Survival Of The Fittest

Have another.

DN: Feo Smith

Time for some Feoing.

FEO SMITH - PROFILE
Disregarding that the name of Feo's dad magically changes from Paolo to Carlos halfway through the bio, there's nothing wrong here. Feo is a comely Brazilian lass originally from L.A. who loves to bomp-chika-bomp her way down the hallways of Bayview and flirt with all the boys, but there's a good amount of depth and care put into her profile to make her a rounded character. There's a lot devoted to her issues with her older sister Wren that feels a bit like padding, but I could say that about every profile post-v3 probably. We get a good sense of her as a person and that's all I can ask a bio for. Onto pregame!

PREGAME
Oh lordy, it's the HOUSE PARTY. So v4's party at stereotypical flamboyant snarky gay guy Justin Corrigan's was all planned out to be the BIG SUPER-EVENT of pre-game, a massive thing with multiple threads not unlike the Swiftball ended up fulfilling many years into the future. Unfortunately this was long ago and far away, and with pre-game stretching out forever and Justin handler eventually leaving, it was condensed down into one confusing big thread where people come and go and no post order is followed. That's not a bad thing, but it also means I'm going to focus mostly on Feo and ignore all the other wackiness (The Jello Shots! Janet Claymont seducing a kid actually named Rizzo! Peter Siu trying to get some newbie character named Kimberly to drink gasoline because he's a jackass! Bet that newbie handler won't last at all.)

So anyways, Feo arrives early with booze and weed and is all like "bitches let's get started with this partay", and we skip forward after what I think was a few months OOC to be like "uh let's just get this going and say the party's started). And a note on why already I'm happy with Feo and know she's going to be a fun character to read that I noted in chat. From Feo's first post:

he checked her reflection. She wore a blue and green iredes . . . iradesne . . color-changing baseball cap with a black collared shirt, blue-jean short-shorts, and yes, two-inch heels to match the hat. She never left her shoe swagger at home.

Now I'm not gonna award it a Peabody, but that's voice and character through description and inner monologue. It's the kind of thing that made Alice Blake a slog to read because she DIDN'T have it.

Anyway, eventually Ricky Fortino drunkenly arrives and sees Feo in the kitchen dodging flying bottles (this party as is written in the background is far wilder than it is reality), and thankfully I know to look for his posts being that I wrote him and all. Him and Feo flirt and pick up broken glass in amusing fashion, but then it basically peters out with no resolution. Still, we got a good idea of Feo as a character, and she's fun to read.

Up next, Feo is at the mall. She stops in at the ice rink and sees Sally Connelly, whose newbie handler is misspelling her name as Connelley in her first post. Boy, bet they won't last either. Sally, Thea Kairos, and Evelyn Reed have formed the MEAN GIRL BRIGADE and completely destroy another new character in Lily Ainsworth who comes up to talk to them, leading her to slink off quoting Sun Tzu as she plans her revenge. Feo comes up and is all like "damn you bitches are ruthless glad I like you" and they share a jolly laugh before the scene also peters out with no resolution. Again, it establishes Feo's character pretty well, she's got no qualms whatsoever about being on the side of the mean cheerleaders even if she's not specifically one herself.

Final pregame thread. Feo is going to prom with Ricky in the limo. Well, she never actually gets there as if you can guess the thread peters out with no resolution, you get a prize.

So Feo's pregame is interesting in that it's the opposite of Alice's in. many ways. Alice had a long list of completed threads and plot lines in pregame meant to set up her character and relationships before the island. Feo, on the other hand, is clearly just winging it, and really none of her pregame stuff relates to the island at all, so you miss nothing by skipping it. But that's not a bad thing, especially for the v4-era. Pregame shouldn't be more important that the island, but if you're doing it you should at least establish and get a feel for the character, and I sense that her a lot. Good work and a fun quick read, although if you are reading Feo it's certainly not required reading or anything.

ISLAND
Feo begins in the saw-mill, which is one of the truly classic v4-clusterfuck opening threads, in that it eventually has like TEN freaking people in it. Thankfully, it's one of the better examples of this I've seen, so hearty congrats to everyone. Basically, the thread openers are smart enough to congeal into two groups of three, and Feo winds up with Ethan Kent and Duncan McMahon. Elsewhere, Joe Rios, George Leidman, and Cisco Vasquez, and elsewhere ELSEWHERE, Garrett Hunter and Jackie Maxwell arrive, separately from Kevin Harding (as I remember he does CONSTANTLY) all to add nothing to a thread that already has too many people in it. Then Brent Shanahan, but we'll get to him in a second.

So anyways, we focus on Feo, Ethan, and Duncan. Feo and Ethan awake groggily, Ethan starts hitting on Feo to help her find her contacts, and Duncan walks in to join them. Everyone's reacted a bit to quickly and are a bit too blasé about the whole "murder your classmates or die" thing, but honestly the alternative of spending forever coming to terms with the situation can be just as bad, and they're all fun to read. Ethan is planning to use his new friends as meat shields or weapon supplies, Duncan is (of course) on the search for Maria Graham, and Feo is just overall pissy and trying to figure out her best options to survive through this. These posts are all pretty short and snappy and we can see the character, good work. Especially when it's revealed that her weapon are the deadly DORIAN'S SCORPIONS OF DOOM, which is still one of my favourite weapon draws ever. Our threesome soon sees the other group, and Feo steps out to play peacemaker when suddenly BRENT SHANAHAN arrives and throws a stick of dyanmite into the sawmill for terrible, terrible reasons. This may have had complaints at the time, but I love it. Shake things up fools! Most of the other groups run away but Feo's like "nah, I'm right in the line of fire" and she, Duncan, and Ethan all get kerblammoed, with Feo being the closest to the bang and getting some fingers and hair blown off. Ethan recovers pretty damn quick to start trying to fix Feo up in a jiffy, while Feo gives us a pointless and superfluous dream sequence while she's unconscious. Duncan recovers a bit later and, in a thankfully bygone fashion of older versions, has the announcements come on even though it makes no sense for the timeline. Luckily everyone else in the thread ignores that and Feo wakes up and is pissssssed and they all stumble off. This was a great if a bit overstuffed opening thread. Yes, everyone established character and committed to the situation a bit too quickly, but that's a minor sin in SOTF and I'd rather it happen than NOTHING happen instead. One thing that doesn't work for me is Feo's occasional gratuitous Portuguese, especially since she's only half-Brazilian and was born in the states and it comes off a bit too much like "El Foreigner, sputtering with rage slips into imprecations in their mother tongue".

