Yeah, I don't think that there's going to be a Part 2 any time soon.
Hello, everyone! This is my first time writing for the front page, so all feedback is welcome.
Far too long ago, I posted on this site's forum that I'd be doing a series on Antigua: The Land of Fairies Wizards and Heroes, dissecting it in much the same way as the Maradonia and Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate articles do and did their respective subjects. I've always had a strong appreciation for the comedy in failed creative endeavors, and it seemed an obvious decision to join the site's ranks of writers with an analysis of just what went wrong with another (relatively) high-profile entry into the crowded, stagnant pool of vanity-published fantasy.
I entered the project with high hopes. I didn't even need to open my copy of the book to gauge the quality of the text within, as it proudly displayed its contents on its back cover, resplendent with the incoherent wording and bizarrely inconsistent attention to detail that pervaded every chapter of the narrative itself. It seemed like an easy target - its moronic prose made Bulwer-Lytton read like Hemingway in comparison; its tortured narrative flowed and ebbed without a trace of pacing or structure; its "re-written and re-edited" text improved on the original edition chiefly by reducing the narration's usage of exclamation marks.
And that was exactly the problem. It was impossible to decide where to begin writing about its problems because the book contained absolutely nothing else. Literary analysis proceeds from the assumption that there is something to analyze; with no plot, character development, or setting to speak of, nothing could be spoken of at all. It was like trying to storm a castle that hadn't even been built. I told myself that I would eventually "get around to it", but I knew better. I had lost the fight before it could even begin.
Months passed. Summer turned to fall, and winter quickly followed. And I found something magical.
Acqua di Gaia (Italian for "Water of Gaia"), an "online serial novel" that promises "giant mecha, big guns, bigger explosions, magical girls like you've never seen them before!" is what happens when weeaboo Japanophilia is combined with the worst aspects of the TV Tropes wiki. Its author, Walkiry, sums everything up perfectly in this "rambling":
The trope of the day is:
Try not to get lost in there :) But if you do, another one you may want to take a look at:
Which is what Acqua di Gaia runs on. The truth is, I though it would be funny to make a very detailed description of the typical Mahou Shoujo transformation scene if I were to make a "novel" version of it, but I ran into the obvious problem that, well, the "transformation sequence" is a cheaty way for animators to get a few minutes of "cut and paste" content for the chapter of the day and cut costs. Cut and paste in text, though, would be a terrible idea (and, arguably, it's not a great idea for animation either). As such, I keep writing new transformation scenes every time the girls transform.
And let me tell you, some forty chapters into the future it starts to get challenging.
Let's take a look at what's wrong with this:
1. If I never see the phrase "trope of the day" again, it'll be too late. I've already seen it. On the other hand, though, there are only three "ramblings" on the site, and this is the only one that mentions the idea. Thank Heaven for small mercies.
2. Acqua di Gaia "runs on" (because it wasn't enough to make a TV Tropes link a daily "feature" without injecting superfluous Troperspeak into the proceedings) "Costume Porn"? Can anything that isn't a fashion magazine even do that? (For those unfamiliar with TV Tropes, "porn" is essentially a suffix that those there use to mean "excessive focus". You don't have to thank me.) As I plan on doing this "blind", I've only read part of the first chapter so far, so I don't know how this is going to be reconciled with the too-vague-to-really-be-worth-quoting "About" page's allusions to apocalyptic wars and ancient powers, but it isn't promising.
3. The cognitive dissonance in the rest of the paragraph is incredible. At first glance, Walkiry appears to recognize that the concept of a "Mahou Shoujo transformation scene" is a cheap, cheesy way to pad episodes in one of the cheapest, cheesiest genres of animation extant. (For the uninitiated, "Mahou Shoujo" is an incredibly obnoxious way to refer to "Magical Girl", a type of animé from the '80s featuring girls who transform into magical superheroines, usually by using some sort of charm or other magical object. Magical Girl shows typically cater to 10-year-old Japanese girls and 40-year-old Japanese men.) But he then ignores the fact that it only "works" in animation (and only in the sense that it reduces production costs) and decides to stick it in a novel. This is incredibly stupid on its own, but it's a symptom of a deeper problem - in fact, probably the deepest of all of the problems involved - that I'll touch on later.
