Survival Of The Fittest

I've done a lot of things on this website. I have an art thread for some reason, for example. But one of the few things I have yet to try is to do an earnest critique threads. I've critiqued characters before for read-a-thons and stuff and basically I'm looking to do the same thing for characters on this website that are more current/are guaranteed to be attached to people that still write here.

Basically here are the rules for you—

1. Characters can be from any version that you've written in, on Main (might make a separate Mini thread on Mini like the critique subforum there is empty as of this writing somebody please make a thread there).
2. Characters must be finished. That means they died or left the island. I'm not taking winners unless their epilogue is finished like 100%.
3. I'm going to try and read everything if I can. That includes the profile and pregame. If you want me to critique particular pregame threads you can highlight up to three that you think are good.
4. One character/entry per handler at a time.
5. That's it.
6. Oh also if you want me to read a Meanwhile thread you can request that specifically.

And here's what you can expect from me—
1. I'm going to try and be mostly constructive, but I'm deliberately not adhering to a specific template.
2. I also might do something stupid and pretentious with the formatting. I'm reserving the explicit right for myself to do stupid things.
3. The queue is more of a waiting room than a line. It holds however many it holds, and people get called into the Slacker's office in an order that is totally mysterious to the patients. It might resemble chronological order, but it just as well could not be.
4. My style of critiquing is that I write down my thoughts as I read and then at the end I try to synthesize an opinion that makes sense. That means that it might not read very coherent. More like a live-blog at times than an actual review. This is just a warning that I'm going to do that.
5. Critiques will be at least a few hundred words but they have no upper length limit. Typically my read-a-thon writeups were a few thousand words.
6. If you suggest a character that I threaded with at some point, I'm going to sort of skim over the parts of the thread where I was present because if I read my own writing for two long there's a good chance I will devolve into caveman-like violence and throw my computer out the window. I'm on the 17th floor.

Completed:
1. Olivia Fischer - V6 - Maraoone [Writeup]

Queue is open to five at a time because that seems to work for other people.
2. Cass Prince - V6 - dmboogie
3. Ramsey Cortez - V7 - The Jilly Part
4. Dorothy Shelley - V6 - Melolosine
5. Arianna Moretti - V7 - Cactus

The queue will remain closed until all characters are finished.

Olivia Fischer from v6 pls

cass prince from v6 please!

LOL DRAG MY SWEATER GIRL

I'd ask about my v5 writing but I really don't want to subject you to my brainworms from about a decade ago, so.

It's been a few months now, so could you look at post adoption Ramsey Cortez?

V1 Adam Dodd please.

No, I'm kidding - Ariana Moretti please.

Olivia Fischer

The first of what I hope will be many of these critiques. Starting off with one Olivia Fischer. It's weird, and this is totally an OOC note, it's strange that so many of this opening batch are V6 characters. I don't have anything cool to add to that, it's just a thing. In the spoiler are the words and outside of the spoiler is uh well I haven't written it yet.

[+] Cochise Time, Babey

Profile:

I like the little editorial detail that snuck in through the profile process of Olivia using the makeup to cover up specifically perceived flaws. If it was worded as "features that she finds flawed" then there would be some level of separation from the weird OOC/IC profile writer person that doesn't/does exist, but by wording it as "perceived" instead it subtly casts doubt on whether or not they actually exist. I kind of skipped a whole huge section of her profile in jumping to this, but I just thought it was worth pointing out potentially for future reference.

Her hobbies are incredibly endearing. I can't think of one person I've met who is into watch-making. I've listened to the S-Town podcast, but that's the closest I've been put into contact with the watch-making and timepiece-restoring world. Robotics makes sense as a way that Olivia expresses her detail-oriented nature in a more outward fashion, keeping the watch-making to herself perhaps and presenting the robotics to the world, maybe even being part of the school club. Poetry takes this philosophy and puts it to words. Card games and board games show a part of her that likes to have fun, but specifically rooting it in traditional gaming is cool. Of course, then she went and became a weeaboo, so, take it as you will.

