Survival Of The Fittest

Posted: **Sat Feb 16, 2019 6:37 pm**

Done with Vera!

[+] Vera Osborne: Vera is Also a short read, at two in-game threads. Her profile paints her as your typical moody art house liberal who Just Happens to know a thing or two about guns. Possible set-up for a player run here. There's also the bit of her being very selfish and individualist despite being a socialist, which also points to a possible player run.

All her pregame is spent with Maxwell Lombardi, who she shares her handler with, at prom. And this is where I discover the chaos that is v4 prom, because it is all contained in 3 threads??????? For some reason???????? So I basically have to sift through the posts trying to find the relevant characters to her scene.

There's a very similar dynamic between Edward/Jennifer and Vera/Maxwell, which leads me to believe that all Brits are the same. This dynamic is basically both of them looking to have a fling and thinking they're dating some newbie, when really they're both playing naive so that they can have their fun with the other. Vera and Maxwell only went to prom because why not? S/he looks hot?? Oddly enough for a handlercest scene, there's not much focus on the scene between Maxwell and Vera, the scene being a somewhat awkward, boring prom. Vera basically spends all of prom being like 'ugh get me out of here'. Between the two, more focus is devoted to Maxwell being his snooty British self, while Vera makes small talk with Sarah and Reiko, and wishes that She Too had a datefriend with brains.

Where Vera really shines IMO is her first thread, One of Three, which Sure Is A Thread. A lot happens in this thread, and it's basically three scenes rolled into one: the standoff between Rosa Fiametta, Vera, Craig Hoyle, Trent Savage, and Kevin Harding, and Maria Santiago's death, with a side-thing going on with Trent's subconscious. The latter two scenes Sure Are Scenes, and make me appreciate Vera all the more because she is my anchor. She is my rock. She is who I cling onto in this midst of all this chaos.

For our purposes and my sanity, we focus on the first scene.

tl;dr Vera and Rosa get into a Mexican standoff despite the fact Rosa has no weapon, Craig and unconscious!Trent drag themselves in the house after much hesitation from the two girls, and then Kevin decides it's a good idea to hold up a house of four people to get a gun and predictably gets scared off.

The Mexican stand off between the two girls is realistic, but it kinda drags? It lasts a bit too long then it has to. But I like Vera here. She has guts, chutzpah. And while the scene itself is too long, the writing between all the authors involved in the scene does a good job of keeping the tension high.

My favorite moment from Vera is when she just, like, turns into a ninja and grabs the gun from Kevin's reach, loads the gun, and points it at him in one movement. It honestly pushes the limits of credibility and seems low-key like godmodding, but one, it's very satisfying to read, and two, you get to see a lot of interesting character decisions here. You see, Kevin tries to hold up the house with a shovel and threatens to bludgeon unconscious!Trent with it if anyone moves for the gun, and Vera basically goes and does it anyways. Like, this is where her selfish side comes out. She also has a push-pull relationship with her gun. She's clearly very attached to it, despite being very anti-gun, because she knows it's her key to survival. But she also can't bring herself to kill because she doesn't want to betray her beliefs, not just yet.

Everyone in the party thread leaves, the standoff resolves itself after Vera gets the gun, and now we're at her death thread, Walk the Line, with Maxwell and Reiko. Vera sees Maxwell and Reiko fighting, basically saves Reiko's life by firing a gun at Maxwell, he shoots her, it's revealed that after prom, Maxwell hit Vera, and then it goes back to the present time where she dies.

I'm not a fan of the BIG BOLD ITALICS and EXTRA LARGE FONT used liberally here, but that comes with the territory that is v4.

At first glance, her death doesn't make sense given her self-serving nature, but I think it was more to stop Maxwell than save Reiko, although that was also a factor. I like how she dies trying to hold onto her gun, cursing at Maxwell. It brings more of the guts that I like seeing in her, and it highlights that relationship she has with her gun, the dependence she's developed on an object she's supposed to hate. She dies weeping, wondering about the fate of her friends, but it's warranted and doesn't lessen the defiance she showed.

Overall, I'd actually recommend Vera. Maybe give her a grade of B- or C+? Her pregame's not an essential read really, given that it's mostly summarized in her time on-island, but I like the attitude and personality she showed on-island.

One More Please

Posted: **Sat Feb 16, 2019 6:45 pm**

Ahh, the train has entered the station! Welcome back from your adventures, Mara. Glad to hear that Vera was your stabilizing rock through the madness. Don't forget to replenish your equipment and take a second to grab a snack from the snack table. Your next assignment isn't that sizeable, but we always encourage you time detectives to go out on a full stomach!

Maraoone: Marybeth Witherspoon

Posted: **Fri Feb 22, 2019 12:16 pm**

So, for Ilario's review, I have invested the majority of my review into a as-read live reactions... critique... thing. Almost 14K words of thread by thread contemplation and bashing of Kermit and Murderweasel that may possibly make sense in context.