4. This is going to be forty chapters long.
At present, Acqua di Gaia spans only nine chapters. But it updates weekly, so I'll need to start quickly if I want to catch up. Let's begin.
Chapter 1
"The Girl who Found a Cat"
Before writing even a single word of narrative, Walkiry both demonstrates a staggering lack of imagination and tells me everything that I need to know about the chapter. From context alone (admittedly the context of the site itself and previous experience with fantasy fiction, rather than anything in the actual story), I can infer that the "girl" is going to be the protagonist, that she'll probably be an annoying animé stereotype, and that she finds a "cat" in this chapter. As Walkiry has bothered to mention the cat at all, I immediately know that it will be supernatural in a way that drives the plot. Nothing in this chapter can possibly interest me now. (Note from Future Jetman: I'm actually wrong about this. While everything that I predict ends up happening, there's one major - and incredibly stupid - event in this chapter that eludes me. It ends up practically defining the entire story.) Yep, it's the transformation sequence. I was really looking forward to you guys' reactions after seeing it in the next article, too.
I tend to prefer named chapters to unnamed ones, if only because it makes it easy to revisit specific scenes in a book. But the name shouldn't give away the point of the chapter! What if Star Wars had been called The Farmboy Who Blew Up the Space Laser and Saved the Day? Would anybody have bothered to see it? (Yes, they would have, but they'd have been a lot less enthusiastic about it.) Chapter titles, like all other titles, should relate somehow to the events that they represent, but they should follow from those events, not vice versa. Otherwise, they just leave the reader impatient for the author to get to the point and far less likely to appreciate the body of the story itself. (Sadly, Acqua di Gaia doesn't afford me many things to appreciate in the first place.)
The alarm clock broke the silence of the early morning with an obstinate and repetitive high pitched beep, until an arm managed to find its way from underneath the mess of sheets and covers on the bed to silence it, with more tries than she'd have liked to admit. Ran emerged from the warm little nest she had assembled during the night, with her red, almost pinkish hair covering her freckled face. She crashed her head back on the pillow with a frustrated scowl.
"Awuuu, it's too early…"
This sets an important precedent for the rest of the story: Walkiry is technically writing a novel, but he does not actually have any interest in doing so. No, what Walkiry really wants is to recreate one of the precious animé that he loves so very much but has neither the money nor the talent (along with his unfortunate status as a gaijin) to produce. And, since Walkiry lacks anything approaching original thought, you can be sure that his story is going to look an awful lot like an animé crossover fanfiction with the numbers filed off. Don't believe me? Get an eyeful of the Project Wonderful banner:
Look at this. Look at this. Walkiry is deliberately avoiding originality here.
It's perfectly acceptable to employ legitimate tropes honestly - if you have ever read a book, seen a play, or watched a film in your life, you have been exposed to narrative conventions which have unavoidably influenced you. That's how tropes come into existence; people see things that they like and emulate them, even unwittingly. But Walkiry is using TV Tropes "tropes", and TV Tropes isn't about narrative conventions. It may once have been, but it's since become an attempt to classify everything that appears in entertainment media, extending to concepts so vague, specific, or superficial that they shouldn't have any business being on the site. To illustrate:
Trope: The Hero's Journey (A character takes on a heroic responsibility, goes on a journey to fulfill it, and returns changed. Thanks to the popularity of Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, one of the most well- known and frequently-referenced tropes ever.)
Not a trope: You Gotta Have Blue Hair (An animé character has brightly-colored hair. This is a thing in an entertainment medium and, therefore, must be catalogued.)