But let's move on to oh here's a fairly famous thread, what with the spooning and the fingerstub licking. So Feo and Ethan and Duncan have all taken shelter in the tunnels, where they wake up all rubbing against each other before Duncan freaks out. He explores a bit while meanwhile Feo and Ethan are all still just like "mmm you feel good baby" and yes, Ethan gives Feo's finger stubs a little taste. It's goofy and silly and gross but presented that way and doesn't last as long as I remember it being, which is good. Given that a day has presumably gone by, Feo and Ethan are now very much into the game and are both sorta planning/wondering when they're gonna need to shank each other, and this works better now that we've had that established. Duncan meanwhile has run into one of those v4-characters-I-don't-remember-existing that always pops up in a readathon as Haruka Watanabe is sitting on the tunnel floor wailing and blubbering, while Frankie Fiametta also makes her debut but doesn't really do much but curse and bring out her cell phone and cause me to furrow my brow. Feo and Ethan eventually untangle themselves and stroll up to Haruka and are all like "aw, look at the baby cry let's steal her oar hahahahahaha LOSER." OK, that's funny. Ethan is like a mean girl cheerleader stuck in the body of an asthmatic nerd and it's fun even if his cruelty is a bit too obvious and Duncan plays the awkward straight man well to them.

Meanwhile it's Liz Polanski oh boy. I don't remember her being here, but she's also just been horribly burned due to the swamp being lit on fire and is covered in blood from carrying severed heads around. She is looking for relays in the tunnels to ESCAPE. Feo and Duncan are like "ugh", Haruka runs away but not before her handler adorably thanks everyone for the opportunity to RP with them, and Frankie is still just like there. But they decide to follow Liz, although that goes nowhere and Ethan just wraps up that she finds something but he stops her from messing with it and they leave. Duncan also takes off on his own, which is a bit too bad. Feo and Ethan make a great pair, but they're both similar and Duncan made a good contrast to them. But alas, MARIA MARIA HE GOTTA FIND MARIA. Feo's also starting to have some good conflict where she feels a bit bad about being such a bitch but is also like, hey I'm in a DEATH GAME here whaddaya want me to do? Only the bitchy survive and all. That's good.

New thread and it's looking like I'm two for two in sex threads oh boyo. Feo and Ethan gather around a campfire for some character building and reminiscing time and roast some marshmallows while Feo talks about her ambitions to be a jazz musician being ruined by the missing fingers and all. This is nicely done, although I don't really know if I square Feo's character with being that serious about her saxophone, especially given she rarely mentioned it up to now. But it's a good way to take a breather and Feo and Ethan both snark and genuinely emote through a "first date" before the sex comes, which is fade-to-black and that's just fine. Of course it brings to question whether the sex is needed at all, but eh. They also both still know and admit that they fully realize they can't trust each other, but hormones and some genuine feeling, what can ya do? I would maybe like to see Feo plumb her depths a bit deeper to really get a sense of what makes her tick but again, can't complain too much. The grey zones they both inhabit in regards to both SOTF and each other are played very well.

Except for the useless rainbow formatting text for one sentence about how good the sex was. That I can complain about.

Onto the final and most famous of threads, it's The House of The Rising Sun. Where to make a long story short, they come across the ranger station, Ethan formulates his plan to create a motor to power up the computer, and realizes he'll have to give his collar a good blowing up to do so. So he tells Feo off in a pretty disgusting fashion to get her to leave, writes down his plan, and smashes the cameras, only for Feo to return and realize what he did, thus kicking off the whole REAL escape plot. First things first, this is played well by Feo, even if it's Ethan running the plan in some absolutely fantastic ending posts by Rugga.

I will quibble on one thing, which is that there was a great missed opportunity to set this up more beforehand. Feo and Ethan's turn to the heroic doesn't betray their characters in the slightest, but it does feel a bit like it comes out of nowhere. Especially when they were a couple threads ago in the tunnels with Liz and her relay ideas, and I can't help but feel there could have been more done there, or even in a conversation afterwards, to set up the desire to fuck with the game. Then when we got to the ranger station, we'd see it all come together. Obviously this wasn't something that was know at that time, which is one of the unfortunate things about the nature of SOTF.

But anyways, missing that, Feo is genuinely devastated by Ethan's remarks, and her discovery of his actual plan is a really great moment. Could again maybe have been a bit more detailed, but that's OK. She's newly determined to rise beyond being the pretty schemer and carry things on and it works great for the character, again without betraying her innate bitchiness which is such an established part of her. And unfortunately this is also mostly where her story ends as well, as Team Ego files in and takes the reins as they start riding a bike for 10 hours or so to power the computer on and find our island coordinates. Feo has one last post where she takes the honors of writing them down and congratulates her own awesomeness on setting up Ethan's, uh, setup, before she goes inactive and unfortunately, we all knew that the station would soon be danger zoned. In the end SOTF_Help takes over but gives her a proper death, as a victim of her own success Feo is left to destroy the evidence of their chicanery, and doesn't manage to get out before her collar goes boom.

So yeah. Obviously this isn't perfection, but Feo is a great read, great fun, and definitely recommended even beyond her importance to the whole v4-Rescue-Thing that makes her a well-known character. She could have been mined deeper, especially with the great voice and character she had, but even though her story is only 4 threads long, they still feel like a complete story told. There's very little fluff or pointlessness (beyond the lapses into Portuguese I mentioned before), and that alone makes her worth reading.

I'll take one more, let's see if I can go 3-for-3 on v4 sex scenes oh boy, and then maybe fill in on another readathon.