But here's the gist of it:

[+] Ilario Fiametta III: Ilario benefits a lot from Ifnotwinter having the writing skill they do, first and foremost. Abstract writing is hard to sell (I’d be one to speak, for sure) and Ilario’s narrative is dominated by non-plot driving elements of extremely fervent, deep imagery that shows what is happening on island without showing island, so keeping the abstract details so engaging and being able to pivot on them consistently to push the story forward allows us to introduce what I think is Ilario’s biggest narrative device:

The ambiguity of his motivation. To me, as my pet theory anyways, there is a lot of possible either-or when it comes to what is actually driving Ilario’s descent into egotistical madness, especially because of the degree of control his character supposedly has given his pregame state. Is it just the anxiety that drive him? What is the real source of his drive to save people- that actual altruistic need twisted by his madness, or some fundamental character flaw of pride ripping his higher brain functions apart and replacing it with Bible’s worth of prosody? He’s not so religious, he’s not so fond of his father, somehow they both become crucial pivots of his character?

There’s a lot of question marks here, but they’re so organic and captivating. Ifnotwinter gets to dance around the answers by playing with Ilario’s own uncertainty and certainty, him being so self-assured for most of his narrative makes him a prime unreliable narrator who can’t accurately sell his own actions. It creates plenty of space for reader speculah to flourish, and to digest the really little details in Ifnotwinter’s usage of diction and structure to emphasize certain things they chose to write for any kind of reason.

Ilario benefits from a lot of strong surrounding cast: special shout outs to Jackson and Rhory’s non-placeholder content, and a callout to my favorite death in Kevin, who was a phenomenal ‘outsider perspective’ on just what sort of person Ilario had become outside of the context of his own head.

I don’t want to say too much here, to be honest. Ilario leans heavily, I think, on taking the details of the profile offered and warping them all to certain extremes, but not in the ways readers might have predicted going in. Ilario has a narrative that seemingly dominates any thread he’s in for the most part, with only Rhory and his Endgame companions ever matching the amount of technical mastery and eye-wateringly reverence worthy imagery… I’m exaggerating here, of course.

At times, Ilario feels more like a walking giant pile of religious allusion and tonal tropes than actual character, and that’s in the best way possible. At times his humanity shines through too, I really want to shout out the usage of his sexuality in Rhory’s context, that was phenomenally done, a very humanizing touch to the character. Ilario is actually a very compact character overall- few motifs, a lot of repetition to hammer points across, but it’s always fresh, always impactful. There’s a lot to like here. A lot a lot.

I strongly recommend Ilario as a read. If not for the amazing words (there are so many I don’t even begin to touch on), if not for the compelling character with so much momentum exploding into endgame as he deserves… If just so other people can come to different conclusions and prove me wrong, so on. Ilario deserves all kinds of perspectives in evaluation, I think, because they’ll draw different conclusions out of the details.

I'll take another and pray they're not as much of an effort required.

Posted: **Fri Feb 22, 2019 3:28 pm**

Cicada, I have no words for you at all - you've taken them all to your own uses. You keep this up and you'll be stealing my job. Great work, as always. Less flavour text this morning as I am le tired.

Here's a character that I believe is a bit less involved.

Cicada: Logan Reynolds

Posted: **Thu Feb 28, 2019 4:24 am**

[+] 3000 words wtf: Profile -

`At 6 feet and somewhere between 2 and 3 inches – he's never quite decided which – Logan ought to strike a more imposing figure than he does.`

As much as this isn’t modern SOTF profile writing phrasing, I like this. It’s a humanizing little detail. As a result of that general willingness to have more florid and personality-rich profile language, parts of this profile get too ‘character voice-y’ or otherwise overly biased. Overreach, so on. The psychological issues that underpin the character seem to be very front-loaded, not very subtle and the profile’s a bit too scarce to sell these blatant character hooks in a subtle way. So, not personally to my taste, but we’ll see where this goes.

Pregame Thread -

Two posts in and our boy comes off as quite edgy. Self-aware in a very blunt way, with a very fast sentence-to-sentence turnover between observation and self-deprecation. I do like how Logan’s lack of knowledge of SOTF is used, in some way, to push the character interaction, using a lack of character knowledge can provide interactions with some interesting dynamism (how to explain, what to explain, so on). From the two-point-five sides worth of opinions being thrown around Logan gets to carve his own unique-ish perspective, some admiration for Bounce (the SOTF fan, run by Namira) in her passion, but generally agreeing with the boys at the table about the criminality and otherwise being disinterested because it seems too ‘mainstream’.

The thread very quickly peters out after that- with some conclusion provided by Bounce calmly disengaging and the rest of the table failing to exit post on out. Logan’s prose is a bit underwhelming and mostly thought driven as of this sole pregame thread, but he does at least have an engaging sort of mentality in the bluntness of his narrative logic (usually no thread of thought carries more than a short paragraph’s worth of weight at absolute most) giving his character an impression of being stubborn and quick to conclusions. Let’s see how that may or may not be kindled on island.