The end result of this is that Walkiry, in buying into the way that his favorite site makes no distinction between stylistic earmarks and actual narrative tropes (a practice actually prescribed by the site's "No Such Thing As Notability" rule), is convinced that he can cargo-cult himself an animé if he writes a story that looks enough like one - and he's completely wrong. It's possible to sit down and write a genuine Hero's Journey story because The Hero's Journey is a structure for creating stories. It isn't possible to sit down and write an animé because the exact opposite applies: animé is a medium, and it's impossible to wring it from a different medium like text. Attempting to do so is completely antithetical to suspension of disbelief - it explicitly reinforces the story's fictionality, and, unless the author is trying to point that out, there is no defensible reason for it. When Walkiry talks about a "Mahou Shoujo transformation scene", when he mentions the protagonist's pink hair and cloyingly affected cry of "awuuu", he's not describing a scenario that he's imagined; he's describing shows that he's seen. It's literally fanfiction.
And he's proud of this! He actually believes that combining things mentioned on TV Tropes with other things mentioned on TV Tropes constitutes a valid approach to serious writing. His cheap facsimile of animé isn't an unoriginal mess of clichés; it's "Troperrific"! The more articles that you can link to from your work's page, the better! (Thankfully, Acqua di Gaia is currently undocumented on the site, but this isn't likely to last.) Walkiry thinks that making something "Troperrific" is an end in its own right, rather than a thing that either happens accidentally or distinguishes irredeemable hackwork, indiscriminately throwing ideas into his story because they were used before, not in spite of it. He's far more concerned with aping the shows that he likes than he is with actually telling a story.
Unsurprisingly, Acqua di Gaia fails to improve in this next passage:
Rubbing her face, she sat up.
"I can't stay on bed. I can't be late again."
She hugged herself as the chill of the outside world got through her flowery white and blue pyjamas, and quickly made for the bathroom with fast but short steps.
"Ran-chan? Are you awake?"
The feminine voice was coming from the kitchen. The origin was a woman standing in front of the sink washing dishes, and when the water from the tap slowed down its flow she closed it.
What dreck. Even the author, like anybody who's read the chapter title, is just going through the motions until he can get the real plot started. "I can't stay on bed." "The origin was a woman standing in front of the sink washing dishes, and when the water from the tap slowed down its flow she closed it." These sentences were written purely out of necessity, without any pretense of aesthetic value or any thought towards revision. (There's no way that this guy meant to type "on" instead of "in", but he couldn't even be bothered to spend two seconds fixing it.) Walkiry doesn't begin to realize that there's anything more to his story than its flashy "moments"; everything else is simply dashed out as fast as he can write it, and he never stops to look back and consider ways to improve it.
"That girl, she could at least respond," she said, shaking her head.
"Come on Miya, she just got up," the man sitting at the table responded, sipping his coffee.
"Sure Taizo, she takes after her dad, huh?"
This is how your dialogue ends up when you avoid socialization and read nothing but animé subtitles. Don't let it happen to you!
Also, how does Ran "take after her dad" by not responding when the only thing that her dad does here is respond?
She turned to the man and smiled. Her red hair was a shade darker than Ran's, and it was collected in a small bun on the back of her head. Taizo let his eyes linger on her wide and radiant smile, and then looked at her narrowed eyes and smiled too, shaking his head.
"I just can't resist that smile of yours, you devilish woman."
This jarring non sequitur provides a valuable insight into Walkiry's writing process. He wrote what he thought would be an impressive line (it isn't), perhaps one worthy even of enshrinement in this forum thread (it is), and shoehorned it into the first conversation in the story, not even waiting for an appropriate context. He thinks that conversations have two purposes: they can drive the plot with exposition, or they can showcase their authors' stylistic flair for dialogue. The latter is probably his idea of character development, but he fails to realize that good characters don't spout off meaningless, "snappy" one-liners to each other in lieu of actual discourse. It doesn't matter how a character talks if they aren't talking about anything in the first place.
