what a polite and kind-hearted young lady
i'm sure no shenanigans involving the consumption of books will take place between her and another interesting fellow
(+1'd a while ago, but i wanted to add something to the discussion)
Entity 140 - "Blanche" / Discussion
Forum
» Meta / Per page discussions
» Entity 140 - "Blanche"
This is the discussion related to the wiki page Entity 140 - "Blanche".
Context?
Ok WOW. With the rewrite it is now my favorite entity entry BY FAR.
YO WHAT HELL YEAH
- Snom, Backrooms Wiki Site Admin
(account deleted)Agreed, blanche is definitely my favorite person in the whole of backrooms (below her of course is berry)
Don't ask about my name I made it when I was 10
THANKS
- Snom, Backrooms Wiki Site Admin
One of my favorite entities then, one of my favorites until now. So glad to have you two in the Backrooms Universe. As always, +1
So, I'm quite conflicted with this one tbh, I’ve decided to novote for now, but this may change if/when I re-read the article.
But let’s begin with the epic viv review shall we?
So, to begin with, we have the "default" Blanche article, the front so to speak. There isn't really much to talk about with this, just your average backrooms entity article, very well written of course, but this isn't the meat of the article so let's move on
The part where almost all the content of the article is, the offset, and this is also where my conflict is.
First we have the interview, where most of our Blanche lore reveal comes from, I… didn't really enjoy it, it was mostly just "not bad", it sadly follows the fantasy info dump format, I saw that you tried to make the conversation look more casual but in the end the
>oh, can you tell me about this thing
>of course, the ancient lands of- [paragraph]
>that's very interesting, but what about this other thing?
>ah, so you want to know about the [thing] little one, well- [paragraph]
was quite noticeable, I do understand that there weren't really many options to give this information so… yeah
Then we have the second part, the Blanche monologue, the "OMFG" ending, and yes it was very surprising, I did not expect the meta ending at all! (the whole beyond thing went completely over my head!, I assume that witnessing the beyond means that the character discovers that is a character in a story, right? This may just be me looking too much into it, lmao)
So the meta ending right, this is what I am not sure if I like, the mentions of scp and the wanderers library, it's just- I don't think this article is for me, it's well written that's for sure, the pace it's mostly great, but… phew idk, I may have to reread this later to really discover if I like it or no, but for now it's a no-vote from me.
aaaaaanyway, good job snom, you created something great, and i love to see that the community enjoys it!
You got the beyond right. The other website references might get axed- it was a good idea at the start but i'm not too keen on it right now.
Thanks for the crit, viv!
- Snom, Backrooms Wiki Site Admin
Update, references axed
- Snom, Backrooms Wiki Site Admin
I feel really conflicted writing this cause I know how much work went into this, but I have to be honest. This was really hard for me to read, for a multitude of reasons, leading me to downvote.
First of all, the entity page itself without the offset is very bare compared to the information presented in the actual interview, which feels very odd given that there's so much information in the interview that there should realistically be much more in the entity page. If I cut the interview out, then the entity page would not be able to stand by itself, even though it should at least have some material to it. My former criticism still stands in regards to the entity page itself. It feels more like a hub than an actual page. And it still feels like a hub, with the offset just being another link.
The interview itself was very hard to get through for a number of reasons, some of which Viv stated earlier. It read like a very heavy lore dump one would find in a fantasy world, except this one has multiple interconnected storylines that challenge the reader to keep track of all the information whilst still maintaining attachment without providing anything for the reader to get emotionally attached to. Sure, this mythos might sound cool, but why should I care at all about any of the gods or what they did before it's known that one of them was/is Blanche?
I was able to stomach the first little story, but by the second or third I was getting really tired. It feels like a painted skeleton instead of something with any meat. It seems like it was more an amalgamation of ideas rather than a fleshed-out cohesive story, because the whole structure of it lent itself to progressing the information without regards to interest. It's like not seeing characters as people but only a means to progress the plot. That's what all the gods were like to me. Not anybody I could get invested or even care about, but just meaningless names that eventually led to learning about one aspect of Blanche. It's grammatically sound as well, but the dialogue is clunky in that it doesn't portray emotion well. It has a huge vibe of "telling and not showing" because I don't ever get any picture of how Blanche actually feels during this episode. When Blanche started crying in the end, it caught me totally off guard because her dialogue didn't even portray that she was saddened. I thought she was simply using a neutral tone, not being emotional.