Island 1 -

Incidentally, so many threads in the tunnels latch onto that light/darkness motif. SC2 could never.

Okay I see what Chib was trying to do there but RIP the quoting of dialogue that literally ended the prior post was so redundant. Starting the opening post in media res from Daisuke’s discovery of him and working backwards through the exposition was a nice touch, I like that structurally. Though, the exposition does get a bit too info-dumpy- we seem to run through way too much, like a checklist of inventory and motivation without giving each revelation space to breathe. A bit too quick paced in information flow. I do like that we get direct pay off from Logan’s having learned about SOTF in pregame- he did research since then, right before being abducted, already hates Danya as of waking up.

The quoting of dialogue kind of works- splits the responses to Daisuke’s massive text wall in a way that allows Logan to get silent words in edgewise without needing to summon huge blocks of info worth of his own musing on what Daisuke has said without temporal context. I may actually have to adopt that as a possible tool for future SOTF writing.

Both of them manage to project a decent amount of personality in their buddy-up conversation- Logan’s more severe lack of humor is sold well enough by the relative curtness of his thoughts, of his dialogue. The habits of each writer, quoting the other ad nauseum to formulate responses, slows the pace some, adds some ‘blur’ between posts that literally slows the reader, and it seems to work alright. Kind of emphasizing a quiet moment before the storm, of sorts.

They’re both very practically minded- tactical and thoughtful, not too much fluff but enough room for the occasional bit of more meandering, humanizing digression to come through. Very Band of Brothers-y.

`Perhaps there was something he didn't know about that was being considered. Some kind of non-violence vow? An analogue to "Thou Shalt Not Kill" from one of the Eastern religions? He didn't know, and didn't bother to guess any further. Made more sense to just wait, and if Daisuke wanted to tell him, he would.`

Stuff like this, for example. Probably the largest amount of somewhat irrelevant tangent Logan’s thoughts veer onto, but still very much practical in context- considering if there’s any sort of catch in Daisuke’s character that might derail Logan’s player hunter plans, if in a slightly discriminatory and offbeat way. Very bash bros type team up. Thread even ends on a line-emphasized ‘lets do this’.

Island 2 -

I do like the structure of the sneaking around being somewhat discombobulated as people’s responses to Logan and Daisuke making it in through a window are scattered out and not temporally consistent- actually emphasizes a sense of chaos and lack of information for all involved. Nobody gets too repetitive- for once everyone isn’t quoting everyone else, which would have rapidly disassembled into mess of unnecessary redundancy.

Okay now there are giant internal narrative blobs fucking up the temporal forwardness of the scene- I immediately retract my praise. The sheer amount of people isn’t necessarily impossible to follow- there are two relatively well contained simultaneously happening events, it’s just moderately more unpleasant to read with a more difficult to track and less stable chronology, slightly ratcheting backwards and retreading with each post.

I like the little detail of Logan turning over the talking to Daisuke, thinking about how the gun changes Daisuke’s standing within the negotiations. Emphasizes the practicality he’s made his trademark. The exit isn’t the best handled- Daisuke’s handler didn’t pick the best time to monologue when so many people have to handle their reactions to his dropping a ton of info on their heads. But it’s a clean escape from the thread, at least. Was getting a little cross-eyed there, trying to keep some sense of the various narratives.

Island 3 -

`He'd missed it when Danya read it out, too busy with his self-absorbtion, but one name jumped right out at him.`

Gives us an excuse. And a typo. Typically if there’s going to be bigger internal narrative drive outside of the context of a character whose voice is that by default, I feel like openings to threads are a good spot to put that kind of thing. Daisuke continues to do a bit much in the way of dominating the flow of ‘space’ one can reasonably allot, sure it’s good stuff, but it does create awkward still moments, especially when Kris appears and Logan kind of has to gloss over a lot of what Daisuke said to immediately put out a time-relevant response.

Bit too much internalization of the back-and-forth with Kris, too much irrelevant digression, slows the supposedly urgent pacing of a scenario’s worth of ‘girl with gun at the door’. Sure, call backs like the one to Daisuke’s having ‘taken over’ the negotiating role yesterday (with it now being foisted on Logan) are good, but there’s a bit too much extraneous verbiage that isn’t necessarily justified in terms of ‘quick thought’, it meanders some. Kris is probably the one who most gets to monopolize the narrative- since she’s the intruder, she’s probably the one dictating the pace.

Kris bouncing on out, scared off by RJ, is probably a decent time for Daisuke and Logan to both take their time in frontloading the pivot in their respective arcs, the moment where they finally confront what they’ve agreed to do head on- albeit, to see it crash into nothingness as their mark gets away. Interestingly Daisuke has the brunt of that development- Logan seems to ‘accept it’, having been characterized as more aware of what was to come from the get go.