It was only a few minutes before the door of the bathroom opened again.
"Ran-chan?" Miya called.
"Yeeeees."
"Hurry up or your breakfast will get cold!"
Ran walked into the kitchen and sighed.
"I hate this uniform," she complained as she sat down.
"No complaints young lady," Miya reproached her, "it's hard times for everyone, it is what it is."
"But moooom," she continued in her special I'm about to have a freak out complaining voice, "it's green and khaki and grey everywhere, even dad is wearing that and he's not even in the army! Why can't we wear something nice! A silk dress, a nice blouse, all I have that is not dull, dull, dull, is my ribbon, and it's the same pink as my hair! Why?!"
Girls are all hung up on how they look. That's how girls work, right?
This exchange does raise the question of who would buy a pink hair ribbon for a girl with pink hair, though, and would go to the trouble of matching the shades. I refuse to believe that the intent was benign.
She was about to take some air to continue when Miya put a plate full of breakfast in front of her. With an almost audible click, she forgot about her fashion woes, took up the cutlery and quickly went down to business eating. Miya smiled and patted her daughter's head.
"An almost audible click"? I get that Walkiry was trying to evoke the imagery of a switch being flipped to parallel Ran's sudden, inexplicable mood shift here, but he screws it up by saying that there's a literal click that just isn't loud enough for the characters to hear. On top of that, while he's decided that this bit of character development is significant enough to be worth a (failed) stab at a metaphor, he somehow fails to realize that it just makes the character look completely unhinged.
"Really, every morning the same thing…" Taizo said, shaking his head.
"Oh dear, are you going to start too?" Miya said, turning to her husband and smiling.
Taizo looked at his wife and started laughing.
"Ayah, you got me there."
"Ran takes so much after her dad."
Was Taizo, a grown man, a father, and the presumable breadwinner of the family, about to complain about how "dull, dull, dull" his breakfast was? Is this supposed to mean that Ran "takes so much after her dad" by whining about superficial things? And is all of this somehow intended to be endearing? I sincerely hope that there's a different way to interpret this stuff, because these characters otherwise grow only more off-putting with each word.
And with that and her smile, she sat down to have her own breakfast. Taizo stood up just a few minutes afterwards.
"Well, I for one don't want to be late, so I'll see you two later young ladies."
Taizo calls his teenaged daughter a "young lady". Not creepy.
Taizo calls his teenaged daughter and his adult wife "young ladies". Urghhh.
He winked, put on his grey cap, and headed off. The small apartment looked as if it had doubled its size with the departure, he was almost twice the size of his wife and his daughter combined.
Something Ran was very proud of. She smiled happily thinking of how jealous all the other girls were of her awesome father.
What? You mean that Taizo was a massive giant this whole time and you never mentioned it? Did it ever occur to you that people might have been visualizing that scene while reading about it? And it's such a heartwarming detail to know that Ran's peers have so little love for their fathers that they're jealous for hers based solely on his physical stature.
How big is this family's front door, anyway?
"You're smiling."
"Dad is awesome," she said in between bites. After she cleaned up the plate, she rushed out of the house, with a cheerful "I'm leaving!"
"Be careful!" Miya shouted as her daughter slammed the door, "really now, she goes from being all sleepy to being hyper in less than half a breakfast."
And so Ran sets out to start her day, leaving her mother to pointlessly reiterate the previous scene with an incredibly hackish line right out of a B-movie.
Now, I obviously can't continue at this level of detail - I'm close to a 3:1 ratio here between my text and the story's, and I've barely even scratched the surface of the first chapter for all of my ranting about it - but I wanted to show the way that incompetence stains every line of this travesty. It would be impossible to do that aspect of this story justice if I summarized any of its text; thinking about anything in Acqua di Gaia for more than two seconds (and, by extension, more than its author did) reveals ineptitude that only builds with further analysis.