DN, you get: Celeste Beaumont

Ho ho. So, as has been amusingly recounted in chat, Celeste is one of the most notorious characters to continue the non-stop sexfest that was v4. I had to fortify myself with booze a couple times, but I did get through it.

PROFILE
Celeste's profile is pretty lean, but it was OK for v4. These days would need a lot more details, but not gonna slag on the profiles for it, just point it out. So basically Celeste is built around the concept that she looks like she's 13 years old and has big hangups about that and tries to dress and act like she's older to make up for it. There's a lot of notes of potential characteristics and stuff that don't have a lot of backstory to them, but again it's v4 so it's all pretty much fine.

PREGAME
Aaaaand then it's not fine. So here's the thing about Celeste. Roughly 95% of her extensive, extensive pregame is all about one thing, and it's her "budding relationship" aka endless PornHub video with John Smith. And to say that this relationship does not work well is putting it lightly.

I'm not going to give an orgasm-by-orgasm recount of it, but I will go through the basics and explain the issues. So Celeste's first three threads are one long, self-contained day-long story. She meets John at the mall and, desperate get get a guy to look at her, orders some tacos and starts essentially climbing all over him while delivering bad one-liners. John, an overweight nerdy artistic virgin, stammers her way through things and becomes half-geek/half-lothario as the double entendres pile up. They end up planning a "date" at the skating rink and meet up there.

At the rink, we continue with a drawn-out mashed-together mix of awkward-teen romantic comedy and erotic fan fiction, until John's erection becomes too much to bear and Celeste drags him off to the bathroom where she gives him an expert blowjob. She then invites him back to her place where her family is conveniently absent because lord knows we haven't established this enough, and we get a third thread that is six-pages long where John arrives and these two geeky virgins engage are sex experts for flimsy reasons while they rock each other's brains out and then fall asleep. But wait, that was only the first two pages so they wake up (with John hard again and also STILL INSIDE HER) a few hours later and it's time for EVEN MORE SEX, except now it's different because she's on top I guess? Then they have to take a shower together and exchange underpants like some terrible hentai John's read.

So now the issues.

1) I went through that in about three paragraphs, but by god it was so much longer. Each of these three threads was at least 5 pages long I think, and it went on and on with repetitive thought patterns and pointless descriptions of everything from the sex to Celeste picking out her size skates and lacing them up at the ice rink. I'm pretty sure the reason this didn't attract nearly as much attention as other sex scenes in v4 is simply because no one actually bothered to read through the whole thing.

2) For all that text (and at least the posts were relatively short), we in the end learned next to nothing good about Celeste's character. Because it's almost all sex and thinking about sex, and what are we gonna do with that? My impression at the end of this is that she's a selfish, spoiled bitch, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, if it's the only impression I get from her actions, I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to see any more. To point out some things in her profile that could have helped - She's mentioned as a big gossip, we see no glimpse of that. She likes to design webpages, hey there's something we could have her talk about the geeky John with instead of her just purring and calling him "Big Guy" (which she does about 764 times and holy crap did it get old). Her dad walked out on the family, hmm maybe there's some backstory that could be used to establish her character and why she likes this loser, but again, it never comes up.

3) This relationship is toxic and bad and isn't portrayed that way. Like I said, Celeste is selfish and demeaning and has some obvious self-anger issues. I get no sense through this or any of her other pre-game threads that she even LIKES John that much, or sees him as anything but the only sexbot that she could afford. John is a loser and a creep who is beyond obsessed with sex and I just felt a bit disgusted by him. He's unsure of his own sexuality but not to get too far into him as a character, it is not handled well. Not to mention the whole thing that Celeste's 13-year-old appearance is commented on time and time again, which adds an extra layer of ick to the whole thing.

4) The idea that we somehow need THREE sex scenes plus a shower scene is beyond the pale. This is mostly just harping on point 1 again, but especially when the fell asleep after sex only to wake up three hours later in a physically impossible situation and be like LET'S GO AGAIN was just aaaaaaaaa. I mentioned a couple reviews ago that I was getting pretty tired of Victoria Logan's character being seemingly obsessed with sex. Well believe me, this had me longing for the halcyon days of Alice and Victoria, where in addition to having actual characters and a real relationship with each other at least were gracious enough to keep the sex to the end of one thread near pre-game's end.

Thankfully, the rest of Celeste's pregame is "sex-free" although unfortunately not John-free. And not really sex-free either, as her next thread is her shopping for sexy clothes at the mall and being enraged because she doesn't see any in her size. Thanks to the gods of casual conveniences though, as Bridget Connolly is here and her sister just happens to own a store in the mall that caters to petite girls (why hasn't Celeste heard of it before? Ah, because I'm sure it didn't exist until now), and they go and talk with Bridget's sister while Celeste orders some stuff and Bridget eats a ham sandwich. There's not much of a driving force to this scene as all Celeste's problems are cleared up in an instant and it's just another pregame thread.

We do get a funny respite for a moment as Celeste goes bowling in her next pre-game thread, an amusingly pointless one-shot where I'm 90% sure the handler started an open thread, had no one join, and then shrugged and abandoned it. Such things littered many pregames so no worries, we'll move on.

No wait can we stick with the bowling as we're back to John. And it's the morning of prom, and apparently John hasn't asked Celeste or I think even talked to her since their all-day sex menagerie? So he wakes up and is like "WHOOPS IT'S PROM!" and invites Celeste to go. Like before, what exactly is the relationship these two are supposed to have?! They just exchanged underwear with each other and now they don't even know if they're going to prom?

But anyways, despite all that this is actually Celeste's best pre-game thread because for the most part the sex is forgotten as each goes back and forth in a montage of "getting ready for prom" as they run to the mall and have to get their hair done and buy tuxedos and stuff all at the last-minute. Again ignoring the realistic nature of it, both of them come of a bit less like sex fiends and a bit more like the awkward teenage dorks you are having the adventures like you might find in a low-budget teen sitcom "Tonight on Bayview High! John and Celeste have only one day to prepare for prom! What wacky misadventures will they have!"

