The V2 Read-o-thon

[Ruggahissy]

An interest that Sorenson has is in gory movies, he claims that they are an indulgence (of course what he doesn’t say is that he had a full hard on during House of 1000 corpses, mostly because it would ruin his reputation and he assumes it was hormones), so Sorenson is just your average guy...except for a slight incident in a movie theater of course, but don’t worry it probably is insignificant.

You can ignore everything else in Sam’s profile, because once he gets to the island, this is pretty much the only part that seems to have been important as far as his handler was concerned. His story begins with a series of four (count ‘em) one-shots, each one more disturbing and difficult to read than the last. I consider myself fairly desensitized to that sort of stuff, and even then I found a lot of them difficult to read.

Right from the get-go, Sam has a wet dream about brutally raping and murdering one of his classmates, and things only slide downhill from there. After a dream conversation with his “darker self”, he jettisons the entire personality listed in his profile and roleplayed in pregame and becomes a collection of the most despicable and evil character traits that the author could think of. He then proceeds to have sex with two corpses, described in graphic detail, while revealing in a flashback that his father is also a necrophiliac. In the last post of the series of one-shots, he strips naked and runs off with the goal of finding and raping Whitney Acosta.

When we come to his first actual thread, it’s probably no surprise that Sam doesn’t enter until the final page, completely ignoring everything that happened before him and flashing his “eleven inches of man” at the people inside before immediately running away.. His post begins with a note that says ((WARNING: NC-17 CONTENT)) as if inviting everyone inside to avoid reading it. After a quick “what the fuck” reaction from the two characters still in the thread, they immediately begin talking about something else and never mention what happened again.

His next thread begins in the same way, but even worse somehow. It begins with a fairly decent post containing Lee-Ann Collier sadly reflecting on her situation by a lake and trying to feed a stray cat that she had found. Clearly not impressed with the muted reaction that he got the last time, Sam enters the thread and immediately ejaculates on her face, with his described penis size seemingly having doubled since the last thread. The thread, now suitably derailed, results in Sam decides to finally cover his nakedness by borrowing clothes from the girl. Unfortunately, this being Sam Sorenson we’re talking about, we’re treated to a graphic description of the process of tucking his massive erection into the Lee-Ann’s small panties, before he then decides to complete the ensemble with a dress. As if to torment the reader with a small hint of reprieve, the religious beliefs mentioned in his profile come back for a couple brief posts before he immediately resumes fantasizing about brutal rape.

Coming right off of declaring to himself his intention to rape and murder Lee-Ann, he immediately falls madly in love with her. Sam’s next post after that is written by Lee-Ann’s handler, and is probably the best quality post that Sam gets in his entire run. Here we get a bit of introspection from Sam’s point of view, and while he’s still a little twisted and evil, his justification for wanting to murder Lee-Ann is given more thought than “I LIKE RAPE”, which is nice.

Unfortunately, right after this sudden increase in post quality, he and Lee-Ann go inactive and are adopted by Mitsuko2. I was pleasantly surprised to see Mitsuko actually attempt to roleplay as the characters she adopted for once rather than unceremoniously have Mariavel kill them off in a single sentence, Nevertheless, their final thread isn’t too interesting to read, with both of them ending up killed off fairly quickly, with Sam basically turning into a feral beast after Lee-Ann detonates her own collar to avoid getting raped, and rushes Huy Tran and Anna Dibenidetti before getting immediately put down in a matter of seconds.

In conclusion: As a SOTF character, Sam fails pretty hard. He exists solely to shock and disgust the reader, and immediately attempts to derail any thread that he enters. As an experiment to test the boundaries of what horrific extremes a handler can get away with without being being shut down by the site’s moderators, Sam is unfortunately a success. He’s memorable, and not in a good way, sadly. Regardless, I’m still glad that I read him, if only for the bragging rights of saying that I have read what is perhaps SOTF’s worst character.

I was really tempted to stop rolling characters here, but I suppose there’s nowhere to go but up, quality-wise. I’ll take another one.

[Ruggahissy]

Brad Wilson is a Slacker/Chad character. If you’re familiar with some of Chad’s other contributions to V2 *coughcoughSamSorensoncoughcough*, you might assume we’re in for a bumpy ride, and you’d be right about that. He’s not as bad as a lot of Chad’s other V2 kids, but he’s still not the best character (far from it).

Profile: Brad Wilson is fourteen years old. His hobbies include being a member of the NRA and Junior Businessmen of America, and running a drug trafficking ring. Oh joy. Brad wears a suit, and his appearance can be described as “cat-like”. It is now canon the Brad Wilson is an actual cat wearing a suit.