The opening paragraph of the profile threw me for a loop, tonally. I think the née thing should be in more profiles and I'm going to steal it for use in mine, but the explanation of Olivia's mom being close to menopause is written in a very nonclinical way and that surprised me. It's an effective paragraph, I'm just surprised that it got through in that form. I think it's also interesting that her father isn't mentioned until a few paragraphs later. The watch-making being tied to a family trade makes more sense than Olivia being drawn to it on her own, and her initial resistance to it makes sense, as do the ways her mother tried to somewhat force it on her. It's from here that the profile takes on the sort of soft stance of being from her parents POV. They're present in her profile in a way that is really natural and symbiotic. Kudos to that.

There's a sort of We Need To Talk About Kevinness to the seemingly innocuous event of Margaret trying to get Olivia into watches leading to her eventual bossiness and meanness around other children. This initial rejection and lack of understanding being the cause of Olivia's heavier leanings towards solitary and reserved hobbies makes sense and feels natural in a way that isn't straightforward. She isn't lonely because she was bullied, she's lonely because, for a short while, she almost was the bully. Or, at least, she was very unpleasant to be around. I sympathize with that, personally. It's also good that these qualities don't go away magically, and that when she finally sees social rewards for her academic skills they re-emerge. Things aren't magically solved when you learn solitaire, of course. Sometimes it takes a confrontation for that. The presence of Olivia's parents from earlier in the profile is counteracted by this—it's not their counseling that gets Olivia to stop being arrogant, it's her own life experience with her friends.

I brought up the anime earlier and I was sort of joking but this interest does come sort of out of left field. This section of Olivia's time in high school feels sort of weirdly rushed and abrupt. The robotics paragraph makes sense, and might make even more sense if the order was switched around—first robotics club, then mecha anime. As it stands its just a bit weird. The college fight seems a little too over the top dramatic, specifically Olivia getting hit. Their dispute makes sense, but Margaret doesn't exactly have a history of being physical with Olivia that's represented in here and thus I would expect the experience of Olivia getting struck by her mother for the first time, at age 16, would have a bit more impact represented here.

Like, I get the conflict doesn't end there, it opens up a rift between the two and sort of returns Olivia to a very early state of mind w/r/t her biting her nails again, but I dunno this part of the profile feels somewhat sudden and, again, out of left field. It's one wrinkle in an otherwise sensible and good profile, the other maybe being that tone is all over the place. I do like conceptually that she already applied to Oklahoma State and got in, but hasn't pulled the trigger on enrolling. OSU has a decision deadline of May 1st, but from the wording on their admissions website it's a soft deadline, so this checks out.

As for the advantages and disadvantages, "has a lot of friends" and "she's moody so people won't like her" sort of cancel out. I don't like these social advantages and disadvantages conceptually anyway, unless they refer to a specific group of people like a club or a band. It's a stretch to say it's a passive GM, but it does feel like it dictates a bit too much of the response of other characters to Olivia, or is trying to. The rest of these are all good. I didn't think of her being good with her hands as an advantage but it makes a lot of sense. The lobotomy pick is an incredible weapon for someone like her, with…………………………………..surgical precision hahahahahahhahahahahaha okay let's move on.

Pregame:

Olivia only has one pregame thread, and that is her memory thread Sometimes when we reach for the stars… which is automatically a 0/10 for not capitalizing every word in the title.

Latanna, Olivia, and Roderick study for History class, is basically what the thread is. It's honestly amazing that Olivia's first sentence is her checking her watch. I honestly didn't consider that she actually likes wearing them when I read the profile, since it isn't really mentioned in her appearance section (sports strap???? lets hope not), but it makes sense and isn't written in a way that explicitly calls attention to watch-making as a hobby of hers.

Of course, then the next paragraph does, a lot.

While watch-making is sort of touched upon as a hobby in Olivia's profile, a hobby that could potentially become a career—and, in addition, it is listed first—it didn't occur to me while reading that Olivia would be the owner of several watches, and also be bad at setting them correctly. This is just about a year or so before pregame actually takes place, so it's not like she's very far off here from her supposed current skill as a watch-owner. I guess owning watches wasn't the hobby, was it. This paragraph reads kinda janky to me and I'm hyper-fixating on it so I should stop.