Although I will point out that this isn't making Celeste a character I like or have any empathy for, since again all her thoughts are about her and never anything else. Oh and she steals her mom's credit card to buy all this stuff and doesn't see any issues with that, so yeah. Oh, and that John goes home after his shopping and decides to thrill us all with a discussion of his wack-off material. Look, I'm trying to take what I can get here. She and John end up being driven to the prom by John's dad (how romantic)

We go to the prom itself where I decided to subject myself to the whole first thread and if you want my increasingly drunken play-by-play you can find it in chat, let's just focus on Celeste. Or there's not much need to because Celeste and John have a bunch of posts but don't really do anything because they can't have sex (although they do consider if they could). They way they talk it's like they both should be realizing that they actually have nothing in common and don't even know each other but instead I think the handlers/characters are just thinking it's idle conversation. Anyways, the end of pregame.

So yeah. Whereas usually pregame is superfluous and pointless at worst and you don't need to read it, I think I would definitely say that Celeste's pregame probably makes her character worse in every way and would actively say you should not read it. On the bright side, at least on the island there's hopefully nowhere to go but up!

ISLAND
Celeste begins by lugging around the sledgehammer she was assigned as a weapon, and being generally grumpy and pissy about this whole death game thing, which at least is a reaction that fits for her character. She and Kayla McArthur have encountered a duo of menfolk in Brock Mason and Steve Hunt, and at least Celeste isn't automatically thinking about sex. Good on her! Brock is fatalistic and Steven is offering to team up with our dyslexic jock so that he can help Brock figure out how to use his gun. We get some decent conflict at least as both Kayla and Celeste want to team up with the guys, who eye them warily as probable dead weight, which pisses the girls off. Brock and Steven go their separate ways while Kayla and Celeste decide they've gotta team up together.

One of the issues straight off the bat (and this was similar in pre-game, although I didn't WANT them to be longer) is that Celeste's posts in general are pretty bare-bones. She ruminates for a few sentences on things, then says or does something. Rinse, repeat. It makes her a fairly easy read, but it doesn't draw us in to her feelings or desires or voice or anything much like that. She's just... as I noted, grumpy and pissy. But this isn't a bad introductory thread overall. We get a bit of conflict, we establish some initial characteristics. Not great, but not horrendous.

Her second thread is a fun thread that features Jackie Myrie waking up and attempting to menace Allie Walworth with her zipped-off cargo pants leg, and a cameo appearance by Tobias Elwin, one of my favourite completely unknown fodder characters! But Celeste and Kayla just walk in for one or two posts after almost everyone else has already left, and then leave themselves having done nothing. Not a promising continuation.

Third thread! And oh no John is back. John has teamed up with Sunil Savarkar and Jojo Joiner, and proceeds to revolt me by daydreaming about necrophilia and possibly forcing himself onto his teammates to deal with his unstoppable horniness. Alright forget John, here come Celeste and Kayla and at least this could be interesting. We get some (I guess) attempted suspense as Celeste and Kayla lean against the outside of the sawmill while the trio of guys are inside. Then it's MORE PEOPLE JOINING, MULES, as in come Acacia Salinger and Roman Jackson, who sneak around Celeste and Kayla while the two girls are musing idly (and I gotta say, boringly) on grades and boyfriends instead of, y'know, doing something. The definitely highlight of this thread is reading Sunil, whose inner monologue just dunks nonstop on his idiotic cowardly teammates as John and Jojo, flail around and panic at noises and come up with terrible plans. Acacia makes a sad pretend phone call to her mom at home in a nice moment, while Roman joins the Brigade of Pathetic Menfolk by being attacked by a moth and rendered helpless. This results in John, true to his cretinous nature, accidentally shooting him with his shotgun. While this is all going in notice I'm not really mentioning Celeste and Kayla, who are planning to go inside themselves but hear the shots and screaming and decide to run the hell away.

I'm not sure if Celeste was MEANT to meet up with John and it just didn't work out that way or what, but I'm also not sure if I like subverting expectations or are just annoyed. I mean, I really hate John so I'm happy they didn't meet up, but still this comes off as another pointless thread for Celeste and I'm gonna say it, her and Kayla make a terrible combination. Neither drives the action or the narrative and they're both pretty blank slates. Kayla has all the character of a sock with a magic marker face from what I've seen, and watching walk from thread to thread and rest in banal fashion is doing absolutely nothing for me.

Anyways, let's move on. We go to the tunnels, and Celeste is wandering alone and lost and has gotten separated from Kayla. This is actually another slightly fun subversion, as instead of the classic groan-inducing SOMEHOW THEY HAD GOTTEN SEPARATED breakup of characters and they're never seen again, Kayla is actually in the same thread in the tunnels as Celeste and they didn't just mysteriously lose each other between threads but have instead gotten apart in the darkness of the tunnels, which actually makes enough sense to work. Now in things that make no sense but work anyways, Celeste runs into it's the return of Meredith PANDORA GRIMDARK BLACK Hemmings. Pandora is busy haunting these tunnels and avoiding the sunlight and after creepily creeping on Celeste, offers to lead her out of the bowels of the beast's den of iniquities and find Kayla in exchange for food and water. Celeste hesitantly agrees, and it actually works! '

Except that after they find Kayla, she goes inactive and gets taken over by SOTF_Help and runs away, pissing Celeste off something fierce. But Meredith still leads Celeste to the exit, and man oh man I wish that Celeste had found someone like her earlier because this is so far and away her best thread. Having a wild character like Pandora Black for Celeste to bounce off of and as the thread goes on, grudgingly relate to and respect a bit, does a wonder for her. She has some life, she has a somewhat stronger and more varied voice, and she actually examines herself a bit. I'm not saying that she's become great, but at least it's something better, and I really do wish that they'd decided to stick together. But sadly, at the exit of the tunnels, Celeste instead just signs Pandora's Book of Death and goes off on her own.