[+] A photograph of Brad Wilson

Brad’s dad (Braddad) is, ahem, “leader of the most brutal gang in all of the U.S. with major forts in every state”. Well okay, I guess. Whatever. Brad’s life is described as a life of wealth, sex, and murder, none of which were mentioned on his list of hobbies *nitpicknitpick*. This statement is immediately contradicted by the fact that Brad’s life was normal, up until he was six. What happened, you may ask? Well, I’ll tell you right now, dear reader. Brad’s father brought him to a dark room and made little Brad shoot a dude in the face (Chad’s also pimping his V1 character right now, in a way that I like far less than Adam pimping himself in Pants’ profile). Life went back to normal for Brad, even though he shot a dude when he was six. Later in that sentence, it claims that Brad was selling drugs to his classmates when he was twelve. I dunno if I’d classify that as “normal”, but hey, maybe things are different in New Jersey. Brad befriended a boy named Louis, and promptly frames him for murder (this has no point, it’s just thrown into the profile to make Brad EEEEEEEEVVVVVVVVVVVVIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEERRRRRR). The last of the two paragraphs that compose Brad’s biography is dedicated to describing how Brad is an asshole, and a WEAK LITTLE BOY. His advantages are that he has a cold demeanor, and that he has gun skillz yo. His disadvantages are that Jonathan Michaels doesn't like him (COME ON CHAD YOU’RE EVEN PIMPING YOUR V2 CHARACTERS STOPPPPPPPPP), and that he has a cold demeanor. Well, okely-dokely, that’s that, then.

A lot of the names of Chad’s V2 threads are references to Peter Gabriel songs, and that’s bad because I like Peter Gabriel songs. Speaking of Chad!threads named after Peter Gabriel, let’s head to Brad’s only thread.

ISLAND: Brad’s story is a cautionary tale on the dangers of giving shotgun-toting murderers named Jonathan Michaels large doses of LSD without their prior knowledge. So, Brad is apathetic to the game because, in his own words, “He can hide in a mountain.”. Honestly, I’m very confused right now. Brad wants Jim Greynolds to come save him, and then Chad makes a gay joke. I’m still confused.

Brad sees Jonathan (Who has just come away from killing Chad’s SI), and decides he wants to make Jon into a slave boy. I’m not making this up. He then decides that LSD is the perfect way to do so, and y’know, I’m not really an expert, but I’m not sure that’s how it works. This feels reminiscent of the legend of the man who did so much LSD he thought he was an orange for the rest of his life. According to Brad, this is necessary for his survival, but I’d disagree. He could just survive by hiding in a mountain, obviously.

Brad then walks up to Jon, who is immediately all like “can u fuck off pls?”. Brad responds by being like “Well gee golly, Jon! How about we calm the heck down and drink some of this water that I definitely haven’t laced with LSD!” and then Jon’s like “M’kay.”. Jon has a headache and angsts for a bit (his headache is described as ball-busting. I guess maybe Chad thought a man’s testicles were in his head, I dunno.), and then he drinks the LSD water. After drinking the drugwater, Jon then hallucinates a multitude of unpleasant things, and he kills Brad for some reason.

HEY! CHAD STOLE MY BIG COLOURED NOISE FORMATTING SHITTERY! I’M SUING! The rest of the post is entirely from Jon’s perspective, and somehow by the end of it, Brad ends up naked and has his chest caved in, neither of which are explained. Jon then shoots Brad in the face before making a really shitty one-liner that makes no sense and is also the title of the thread. The end.

Conclusion: Well, I don’t really have much to say about Brad, because it’s pretty obvious he was designed as a prop for Jonathan Michaels’ story. His writing is technically competent for the most part, but the actual content is kinda meh, and I’m not even gonna touch upon his realism, because that kind of stuff is to be expected from V2. Brad’s an obviously EEEEVVVVVIIIIIILLLLLLL pre-made player type character, so I guess I’m kind of glad he died early on without contributing to the hordes of V2’s premade players. He only really existed to give Jon another kill to angst about, which I guess for V1-3 is okay, but I’d have rather he’d been written by another handler so the Jonathan/Brad scene could’ve been more cohesive and less character cannibalization-y. Like, I can’t say that I hated him, but I can’t recommend him either. Excluding his profile, he had maybe three paragraphs that were dedicated to him, and the rest were just Jon being sad/high AF. He just doesn’t have enough content. Like, most of my gripes from reading him were about Jon, which kind of makes sense, considering the amount of time Chad dedicates to each character. Brad had lots of potential to be a not-a-fodder character, and he could’ve even been somewhat interesting given he was done right, but instead he got fed to his handler’s flagship.

Next!

[Ruggahissy]

Maggie Heartgreeder was too nice for SOTF.

Her pregame is pretty good. She starts in a bit of an odd situation, dealing with the aftermath of Kim Jones-Laramie's murder, but she handles it rather realistically, panicking at the idea of someone dying in school and trying to get her mind off of such awful things. From there she just goes on about her day, being fairly pleasant aside from a few harsh thoughts about Siouxie Sioux that she immediately chastises herself for thinking. She's not outlandish or gimmicky, she's just... normal. And it works.

On the island, Maggie worries about players and the possibility of dying, but she still tries to be nice and help people when they just so happen to blunder her way. She does get nervous after more people start to show up, particularly in the case of one Garry Dodd, and she leaves.

