Katawa Shoujo Forums

Pacing, huh?
Well, I guess we have to chalk that one up to my insufficient writing skills as well.
I think it's hard to write time skips, especially in a story where the protagonist is experiencing a lot of new stuff. It would just feel strange to me to let a few days pass and then explain something that the protagonist should have learned long before.

This is also something that bugs me a lot in many Anime: The protagonist has a burning question, and there are people around who know the answer, but for some reason he doesn't simply ask, is satisfied with an evasive answer or is interrupted by something and afterwards simply forgets to ask again.
In some extreme cases (like the recent Witchcraft Works) the question in question (pun intended) is something as trivial as "Why the heck is everybody trying to kill me?"

In the case of this story I didn't see a plausible reason to add a time skip. The story I wanted to tell (sans epilogue) neatly fit into the one week timeframe, and the only part where I could have plausibly inserted a time skip was before the climax. I thought that would be a bad idea since it would have taken all the momentum away.

My searches didn't find anything, and I don't feel the desire to duplicate someone else's work, so I was wondering if someone has saved this into a pastebin, a .txt/.doc file, or somewhere else for download/archival?

If not, I'll take a shot at it here shortly since I believe that just copy/pasting will not suffice and minor adjustments will have to be made.

Wow, amazing fic. Was skeptical of the idea at first. I just read all of it in one go.

It has acktion, magicks, and Hisao/Misha. Win.

and
Kenji being a relevant and useful character... Yay!

before i start reading, is it all about misha or hisao? MY friend told me that you intergrated KS with some other vn

AnImpatientUser wrote:before i start reading, is it all about misha or hisao? MY friend told me that you intergrated KS with some other vn

I can only offer some useful advice here: check out our libraryand see the listing for further information about many of the stories here.

The romance is between Misha and Hisao, but all characters from Act 1 do get some screentime.
There is no other VN "integrated" in this story.

@Frankyo:
Thank you very much.

Poor, stupid me. I thought I was walking into a regular old Misha route, and suddenly, mind-readers and mages start jumping out of of nowhere.

Also, is there any particular reason SilentCook hates crossovers?

All very valid points SC. ^_^, but even in visual media, aspiring artists will copy works for practice. If that's what it is, then it's all good. But as I stated. ALL valid points.

Keep after it Mirage. Bring a meat tenderizer if you must. In my line of work, my stuff is edited by various people. Always. From my point of view, it's looking good. I've picked my pencils and sketch pads back up and I'm in for several weeks of pain while I try to get my fine motor skills resharpened. :\

Given that this story is over two years old I don't plan to do much editing for it - barring someone finding a typo.
And since my goal was to see if I could write a good* story about the characters gaining superpowers (or in this case magic) it was not avoidable that it became what is by SC's definition a crossover. (It's not one by my definition, though. For me, to be a crossover it would need at least a second fictional work as a basis.)

Anyway, thanks for the feedback!

*for some definitions of "good"

Time to drag this thing back out again. I actually remember starting to read this at some point, but then I stopped and I don't remember why.

Mirage has gotten better as a writer since then, but this is still a delightful little romp. Early chapters seemed a bit rushed and crowded. Finding out Misha liked Hisao, finding out she was potentially dying of cancer, and then discovering they had magic powers all about the same time was a a bit much, but in the end it all wrapped together nicely (although I still don't think Misha having a major relapse was necessary to the plot.

I think you write action scenes much better than you give yourself credit for as well. Those worked out wonderfully, with everybody pitching in at the right moments and not making their victory seem too easy. That's something I've seen a lot of action writers here have trouble with.

Mirage has gotten better as a writer since then,

Interesting - considering I haven't actually written all that much since then

And yes, it probably is rushed compared to a lot of other fictions, but I'm really not the type to put in whole chapters as padding in between the relevant plot. If I were to write the story again today, I probably would use about the same amount of words for the same plot.

What I WOULD change is that I'd probably stretch the story over two or three months by inserting a few time-skips. This story was written as a direct continuation of Act 1, and that basically followed Hisao from morning to evening each day, and I followed that without thinking about it too much. The result is that all of the story is packed into one week, which is really quite a fast pace.

I stand by what I wrote a few posts above: It's hard to believably use time skips in situations where everything is new to the narrator/protagonist, but I guess I should have worked in a few anyway.

Thanks for the compliment about the action scenes. I'm also satisfied with how they turned out, but the fact is that while I wrote most scenes in one go without tweaking more than a phrase or two afterwards, I spent four or five times of that effort on the last few chapters.

although I still don't think Misha having a major relapse was necessary to the plot.

Her relapse was the reason she visited him in his room in "Poor Unfortunate Souls". Without it that relationship would never have come to pass within that first week. So yes, it only needed to be there, because of the "rushed" thing, but in that sense it was neccessary.

7/8 years feels like a fair revival period yeah? Well, even if not I'm here to leave a comment anyways. This was a really fun read and I quite like a lot of the ideas and twists in it. The story was fun, the premise was fun, and the execution was fun. Sometimes a story doesn't need to be sensible to work, and I think this story proves that. Honestly Kenji typically really annoys me more than anyone in the KS-verse, but I found myself okay with his presence here, and by the end I was even slightly-willing to accept his relationship with Hanako (with the headcanon that she has been slowly "calming" him down to believe that a "brutal war" was never the end goal of the enemy, but a slow and silent takeover from the shadows that he should work against slowly and silently as well. Still eccentric, but less outlandish, but that's just me.)

As other discussed earlier, there were issues to be with it, particularly the breakneck pace of the story, but again, if you are willing to believe magic exists in this world and it just so happens that all of our main characters from the game just so happen to be the only magical girls (and boys) in the school, the other plot-points become easier to digest as well. I also know some of that comes from personal taste of liking slower stories (that are well paced, not drawn out for the sake of being drawn out).

There was also some characterization that I felt was a little out of place, but it was just that. A little. And when the base-structure of the story shifts as much as adding magic into the world does, than the characters would probably act a little different as well. In the end, it was a fun story meant to have big and fun scenes to imagine. Shizune literally commanding everyone around her to fall to their knees before her? Check. Emi Charging someone at faster than anyone reasonably could? Check. Lilly seeing the entire battlefield before her and keeping everyone connected? Check. Hanako tanking a literal fireball? Check. Rin painting the world in her image? Check. Kenji defying the odds and being legitimately a chill dude? somehow, check! Hisao being a Knight in shining armor, but literally(ish)? Misha? Check. Literally just a really fun and well executed story that does exactly what it sets out to do really well. Thanks for the fun read over 10 years later Mirage!

Thank you for the praise!
I may not check the forums as regularly as I once did, but it is always nice to find a post like this waiting when I come back.

As for the pacing, that was very much intentional. I wanted to include sonething of releveance for the plot / character development in every scene (even if that relevance would only become clear later on). If a scene didn't have that, I just summarized it in a short flashback.

And the characterization... Well as you said a bit of license was neccessary here, but also this story was written before the full release, so I had only Act 1 to go on at the time.