She emerges in the swamp "days later" and has heard that John and Kayla are dead, which is never a good sign, because it hints at one of Celeste's other big problems - inactivity. This usually isn't evident as much during a readathon, but you can sense it around the edges. With OOC notes on the inactivity timer and SOTF_Help and characters changing handlers, it becomes clear that Celeste and the other people in her later threads are moving sloooowly. And then you look at the death order and see that John and Kayla have already died (not to cheer the deaths, but uh... OK, I will. Yaaaay!) like 50 kids ago and that this thread ends at the same time as the rescue happening and realize that holy crap this must've taken months. And that does hurt Celeste as a character, as she's gonna be surrounded by people who have already gotten through a ton of storyline while hers is seemingly still in first or second gear.

But onto the thread itself. Celeste has changed over the couple days, shaken by the deaths and Pandora has rubbed off some actual character on her perhaps. I wish it could've been set up more, but I'll take it. Celeste is a miserable ball of selfish self-loathing, wandering in the filthy swamp, realizing that's she's alone and probably doomed. Not helping things are the equally miserable Tim Questaire, who at least tries to help, and the loathsome Morgan Leftowitz, who is too busy nuzzling the dead body of Jen Romita to do much. Also not helping - George Leidman comes in and gives Tim a good skewering with his sword before threatening Celeste and leaving. Celeste is both stunned and freaked out, having humanized a bit more as a character by all this crap happening and she develops a theme in that she's certain she's been cursed, and that she's passing that on to everyone she knows or meets (except Pandora, who Celeste muses later already lives in the darkness and thus can't be affected, haha I like that it's cute). Morgan at least is crazy or creepy enough that Celeste is desperate enough to go with, and she ends up following him to the Key for our final thread.

Wherein apparently Morgan had a plan to ESCAPE with Jen's dead body on the wrecked boat. Until he sees the boat is, y'know WRECKED and all and obviously not seaworthy. That's enough to put him out of commission, as he's easy pickings for the slightly off-kilter and total-jackass Josie Vernon to come on in a give him a shooting. Morgan dies groaning to "burn the boat" to which Josie is like "sure hahahahaha NO" and skedattles, and Celeste watches this happen and that whole curse thing is all she can think about in her current state. She's basically a wreck and even if this hadn't been when finally her inactivity won out and she got caught in a danger zone and taken care of by SOTF_Help I think it was about time for her to go. So Celeste decides why not, she'll burn the boat but can't actually accomplish that for many obvious reasons, and in the morning the Key is DZ'd and Celeste breaks her ankle jumping off the boat to leave and that's that for her, as she realizes the curse has come finally for her and accepts her fate.

Celeste really can't be recommended reading. She accomplishes very little and isn't exactly an enthralling read. But if you ignore her pre-game (obviously) and focus on her last three threads while ignoring the fact that she somehow managed to get to 45th place in v4, you'll at least have something there. She shoulda stuck with Pandora, is all I can say.

Alrighty, I was going to move down to v3, but I am now perversely curious if my eheheheh "luck" will continue, so I'll take another one.

If I get John Smith though, I'll politely pass on him. I've already read enough.

DN: MOARRRRRRR

Rizzo Vitoria

See, I WAS going to head over to one of the other readathons after this one as I didn't really want to be that guy doing 15 straight reads. But nooooo, since I am apparently doomed to get nothing but sexkids until the end of time I shall take another one after this review to see if my hohohoh luck holds true. I am a compelled gamblingman.

Anyway, Rizzo Victoria.

PROFILE
So Rizzo, it must be noted, is written by the same handler who gave us John Smith last time. Rizzo and John were, in fact, their only two characters in SOTF. And while it's not entirely my place to comment on a handler's potential issues.... I'm gonna do it anyways but at least get that out of the way here even though it doesn't fit. So Rizzo, much like John, is set on "super-horny" all the way through his entire journey on island. He only has sex once (and we'll get to that later), but he's constantly obsessing over it, comparing things to it, all in much the same fashion and style that John does. He even has the same, Iunno, fetish for absconding with panties and falling into a coma immediately after sex. So I don't know what exactly this implies about the handler, if it's their line of thinking or if they're trying to deliberately play teenagers as rampantly oversexed to comment about something, or if they just think that's what teenagers are doing all the time, but it's not great. And it colors everything they write in ways that other characters don't.

Fortunately, Rizzo does breathe on his own a bit more than my experiences with John did, at least partly because he's an amusingly silly character starting with his profile. So Rizzo is a too aptly-named short little scuzzball who enjoys dumpster diving for clothes, selling other scavenged items for the right price, and topping up on caffeine pills. His profile mentions "parkour" but I think that might have been either a holdover from when people decided FUCK THE PARKOUR in v4 because it's never mentioned again either in his profile or really anything he does. His profile, like many v4-era stuff, would need to be fleshed out a lot and some stuff explained more for future versions, but as always, it is what it is.

PRE-GAME
Rizzo has one of the most pointless Memory of the Past things I've ever read, which is basically just a summation of his bio written a bit more informally. It's the kind of thing you can do to pass the time on your own and help you flesh out your character or build their voice, but there's no reason for anyone to read it. Moving on.

And so let's start pre-game proper by taking a dive headfirst into a dumpster filled with complete insanity!

So one of the things I've discovered. If you want me to enjoy your annoying, creepy little loser of a character, one surefire way to help is to put him into a scene with some complete idiot far more loathsome than he is! I'm guessing that was mostly fortuitous timing on Rizzo's part, but damned if it didn't work a bit. We meet Rizzo as he true to form rummages through a filthy dumpster in the back alley of the mall looking for stuff to gank, when what should he hear but some nerd named Sean Carver just straight-up buying a bunch of meth from some shady and vaguely stereotypical drug dealer for moronic and inscrutable reasons that I'm not gonna go into detail with as I'm not reviewing Sean. Rizzo, not one to let a sales opportunity go to waste, pops out and offers to scrounge up some accessories for this fine upstanding citizen, which causes Sean to first think that Rizzo is Walter White and ask for a hookup and then freak out because he thinks he's a NARC, MAN. A STOOLIE!