Her deathpost is a bit of an odd spot for me. It's a massive series of flashbacks set to Sarah McLachlan's "In the Arms of an Angel" just as a power line falls into a puddle and electrocutes her, killing her instantly and painlessly. It's not badly written, but I think that there may be just a bit too much going on at once. Then again, I suppose that oneshots are there for us to experiment in such a way.

Maggie's a good read written by a competent writer, and I think I could recommend her. You won't find brutal fights or high drama, but you'll get a nicely written, consistent character, and that's a pretty good deal.

Another character, please.

[Ruggahissy]

Alrighty, Justin Moore! Written by Dan, who was a pretty good writer and stuff!

Profile! So, right off the bat, I’ve got a good feeling about this one. His hobbies are normal things that I would expect a teenager to do. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about Justin’s physical appearance. Sure, if he was a character from a recent version he’d need a lot more details, and it explains that he has a (normal!) medical condition that doesn’t seem like it would fit into his appearance, but he’s from V2, back when we were less strict with stuff. I have no complaints so far. His bio is pretty good, too! There’s nothing out of the ordinary about him, sure it has some tonal issues and is lacking in detail, but as I said before, this is V2, so it’s excusable. Overall, I’m optimistic about his time on the island, though I haven’t run into him before in all of my V2 reading. Oh golly, he’s got five threads, too!

ISLAND TIME! Justin’s first thread is a oneshot, in which he wakes up in the sewers, notices it smells like a sewer, speedreads his weapon guide, decides against playing, notices it smells like a sewer again, and then leaves. It’s decent. I don’t have much to say about it, but it’s solid.

Thread dos! Justin heads over the the mansion ruins, where he finds another smelly thing. This time, it’s a corpse! Wooooooooooooooooo! Man, Justin’s been having some bad luck with odors today. There’s some OOC Megami yelling at Dan action, and then Justin leaves the thread because the mansion became a DZ, and nobody joined his thread because like everyone else was inactive or killing inactives. Oh well.

In his next thread, Justin heads over to the residential district, stumbling upon Maggie Heartgreeder’s dead body. He uses a stick to grab Maggie’s bag from the electrified pool of water she died in, and then he takes a nap. His next post is one IRL month later, in which he leaves the thread because nobody joined. I’m beginning to see a pattern here. Next thread.

In this thread, Justin is joined by Blake Ross (a personal V2 favourite), which is a good thing, because now Justin can actually do something. YAY! They have a short conversation, and then Justin leaves. This was actually a pretty good thread; like, there’s a bit of dialogue that doesn’t make that much sense, but otherwise it was neat. Next thread.

This is Justin’s last thread, and it is rather fittingly titled “This is the End”. (HMMM SUBTLETY). Looks like he’s gone inactive now. Shoot. Well, now he’s being written by Kyle, and it is dark and spoooooooooooky outside. Justin immediately decides he’s playing now (thanks V2), but then some rando starts shooting (it’s not even mentioned who), and Justin’s like “YIKES!” and runs away. Mid-run, Justin falls over and lands on his knife (THE OG KNIFE-FALL DEATH, BEAT THAT V3!), and in the midst of his “AHHHHH I LANDED ON A KNIFE THE PAIIIIIIIIIIN!” writhing, he falls down a manhole and explodes or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Conclusion: Justin had a lot of wasted potential, but aside from going inactive, none of it is his fault. Like, he could’ve been really cool just being a normal person on an island full of not-normal people, but unfortunately nobody ever joined his threads (aside from Blake Ross, who was one of V2’s rare normal people). He was good while he actually had a chance to interact with people, but alas nobody ever interacted with him.

Another one!

[Ruggahissy]

I can't really say much about Preston. He wasn't terrible in pregame, but his posts were all, like, 3-4 sentences long maximum, so there's not much to critique.

His only island thread has Mitsuko2 roleplaying him at the same time as 3 of her other characters. Her posts switch between perspectives so frequently that barely any time is given any particular one of the characters. After a few posts in this crowded thread, Preston sacrifices himself to save one of Mitsuko's other characters, and his death scene is written entirely from the perspective of his killer. Overall, he felt more like an NPC than an actual protagonist, even in his own story.

Another character, please.

[Ruggahissy]

Tanesha Lexx was disappointing. I had read good work from Megami already, but Tanesha was not good at all.

In pregame, she spent a lot of time thinking about how much she hated other girls, particularly the popular girls. Shen she wasn't dwelling on that, the narrative was pointing out how fat and ugly she was. She had a few decent interactions with Jackie Kovacs and a girl named Jolie who didn't make it onto the island, but nothing spectacular.

On the island was when things really hit the fan. She starts with a brief interaction with Whitney Acosta, but when she sees Whitney talk to Matthias Kovalenko, her hatred of popular girls becomes her sole driving force until her final thread. She screams both internally and externally about how they should all die, and uses the word "whore" more times than I've ever read anywhere else in my life. In other words, what was already a not-that-great character turned into a flat island psychopath almost immediately.