"Now, Stellar Jetman," you may be wondering, "isn't that basically what you said about Antigua? And isn't that what made you not write about it?" There's an important difference here. Antigua's text is so formless and inarticulate, its characters so legion and so devoid of detail, its events so unpredictable and arbitrary, that a story can't even be discerned. Acqua di Gaia, on the other hand, at least attempts to have some sort of structure and logic, only failing in that it misapplies its ideas (to the extent that "throw the animé index on TV Tropes into a blender" and "attempt to write flashy one-liners instead of giving the characters actual dialogue" count as ideas) instead of having none at all.
It's also a better choice because, unlike Antigua, it fails in ways that can teach. Its ridiculous, exaggerated faults result more from inattention and a lack of restraint than anything else, and those problems can afflict any writer. Who hasn't been tempted to write "cool" ideas into their stories for their own sake or skim over less interesting areas when revising? By taking them to their more-or-less ultimate conclusions, Acqua di Gaia serves as a powerful warning against things like this.
More will follow shortly. Well, given that the Walkiry's actually shown up and seems like a cool enough person, and given that he apparently doesn't take the story all that seriously, continuing this series makes a lot less sense than it did before. I was really looking forward to doing more of it, but that would honestly be a lame thing to do at this point.
swenson on 6 January 2012, 23:19 said:
Well, now, this should be interesting. settles in
Stellar Jetman on 6 January 2012, 23:21 said:
Sorry about the technical difficulties, everyone; the article wouldn’t post from my computer, so I had to send it to SlyShy for him to post, delete it because stupid stuff happened to the formatting that I couldn’t fix, then re-send it to him. He then waited a day to post it in order to avoid having a glut of new articles on the site.
But all of that’s been taken care of now, and everything should go much more smoothly from this point.
Fireshark on 6 January 2012, 23:38 said:
I flipped forward a few chapters, and there’s an overlong wall of text for a transformation sequence, written in dreadful prose.
Written transformation sequences? Pink hair? What next, are her eyes taller than they are wide, too? Does she move at about 10 frames per second? Seriously, anime is a medium, not a genre. These visual tropes have no point in written fiction.
I rarely criticize dialogue, but this is horrible. It really does look like horrible subtitles.
Wow, what a sneaky description! I’d prefer a short infodump to this kind of contrived talk.
Karamazova on 7 January 2012, 01:33 said:
Lol, guys, look:
http://www.acquadigaia.com/on-tvtropes
Lord Bob Bree on 7 January 2012, 01:48 said:
Clearly, she is a robot, and that click was the mechanism that switches her personality program.
Everyone being a robot may or may not be an effective explanation for why all the characters act as they do.
Fireshark on 7 January 2012, 02:06 said:
He’s mad. I can smell it. Uses troll sense to scan post for meaning and anger
He’s focusing entirely on one aspect of the article, while carefully ignoring everything else. A basic technique. I want a real response from him about writing technique, use of visual tropes in writing, and writing believable characters and dialogue. I also want to know why he writes wall’o‘text transformation sequences, and why he’s so bad at punctuation.
Bottom line, he really wants us to be mad about one minor thing, so he won’t pay attention to the real criticism. He’s JUST ENTERTAINING US YOU GUYS! So’s Tesch.
Fireshark on 7 January 2012, 02:16 said:
Maybe that was a bit much, since I can still enjoy things that aren’t very well-written (Inheritance, etc). But the problems in his story definitely deserve criticism, which he should pay attention to.
Walkiry on 7 January 2012, 02:17 said:
I’m not mad. No, really, I’m not.
I’m not entertaining you either though, you’re doing a fine job at it yourselves. That’s what I meant shrug
The “focusing one only one aspect” is that it’s pretty much the one aspect that is, well, completely off. Much of this critique focus on the Tropes thing, which as I mentioned it was never played for anything more than some fun – it amuses me, it seems popular enough, and most people don’t take it very seriously.