It’s a bit odd, actually. Logan plays the part of the ‘cool-headed’ one very well, the moral core of the group while Daisuke has a dynamic moral role as the other half of the duo. But Logan’s motives seem more generally obscure, I’m wondering if there was a better spot to reveal that hand, and then have Logan become more of a static character from thereon like his profile promised would be the case. It’s like, Logan should have been more frontloaded in motivation into his first thread, what we got wasn’t necessarily enough given the kind of stable role in the dynamic Logan is set up to play- that stability feels empty without a clearer look into his head.

Like, for example, the reveal that Logan feels he isn’t ready to be a killer feels a bit… out of nowhere, like the setup wasn’t really there for that to have the impact it should have. What could have been a very interesting swerve in their dynamic, after having faced real killers for the first time, comes off as flat.

Island 4 -

Like, here, for example. One post into this thread and I feel like I can’t really buy the current developments hinging on Logan’s having temporarily acquiesced his motive- because I didn’t buy that move in the first place, it felt cheap. This makes the possible element of drama to Logan’s sudden fear and paranoia- his sense of purpose, or some perversion thereof- being reignited when a girl with a weapon and a dead body in the tunnels paint all kinds of wrong pictures. This could have had the potential for a strongly dramatic and thrilling scene based on miscommunication and the emotional energy of Logan’s verve being forced to fruit by a different sort of ‘confrontation with a supposed killer’.

But of course there’s no pay-off. Logan has to double back with a double post, dropping the potential change of his character trajectory by necessity, and thus lacking for interesting motivation within the context of this thread- or in general. We also unceremoniously lose Daisuke here, with Logan forced to escape the thread without so much as a thought looking back- I feel like at least a little rumination on ‘wait where is the dude I just spent three some days of my new horrifying life with’ might have at least closed out the thread for Logan on a less vague note.

Island 5 -

This thread is framed as a detour- with Logan having not picked up the news on Daisuke’s death yet, which actually seems like an okay way to put off that particular emotional reckoning. We experience a few posts worth of Logan trying to get along with a few other strangers he’s run into, and honestly I don’t think it’s that bad. I like mood whiplash to an extent (not that there was a mood of any sort to whiplash between, given how undercooked the last thread was) and the pivot into a more introductory, relationship-building and banter-heavy thread is set up fairly well by Chib going out of their way to make sure they set us up temporally well before launching into a more downtempo exchange.

We also get some in-passing references to further build on Logan’s motivation, which work pretty well. Given the brusqueness of his character narrative asides have strong weight even if only tangential. Stuff like this-

`Logan decided there that if he didn't act as though he had a chance, live as though he planned to live long, he wouldn't.`

It’s quick and to the point, which seems optimal for Logan’s characterization as established.

Unfortunately the posts leading up to Logan’s exit are a bit all over the place, some not even giving the appropriate amount of context to tell what happened in the first place. I don’t blame Chib for quasi-ignoring the specifics and providing just enough general context to justify Logan taking off, it seems like the best move in an otherwise hard-to-salvage situation. Points for cutting losses like that.

Thread 6 -

Opens with a bit too much retrospective summation that doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know as readers- too casual in tone (as Logan often is in general) to really sell any sort of weight of this recap that might add a spin in terms of Logan’s interpretation of what has befallen him thus far.

Logan’s motive continues to be… inscrutable, and not in a way that’s engaging. He ping-pongs here, once more randomly picking up his player hunter motive with very tenuous justification (this one girl in particular killed a bunch of people, so I should honor Daisuke’s memory by shooting her with his gun!). In a way the sort of disaffection and disconnect that comes off in how casually Logan treats everything- Daisuke gets put to some kind of appropriate rest, but not much verbiage is dedicated to it- almost seems compelling in it’s own way, kind of extending Logan’s opening island personality and making him seem static, which could be intriguing… But the motive’s been explicitly shelled out before, repeatedly, and thus that potential mystique gets reduced drastically.

Also there’s some temporal weirdness here- Logan knows Daisuke died in this thread, but not in the last, but this thread is capped by the fifth day announcements so there’s a gap in between in terms of when Logan learned of Daisuke’s death and when he responded to it… feels like something doesn’t add up.

And once more he tries to assure us his motivation is nebulous and hesitant, when earlier in the one-shot he’d contemplated killing Liz with some amount of tonal determination. The flip-flopping is weak, there’s no IC thread tying it into a sensible narrative!

Thread 7 -

An example of when quoting what was said by someone else is not necessary is when it was literally the last line of their post prior to you quoting them as the first line of your post.

Logan manages to escape just prior to the triumphant return of SOTF_Help memes, but once more the static presentation of his character doesn’t do much favor to his brief presence in this thread. There’s an interesting casualness to his motivations- just wanting to wash his hair, finding someone he was familiar with in school in the form of D/N’s Ricky (who opens with a very strange, kinda godmoddy personal invasion of space of another female character) who brings up some amount of fondness. Again, mood whiplash is something I like in moderation. But his escape from the thread does feel a bit much like more of the same.