(I'm gonna note that it's very obvious that Sean's handler has less than any considerable experience with drugs. Which is fine! Don't think you need to do drugs to write your rampant druggie, kids! But do maybe do a bit of research)

Anyway, Rizzo is rightly weirded out by all this and is about to go get some frozen yogurt when Sean breaks down in tears, confesses his shameful and boring life to Rizzo, and so Rizzo decides to help the guy out by giving him a bendy straw he scavenged from the dumpster which Sean then proceeds to use to snort ALL THE METH. He immediately overdoses and I ignore his attempts at dream imagery and flashbacks while Rizzo freaks the hell out and eventually calls 9-1-1. Rizzo is treated with at least a decent touch of realism during this and I'm not hating the guy. I am certainly hating Sean, who then wakes up and threatens Rizzo into helping him to his car, where he drives away covered in puke/urine/drugs. Sean does have one line in a future pre-game thread, but the handler notes that as taking place BEFORE a thread that was previous to this one. So I'm just going to assume that this is the end of Sean's pre-game and he never gets on the island because he proceeds to get into a horrible car crash and get arrested and share a cell with Monty Pondsworth.

But er, Rizzo, yeah. This thread, silly as it is, is amusing for that reason and actually serves to establish most of Rizzo's prime intended traits - scummy, cowardly, a bit desperate but not altogether evil. Honestly, if you're reading him for whatever reason I'd just skip the rest of his pre-game since it's all downhill and go straight to the island, you won't regret missing out on what comes next.

So I'm gonna try to summarize this without going into much detail because god knows it doesn't deserve it. Rizzo arrives at the V4 House Party Thread (TM) where he does cement some place in SOTF lore by bringing the fabled Jello shots that Charlene Norris stuffs into her chest cavity. There he meets Janet Claymont who drags him upstairs for explicit sextimes and he loses his virginity.

In one sense, this isn't nearly as bad as John as John and Celeste because at least it's contained to one page of X-Ratings, and it does have a broader storyline at play - Janet cheating on Chadd Crossen and regretting it. In another sense, it's much worse because and there's no way to put this lightly, it's described multiple times that Janet is completely smashed and Rizzo is completely sober, yet Janet is portrayed as the temptress during the first half of this while Rizzo is just the poor schmuck who can't control his willie. Now I know it was 2008, and yes, this kind of thing does and still does happen, but I shouldn't have to read the sex itself written in the same "OH HO SO TITILLATING IS YOUR WEENIE OUT OF YOUR PANTS YET" fashion as John and Celeste were. Especially when we're then supposed to treat it (mostly) seriously the morning after, when Janet realizes what happened and tears into Rizzo, and especially when Rizzo's reaction contains the charming belief that hey, someone was gonna have sex with her so it might as well have been him! Rizzo Oh, and Janet is kinda portrayed herself as having an overdramatic response to this, on and and and Rizzo fucking steals her panties at the end of this. Again, I'm obviously not gonna say this doesn't happen and should never be portrayed, but there were about a million ways to do this better if you really had to do it. And yes, at least Rizzo is pretty well defined as a loser in the narrative in more of a fashion than John is, but that's not much comfort.

Rizzo's remainder of pre-game is pretty uneventful even though one has like 70 freaking posts. In that one, Rizzo is feeling a combination of lost, alone, and bitter after the house party, which is believable at least and he's not just coming off as unrelentingly horny for more. He still can't come off as a LITTLE horny for more which, c'mon handler enough already, and his descent into proto-MRA thoughts isn't making me want to exactly root for him. Oh, the rest of the thread you ask? The rest of this thread is a lot of freakin nothing as Rizzo and Aaron Hughes sit in the mall food court doing jack all while Amber Whimsy, who really needs a better hobby, spends forever trying to pry gossip out of them but mostly fails. This goes on roughly forever and doesn't have a payoff, like I thought that Rizzo would give up Janet's name and find himself in deep shit as it was spread 'round the school but maybe that was just another abandoned plot line so we shall play a sad song.

Rizzo moves on to prom, where he is (mostly) back to being amusingly pathetic. In fact if you ignore all the implications of Janet and just think of them having consensual or at least co-drunken sex together, it kinda works if you squint as Rizzo first is stuck in the hellscape of having to converse with Chris Davidson before seeing Janet, and eventually, trying to impress her by dancing by himself in the general vicinity of a group of attractive girls, hoping that Janet will mistake one of them for being his date.

ISLAND
Now onto the island. I do credit for Rizzo, like in pre-game, establishing his character right away as he wakes up fittingly in the swamp and pukes everywhere and freaks out due to not having his caffeine pills. We get your standard v4-opening thread of people coming in! First up is Michellle O'Cain, who I love simply because of her standard-bearing as IMO v4's single worst hair as I have mentioned with chat and must again share with you all.

She has dyed her brown hair light blond with her bangs dyed white with several light red/pink streaks going down.

Just look at this!



Michelle in any case has covered herself in swamp muck for camouflage purposes and sets herself up as a potential player/manipulator who doesn't want to play just yet. Theo Behr enters and disappoints my as I initially confused him for Teo Weinstock, and establishes himself as an equally shifty guy who does have some medical experience. Oh, he also makes the expert medical decision to throw away his Anti-Crazy pills but that never leads anywhere so whatev. Up next we get Orpheus "OC" Campbell, who got the hot pink keytar in one of v4's best joke weapons, and is looking to be the straight man of this group.

Rizzo, for his part, squirms on the ground sick and briefly imagines a four-way sex scene going on here. Oyz. Anyway, this group doesn't last as Michelle almost instantly ditches them (this makes me frown, it's the first thread and running off right away is IMO usually not a great sign for the character). Theo and Rizzo and OC decide to band together for lack of any other options. This is your bog-standard v4 opening thread, with people coming in and vaguely deciding to stick together with no long-term plan after engaging formalities. It works decently enough in that regard though, as we establish characters and nothing insipid happens, so OK work folks!

Next threads, as Rizzo is really establishing himself as the Useless Load, constantly holding his companions back with his needing to puke and rest and stuff. Theo is just about had it, and his paranoia increases as Carla Conners appears, toting a gun and a cheerful attitude. Theo, because he's a moron, decides to run away from this friendly girl who would bring an actual weapon to the group. Or he decides to use that as a flimsy reason to run away and get killed by Rachel Gettys because he just got rolled. I've ragged on when that happens before, and I'll rag on it again. Try to come up with a good reason to get your rolled kid into their death thread, please.

