thread to post teasers, get input, and so on, while the actual stories will be posted on ff.net. For now though most of the content that i'll be uploading in the next few hours will be stuff everybody' has already seen in some capacity. I have a better idea of where I'm going with the story too, though I'm still experiencing a few hurdles. To that end, don't be too surprised if I go and edit a chapter to work better, I'll do my best to keep things clear. Chapter 1: Chosen Thanks for reading and I welcome comments and discussion!
Good to see this finally up on ff.net. I like the concept of the story and your execution's really good. I'll comment more on the story itself when I have time, mainly because I'm marking finals, right now.
So far the story is well written with a few flaws. Some of it I think I can blame on fanfiction.net's formating errors, like the sudden leaps in perspective or time without a scene break to denote them. Others are more structural, your fight scenes come across as dissonant and forced. This may be a deliberate decision on your part in an attempt to mimic the Evangelion anime, but if not you need to work on that. Your style through the rest of the fic is kind of minimalist, focusing more on the emotional reactions fo character than the physical world around them. Switching to a style focusing on the viscera of the combat just stands out. Frankly, your focus on gore is not shocking or compelling, merely eye-roll inducing. Also, you rely too much on the sudden reversal of expectation. That tactic, if overused, merely becomes stale. You can't get your audience cheering for the hero if they know every single fight will end with him in the hospital. Not even the original Eva had Shinji fail as badly as you've had him consitently fail, and there is a reason for that. You have to make the audience root for the hero before you can pull the rug out from underneath him. ------------- Epsilon
there are bits and pieces, some new scenes. I'm still working on getting the bugs out of FF.net formatting. and yes, I'm 100% playing the subvert expectations card to the hilt, because I am so goddamn tired of Solars Win Forever, as well as 'Give Shinji Power; plot deforms around him'. Shinji will get up to speed, so to speak, and it will be all the sweeter when it happens. As for the writing style... I really don't have one yet. This is my first real attempt at writing a coherent story, and it's showing.
Well I'll give you some advice then. First, like I said, gore and viscera does not equate to an interesting or compelling fight scene. Detailed descriptions of body parts being maimed or exploding does not make your fight seem more realistic or gritty, it just makes you look like you liked Saw and Hostel. You can use gore, but it has to be used sparing so that it retains its shock value when you do pull it out. So whenever you find yourself talking about exploding organs or fountains of blood stop and rethink the scene. Ask yourself, "Is this absolutely neccessary for the story?" The way to make fights seem gritty and realistic is not to focus on details, but to unfocus entirely. Real fights are chaotic, confusing and fucking scary because you hardly have any idea what is going on and might die at any second for reason you can't understand. Instead of superfocusing on them draw back, describe things happening in a manner Shinji does not understand or even realise is happening half the time. Second, you have to let your hero win and be awesome. Evangelion gave Shinji a lot of early wins in the TV series so that the audience would be invested in him. They would see him as a flawed hero, but still a hero. Then they put him in over his head. That's the point of a tragedy. You have to make the audience care, you have to make them want him to win, to expect him to win. Then, later, when you have him fail the tragedy is more compelling. The only thing you accomplish by having the hero constantly fail and get defeated is to have the audience turn against the hero. They expect him to fail. That isn't tragedy, its just pathetic. Winning back your audience to cheer for him once they've already labeled him a loser is a very long and hard task, trust me I know. This is especially true if you do something like powering up Shinji. At this point, your audience is fully "so what?" about the fact that he's an Exalt. To them, him glowing gold has changed nothing so it doesn't matter. Exalts are supposed to deform the world around them that's the whole point of them. Exaltation is pure mainlined Agency. ------------- Epsilon
Maybe so, but this isn't the first time this story was written. Bear in mind that a lot is going to change from canon, and the whole "early wins leads into being doomed to fail with no hope" tragedy might end up being avoided completely (later character development seems to imply that, or at least the complete and utter death of canon and all that entails). This part of the story is mainly revealing that this isn't a "cast member power-up, heroes auto-win" story. Over the next several chapters we'll get to see Shinji improve and basically start ruining everything that everyone is trying to do to him while remaining painfully human through it all. Plus, the whole "Solar Win" isn't going to be invoked. So far, Shinji has no one to learn from or support his new nature aside from a vague past life that only appears when he's out cold. He is going to be doing a LOT of trial and error just to keep from wrecking his home. Suffice to say, this rendition of the Eva story might not remain a tragedy at all. Everything is going to change from the ground up. That said, I agree with the fight scene advice. Even if Shinji's superhuman awareness allows him to keep up better than a human, he's still scared mindless, and combat with alien foes just makes it worse. There is little need to describe every strike unless a particular attack or injury proves crucial to the battle's outcome or future plot. And Shyft, it's good to see this story back. I'm looking forward to the improvements to the already clever idea and story.