Not necessarily bad to stay in character, but Logan really doesn’t seem to have offered much in the way of expansion on the initial character hook several threads in- and what was offered in terms of the underlying motive/cause felt weak due to backtracking and inconsistency. Death thread is up next, so we’ll have to see…

Thread 8 -

I mean there’s an interesting digression there in his first post- the idea of his childhood dreams of being on a Ferris Wheel, juxtaposed with his more practical leanings in terms of ‘do not sleep somewhere I could fall and die’. Here in this thread the back and forth between Logan and Bill is somewhat reminiscent of the first half of Logan’s story- Bill plays Daisuke’s role with a twist, wherein Bill is not friendly and is armed, and thus we get to see Logan’s player hunter lean with a different angle of presentation. As in, Logan not wanting to be a killer is reinforced, which would be a good emphasis… if the thing being emphasized had ever been sold well in the first place?

I actually do like the angle Logan takes in his momentary hesitation when confronting Rhory- it’s framed as his practical doubt in the one dude holding the shotgun telling him he has to kill a killer, in him evaluating the situation and noticing that Rhory doesn’t look especially killer-like. It is a good usage of the characterization that has consistently defined him, actually, sort of careening on either side of the knife’s edge and not taking any sort of formal plunge to one side or the other. If the entirety of Logan’s narrative had been this waffling and he hadn’t taken clearer stances prior I think everything might have been better presentation wise.

His death post is reasonably well structured. The more blase tone sets us up, then there’s some big gunshots (okay slightly too big, the formatting is more silly than effective) and several paragraphs worth of quickly detailed visceral content, nice and brutal and effective. The thoughts trickle in after the fact, with adrenaline as the excuse, which I like. There’s a good flow to this all, nothing seems too out of place except for the big honking gun onomatopeias. The idea of framing his dying breaths as accepting the lie he’d lived- that he didn’t regret anything, is interesting because it actually does give a pretty legit payoff to the more dubious back-and-forth of his storyline overall.

It’s a good death, actually. Gives us closure that I legit hadn’t seen as possible to give, embraces what Logan was as a character, and even closes on a note of ambiguity- does he really mean that smile? Did he really delude himself that well?

Overall -

First thread was quite promising to me- Daisuke and Logan had strong chemistry. But that chemistry started superficial… and never seemed to delve deeper, which is where my main issues with Logan come from. Logan always stays on that surface level fundamentally- which could be an interesting way to spin the tale of this wannabe baller trying and failing to make impact on the island by having a plan and then admitting he doesn’t have the character to see that plan through. But then there are times where we *do* delve deeper, but none of those particular instances actually stick the landing. It’s like, when you’re going to reveal something deep about a character’s motivation, you have to stick the landing. Logan never does, which is where he falls off for me.

However, what verbiage is there is nice and digestible, Logan has a very engaging dialogue much as it is one-dimensionally bro and funny for the most part. He had strong potential and his death sticks the landing in a unique way, playing off the shallowness that seemed purposeful in his character. I think Chib just needed to stick to their guns- they tried to show us depth and insight into Logan but couldn’t sell it. If those moments hadn’t existed, then Logan would have been fascinating to me in the same way someone like Matt Moradi from V6 is- good economy of words and a character with clear motivation but obscured by a lack of particularly impactful insight.

I wouldn’t recommend Logan. Maybe give his first thread with Daisuke a read because that’s a good back and forth and island opener. But besides that Logan doesn’t feel complete to me- everything between his first thread and his death thread falls short in some way or another. And Logan is plagued by classic V4 issues of placeholders, inactive deaths, and so on, making what good stuff that is there to be weighed down further by factors beyond Chib’s control.

Don't give me another, for now. I move on to better pastures (kinkmeme)

Posted: **Mon Mar 04, 2019 12:54 pm**

Somebody got to Scott's threads on his page before I did, which is good because the board search function has decided that "walk" is too common a word to search so I couldn't find his one pregame thread at all.

Fortunately, Scott's short island time does a decent job of telling us what kind of person he is. He likes money, he likes art, and he's really not about this whole killing thing. His first thread is kind of weird, in that it effectively acts like two different threads and spans two days; a group of people wake up day one, most of them leave with only Meredith Hemmings staying behind to be goth in the hall of mirrors, and then Scott gets there and meets up with Meredith, Steve Barnes, and Jonathan Jarocki, and they all stay there through the next day-ish.

Scott's a quiet character, but I like him as a grounded, down-to-earth voice when crazy stuff happens around him. He stays detached somewhat in his first thread, and he doesn't end up sticking with anybody from it though he states intent to team up with Steve (I'm guessing because he ended up slotted to die and had to move on to that), but his internal voice is consistent and good. His second and final thread sees him confronting Raidon Naoko and becoming Raidon's first kill shortly thereafter. Even in this thread, he's not the primary mover and shaker, with Raidon and Julian taking comparatively bigger and flashier roles, but Scott remains both quiet and good, and I like that he makes a last-ditch attempt at self-preservation instead of standing around and listening to monologues, even if the monologues themselves are good.