OC, who had gone up ahead, comes back in and decides to split some delicious-sounding sandwiches with Carla and Rizzo, but Rizzo is more interested in Carla's unnamed medicine-pills and offers her $30 bucks for them in another amusingly pathetic moment. Carla declines but has a sandwich and is then never posted with again in this thread so OC and Rizzo eventually continue on. That's not the best followup thread, especially since their adventures also share a thread with the slightly-more-interesting-at-this-time adventures of Isabel Guerra and Dave Morrison, who are doing their own thing in a separate section of the thread due to too few areas to go around.

Anyway, onto Rizzo's third thread, as we begin with a classically depressed and ruminating Nick Reid. Nik Kronwall and Fiona Sparki enter, there's a brief standoff as they ask if they've seen various people and some Nick/Nik confusion on my end, and they end up leaving as OC and Rizzo themselves come in. OC's plotlline is established as "searching for his girlfriend Josee" which means this thread has been a lot of "HEY HAVE YOU SEEN XXXX" thus far which is, as I've noted, not exactly my favourite SOTF journey, especially when there's not enough around it to add more flavour. OC himself is becoming tired of Rizzo's strategy of cowering and hiding behind him, which again I do like the consistency in Rizzo's character, but it's another thing that's not too enthralling to read. This is another thread that doesn't really go anywhere, but it does have a couple fun moments as Rizzo agrees with the inherent silliness in wandering the island hoping to find some person (and then immediately ruins that by fantasizing about Janet naked for him to mount) and Nick snarks to OC that he thinks he saw Josee's dead body (he didn't and is just being an asshole), only for OC to brush it off as Rizzo suggests they get the hell out.

And get the hell out Rizzo does, only to reappear on his own in his new, final thread to die. His explanation for why he lost OC? Well, the classic and eye-rolling "He went to take a piss and somehow got completely lost from his traveling companions oh no!" As I've said, I really don't like it when these are handled with such flimsy reasoning, although god knows I think I've been guilty in the past myself. And MurderWeasel has noted that OC might have gone inactive himself in between threads so might not be his fault.

But in any case, the point is pretty much moot as Rizzo's now in a Reiko thread and we can all see where this is going. Reiko's bestest buddy in the world Carol Burke is all trying to be chipper and naive and earnest about how great it is that she's found Reiko and how much trust they have and no way no how Reiko will ever do anything bad to her nosirreebob, and the foreshadowing is as thick and unsubtle as London fog. Rizzo enters in alone and hides in a bush while wondering if they might be lesbians just to annoy me one last time. Carol is actually really fun to read but this setup is way too blunt. So while Reiko is ignoring medical advice and getting anxious to do some killing, Rizzo obliges by blundering forward a bit and Carol goes to investigate, then WHOOPS her finger slips on her gun and she blows a hole in Rizzo's thigh. Rizzo thus ends the game as he started, squirming on the ground pathetically while leaking various fluids, as Reiko wanders over and finishes him off with a shot to the head with all the urgency of a bored meat factory line worker. She then will end up strangling Carol to death over a minor perceived slight while the narrative apparently expects us to feel sorry for her but that's a story for another day.

So alrighty then. Rizzo's island time isn't exactly THAT bad, but he's not a necessary character by any means. He is at least committed to being a useless, pathetic load and is written that way, and I'm not even saying support characters like that CAN'T work, but the writing quality isn't enough to give Rizzo any more layers than that and, in what's probably his biggest problem, he's never really involved in any storylines or with other characters that he can bounce off of. His group falls apart quickly and in a mostly uninteresting fashion, and his only real companion is OC who's fun to read, but isn't a strong enough or driven enough character to carry Rizzo's story as well.

When you compile that with Rizzo's really problematic pre-game, you get a guy who's fun in spots, but not I'd say really worth the effort. Although feel free to check out him and Sean in the back alley for a fun ride, at least! And if you do run into him on the island while reading he's not going to make a bad impression. Just won't make that much of an impression at all.

OK THEN. LET'S ROLL THIS WHEEL OF FATE ONE MORE TIME.

DN: Katelyn Wescott

KATELYN WESCOTT - PROFILE
Katelyn is another member of v4s Terrible Hair Brigade, with mousy (blonde? light brown?) hair made worse by dying her fringe bright green in an eye-searing combo either way. She's short and kinda dumpy which is nice to see, and her profile is all normalcy. If anything, it's veering a bit too much to the bland side of normal for me. Obviously, that's not to say that I want every profile to be WACKY, but I'd hope for them to be a bit deeper. Katelyn is a Nice Girl who has a big extended family and she's chatty and really good at English. Somehow this causes most social cliques at the school to dislike her except for the NEEEEERDS, so she hangs out with them. That's about it. Oh, and she plays some video games sometimes. So it's not the most enthralling bio I've read, but there's nothing bad.

PREGAME
Huzzah, I finally get a kid with next to no pregame!

So Katelyn comes with her big family to Richard Han's (he of the future GRAVITY death) family's Chinese Restaurant where he is stereotypically forced to work. Richard has some banter with his parents and we get to meet the kitchen staff at Han's Kitchen which I'm sure was essential information. I kid, I kid. I do hope that Stacy the early-30's chef from the Szechuan Province and Michael the bald Thai university student went on to long and successful lives!

Uh, ANYWAYS, Katelyn. We get to meet some of her random siblings and it's a fun post where they like to go to this Chinese restaurant for dinner when they don't feel like cooking. Look, this is like her entire pregame, what do you really want me to say about it? Katelyn goes to find Richard who she's friends with, and they "slip out" of the restaurant area, so they can "talk" better.

Yes. Taaaaalk. Richard greets her. Their eyes smoulder at each other. She asks him burning questions like "Looks busy, eh? Having fun" and he seductively replies "Yeah, like always. How've you been? Didn't see you at school today." Indeed. Why WASN'T she at school today? Was she snorting meth? Fleeing from Monty Pondsworth? Do they end up having sex multiple times in the alley behind the Chinese Restaurant next to the grease dumpster?