Then her final thread comes along that explains her motivations, and it doesn't really hit home for me. It's not badly written or anything, but it feels like kind of a grab for sympathy after Tanesha had spent the rest of her time on the island going on a rampage just because she saw a guy talking to a girl.

So yeah, I'd say you should give Tanesha a skip.

Another character, if you please.

[Ruggahissy]

I finished Huy Tran. He was one of the longer v2 kids ( 6 whole threads, folks) so I split it into two sessions. I found that his biography was pretty good.

Huy didn't have pregame but finds a school friend he knows in short order, Anna. She's kind of crazy when he finds her because she finds the jizzed on corpse (thanks Sam) of her twin sister. At first she starts rambling about how she should be dead too and Huy calms her down. They travel together and run into Sam himself right after his hands are blown off by a girl who pulled her collar to EXPLODE rather than be raped by him. Sam, now with no hands, runs at Anna. He mistakes her for her dead sister and is convinced she's come back from the dead as a demon and has to kill her. Huy is a sensible guy, he grabs Anna's axe and kills Sam before he can hurt Anna.

Huy is the true hero of this version. The evil has been slain.

But Huy doesn't know what kind of horrible monster Sam was and he feels bad about killing someone even if it was completely justifiable. He thinks about his life at home in which he was doing so much (basketball, advanced classes, working a part time job at McDonalds, looking after 5 sisters) that he almost kills himself. This memory scene actually stuck with me. He's playing with a knife, just sort of looking at it in his hands while thinking about things and then he kind of stops paying attention and slashes a wrist almost without thinking about it. He runs to the bathroom, gets bandages and his parents take him to the hospital. He tells them it was a kitchen accident and though it doesn't look like a kitchen accident, his parents accept that and they never talk about it again. The sequence feels very real and not melodramatic and it shows how much stress he's under to have so much responsibility and I think that also plays into how he acts on the island.

There is something just so soft and pleasant about Huy. He's really kind and he's always trying to raise Anna's spirits and hug her when he feels she's sad. He is someone that I didn't picture as Cyco, the writer (who is excellent with him) but as a real kid.

Both Huy and Damien get BKA awards and Sonia Nguyen delivers them personally. Damien is horrible and I wish Huy would have punched him, but he's too nice. He's over the top psycho in a way that just makes you roll your eyes and is weirdly racist to Huy. Huy just kind of keeps his distance like any normal person would. Sonia delivers their weapons and while Damien is giggling fiendishly and blaming his mother for him ending up in SOTF (seriously, I don't understand this. How is this her fault?) Sonia and Huy speak. It's a good scene and you feel like Huy is you. He asks her why the terrorists are doing this all over again. She says "Pest control" and leaves.

He returns to Anna, they embrace since he's glad they're back together and they leave. They encounter Ricky and Whitney and the four go into a house for the night. The portion with Anna, Whitney, Huy and Ricky is one of the best scenes I've seen in v2. It has a very old-school Battle Royale feel to it. Anna and Whitney both take showers (surprisingly tasteful) and Anna realizes she is in love with Huy. Huy and Ricky keep watch and they discuss escape. Ricky and Huy discuss different methods to inspect the collars, agreeing they can take a look at some corpses and if they manage to get the collars off they can head to the terrorist's base at the marina where there are boats. Ricky hears something outside and he goes to check on it while Huy goes up stairs to check on the girls. The noise is just a dog tipping a trash can. As Huy goes up, Anna wakes up from a nightmare, sees his figure in the dark and stabs him.

Huy is sad to die, but not angry because as he dies Anna tells him she loves him and he realizes he loves her back and he can't be mad at her.

Bonus: She shoots herself right after.

Huy is someone I think could easily be dropped into any of the more "modern" SOTF versions and wouldn't be out of place. The only thing that keeps him from being truly great is his company: Mitsuko's Anna isn't as good as he is. However, I think this is the best she's ever done and Cyco managed to get her up in quality just by being a very good writing partner. Huy is a regular guy with a little depth that seems like a friend. You just want to stay with him forever. If there's ever a Second Chances 3 I'd like to play with him if I can get permission. I can recommend him, with the caveat that Anna and Damien aren't nearly as good. But yeah, check this guy out.

[Ruggahissy]

soooo Adrian Gray (which I'll call AG)

AG is... a goth. Like, not the first one but one of the earlier one in SotF. Like V6's Min-jae but white and more (less?) insufferable. It is worth noting that he is a) full on goth, b) bullied, c) changed his name to make it More Teenagehood-er. I think he could be a workable concept in a later version but he would need a lot of reworking. For example, the tone of his profile is less than stellar, has a lot of issues with grammar and boring stuff like that and, while he does feel like a character that could exist, feels like he was written as a pregame villain.

