+1 from Goerman
Nikuchan,
So happy to see the hard work of my friend and colleague finally come to fruition.
Entity 68 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page Entity 68.
I'll preface this with I'm not gonna go in depth or give much feedback because nothing will come of it.
This is a very safe take on the partypoopers. The same issue I pointed out before of how you could the text written by party husks with third person pronouns and say the MEG wrote it and there'd be issues. There's nothing personal to this like I don't get why it's first person. But also, as I said, this is extremely safe. They're too homogeneous and bascally just the absolute good guys in the party world.
Ths feels like a rewrite to get a fan favourite back on site, not a rewrite to improve quality or fix flaws.
This is an excellent way of putting it, and I completely agree.
It's not like the article is poorly designed or poorly written either, but it's just… bland and sterilized.
Niku is always excellent at putting passion into her work, which is why this article feels so off to me. Like you said, it feels like a rewrite to get partypoopers back on site, not to improve or build upon the concept past a basic requirement.
I'll list a few of my thoughts here:
Positives:
(+) Good explanation on Partypooper biology ("phobic centipedes are underdeveloped, etc") in order to make them unique
(+) Having them be a separate strain of the "Partygoer virus" (so to speak) allows for some creative use of the rewrite in the future
Negative:
(-) Overwhelming abundance of artificial sympathy. Like Limdoc said, "There's nothing personal to this, I don't get why it's first person." We simply don't care about these characters, as they haven't been built up properly for any of their struggles to have real effect on a reader. Throwing in a line or two about "he misses his wife," and "People are going to treat me like shit now" are examples of this. They mean nothing, because we haven't been given time to actually walk in Reginald's shoes. Perhaps I'm being a tad bitter, but I strongly dislike when people go this route for trying to build emotional connections with characters. It feels unoriginal and it never pays off. This is the page's biggest downfall for me, aside from its sterilized feel. The "artificial sympathy" takes up a majority of the page's content; it's an overload of crybait that has no time to properly set in and warrant a real emotional response.
Conveying an emotion is one of the hardest things to do as a writer, I won't lie. Most people on this site have trouble truly capturing that essence. I'm not experienced enough to tell you how to connect with an audience, it's something you need to figure out how to do for yourself. There is no right way to do it, but there are certainly wrong ways. In this article it feels uninspired and insincere, which is *not* what you want for this type of thing.
In summary, I would like to see this revisited in the future. There's definitely potential here if given a proper format. The concepts of the entity can definitely be expanded on, but you've made a good starting point. Unfortunately, the safe nature of the page detracts from its positives.
Novote.
i agree with some peoples' negative points on this article, and i intend to give you some crit in DMs if i ever get the chance.
that being said, i really felt for the character and the imagery (especially the idea of not being able to hold a pen, that does speak to real disabilities) is very vivid. i appreciated it, and the page made me smile by the end.
~ scutoid (backrooms wikidot mod, backrooms fandom admin.)
I'm not an easy reader to please. The fact that this entry entertained me says something. I cared about these characters. I found the MEG's cavalier attitude toward humans stuck in partygoer bodies to be troubling.
There is a lot of potential here. I respectfully disagree with others in that I think first person fits well, especially if you take the time to flesh this out a little more. I'd like to see the protagonist's transformation in more detail. Take time to show how he and his family were attacked. How they all died. How he transformed into this monster on the outside. How he realized he was different. How he reacted to the other partygoers. How he ditched them. How he found others like himself. How he first approached MEG and how that first meeting went. You could add all the previous details as part of his first meeting with MEG, telling them the tale. These are just ideas, but these details would make your character even more real to me.
That being said, I did enjoy it the way it is written. I never read the original post, so i have nothing to compare this with.
/forum/t-16848478/entity-68#post-