Weekly Update - 136 (Patreon)

Blorp.

Did you know that today marks the 12-year anniversary of 10-10-10?

Yeah, it doesn't work that way, and 2110 is 88 years away.

Comic This Week? - I think so! I'll let you know if that changes, but I think yes.

Drawing: Pages 155 - 160 (OwO what's this? Working on multiple pages at once? Well, we're FINALLY FINALLY coming up on a part of the series I've been planning for nearly four years, and I want to get a head start planning out and sketching out these next few pages so their delivery is as perfect as I can make it! I'm scared to death but I think you will all like it!)

Playing: Rimworld. I don't know if you are all aware, but the next expac has been announced this month and it's adding furries as a canonical and supported part of the base game (they're gene-modified humans but still.) I've never been more excited. Favorite game ever btw.

Riley Minicomic when? After I end Chapter 9, I'm planning to do a few more pages of the skrunkly.

Tabletop Gaming News: We're all nerds, right? Do you guys care about this stuff at all? This weekend I finally concluded my Cyberpunk Red campaign and forced all of my players to tell us how their characters died in a blaze of glory, leaving so many unfinished plot threads, unresolved character arcs and untold stories. Staying true to the genre of Cyberpunk, I wanted to give the campaign a satisfying sendoff, but with the option question: did any of it actually matter in the end? Though their characters may have never made any huge difference in the grand scheme of things, each one left a lasting mark on Night City, on the people they interacted with, the lives saved, the things they did, no matter how small their impact might have been.

Ramble:

The topic of sequels came up this weekend, and it got me thinking. There's been exhaustive analysis as to why sequels suck. That's just an accepted fact. It surprises no one. The rare "good" sequel exists, but they are the exception, not the rule. And I know I've probably also talked about or touched on this before, but I had a flash of insight that kinda got me to kind of frame the topic a little differently in my brain.

When writers come up with characters, they aren't imagining a complete and whole person. We come up with as close to a complete and whole person as we can, but more often than not, we're imagining a person as they are defined by whatever story we want (or need) to tell. Too far outside that initial story, our imagining of the character starts to get pretty fuzzy and unclear. Imagining something is much like dreaming. It makes sense to us in vague, nebulous terms, but under close conscious scrutiny the illusion begins to lose cohesion.

People are just far too complicated for us to ever imagine wholly and completely, (nothing so simple blah blah). Much like how with worldbuilding, we must focus on imagining only the relevant parts of our world, we have limited imagination bandwidth. We can imagine a rich and deep world, but not exhaustively calculate every last detail of it. A lot of it has to be left for the readers to fill in with their own imaginations. So while a real person might have a long and very interesting life with multiple interesting stories therein, a fictional character is usually framed by the single most interesting story that happened in their lifetime. And for what reason would the writer want to tell the second-most interesting story of that character's life first?

Which presents a unique problem once that character's most-interesting story has been told. Writing a sequel is often trying to come up with a second story for a character whose story has ended.

For a long time, I've felt that the key to a successful sequel is telling a new story about a new character in the same setting. And this just kind of reaffirms that for me. Involve the existing world as much as possible so it feels like an evolution, an addition to the original story, but your main character from the first story, if involved at all, should be at best, a side character. Otherwise, you're most likely going to tell that character's second-most interesting story. It might still be a good story, but it'll almost always be less interesting than the first.

Anyway, I know none of this is probably new, but reframing it in my own mind to recognize that sequels are primarily a CHARACTER problem, helps me to at least think about it in a different way than just "sequels are teh suck." That said, sometimes even sequels about new characters suck too, when they are written with $.$ in mind more than anything else. Hope some of you find this interesting at least!