Nah, the thread just ends there. But I can dream.

Katelyn has one more pre-game thread where she votes for prom in the massive PROM VOTING thread. Proving my suspicions all correct, she votes Richard Han for King. She votes Laverne Falciender, a pregame only character who was uh..... let's say problematic in concept and leave it at that, for Queen because Katelyn is nice. OK THEN ON TO THE ISLAND.

ISLAND
Katelyn wakes up in the tunnels and turns on her flashlight/torch and shines it around, eventually attracting the attention of Marion Summers who I don't really remember but is apparently yet another Intrepid Reporter Girl of which I've read a bunch now in v4 was it a fad or something, and Aston Bennett who assumes the even more common role of Asshole Who's Obviously Gonna Betray Everyone First Chance They Get. This group banters back and forth in our now very well-worn SOTF opening thread with stuff like "Hey!", "I'm Jimmy Jobob!" and "What should we do now?". Katelyn, although coming off as the most normal girl her with her reactions to being SOTF (basically she's scared shitless but is gonna try to Keep It Together), ends up taking a bit of a backseat as Marion and Aston argue. They agree to team up together though, because it's an SOTF opening thread, except that then Katelyn moves off and Marion and Aston instead stay back to argue some more and Marion goes elsewhere while Aston goes inactive and is picked up by Brackie.

So that didn't accomplish much. Katelyn did at least establish her character though, and she has a couple fun moments like the time she reaches into her pack and finds the trigger of her megaphone and freaks out thinking it's a gun. Although she'll now have to find a new group of People to Team Up With in her next thread...

Which is still in the tunnels, and while they can get really old as a v4-location concept I do like the consistency at least since it's still (I think) the first day. We meet up with Remy Kim and his sister Josee Trembley. Remy is on the freakout and is screaming around for Reiko, whom he's lost. Apparently he's friends with both of the Ishidas and really wants to find them both. Hohoho, one is already dead and the other is on her murderous rampage. NOT A GOOD IDEA, Remy. Josee is a sour apple who tells him to shut the fuck up before he gets them all killed and mutters a bunch. Anyway. Katelyn comes across them, shining her flashlight incompetently, and they all end up teaming up because they're not trying to kill anyone right now. This thread is basically a redo of the first one with some people that will stick together longer than one thread, and I'm not exactly enjoying the rapport between these group. Remy is colossally emotional and vacillates between breaking down in tears and raging about how much he wants to punch Josee in the face. Josee has no emotions whatsoever and doesn't seem to give a shit about anything. Katelyn treads the middle ground, just Hopeful That Things Might Work Out and Scared of Being Killed. They don't have much of a purpose and none of them are leadership material, so yeah.

Let's move on and oh yeah, I know this third thread which SPOILER is Katelyn's death. Our group of three wakes up to the announcements in various ways as suits their temperament. Josee would ordinarily be the most fun character here as she's a snarky bitch, but her posts are about 200 words (and she's already been adopted off) and I'm just not jonesing with her. Remy is a hot mess and not in the most fun way to read. Katelyn is still the most normal but she's all surface-level emoting and stuff. We needs things to happen!

That thing however should not be Cisco Vasquez. Now Cisco has his moments as a character, but he's... problematic. And he's with Joe Rios, who is better but also eeeeeeeh. But anyways, Cisco is a CRAZYMAN, we know because we are told OVER AND OVER how he's lost all touch with reality. AND OVER AND OVER. See, because Joe got a scythe as his weapon, Cisco thinks that Joe is the Quite Literal Grim Reaper, and that he must therefore follow him as, like, The Reaper's Assistant or something. Joe Rios, who clearly is a takes-things-as-they-come sort of guy, just sort of allows this for nebulous reasons while shrugging his shoulders. But anyway, the other thing about Cisco, because he's CRAZY YOU SEE, is that he got a Carol Channing record as his joke weapon, and then in the explosion at the sawmill (remember that from previous readathoning!) he accidentally got it switched with a jagged saw blade of death. We know this because we are reminded OVER AND OVER how what his CRAZY mind thinks is a record is actually a saw blade. AND OVER AND OVER. IN EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN POST I'VE READ CISCO BEFORE.

But why is that important, you may ask? Because Katelyn and Remy have the bright idea to hail Cisco and Joe, whom they see in the distance, with Katelyn's megaphone and they say hello. Cisco has the even brighter idea that he will show this friendly group that he and The Literal Grim Reaper are not a threat. How? By throwing his record at them, of course! So he does, as he tosses his saw blade and it hones in on Katelyn's neck like a drone missile and slices her neck open, and she bleeds out quickly and dies with a pointless cut to her family back home crying for one sentence. It's not a drawn-out BKA-baiting death through and at least I'm happy about that.

This has always been one of the single dumbest deaths in v4 for me. Nothing about this works. Why the hell does Cisco go from The Grim Reaper's Assistant on the Hunt for Souls to being the nice Cisco guy? Why does Joe not stop him from throwing the saw blade when he clearly sees what's going to happen due to Cisco monologuing for a minute about it and Joe thinking at length at what a horrible idea this is? Why doesn't Katelyn move out of the goddamn way? How the fuck does that distance work? Do I really need to point out the impossibility of Cisco tossing his saw blade what appears to be the length of a football field or something and having it just happen to hit Katelyn in the neck? WELL HOW ABOUT IF I ADD THE FACT THAT THEY'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FREAKING WOODS! There should be trees everywhere! aaaaaaaaaaaa. I have no idea how this death came about or whose idea it was, whether it was planned or just ended up being soldered together ineptly at the last minute after other ideas fell through. Either way, it's a really bad end to the character.

Not that there was really THAT much about Katelyn. She's actually a super easy, breezy, read. And she's written very competently. But there isn't much depth, and not much happens, so there's not that much worth about seeking her out.

Anyway, I have done my duty for now and finally broken the terrible streak of sexkids. And I've just gotten rolled a 17-thread surviving SADD wonder in the v3 Readathon, so..... I'll see you again in a while >_<