Let’s see what else… Wall of text transformations? I explained it quite clearly – a joke on the Magical Girl Transformation Scene. Maybe you didn’t find it funny? It was never any deeper than that.
Visual tropes in writing… Same thing. You see, this post is completely right about that, it’s supposed to be writing like it’s a TV show. Go ahead and rage at it, so what?
What else… Puncuation? English isn’t my first language.
Anything else while I’m here?
Fireshark on 7 January 2012, 02:38 said:
Thanks, actually. I think it helps to better know what you were going for; perhaps the story just didn’t feel jokey enough for me to take certain bits correctly. I do think that, simply taken as a piece of written fiction, the story contains too many elements that don’t work in the format. If the story had been intended as a joke, I probably would have laughed my head off at the transformation scene and things like it. I think I took everything a bit more seriously than you meant it.
I still don’t think it’s good, obviously. But if I liked the story, it would have to become something it’s not supposed to be. I’m not going to ask you to do that, of course.
Stellar Jetman on 7 January 2012, 02:46 said:
@Walkiry
Good. You’re already better than ~99% of the bad writers on the Internet.
I’m honestly impressed that you came over here to respond to my article. It almost makes me feel bad for dumping on your story.
Exactly one section focuses on “the Tropes thing”. The rest of the article talks about how you botched the execution of the story itself.
Nothing in the story or the newspost indicated that it was intended as comedy.
It doesn’t matter if you wanted to write an animé; it’s still a horrible idea for the reasons that I mentioned in the article, and its problems run far, far deeper than its subject matter. You’d be better-off writing either true fanfiction or a complete parody. If this was intended as a parody of animé, you should start over and rewrite it, because it doesn’t begin to resemble one.
I focused on the content of the writing, not the mechanics. Everything that I said would still apply in a story with perfect grammar.
The only thing that I have “rage” for here is the idea that TV Tropes should be taken seriously as a writing aid. The story itself merits, at best, rolled eyes and a sigh.
Stellar Jetman on 7 January 2012, 02:53 said:
@Walkiry
I almost forgot to ask: how did you find out about the article so quickly?
Walkiry on 7 January 2012, 03:10 said:
The story itself is not entirely a joke, actually, so it’s not surprising it didn’t feel jokey enough for you. I guess one way to describe it is that I added all this as just a bit of fun window dressing, fun for me and I hoped a bit of fun for the reader too (guess it’s hit-or-miss, since believe it or not a few people I’ve shown the story to have found the out-of-medium parts to be a good bit of fun). If you shook the story to loosen them until they drop, the backbone of the whole thing wouldn’t change much.
Which goes back to the “on TvTropes” post I made, and what I meant. The Tropes are really fluff, and I don’t particularly try to hide it I think, so having much of the discussion hinge around good or bad use of tropes just struck me as… off, which I can only explain as carrying all the luggage of the SA thread.
That’s all really.
—-
Hm, Stellar posted while I was typing. Lessee:
“”“Exactly one section focuses on “the Tropes thing”. The rest of the article talks about how you botched the execution of the story itself.”“”
To be fair, a quick eyeglance shows it’s about half the article. One part, true, but a pretty hefty one at that.
“”“Nothing in the story or the newspost indicated that it was intended as comedy.”“”
Really? As I mentioned up there, a few of the chaps I’ve asked to take a look took those parts as the bit of fun they were supposed to be.
You’ll notice I’m not claiming the story is funny, I’m pointing at those “out of place” parts. I mean, doesn’t the fact that they’re played so straight give it away?
“”“It doesn’t matter if you wanted to write an animé; it’s still a horrible idea for the reasons that I mentioned in the article, and its problems run far, far deeper than its subject matter”“”
Okay, look, I just can’t think of anything that I can say that would convince you, because as I’ve mentioned, it’s really just about whether you’re enjoying reading it or not. So putting visual gags in text throws you off and you think it’s completely out of place, but… Well, some of us have fun with it, writing and reading them.