The good news is the rest of the post, and really the rest of the thread, is on point. There's some minor convention and grammar stuff here and there but Olivia's presence in the thread is pretty well-written and considered. The thread only goes a few rounds, but in that time we get good insight into Olivia's mindset, how she perceives her friends, and just generally what it's like to be here. I wish she didn't disappear for most of the thread, and Roderick is generally sort of nasty to her, weirdly? That's just how it reads to me. Olivia feeling sort of shot down by the end really hurts to read—by which I mean I felt really bad for her. There's an argument to be made that V6 predicted the rise of wholesome memes and uwu culture through its roster of smol bean moeblob characters, and I hadn't initially considered Olivia as part of that group, but after this thread I feel like I have no choice. She's incredibly grounded, though, which means that the only reader who is going to even make a stupid connection like this is an asshole like me. I feel genuine sympathy towards her, not pity, which is good, and not bad.

I'm hungry and tired so I'm going to go to bed and work on this tomorrow. The purpose of these couple sentences is to let you know I did this in multiple settings. This train has multiple stops, if you catch my drift (train whistle noises).

Island:

Olivia's time on the island starts with a oneshot. It's an introspective piece about Olivia hiding in a cave and trying to keep herself from going through the cliche panic and crying that she thinks most of her classmates are going through. It takes her some time, but she works up the courage to go out and meet her classmates on the island, to venture out from the cave, Plato be damned. It shows some determination on Olivia's part not to fall to the wayside and be a coward, it shows her somewhat triumphantly getting her footing on the island; It is also entirely pointless for two main reasons.

Firstly, it doesn't tell us that much about Olivia as a person. She has a cycle of denial of her situation and acceptance of her fate that is at the very least resolved somewhat in this post. It's a lot of words to do something that could be—and to Mara's credit is—done in the next thread, which is to remark on the start of Olivia's journey through the island. At most it sets a narrative tone in the same vein as a prologue. While it does relatively little for Olivia's progression as a character, it establishes the general mood of her run as contemplative and self-conscious. Which, as the second point, is done in her entry into her following thread, which renders this one wholly redundant. I don't mean to rag on it too much. It's well written. It just functionally doesn't achieve much for the character. This is my general opinion on opening one-shots—unless there's something really specific going on, something with intent, then character openings generally feel better when they happen in medias res.

This has the side effect of diminishing Olivia's entry into the next thread. She remarks on her new beginning, her "final" beginning, in her second post. It's a little jarring considering just how well executed the post is for an opener, despite not being one. It provides a link between Olivia's personality as a passive observer in Cochise and her waiting for Hannah to notice her here, and in doing that suggests that later that passivity will be an important thing to consider w/r/t her as a character. It still has an impact, but that's blunted by the earlier oneshot. It's wonderful set-up for the return of Olivia's to this point merely implied bossiness, as she tells a panicking Hannah to shut the fuck up. Irene arriving right after and remarking that it's out of character for Olivia is a good reminder that no, it's really not—this is the person she really is, the person she protects her friends from.

Hannah, Irene and Olivia form a group, literally hugging to set this up, and Olivia worries about the rest of her friends and making sure they're okay. +1 for version inter-connectivity. Olivia zoning out in the middle of Irene's list is good, it shows her initial instinct to find her friends being tempered once she realizes just how many people that extends to. Then the group is surprised by Alan and Kaitlyn. Olivia's post after they enter is interesting, it breaks up the shock of them arriving by starting with a flashback Olivia had before they showed up, which creates a sort of jagged pacing here. They get bogged down in a weapons trade for a bit before the tide rushes into the cove, which I thought was a really cool detail, nature forcing them out of the area even more than the pressing circumstance of the death-game does. It's a sort of wary ceasefire that happens between them, much more fitting to Olivia's style than a full alliance. They noped out of there. Very understandably so.

The next thread opens with a long multishot, which is hard to critique because Olivia appears in it but is written mostly by Cicada, who did not ask for this critique, and thus will not get critiqued. The Scooby gang walks into the asylum, pokes around for a bit. Olivia actually takes a look in her bag (if this happened in the opening oneshot it might have justified it) and discovers what the terrorists took from her, many of her personal effects being representations of the person she was before being thrown into the killing game. Then, they find a corpse, Irene gets spooked, and Hannah gives chase. We see another instance of Olivia's passivity that was hinted at earlier on as she spends time waiting next to the corpse instead of giving chase, and then decides that her own inaction means that they abandoned her, which was pretty interesting, but what's most interesting is that she decides to strike out on her own after this. The passivity is left behind, and Olivia begins to author her own fate.

