HELLO!
You know why I make this opening by the way? Annoy-O-Tron, that’s why. Whatever. It is Funatic, WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED?! I think I made that joke before…Whatever.
Arc 2 is over. This Arc was about the whole Abyss becoming a bit more real in the most effective way: By showing John that life in the Abyss is at the edge at any given moment. Theoretically that is a lection he already got from the Rockers but honestly getting assaulted and saved within your school is just a few sizes smaller than your Guild Master dying due to magical blood overdose. It also sets the tone for the rest of the Season because trust me: It gets darker before it gets better.
Which is why the next Arc will be called Bloodfallen….wait than makes no sense? Well I originally wanted to call it Sunset but that made even less sense so we go with the topic at hand instead.
This Arc was called As Above so Below as a bad pun. In case you haven’t gotten it, because it is stupid: The above was Travolta’s laboratory while the Below was Victoria BELOOzero. They were both lying about their true intentions and what they were doing. Although in the late Baldy’s case I made this a lot less clear until the later stages of the Arc.
If I had any regrets about the Arc it is pacing. Introducing characters, Levelling up John, keeping the suspense going AND squeezing sex scenes in there proved to be a bit too much in the recipe of writing. I think I barely scrapped it together though but if I ever do an Arc like this again I am going to shave a bit of the erotic and the levelling in favour of character development. I also found out that time skips, which I usually do a lot off because I don’t think each day can be filled with adventure when you need to have travel times and all that jazz in mind, are really hard in this story. The simple reason for that is John, him getting gradually stronger instead of at once (like most protagonists) means that timeskips have the distinct possibility of catapulting him thirty levels ahead, literally. Hard to balance.
I also nerfed Observe in this Arc. I will honest about that fact. Observe being a reliable tool for information gathering makes writing stories like I do really hard. I love me some mysteries and there can’t be any If the second he looks at somebody everything is revealed. There are some work-arounds, like SecretBlonde never showing his face or people moving to quick to get it working but I can only do that so often before it gets stale. Better Observe is a good but unreliable tool. It still reveals a lot of stuff, just not all the important bits.
There was a scratched sub-plot about John and Rave getting in trouble for her punching Frank at the end of the last Arc but I deemed it to unimportant to squeeze in there.
So, to summarize the whole Arc:
Travolta got his hands on something he shouldn’t have had and while the people he stole it from investigated the whole thing everyone got into trouble and in the Travolta died and Jimmie left the Abyss.
Now it’s just Rave and John, which, if we are honest, is just about what most of you are interested in anyway. Which I am happy to continue to deliver on for a bit longer.
I would give you an Extended Character Insight but I don’t know about who as Victoria will be the one after the next Arc.
Did I mention that the next Arc is called Bloodfallen? Guess where we are going….
The Gamer CHYOA Edition, Funatic Branch, will return to you on the 21. August 2017.
Funatic OUT!