I'll toss Scott a recommend for being short and sweet. He's not actiony, but he's a good example of how a short character who doesn't get to do a lot and dies a quick death can still be a nice little read.

Not taking another one just yet, but I shall return.

Posted: **Thu Mar 07, 2019 10:33 am**

Well I guess two days' break is enough, give me another.

Posted: **Thu Mar 07, 2019 3:33 pm**

Flavour flavour me brain borken atm flavour flavour.

I will update the main list shortly.

Zee: Kevin Warick

Posted: **Sun Mar 10, 2019 4:12 am**

So, Nick Reid. A bit of a meatier prospect than the last two kids, but that's what spoiler tags are for.

[+] Let the Reid-a-Thon Commence: The first thing we notice about Nick from his profile is that he's got more than a few problems, depression being the key factor for him. He's had some side activities like archery and LARPing that would be good for if he ever got his hands on a melee weapon, and he's got the moodiness and fatalistic attitude that would be perfect for a premade player. Let's see if I'm right, shall we?

No pregame for this guy. Well, there is one thread, but it's been designated "non-canon", since the personality his handler decided on changed between the pregame and the game itself. That's fine, one less thread to read for me.

Hie we to the island then. His first thread has him wake as many students do in V4, wondering if he's on the school trip somehow and then realizing that maybe, just maybe, being stranded in the middle of the woods isn't part of the itinerary. He's paranoid and alert, and immediately distrusting of the two students who show up to say hi. His dismissive, almost hostile reception for the SOTF fanatic Andrea Raymer shows that, even medicated as he claims to be, there's something off beneath the hood. He's got molotovs as his weapon of choice, and he quickly brings one to bear as he has to defend against an attack by Alex White. Naturally, and this is a detail that I really like, the bottle is unsuitable as a shield and shatters on Nick's arm, cutting it up pretty badly. This injury is entirely voluntary, which isn't something you see in V4 a lot, since everyone was trying to lawyer a kill in that version.

Regardless, this injury forces him to flee, and we see him at the gazebo, paranoid and angry about all the cameras watching him. He's apparently bandaged up the arm between threads, which makes sense, since there is a pair of tweezers in the medical kit. He could theoretically pull the glass out if he was careful enough about it.

Anyway, since he's decided he's had it with the cameras, he lights up another molly and sends it flying towards a camera attached to one of the gazebo's posts. Trouble is, as you may be aware, gazebos have more of an open-air atmosphere, and the shot goes wide, impacting a kid having a conversation on the other side. This isn't the first kid I've read who's managed to score a kill by throwing a weapon at random, and if it weren't for the rules of narrative convenience, that would almost seem unlikely. More unlikely is the reaction of Maxwell Lombardi who basically teleports up to Nick and starts beating him up, forcing Nick to run yet again.

Actually, can I talk about that for a second? I know it's GM-approved, but it feels so strange how a kid can just run up in a single post and not encounter any resistance or objections. I mean obviously, if you needed permission to approach everyone else's characters at all times, that would bog down a thread and make it hard to get anywhere, but at the same time, I feel like you could strike a balance somewhere.

Anyway, it's time for Nick to kill one of my characters. But first, he needs to show up, feeling tired, ragged, and stupid. He's had a rough time on the island already, and his nerves are frayed. This is all handled realistically and, coupled with Nick's preexisting conditions, makes it reasonable that he'd just snap and start slamming a kid's head against a wall when he sees the kid attacking someone in front of him. Which he does, though I misread and thought he was slamming Tom Guthrie's head into the floor. Here's my reasoning: in order to achieve the wall-smashing, he has to drag my character up from the ground where he's tackled him, line him up, and start smashing him, without any resistance from Tom or attempts to break his grip. What I thought was, quite reasonably, he had climbed on top of him and was letting gravity assist him with the smashing, but if I'd actually read what was happening instead of worrying about my own narrative, I would have realized that wasn't the case.

Sigh...I wish I could go back and tell my V4 self to read the friggin' posts.

Anyway, as he pounds Tom into mush, something else to mention is that Nick is still trying to present a calm and collected front to the outside world. He has a conversation with Jennifer Perez beforehand that's actually fairly friendly, albeit a bit awkward. This is important to consider. Nick is a killer and ready to spring into action, but he's not just killing indiscriminately yet. His first kill was an accident and his second was in defense of someone else. Let's see if that holds up though, since killing Tom gives him a sword which, we've established, fits with his interests as a LARPer. Things might get a bit hairier.

Well, first off, he has a one-shot where he dreams about running himself through with it. He wakes up, angry that the thought had even gone through his mind, and he moves on. This scene is basically just to highlight his degrading mental state. Ultimately, he leaves it with renewed purpose: he is going to play the game, and he is going to try to win.