on the note of injuries, they actually are fairly important down the road, at least the not-intentionally self-inflicted ones. Regarding the battle/awareness, most of that is simply me being 3rd person omniscient? Thinking about it, I do see how it becomes rather jarring; I tend to use viewpoint characters a lot, only describing what they perceive scene-to-scene. When it jumps to a more openly god-like perspective, that is awkward?
Usually, yeah. It tends to work better to describe fights from the viewpoint to the fighters themselves or that of a spectator with roughly the same ability to perceive things as a the participants themselves (rather than seeing everything, only being able to perceive so much and having to shorthand or fail to comprehend the rest). If you use god-like perspective, it needs to be used more often. Suddenly having it used after so many other viewpoints can get jarring.
I notice that Gendo comes up with the word Chosen before anyone speaks to Shinji. Is this plot or an oversight? I must say, I love the rewrite. Even with the Unconquered Sun assisting him, It's great to see Shinji's limit. Without Unit 01 he can survive, but not beat the Angels. It makes the difficulty he is having with syncing and destroying the eva more serious. Also, I love his new iconic anima.
that is indeed an error, indivisible, thank you for pointing it out. Protip: I hate the UCS 'uses his charms through Solars' thing.
Any particular reason why? I think it makes quite a bit of sense; a just starting out solar is very, very vulnerable, and generally they exalt due to being in a very dangerous situation. Being able to have a bit of a power boost for the Exaltation scene keeps them alive, and also gives them a taste of their eventual power, one that as they grow they're realize that they can actually surpass.
When playing blackjack, if you're on twenty, you don't ask for another card. Thusly, I am dubious of this rewrite. Actually, I dislike all rewrites, but that's because I have a really good memory, and so find rereading things hopelessly boring.
well, it's less a rewrite and more me taking the rough draft you already saw, and cleaning it up, fixing spelling errors, adding scenes, changing order of events, etc. But if you'd rather not mess with it, no worries.
You dislike it simply because two people wrote it? Especially considering that it makes the crunch match up with the setting more? And what's wrong with Holden and Hatewheel?
Yeah, but the order of events before worked so well. I don't want to put you off, if you feel it needs a rewrite, you should rewrite it. Better to have to go through the irksome process of rereading a story than to have an enjoyable story quashed by whinging.