This next oneshot is pretty good. It's a pretty relevant flashback that's interpolated well with her current story. It comes at a lull where Olivia isn't sure what to do, which is the perfect time to break up what has otherwise been a remarkably chronologically linear tale. Her soreness and absolute state of defeat is sold incredibly well throughout the rest of the oneshot. I especially like her waking up to the harsh asylum light, the descriptive language in that section is great and I like the separation from the announcement reaction, which would be the only area that I would complain about in this oneshot. It's a little bit hard to follow, a little roundabout. The "shut up" sequence that follows suffers from the suggested break in time. The image is of Olivia rocking catatonically back and forth, not of her trying to silence the nagging voice in her head and muster the strength to move from her room. When she eventually does, it's an incredible relief. Parts of it almost read like she won't be alive by the end. If I didn't know from the wiki I'd be worried that she'd have committed suicide, which would have been an unfitting end to her story and leave her with an incomplete arc, in my opinion. I'm glad that didn't come to pass.

I've not a clue why Olivia left the thread with Bernadette. Perhaps for OOC reasons involving the declaration of the area as a danger zone. The thread stinks of missed potential. It would have been nice to see these characters interact. Olivia backing down from the exchange feels weak,and flies in the face of where I thought her character was going. Perhaps she could have instead invited Bernadette to come with her instead of leaving silently. Regardless, it's a missed opportunity.

Entering a thread as central and long-running as "Get Me Away From Here" is no small feat. It must have taken a lot of courage to work up the nerve to post and break what had settled as a status quo in that thread. It's a little out of character, given Olivia's reluctance to interact with Bernadette—who she was able to get a visual on—for her to spend so much time trying to get into the cafeteria. Georgie Lee and Fiyori take the spotlight away from Olivia in their reaction to her arrival. So far, Olivia doesn't do anything distinctly her in this scene. Her arrival can be interchanged with anyone else's. Her opportunity to break out hinges on her first instance of spoken dialogue. The hope, in reading this, is that she won't leave without a second word like she did with Bernadette—the hope is that she'll get around to saying even a first word to these people, and that it'll be impactful and start momentum for her narrative going forwards, which at this point has yet to balance the deep introspection of the "Concrete Cave" oneshot.

I'm happy to report that she does. She even mentally references the circumstance with Bernadette. What I don't like is that this isn't used as an opportunity for her to move forwards, but that instead she takes another subservient stance to Fiyori and Georgie Lee's story. Georgie Lee welcomes her to the cafeteria, and Olivia gives up her weapon. The stars of the show are Georgie Lee and Fiyori. Olivia's interaction with the door doesn't bring her in as equal in importance to the thread. Instead, it gives Georgie Lee and Fiyori an opportunity to react to the passage of time in the form of the rain. I recognize that if Olivia encountered these two earlier in her game and if they had taken the place of her previous group, my criticisms would be unfounded, but she's already had the chance to learn the lesson that she can't be subservient to others' whims. This entry doesn't show that for her, which takes away her opportunity to truly shine and instead renders her a somewhat tragic, pathetic person.

Fiyori is angered at what Georgie Lee says in a very good moment for her that leads to her leaving the cafeteria. Olivia and Georgie Lee have a moment of catching up. The thread skips forward at this point and I feel my interest waning. I want, as a reader, to go and see what Fiyori did. Olivia returns to sulking. The promise of possible development from earlier on is repeatedly denied fruition. Georgie Lee's questioning of Olivia's plans reads less as earnest concern and more as disbelief that Olivia has absolutely no idea what she wants to do next, not a single bucket list item or even suggestion for something to take her mind off of the announcements. The day passes and they go to sleep again, and in the night Olivia goes to her bag and is reminded of Irene and mopes, and I have trouble feeling sorry for her. Essentially, this sequence just woobifies her.

The next day it comes as no surprise that Georgia Lee and Olivia wander back to Fiyori for direction. Fiyori is a character that can move the story on her own, and her symbiotic relationship with Georgia Lee is not something that Georgia's narrative can go without for so long. The person of attention immediately shifts to Colleen. Olivia literally stands in the background. If the intent is for Olivia to be pathetic and passive in these moments, I must commend the dedication to that, but I don't like considering authorial intent. It's irrelevant to my initial impressions. Olivia's attempts at playing peacekeeper when Georgia asks the Armor Piercing Question (understand that I don't like resorting to trope speak) are laughable, from an in-character perspective. There's a severe disconnect between what she wants to be doing and what she is doing and in my opinion we've had a scene that should have made that gap disappear already in that long, introspective oneshot, which as time goes on seems less impactful and more like spinning wheels. Dramatically spinning them, making them rotate in their casings, but spinning all the same.