I don’t know, I just don’t see what the big deal is.
“”“I focused on the content of the writing, not the mechanics. Everything that I said would still apply in a story with perfect grammar.”“”
That was aimed at Fireshark, who wanted to know why my punctuation was bad. Actually, the whole thing you’re quoting was answering him.
“”“The only thing that I have “rage” for here is the idea that TV Tropes should be taken seriously as a writing aid.”“”
In that case, you’ll be glad to see I’ve repeatedly said I’m not taking it that seriously.
—-
And another post while I was typing!
As to how I found the article so quickly: Website logs, of course :)
I’ve been checking them regularly to see how the ads are doing and where people are clicking from the most. They’re incredibly cheap to run (an aside: I was very disappointed with Google AdWords, luckily it was a free $75 trial!), literally less than a dime a day if you don’t want massive traffic (2c-10c per click in general, as far as I can tell, I’m at the lower end of that). Not that I get paid commission, but Project Wonderful is actually pretty good, if any of you plans on setting up ads for anything.
Stellar Jetman on 7 January 2012, 03:36 said:
@Walkiry
I didn’t get the idea from the Something Awful thread; I just saw the word “Troperrific” in a Project Wonderful ad and assumed the worst. I do follow the thread, though, so it was interesting to see it surface over there, too.
As far as discussing “good or bad use of tropes” goes, it had more to do with the ad and the links in the news posts than it did with anything else. I saw a bunch of TV Tropes references and figured that you put a lot of stock in the site.
Yes; it’s very reassuring. I’ve seen serious animé-wannabe writing in TV Tropes’s own writing forum, so I figured that Acqua di Gaia was more of the same. And seeing it on a slick-looking, independent website made me think that you were even more serious about it.
I apologize for making that mistake.
Walkiry on 7 January 2012, 03:59 said:
Erm, that’s quite the coincidence then, the SA thread and this post are separated by days after running the same ads for something like 2 1/2 months, with the same opening angle and the “time marches on” hook. My mistake then, apologies.
I wonder if the ad sneaked into a brand new site in Project Wonderful at that time and that’s how I hit a new slice of people with it. Since those are the cheapest places to run ads (it’s all set up automatically, I have to scrub “troll” sites from time to time, but eh, it’s cheap).
“”“I’ve seen serious animé-wannabe writing in TV Tropes’s own writing forum, so I figured that Acqua di Gaia was more of the same. And seeing it on a slick-looking, independent website made me think that you were even more serious about it.”“”“
You could say I do take my fun seriously :) I take my fun more seriously than I take myself, in fact.
Stellar Jetman on 7 January 2012, 04:21 said:
@Walkiry
It’s a coincidence. I’m following or catching up on almost 20 webcomics right now, which makes for a lot of Project Wonderful ads. Normally, I have my ad blocker on, so I don’t see them, but I turned it off to get an unrelated image to display and saw your ad too.
Yeah, there’s really no way that I can write another article on this. Sorry for any trouble, Walkiry.
Walkiry on 7 January 2012, 04:31 said:
“”“Yeah, there’s really no way that I can write another article on this. Sorry for any trouble, Walkiry.”“”
Hey, no problem, and thanks, it’s been nice to be able to sort things out so quickly. And as I said, apologies for the implication with Something Awful, guess I was the one who put baggage into that bit :)
Stellar Jetman on 7 January 2012, 05:10 said:
@Walkiry
In all fairness, it was probably seeing it mentioned in the thread so soon after running into its ad that got me serious about writing the article in the first place.
And don’t apologize for associating me with Something Awful; I love the site, as zealous as some of its members may be.
star plus on 26 January 2012, 14:56 said:
this is nice serial i like it