What follows is a rant, i'm putting it in spoiler tags. [spoiler]Holden's a fucktwat who wanks solars to the exclcusion of all else, has no sense of game design. To 'salvage' Exalted 2e, he propagates the same basic suite of effects that have been proven 'necessary' by the metagame to survive; paranoia combat: Perfect Defense, Flurrybreaker, Surprise Negator, etc. His sense of setting direction also /sucks ass/, and is an immature, boring writer. Holden basically believes in content exclusivity; he believes, and writes into the game, that if you are not Solar, you do Not Matter. Best example: in Alchemicals 2e, there is this setting threat called Gremlin Syndrome that can affect spirits and Alchemical Exalted, no autocthonian magic (the primordial or Alchemicals) can cure it permanently. This in and of itself is fine. It goes on to say that only Order Affirming Blow or an equivalent to Solar Circle Sorcery can permanently cure Gremlin Syndrome. A part of this is fine; I don't mind these powers as being called out as possible cures. The issue is this: Alchemicals cannot solve their setting problem themselves. This is painfully deprotagonizing; I know, I play in an alchemicals game. They may never meet a Solar, or anyone with Solar-Tier powers. The key here is this: I'm not saying Alchemicals should get charms or magic to do it, they should get a story to do it. Right now it's badly presented in the book as possible. I've seen more people say 'No, you can't do that'. When I got into this game as "Yes, you can do that." A lot of people are going to shout 'but what about setting consistency?'; well, I'm going to say this: I'd only like things be possible, I don't mind if they didn't actually successfully happen, or haven't happened yet. Remember, Alchies by default don't get gremlin syndrome curing magic, so by its very nature to even try to fix it, you'd need to find another way. I just hate that the only presented way points to Breach the Seal/Find a Solar. Hatewheel's a pretentious fucktwat who thinks his shit doesn't stink, and can never be wrong because he's being paid to write. Any mechanical thing he's written has quite frankly been utterly terrible; he wrote about 10 solar hero expansions for the Dawn Solution; they were utter train wrecks. He also wrote another charm that basically did what the base system already does badly a thousand times over. I can't remember the whole charm, but it basically applies the damage steps [Essence] times over. I hit you for 2 damage? Oh I use this charm, now you've been hit for 10 damage. (Most not-tweaked human stock have 7 HLs to take damage with.) Hurray, more paranoia combat! Suffice to say I don't trust anything mechanical he's written, and while he has written good fluff, it skews wildly into stupid territory. They Daystar writeup was mostly awesome, until you started getting into Merela-wank and VALHALLA; which made no fucking sense. There were no ghosts before the primordial war! Ghosts could not exist! It just did not happen! [/spoiler] Now, Holden and Hatewheel, they're not incapable of doing good things, and I don't fault their motivation; they love the game as much as I do. They just... Suck at writing for it. I like setting consistency as much as the next guy, but 'setting consistency' is why we have people who expect it be possible for an Ess 2-5 Solar to solo a Primordial. Setting Consistency is why we have great-curse errata to be "This exploits a one-time flaw in Exaltation, corrupting the limit track." The Great Curse Errata served two purpose: it made sure everyone kept a limit track even after curing the great curse, because some charms inflicted Limit on people; and to go "This beats integrity protecting prana, but it can only happen once." I looked at it and went. "...It's the fucking Great Curse, it was a Primordial Death Curse. It's strength is Plot. You didn't need to justify it.
Really? There was like, half a dozen things that had to happen a a lot sooner to make sense for my plans, mostly with Gendo and Rei. well I never said I was going to stop, heh, I just didn't want to hold you to something you weren't going to enjoy anyway. I appreciate the clarification though.
I phrased it poorly. What you had written before worked really well, but it is of course unclear whether you'd written yourself into a hole(so to speak) and felt a rewrite was necessary to get out of it. I was going to add something about rewrites being needed in the event of massive plot derailment that may as yet be unforseen by the reader in my previous post, but it felt a bit pointless and rambling. Of course it's possible my lack of any knowledge whatsoever with regards to Exalted and my minimal knowledge of NGE(I watched the original NGE once, barely paid attention, and spent most of my time snickering at it) contributed to my inability to see any problems. I don't imagine I hold that much sway with you. It's just I really hate the idea of someone stopping doing something harmless that they enjoy on my account just because I whine about everything. So I add disclaimers on a semi-regular basis. That way there can be no confusion.
THANK you. I'm glad some people hate that "errata" (read: setting retcon to justify their atrocious Charm design) as much as I do. ------------ Epsilon
well I really had no problem with a limit-track remaining. I also like current IPP, it's very Solar. It's just... People get too hung up on setting consistency, especially when dealing with the proper mythic tier of the setting; like Primordial Death Curses.
"That's not Tokyo-3 the place where we live and go to school. That down there is the kill box. That's the place where the enemy goes to die." I don't recall if that was in the original version, but I'm glad you're allowing the military otaku to show off some halfway useful knowledge. Plus it was a delicious line. Hmm, in general... still awkward in spots. Some transitions are abrupt and unmarked- particularly if a minute or two passes within a scene.