His pregame interactions are around his gimmick. This reminds I didn't mention it: he's like... really feminine and in denial and not in denial at once. He's kinda like "wow i dont care im feminine" then few minutes later "am i being too feminine i dont understand". First thread he has, he's like "haha im painting something funny" and starts laughing which is a really weird but then it gets weirder when a male students hits on him and the other guy is like "wow you are a pretty girl haha" and randomly raises his sleeve to show self-harm scars like lmao? me?? Also AG pulls a box cutter on him and the guy is like "haha thanks for making me see your book wink wink thats hot"

Second pregame thread was the aftermath of the pregame murder. That is such a weird thread. Like, there was a literal murder and a classmate they knew died, and they are like "haha she died thats sad boohoo murder mystery how kawaii" and it doesn't read as a real scene. I mean personally I would be like "shrug emoji" but like... they are like "this is so weird haha" and moves on? gosh if that's a not a mood.

His first thread is interesting. You can clearly read that AG has a strong dislike toward his classmate: when he hears footsteps in the sewers where he woke up, he decides on killing me. I think that's a good example of how AG was made to be a pregame killing machine. While he could be read a realistic concept, his execution was lacking. The second I read his profile, I knew he was going to be a villain because there was many red flags. Anyways, he takes Joshua Moore's existence as a sign of agressivity and he smashes his skull with... a leather strap? I probably read that wrong but now that's how he score his first and only kill in his first thread in the sewer.

He dies in his second thread after about 4 to 5 posts after the open he made. I'm assuming the month started and he wasn't rolled but then he got rolled and it resulted in... well, him falling from the dam and dying from it. It was a very anticlimatic death: it was hyped up as a fight but then he simply step backward and died in the most common way as possible. Around his death, several characters join like Lavender Heart who are like "wow hah he fell how sad anyways hows the weather".

So thats... all.

AG is a short character that had potential but was limited by the version's standards. He could probably be a very interesting character in a later version but due to him appearing in V2, he iwll probably never be known as a good character. He wasn't bad by any means. He was decent, while he was a villain from the start, you could understand why he was okay with killing people who had bullied him throughout his life. I don't think he left a mark and that people will look back at him like a gem from V2, but I think he could be interesting for new people to read as an example of the standards of V2 without them getting creeped out.

so yay thats all im going to bed

[Ruggahissy]

'"Sarah. An Linh." He briefly glanced at the other boy. "Guy I don't know yet. I'm glad to see you all."'

So Lance was better than Lester. He woke up, thought about his girlfriend, ran into some other girls who decided he would be okay to travel with, their group was suddenly grand central station as everyone else including 2 Bukowski characters and a Xaldien characters just ran through, and then this happened, summed up by a quote from the wikia that must be seen to be believed:

Lance didn't know it, but he was being watched by the prying eyes of Marimar Perez, who in her insanity believed him to be an evil eel bent on luring her mermaid sisters (An Linh and Sarah) back to his lair and the evil sea witch that lurked within. Marimar pounced from the bushes, impaling Lance on her machete, and that, was that.

It's nice to see inactive deaths always had a touch of weirdness to them. Anyways, Lance was normal and alright but I can't really recommend him because he was one of the biggest crimes in a characters for me: Boring. He didn't have a distinct voice, didn't do anything that wasn't expected of him from his profile, and didn't interact with anyone I was already familiar with (in a positive way - murderous 12-year-olds do not count) and thus he didn't really have a jumping point for me. Read him if you're a completionist I guess.

ANOTHER DEAR BARKEEP

[Ruggahissy]

(this is gonna be long as hell because Sera was in 6 threads not counting pregame, most of which are pretty long, and i'm a long-winded person so strap in)

So considering everyone else's v2... uh, let's say Experiences, I think I got pretty lucky. Sera isn't a spectacular character by any means, but she's written solidly enough. Her profile made me a little iffy but not in a GIANT RED FLAG way, just in a "do we have to talk so much about the cup sizes and attractiveness of 16-year-olds" way, and otherwise it was fine. Her only pregame threads are both oneshots that are primarily about Tanesha Lexx and have Sera break into her locker, steal her journal, find out that she spread a rumor about another girl, confront Tanesha about it, and imply she's going to ruin her with the information. All of which I'm fine with, but it really is written in service to Tanesha's character, not Sera's, so on we go.

Sera's first thread is another oneshot, this one with her finding the body of a character (Wanda Lovett) whose only mention in the whole game is as an already-dead girl with a suicide note. The writing is good but it's weird how her only reaction to seeing a corpse is "oh my classmates Are here". Also the post refers to Sera as "the blonde girl" and "the blonde-headed girl" way too often but that seems like a nitpick by v2 standards. The next thread has other people in it finally. She laughs hysterically at Adam Amanto (there are so many adams in sotf) pointing a gun at her, Brandon Cuthbert appears literally out of nowhere and is awful (i do not envy whoever has to read this kid), and Sera genuinely seems conflicted on how she's supposed to feel about him because he's killed people but also he's a tiny child? Then Adam and Brandon both go inactive and Megami has Brandon kill Adam and Sera kill Brandon in self defense. So that happened.