To that end, he comes upon a sleeping Tabi Gwyneth and decides that he's going to rob her instead of killing her. His idea is that if he steals her supplies, she's going to have to kill to survive, which will make the island come down on her head without him needing to dirty his hands. Interesting strategy, and it would have worked out great, except that she has a traveling companion in Ivan Kuznetzov, who just strode in with a brand new shiny BKA awarded shotgun. It's only thanks to Tabi begging Ivan not to kill him that Nick walks away from that confrontation with only a blow to the head.

Next thread, Nick tries to get some rest and he's immediately interrupted, but outnumbered. He decides to try diplomacy and asks about the locations of the long list of people he's wronged so far. Unfortunately, nobody's playing ball. He's a killer after all, and that means that his hands are permanently stained in most people's reckoning. Some of them run, others appear and threaten him, and ultimately, he strides away, having accomplished nothing. Less than nothing actually, since he tries a fancy move with the giant thrusting sword and just fumbles it instead, leaving him walking away in shame and embarrassment. But at least he doesn't leave the sword behind. That's something.

Back to the caves, he tries to find Jennifer Perez and comes across David Anderson. They have a confrontational chat and Nick gestures a bit too much with his sword, accidentally making it seem like he's trying to swing it. It's interesting how Nick's handler wants his kills to have some underlying circumstances behind them. He could have gone on the offensive immediately, but instead he provokes a fight on accident, forcing him to headbutt the poor kid to death in what's essentially self-defense. Not that anyone else is going to see it that way.

In fact, Ma'afu Tuigamala takes immediate offense, hoisting Nick up by his neck and demanding to know why he's going after Jennifer. Nick almost wants Maf to finish him off, his suicidal feelings welling up again, but he rallies against himself and starts lying through his teeth, succeeding in getting Maf to release him.

Next thread, we get some fun formatting. Nick's handler has done some tricks with font colors in the past to show how turbulent his mind is, but this is the first time we get something as truly bizarre as...well, let me just post it.

There was blood gushing onto a grassy slope, oozing and trickling, percolating through
the rocky roof of his new life's home, soil and stone, tracking him, leading him,
dripping, droplets detaching from the craggy ceiling like miniature bombs,
leaking like
water. Tiny homing missiles
hitting his forehead, assaulting his mind's residence,
splashing off into puddles reeking of death and decay,
running down the walls, drilling into his skull not like
little drops of liquid, harmless beads of moisture
making little plip plip noises, but like bullets
streaming through his skull, unbearable reminders of his classmates lying
across the floor, dead because of what he'd done, hounding him until his blood, too, would flow
like a miniature river.

I guess I can say that I've never seen something like this. It must have taken a lot of work to put it all together like that.

Anyways, it's time for another kill, and this one, I'm not gonna lie, is a little bit silly. Basically, Nick stabs William Sears through the eye with the estoc and then beats him to death with the weapon's cross-guard. No amount of dramatic storytelling could make that sound convincing. More to the point, it shows Nick's increasing disregard for the bodies he's leaving behind, since while he gets attacked this time, it's with a makeshift weapon that he could have just knocked away easily. Killing's become so easy to him now that he can basically do it for any provocation, no matter how weak.

Next thread, I'm almost wondering if I missed something, since Nick is thinking about Liz Polanski and how she somehow outsmarted him. Where did he encounter Liz on the island? Was this something that had been arranged between threads? Who even knows. Regardless, he finally bumps into Jennifer again, and the scene is awkward, albeit surprisingly civil. Even Nick admitting that he'd killed even more people since the last time they met doesn't make her push him away, and there's hope that as long as they stick together, Nick could be in control, could perhaps even mend his ways. Nick is distrusting and unsure of her, but he's tentatively willing to ally up. And in fact, when Jennifer starts tearing up in the next thread over the most recent announcements, he actually tries to comfort her about it, and they share a tired hug together.

Of course it doesn't last. More people file into the thread, chaotically threatening each other and drawing guns, so Jennifer stays behind, trying to smooth things over and prevent any lives from being lost. Nick, not wanting to be caught in the crossfire, leaves Jennifer behind as he goes his own way. But oh no! As revealed in the next thread, he's left his medication behind. He's in the fairgrounds, at a spot where he and Jennifer were supposed to rendezvous, but as he's waiting, a guy called Marty Lovett comes by, digging graves for the people who died here previously. Nick's presence is given away by the arrival of Anna Chase, and Marty tries to take the initiative, only to run right into Nick's sword as he charges forward.

Not even distraught anymore over what he's done, Nick instead faces down Anna Chase who's threatening him with a crossbow. His death seeking thoughts creep in once more as he calls Anna's bluff, daring her to pull the trigger. She doesn't, and Nick decides to spare her because of it. I think it has to do with how Nick's been playing the game. As I've mentioned, every kill has been at least somewhat provoked, even if in the most pathetic ways. Nick has never been the initiator of conflict, and it's still the line that he draws, even now.

