Yamaku Book Club (20220124 Dish Washing)

[Mirage_GSM]

I sent you a few suggestions, but personally I think doing a whole bunch of stories at once is quite tiresome. I'd much rather go over one story (or a few shorts) in a shorter interval than reading half a dozen and struggling to write something about every one of them. Also, you'll exhaust the library in short order

[brythain]

I sent you a few suggestions, but personally I think doing a whole bunch of stories at once is quite tiresome. I'd much rather go over one story (or a few shorts) in a shorter interval than reading half a dozen and struggling to write something about every one of them. Also, you'll exhaust the library in short order

Okay, I shall try to limit it to five short stories or something like that, one a week or so? What do the rest of you think?

[Gajzla]

I would prefer to only have one story to focus on at a time, with one a week sounding about right. Thats just my preference though.

[dewelar]

*nods* If there's not going to be one large story focus, I agree that splitting the group into one or two a week would be best.

In reply to forgetmenot above, as I said in my own postscript I definitely appreciated your comments throughout. I can also relate to the concept "this would be a better story if it was a different story" (I've said as much myself to various authors), to which my only defense is that the story I told was, with minor exceptions, the story I wanted to tell.

[brythain]

No, it'll never be the final word on this work. But this is my last word for the session before we move on to a sequence of Emi pieces.

'Developments' is outstanding to me, not just for sentimental reasons, but because it traces in minute and believable detail the developments in the characters' inner lives as responses to external events. It is a thoroughly modern (by comparison to classic, post-modern or mythic) piece of literature in that it presents psychological growth—with all the stops, starts and funny transitions that are known to the human condition—of a reasonable nature. It gives us some degree of closure and satisfaction by the end, but not without repeatedly frustrating us along the way. It's indeed the story dewelar wanted to tell, although he might now (or in future) think he could have done it differently.

I think a lot of the readers here feel the same way, although we might have smaller differences about pacing, plot, and believability. Sometimes there are rabbits pulled out of hats, but most of the time, there is adequate warning even if that's only seen in retrospect. It thoroughly deserves all the comments and discussion that it has engendered, and surely enough, its place in the hall of fame (if we had one) of the KS fan fiction forum.

Thanks, dewelar, for spending time with us.

======

Currently, I have a list of almost a dozen Emi pieces that we can talk about. However, to ease us into this transition, I've dug up two of the oldest Emi stories in this forum. For the rest of this week, here are two very short pieces which you can comment on — in terms of how Emi is/was presented to us as a character, and suchlike. So, here we are:

Emi Ibarazaki: Fastest Thing On No Legs

Empty Hallways by cpl_crud (31 May 2007)
Crush by Silentcook (21 Mar 2008)

Next week, we'll have more Emi (after all, her birthday's coming up on 14 March). I'll add some Meiko and Nurse if I can find appropriate pieces. Thanks!

[Mirage_GSM]

Oldest stories indeed. Must have been years since I last read those...

Empty Hallways ins interesting in that most of Emi's backstory wasn't in place when it was written. The accident where she lost her legs apparently happened during her time at Yamaku - no idea why she would have been there in the first place in that case...
What also struck me were the similarities to Hanako's bad end: A obnoxiously helpful Hisao and the girl losing her cool over it. So now we now cpl-crud had played with that particular idea for a long time... Though the reconciliation was a bit quick in that particular case.

Crush, written almost a year later seems to have the backstory as well as the characterisation for both Emi and Rin more or less in place, though it's still a bit jarring to see the use of suffixes that were later dropped. Also Emi's assessment of Hisao's endurance is quite... generous. Also an optimistic outlook on life is not really his strong suit in the VN, so I guess Hisao's character was still a bit up in the air at the time.

[kaserkin]

Is "fan fiction" the right term to call things written by the authors of KS?

Anyway, Empty Hallways is very interesting. It seems that Emi had quite a different temper originally. She never really snapped like that when she was stuck on the wheelchair after her infection, but it's probably because she just lost her legs in this reality. It makes me wonder how things would have gone if she was at Yamaku for some other reason and then lost her legs during the course of the game. It would be a completely different story, but a very interesting one.
The Emi (and the Rin, who is pretty great) we see in Crush is much closer to the final version. Hisao also seems more optimistic about his new life at Yamaku, but it could just be because it's told from Emi's point of view.

I don't have much else to say, really. They are short pieces, but well written and engaging. They give great insight on how the characters evolved during development.