About the ending, it felt pretty anticlimactic. Viv said that he did not expect it at all, but to me, it was pretty predictable and I was secretly hoping you wouldn't go down that route. The whole revelation, since there is no tension or buildup, doesn't have any oomph or power to it. It's like if you wrote a story, but started with exposition about the world and then skipped to the climax. You have a lot of information here. A lot of great concepts and really nice worldbuilding. But it's all suffering because you shoved it into a box too small for it and crushed its organs. I would be really interested if this whole backstory was explored in separate parts, but it feels like a sandwich with two loaves of bread and no meet. There's no motion to this story, only plot points.
This also brings me to Blanche as a character herself. While you can sort of do some hand-waving with her mysterious godlike properties, she feels shockingly one-dimensional. Perhaps it's the fact that she always acts the same and doesn't really show any sense of external factors affecting her, but it seems like Blanche is more a role than a person. When I was reading this article, I didn't feel any sort of attachment to her because it feels like she's a stoic, tea-loving brick. It's hard to grasp what she feels or thinks at any given moment, and it's really hard to relate to her. Perhaps it would be better if you tried a story from a first-person perspective that explores her internal thought process, but it feels like too much is handwaved away because it's "mysterious."
Blanche's powers also are kind of questionable, narratively and logically. It's a bit of a power creep. She has so many abilities and skills, and yet there isn't much shown that she does with them, or ways they are integral parts of her character. Such with the dreamwalking and the mindreading, it feels like they were put there to explain a plot hole or look cool than to develop Blanche as a character. This is a huge trap that so many fantasy writers fall into when writing godlike beings. There's too much power, too much ambition, and not enough depth. Blanche, to me right now, is a shallow pool of water, covering many bases but not deep enough to swim in any. Blanche to me is a leaky boat patched with Band-Aids. There's bound to be logical inconsistencies and sprung leaks further down the line if you don't heavily explore some of these topics and abilities, as well as the moral, real, and narrative implications.
The same characterization can be applied to Dawn. In this interview, at least, she doesn't seem like an actual two-dimensional character. She's more akin to anon questions in a QnA forum. Part of this is because her dialogue is impersonal and generic, but also because there's no motion from her herself. In the entire course of the interview, she learns things, but neither of them really change fundamentally as a person. She's just there to provide mild reactions, go "ooh" and "aah" and move the story forward. All these small things combined made it just really hard for me to get through the article because there wasn't anything there that made me invested. It was extremely dry and read more like a list of facts than a narrative piece, even though it was framed like a tale. One other thing of note that Sludge pointed out earlier is that Blanche tends to overuse ellipses in her writing, which I noticed at the ending part.
The lack of depth of Blanche's character also makes the notes written by her feel forced and disingenuous. I can tell that it was written by someone who is not Blanche, because I know that person's style of writing, but I don't know Blanche's style of writing because I don't have a grasp on her personality. It's also similar to how stoic she is - it feels really monotonal; all the Blanche notes read exactly the same, which is good for consistency but bad for character development and depth.
These are just my personal gripes. Overall, from a simple SPaG standpoint, it's written well. I also love the concepts posed in this article, besides the trite ending meta-reveal. I like the backstory… I just want more thorough explanations. This is a good start, in my opinion. It's a sort of outline, but I don't think this is nearly the finished product just yet. I would personally focus on blowing back the ambition a bit, and really analyzing Blanche's character - both her front personality and her internal details that seem to be missing. Instead of going all out in terms of crazy concepts, I suggest you dial it back a bit more and work on building Blanche up as a character before building her up as a plot device.
That's all I have for ya, good luck writing!
Echoing the sentiments here, Rika was able to capture everything I couldn't get out of my head about the article. I differ on some things of course, but I found myself nodding a fair amount of times while reading this comment.
thanks for the +1! glad to hear you liked it :3
- Snom, Backrooms Wiki Site Admin
+1 Quickly became one of my favorite entities in the Backrooms after reading her page and her associated pages!
I'm glad to hear it!
- Snom, Backrooms Wiki Site Admin
Congratulations on this page exeecding 90 up votes!
/forum/t-14045839/entity-140-blanche#post-