Next thread. Sera runs into Jana Brown, who 1. just woke up somehow (it's apparently day 4 how the actual hell) and 2. is a sweetheart who I love immediately. Cyco is a really good writer and does a really good job of making me like Jana immediately even though I'm mostly skimming her parts to get to Sera. Meanwhile Sera immediately gets to wasting the goodwill I've built up toward her character by gleefully lying to and manipulating Jana, and honestly it's again a testament to how much I instantly liked Jana that this is bothering me so much. It's not super out of place for Sera either, from what I've seen of her this doesn't seem OOC or anything, though it's a bit of a rapid shift from "terror" to "master manipulator". She has thoughts at this point about how killing her best friends wouldn't really be THAT hard, though, which makes me nervous.

Thread #4 is long as hell so I'm just gonna be as short as possible about it. There are a lot of people in this thread, one of whom wanders in and out in two very short posts, one of whom appears to be a samurai, and one of whom is Kevin Kapustiak, who seems okay enough. Sera goes very quickly from "this boy is my new meatshield" to "spilling my deepest darkest thoughts" which is... weird. Like one post she's apparently super excited by the possibility of a fight between Kevin and Samurai Boy and the next post she's talking about how fake her friendships were. I dunno, it's just a weird tone shift. Then Kevin... switches handlers????? And suddenly his handler is another character??? I have no idea what's going on in this thread anymore. Sera basically eggs Kevin and the new guy on into a fight (offering herself as a prize which...... ew) and then there's another guy (Also controlled by the guy controlling the guy who's fighting Kevin- Matt- and who Used to be controlling Kevin, and this is awful) who shoots Kevin and he's dead now and what the fuck. And then Matt and the Other Other Guy (Rob) are just like hey girls sorry about your friend lets team up now and Sera's cool with it?? Sure why not. This topic is a clusterfuck of the highest order and I'm tired.

New thread. Sera keeps pingponging between "normal scared girl who knows she's going to die" and "MASTER MANIPULATOR", sometimes in the same post. Jana is still good. Matt kills an innocent girl and no one really cares besides Jana, and Sera and Matt ditch her because Sera's morality is nonexistent in this thread I guess. Then Sera and Matt make out, very much out of nowhere, and it is at this point that I notice that there's a content warning on this topic. Goddammit. They do the Entire do and then Sera kills him. Tragically beautiful. It's... not that bad as far as Sex Murders go?? I don't know how you judge Sex Murders.

LAST THREAD I'M ALMOST DONE THANK U JESUS IN HEAVEN. And it's a oneshot. Where Sera runs into Gail Smith who moralizes at her and then they shoot each other and they both die. It's a long post that somehow still feels rushed.

okay SO this post is really long but final thoughts/TL;DR: Sera's pretty good by v2 standards. The biggest problem I had with her was inconsistency- sometimes she was scared, sometimes fearless, sometimes genuine, sometimes manipulative. She'd have a Revelation in one post and be inspired to be less shitty and then be shitty again in the next post. None of her traits are unrealistic, it's just weird that she bounces between them so much. From a technical standpoint Megami's writing is great, no complaints there. Overall I wouldn't necessarily recommend Sera, most of the characters around her (besides Jana, who is a blessing) are pretty uninteresting and she doesn't run into any of her friends or anything so there just isn't much emotional payoff. Plus her death is just... unsatisfying. With that said, she's by no means a bad character.

Give me another.

[Ruggahissy]

CONTENT WARNING: KERMIT LOSES HIS MIND.







Lavender Heart has a silly name. What were her parents smoking? Whatever it was, I want some.

It’d be a good drag queen name, tho.





Ugh i really dont want to do this why me?



Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?



Okay here’s her profile i guess: Lavender has no hobbies. She used to be on the lacrosse team, but she quit because she didn’t the time. WHAT? WHAT WAS SHE SPENDING ALL HER TIME DOING? I DONT KNOW BECAUSE SHE HAS NO HOBBIES OR EXTRACURICULAR ACTIVITIES! THIS BOTHERS ME SO MUCH THAT I TURNED CAPSLOCK ON! FUCKING CAPSLOCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK



Im better now i think. “Her hair is sandy brown and she usually keeps it in a ponytail using a purple hair tie, hating the feel of hair in her eyes. Speaking of eyes” masterful segue right here. Also, her name is Lavender and her hair tie is purple. GET IT? Nggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhelp. Her nose is so small that when people look at her they sometimes don’t see it. oh jeez okay. help me. please rugga why would you do this to me i thought we were friends. She usually wears jeans (yay realism!) and a shirt. The shirt is coloured lavender. nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.


Lavender is a happy girl, except for when she’s not. She spends most of her time worrying about her best friend, MARIAVEL VARELLA (more like MariEvil am i rite?). Lavender used to hang out with the Kool Kids Klub, but now she doesn’t for some reason. She is also a meanieface, being described in her profile as, AHEM, “coming off as a cruel beach. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Apparently, Lavender has had a lesbian crush on Mariavel since the age of seven. She’s sure an early bloomer, huh?