Alba's arrival is welcome in the wake of Fiyori's departure. Alba brings in a group of people who can move scenes, and of course that's what they do. Olivia is caught in the middle of this as a spectator.

Olivia wrote:And Olivia just watched it all from her seat, words still stuck, two away from Coleen and one from Georgia Lee. She watched as the gun flashed, as Georgia Lee collapsed, as everything collapsed, as Coleen got her gun.

Yup!

The next sequence is a little confusing, the timeskip not really executed effectively, because Georgia Lee leaves in a much earlier post and thus the tension of them searching for her is gone because we, the audience, know that she's been gone for a while. Olivia follows Enzo and Colleen to look for her, and that leads into the next thread, where they find Georgia Lee already dead, and Olivia helplessly tries to rattle her to life. Fiyori comes back and brings with her, as expected, a revelation and suggestion that keeps the thread moving, but I'm not talking about Fiyori yet. That'll hopefully come another time. Fiyori asks Olivia into another room and Olivia makes a decision that is unpopular and suggests independence for the first time in her run, really, and is repaid for this decision by being killed. The one time that she would have fared better if she listens to those around her, she chooses not to. It's hard to feel sorry for her. Fiyori obviously was shady. Olivia can't possibly be this subservient to the will of others, can she?

Fiyori and Olivia have a tense discussion and then Fiyori shoots her for no reason. Olivia's dying stream of consciousness is something of a callback, but it just reads like forcing sympathy—oh, she's dying, her sentences don't make sense, her mind is racing. It's an obvious move. Olivia asking the others to leave is good. I like that. It perhaps hints at regret for her own passivity. I don't like the "oh god" ending. Olivia dies as she lived—hoping for something, someone, even a higher power to enrich her with meaning. The futility of this is what I really feel sad about. Not the fact that Olivia is gone, because in many ways she doesn't have a presence that is noticeably absent from this point forward. It's interesting just how far this strays from her attempts at being independent in her backstory. A potential story about Olivia coming out of her shell and attaining her full potential as a person turns into a story about her making mis-step after mis-step, and finally, fatally, making the mistake of thinking that there was still hope for her as a person with the agency to make decisions. She's committed to the path of least resistance, but decided at the last second to jump off that path and into a pit of thorns.

Sorry.

Let's take a peek at her meanwhile.

Meanwhile:

Olivia's presence in this meanwhile is primarily as a figure for Latanna to lament the loss of. It's not about her family, which is disappointing considering how intense of a role they played in her pregame. They come up in game proper in a flashback where Olivia's mother is revealed to have been against the science trip. That fateful oneshot. I can't complain about much here because there isn't anything to complain about—this is Latanna's meanwhile thread, and though it makes mention of Olivia, it just isn't about her. I'll just say that a Meanwhile thread with Olivia's parents would have been nice to read, and move on.

Conclusion:

Olivia is incredibly promising in her first half, and falls disappointingly flat in her second. She is more than competently written throughout and I have no real complaints about the technical aspect of her story. I'm just somewhat thoroughly disappointed with the way she wound up. There's a lot of build-up—hype, if you will—for her to become someone, an individual, and there are many points in her narrative for this side of her, the bossier side, to materialize, but it never does. It comes up early on, and what I read as potential foreshadowing was instead something that Olivia never stopped apologizing for—profusely, weakly, uselessly—until she died. If this is supposed to be a nihilist, depressing look at how people completely fall apart when confronted with dire circumstances, it works. It's harder to admit that when Olivia was consistently surrounded with people that didn't fall apart, but I will concede it. That doesn't make it any more enjoyable of a read. I'd recommend the first half of Olivia to anyone wondering if she was worth reading, then a switch to Fiyori as a POV character when Olivia enters the cafeteria thread for that particular read. It encompasses all of Olivia's remaining run-time and leaves the reader with someone to follow all the way to the end that succeeds in a lot of areas that Olivia did not.

And there you have it. Over 4,000 words later, it is done. The queue will remain closed while I work through the next four characters. Please be patient; though I have an abundance of time at home now, I won't forever.