[TheHivemind]

Vanity demands I look in on this discussion, but really I ought to abide by the Prime Directive... I don't know, what do you think? Does the historical context of the piece change the meaning of the piece and cause it to mean something else? If you weren't like, there, man, does the actual meaning matter? How deep does the meta-rabbit-hole go when an author drops in on a fanfic discussion about a character he wrote? Does it matter if he wasn't the author when the fanfic was written? Are we on some Inception-style shit?

Well, maybe in this case it sort of does. Let's clear this up real quick:

Emi didn't just have her accident in crud's story. She just lost her running legs (I think at the time the idea was they'd break or something, but we changed it to be her getting an infection in the final version). Anyway, that's some Important Historical Context (or correction).

Right, Prime Directive broken, but it was for the Greater Good. Back to orbit or...whatever the hell. That whole metaphor fell apart on me about two sentences in.

Carry on.

[brythain]

Here's the extended list (I'll add to it every few days):

Emi Ibarazaki: Fastest Thing On No Legs

Empty Hallways by cpl_crud (31 May 2007)
Crush by Silentcook (21 Mar 2008)
Once (From The Vault) by TheHivemind (29 Apr 2009)
Emi's Winter Break by griffon8 (completed 03 Sep 2010) (long)

[Mirage_GSM]

Regarding Once...
Well, no offense, and you probably know it yourself, since you wrote it was unedited and you did much better later, but the writing's pretty awful.
There narrative voice is a mix of two subjective narrators changing freely back and forth between each other, and it's not always clear where the change happens, the tenses slip into past tense several times, and there are some run-on sentences - especially in the beginning - that felt like you were channeling A22...
The story itself... Well, with the pacing being what it was it felt more gratuitious than anything else.

What would be interesting is how this would have fit in the VN at all - you know, since the VN is First person narration from Hisao's PoV, and that's pretty much standard for almost all VNs.
Was there a time when you considered choosing another narrative voice for the VN?

Will comment on the other story later.

[Mahorfeus]

The script format of Empty Hallways threw me off, but then it is more of a prototype than a fanfic. I did like it, though it would not fit into the VN as we know it. Emi was simply too guarded and resistant to being helped in the final product. Hisao's actions here would have more than likely triggered her aversion 'white knighting.' But she is more vulnerable here, and I actually kind of liked that for whatever reason. That being said, in a route filled with drama, a scenario like this might have been too over the top.

If I had to sum up Once in one word, I would have to borrow Mirage's choice of gratuitous. I can't comment too much on the writing itself, but the entire prospect of these two characters just happening to meet under these circumstances failed to suspend my disbelief. That being said, their discovery of one another's sexuality didn't have to lead into a full-on yuri scenario, but then of course it did.

[brythain]

Hmm, interesting comments on older material. I'm going to add one more work from 2011, the year before KS was released. Then we'll take up to a week to finish reading 'Emi's Winter Break' (anyone with comments yet?) and... the latest addition. See below. I'll add some post-release works just before the Easter weekend.

Here's the Emi list v3.1 (I'll continue adding to it every few days):

Emi Ibarazaki: Fastest Thing On No Legs

Empty Hallways by cpl_crud (31 May 2007)
Crush by Silentcook (21 Mar 2008)

Once (From The Vault) by TheHivemind (29 Apr 2009)
Emi's Winter Break by griffon8 (completed 03 Sep 2010) (long)

Tripping by Mirage_GSM (started 14 Jun 2011) (long, incomplete as of 2013)




Note: Other Emi pieces already discussed in this thread include Rooftops (by Numb, written 24 Aug 2013, discussed from 17 Jul 2014), Exceeder (by Steinherz, written Feb-Apr 2013, on hiatus, discussed from 20 Jul 2014) and Ascent: An Emilogue (by Mountaineer, external, discussed from 12 Aug 2014). Mehkanik's Emilogue (also external) was linked on 17 Jul 2014 in the thread but not the first post. Links can be found in the first post of this thread.

[griffon8]

Hmm, what's this? Imminent talk about one of my writings?

Well, I guess I can make a return to the forums for that.

Thanks to Hoitash for letting me know this was happening.

[brythain]

Hmm, what's this? Imminent talk about one of my writings?

Well, I guess I can make a return to the forums for that.

Thanks to Hoitash for letting me know this was happening.

Glad to see you back! Also, I have no idea how best to feed more Hoitash into the Book Club. Probably need a special event for that.

[Hoitash]

Hmm, what's this? Imminent talk about one of my writings?

Well, I guess I can make a return to the forums for that.

Thanks to Hoitash for letting me know this was happening.

Glad to see you back! Also, I have no idea how best to feed more Hoitash into the Book Club. Probably need a special event for that.

I have written a great many holiday specials.

And summer series. And summer is coming (it's spring now.)