Also Lavender has the same handler as Mariavel, so that’s a bad sign. (PROTIP: DON’T HAVE YOUR CHARACTERS HAVE COMPLEX (or non-complex) RELATIONSHIPS WITH EACH OTHER. IT ALMOST NEVER WORKS WELL!)

One of her disadvantages is that she has a heart of gold. nice one.



PREGAME: SHE HAS SOME BUT THE V1 SITE IS DOWN YESSSSSSSS THANK YOU BLESSED INTERNET GODS!



ISLAND: NO THE CURRENT SITE ISN’T DOWN I MUST SUFFER DAMN YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU



okay so…



hmmm




okay.





I feel like these two quotes give more than enough information about Lavender:

“Wrong. This was wrong. This place… this game… everything. It was all wrong. She couldn’t get that thought out of her mind. Mr. Wilson… that guy… she was gonna give him a piece of her mind. She was going to find Mariavel, make a plan, then get the heck out of this hellhole! She sighed and continued to walk. That would be hard though, considering she didn’t know where the hell she WAS!”

“I’ve loved… loved you for a… l-long time now…. So survive ….Mari, continue to live.”

These are respectively the first and last things she does on the island. SHE JUST EXISTS AS A PROP FOR MARIAVEL RAAAAAAAAAAGH SCREAM THATS ALL SHE IS BUT SHE’S NOT A GOOD ONE UIG UIDBYU gn*&G&*DG BCNJB IDJD JKNDMN J90UY$ YNM









Serious note: While we may look back at V2 as the version of “what the fuck is going on?”, I feel like it’s important to remember that back during V2, SOTF was a much different site. While nowadays realism and all that shiz is seen as really important, in V2 it wasn’t. And that’s okay. I wouldn’t really recommend you read Lavender, but she’s not as bad as my unintelligible screaming made her out to be. By today’s standards, she’s not very good, but we’re a different site now. It’s like comparing peaches and plums. (because both of them are still quite similar but are ddiiiiiifffffeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeennnnnttttttttttt). Lavender was a product of her time, and so she’s alright with me.

Throw me another one. Maybe I won’t go insane this time. I hope.

[Ruggahissy]

okay so one post wonder or not I'm gonna do an actual writeup here

brittany's profile isn't actually too bad. it has her cup size which I hate and it has her losing her virginity at 13 and becoming promiscuous afterward which makes me itchy but otherwise she isn't a premade player or anything, just a snobby rich girl. in her first and only post she basically thinks "do they even Know who i Am" re: the terrorists, yells a lot, and literally says the line "Are there any of you rats out there that can help me?" which is a great way to make friends! then the Gossip King kills her, and i won't even get into what happens to her corpse after that (sam sorenson happens).

final thoughts: a character who almost sort of kind of i guess had some potential, which was completely wasted. no points.

[Ruggahissy]

Derrin is an experience.

So the first warning is that he has disassociative identity disorder, or DID, which is multiple personalities. A unique one apparently, in that his personalities talk to each other. Normally 'Jeff' is suppressed by medication, which is good because Derrin is a nice kid and Jeff is a psycho.

So Derrin has a ton of horrible stuff in his biography. He is a foster kid with a ton of horribly abusive families in his past which apparently resulted in his DID . There's a lot of very casually thrown around references to sex offender foster parents and abusive ones and it's all very unfortunate.

The real crazy starts later. There's references to 'the answer', which is described as a glowing crystal, which Jeff seeks constantly and supposedly would be unstoppable even by death should he get it. Luckily this basically doesn't show up in the game because SOTF is not Final Fantasy and this is a very addition to a character that's already really out there.

Derrin has no pregame, so it's right to the game. It opens with Derrin and Jeff in a dreamscape, where Jeff tortures Derrin with memories of a terribly unpleasant scene which is derived from the prologue it seems. They argue a little, and then wake up when Derrin is thrown out of the helicopter hundreds of feet in the air.

He survives by landing through an attic of an old house and crashing into a pile of old bedding and mattress. That isn't how it works of course, so we'll move on. He encounters Garry Dodd downstairs (who is a whole new can of crazy) and leaves.

He briefly enters and exits a scene with Carmen and Pants after they've left, for no real reason. Then he runs into Garry again, gets knocked out in an explosion, Garry cuts him up a bunch but then Jeff takes over and punches Garry who runs. Derrin takes over again and freaks out because he's bleeding everywhere, attracting Chiaki who shoots him in the stomach to kill him painfully. He has a peaceful moment of telling off Jeff and then dies.

The good parts are present, albeit in small doses. If you took just Derrin's writing without the DID or abuse or anything, he's a fairly decent character. A person gets killed and has a Christmas ornament on their face which amuses Derrin until he sees that they were stabbed in the head with a tree topper star. His interactions with Jeff are reasonable from his perspective, for a given value of reasonable considering the premise. The grammar is alright, though there's a fair few spelling errors.