Next thread's a oneshot where he steps inside the house of mirrors, discovering a note left behind by Jennifer, pointing him to where he needs to go to find her and Melissa Li. But first, he hits on a potential discovery, one that could perhaps affect the game in a significant way. Reflecting on the collars, he considers that they're just an electric circuit, one that could be disrupted using the right method. But he needs wires, which he pulls out of the walls in sufficient quantity. We don't see the denouement of his plan in this thread, but hopefully it happens quickly, because there's just one more to go until the end.

Well, he finds the two of them, and as it turns out, what he's got planned is to remove the batteries from three flashlights and form a circuit of all of them together, using their collective current to short out the collars. They're hesitant, unsure whether to trust him, but Melissa's willing to try it. Only trouble is, it doesn't work, and rather than disable the collar, it ends up triggering it, killing Melissa on the spot. This is the point of no return for Jennifer, where she's unable to make any more excuses for Nick's behavior. Worse, Maf shows up again, and unlike the first time, Nick has no way of talking his way out of this one. His plan, his one chance for redemption, has literally blown up in his face, and now there's nothing left but for him to face the consequences.

The wiki claims that the confrontation between Nick and Maf is the first time that there's ever been an official swordfight in the series. Maf wrestles Tom Guthrie's estoc out of Nick's hands, Nick goes for Melissa's sword, and the two of them begin to basically start hacking bits out of each other, ignoring Jennifer's pleas for them to stop. For the first time, rather than taking the situation calmly or feeling depressed about it, Nick is absolutely angry, shouting threats at Maf and going in like a madman. Unfortunately, as he'd showed himself in the confrontation with Marty, when your opponent has a four-foot long blade, charging straight into it is the worst possible move.

Rather than panicking, Nick instead starts laughing as the realization hits him that he's going to die. He'd reflected in previous threads that the people who died were the lucky ones. They were at peace, untroubled by the need to kill, to survive. By the same token, he's been freed now, and his last act is to smile as he sinks down to the ground, his miserable killing spree at last brought to an end.

I really liked Nick Reid, since he was a good example of a spree killer who wasn't technically a player. All of his kills were accidents or him acting in self-defense, and yet he didn't have any real remorse for those kills. He was a complex character; not a villain, per se, but definitely no hero. He was just a tragic character, trying sometimes but always failing at redemption. Of all the narratives in V4 I've read, his was the one that's fascinated me the most, and I don't know if anything could really top it.

Could I get another one?

Posted: **Sun Mar 10, 2019 9:54 pm**

maddy writeup

Spoiler!

Posted: **Mon Mar 11, 2019 7:14 pm**

Thank you kindly for your writeups, Blast and Lore.

Here are two more.

Blastinus: Ericka Bradley
Melusine: Janet Claymont

Posted: **Sat Mar 16, 2019 2:30 pm**

Done with Marybeth.

[+] marybeth: I think I'll be a bit short with this one. Marybeth is a character that is fun to interact with, but not fun to read.

I'll lump together discussion of her pregame and on-island time. The thing is, a character like Marybeth, a character that does the same things Marybeth does could work. Like, it is sensational to see someone literally push another person into a fight, egging people on to conflict. Where she shines is Woods of Paranoia, her second island thread, because this is where she is most consequential. She literally pushes Francine Moreau into a scuffle involving three other people, which indirectly leads to her death via flare gun. She adds another degree of tension to this thread, and to the previous thread, Resolve, to a lesser extent, through her chaotic evil actions. I'd love to see a character like Marybeth whose motivations are fully explored, where we get to find out exactly why she's so eager for a story, why she literally writes fan-fic of her classmates. It's entertaining to talk about, fun to hear about, but it's not fun to read because Marybeth is a very one-note character. All she ever does is intensify conflict, try to get the tea for no reason other than to get the tea. The writing is technically sound, but we're never provided any reason. She's just a gossip, that's it.

Her death is sadly a placeholder, and it's done even more disservice by the fact that it's the sex death. She's treated as a footnote to Clio and Maxwell's love scene.

My main takeaway from this is that Marybeth would be a good Second Chances character. Like, there's potential in a character so deeply invested in viewing the world as a spectacle, there's a lot of interesting motivations that would be nice to examine, to explore. But that never shows up. She's just a gossip. I think she's a D+-tier character, in my opinion? Not horrible, so to speak. Again, the writing's technically sound, and it's somewhat funny (in a good way) to read a character like her. But yeah, not much to her below the surface.

I'll hold off on getting another character for now.

Posted: **Mon Apr 01, 2019 2:27 am**

Alright, so...Ericka Bradley. One of the finalists of this game, and I've never heard of her before. Seems like very few people talk about her, which may indicate that her story is a bit more middling than others. I guess we'll see, won't we?

Spoiler!

May I have another, please?

Posted: **Mon Apr 01, 2019 6:07 pm**

Another one, comin' right up.

Blastinus: Feo Smith

Posted: **Mon Apr 01, 2019 6:15 pm**

V4 was great, I'll take a kid!

Survival Of The Fittest

The V4 Read-a-Thon

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