There's a lot of rough stuff unfortunately. The crazy weirdness in his background that never really comes up is pretty unnecessary, of course. His opening is totally nonsensical and is basically cartoon physics. Anything with DID is very sensitive to how it's handled and it almost always fails. The cartoonish sadism in game fails to line up with the emotionless ruthlessness Jeff is said to have in profile, which makes it even more jarring. Another nitpick is the use of italics to represent Derrin/Jeff conversing, which is very distracting.

I guess overall Derrin's not completely garbage. He has a lot of very questionable stuff we typically associate with older versions, but it does at least have a little more to it because Derrin himself is a functional character piece. Overall, I probably wouldn't recommend giving Derrin much of a look, but two of his four threads have only one post of his, so he's not a long read.

I won't be taking another just yet, but sometime in the near future I will request one.

[Ruggahissy]

Anna Dibendetti is a bit of a hard one to discuss, but I'll do my best.

She doesn't really start out that inspiring, with sub-par writing and her only goal being to find her sister Jamie. She bumbles about for a bit before getting kidnapped by Paris Persphone, only to escape when he gets into a scuffle with Preston Grey. Throughout all of this, she never really captured my interest.

However, in Without You, Anna comes across Huy Tran, and there's a pretty clear shift. Mitsuko's writing is a lot better when the two are paired up, and Huy being a fantastic character in general really brings up their story. During the rest of Anna's time on the island, she's with Huy, and since the two play off of each other so well, it's a really nice read.

Unfortunately, it ends in tragedy as Anna kills Huy, shortly before shooting herself as without Huy and Jamie, she's too crushed to try to keep living anymore.

Honestly, if I were to rate Anna as a character, I'd say that she's okay. Her first few threads aren't really good, at least on her end, but her story with Huy is really great. And for the latter half of her story alone, I'd say that she's worth a read.

Another character, if you please.

[Ruggahissy]

Seven threads. (breathes deeply) Death comes to me. Anyway Gail Smith. Her profile doesn't throw up any red flags, she's a repressed sheltered girl with some health problems. Also I already know how she dies because she and Sera kill each other. She doesn't have any pregame either, so let's just get into it.

Thread #1 starts with Gail Smith and one of her handler's other characters, Jackie Kovacs, waking up in the same place at the same time and talking to each other. Why Do People Do This. It's so clunky. The writing isn't bad, especially by v2 standards, but it could use some proofreading. At least at this point her and Jackie are basically joined at the hip so I kind of have to review him along with her, and he's definitely the more talkative of the two at this point. He's the one making plans with the other characters showing up, Gail mostly just stays back and thinks. She definitely has a personality, though, and her thoughts and feelings come through pretty well in the writing. She's nervous, she reads people well, and she refuses to take a weapon because she knows she can't use it. Honestly, that's enough for me to like her. She feels like a decent person who doesn't want to imagine having to fight or kill anyone.

Next thread- The Gail/Jackie Wonder Team is still with Ricky Callahan and John Matthews. Gail's thoughts are a little repetitive on the "I won't play this game" angle but it's fine. Jackie comes to the conclusion that he'll do anything to protect the group, including fight, and Gail is kinda like "I'll do anything to help us too, except, uh, fight" and it's kind of adorable actually. Nothing else really happens here, it's just talking, but it adds to Gail's characterization a bit. Next topic is the one where Jackie dies apparently so so much for the Wonder Team I guess. Nealosi is doing a better job of separating Gail and Jackie here. Gail runs off a few posts before Jackie dies and comes back in time for him to say his last words and for her to cry about it, and it's actually done pretty okay, and I'm actually a little sad. I could do without phrasing like "wiping crystal tears from her pale cheeks" though.

I don't really have a lot to say about what Gail does in the next two threads, since she basically just follows Ricky and Whitney Acosta around. The one negative I'd say for Gail is that she has very little agency in her story. The other negative is her character is pretty flat. She's a good girl, she doesn't want to hurt anyone, etc. She actually makes a good counterpoint for the more active (and more violent) characters around her, and it's hard not to like her even though she's not particularly three-dimensional.

Then Mariavel appears and takes over the thread Gail's in bc she's Mariavel and why, Gail's handler takes her into another thread to do a killscene but apparently she's too overdue for death and Megami takes over, and the death I talked about in Sera's writeup happens. And it's way worse having read Gail's story; Megami takes a character who's been nothing but sweet and trusting and kind the whole game and has her lecture Sera about sin and how they all deserve to die and blah blah blah it's sooo far from Gail's character and I hate it.

final thoughts/tl;dr: Gail is a surprisingly good character- not a particularly well-rounded one, mind you, but a consistent and likable one. I think I could recommend her, outside of her super disappointing death. Plus you get to read all of Jackie Kovacs along with her, and he's good too. (also 7 threads was a lie, one of them is a one-post setup for a death that doesn't happen and another is the aforementioned oneshot Sera/Gail death scene that you should probably skip anyway)

(slams dead kid on the floor) ANOTHER