Posted by 5UP3RN0V4 4 years ago Report

A three part story. Interesting.

Posted by helenarlet 4 years ago Report

Just a little something short for one of the side characters.

Posted by 5UP3RN0V4 4 years ago Report

Excuse that second comment. The server seemed to have been acting up.

Posted by 5UP3RN0V4 4 years ago Report

A three part story. Interesting.

Posted by TheDarkTraveler 4 years ago Report

great side story, I thought WetMaw was Mrs Small until the underage pray thing and the reveal that she had no idea about it. Personly I think she should try and help this bird she could let her live with her on the premises that she would "most likely eat her in the morning". This may make the bird think, well I might as well try...(insert thing she wants to try) knowing that she has a nice warm tight safety net waiting for her at home. if she turns takes her second chance and turns her life around then the vore threat becomes a running joke and Anny gets the satisfaction of seeing this girl turn her life around. But if she is the type of negative prey that thinks "well I failed one thing better get in a stomach" then Anny can have the nice feeling that she tried and the nice feeling of prey in her stomach.

Posted by helenarlet 4 years ago Report

Thank you for your input~ It always means a lot to me to hear what others think and have to say about my stories. Both the good and the bad. (I wish my Amazon customers were as generous as everyone here when it came to the review sections...) And just know that even if you leave a "this is what I would do" or a "I hope this happens" and I don't use your suggestion in the next story, it doesn't mean that I don't appreciate or didn't like your suggestions. It's usually just, not what I had planned out. I do some level of planning when I write a series like this, so there is usually some outline in my head I am following. But it's still always nice to see readers getting involved and telling me what they would do. I enjoy seeing that a lot.

Sadly I can't really comment on your suggestions though because I don't want to give away what's about to happen one way or the other.

Posted by TheDarkTraveler 4 years ago Report

Thats fine I am glad you like my feed back and I undersrtand that you have a plan of how you want it to go and you should totaly stick to it. I only hope that I might inspire someone (or inspire myself) to write an unrelated story based on my ideas some day.

Posted by juicefox 4 years ago Report

Hmm, it's an interesting idea, and well written. But, to me, Anny came off poorly. She's hogging all the prey and as soon as someone else takes one, she gets all pissy. Sure, this pred was smug, but her response was the same but worse, which boils down to "he sucks, I'm great and I know what's best for everyone", a feeling reinforced by her always being the one telling people how to conduct themselves and what to think.

Maybe if the prey were more evenly distributed between multiple predators rather than almost all going to Anny, and if the conversation wasn't so one sided with Anny lecturing and everyone else agreeing except for the "bad" snake, I think it would have made her less unlikable for me.

I don't know, just the way that everyone seemed to love Anny and dislike her one competitor made her feel a bit too much like a mary sue. No one was critical of Anny except the anaconda; no one even questioned the in-stomach praise of her, which could have easily been written by Anny herself (you even demonstated how easily a message can be sent from anothers account towards the end, and it would have been harder for a prey to pose as their predator as it would be for a pred to pose as their prey, which would be EXTREMELY easy, so much so that I assumed that Anny did, in fact write this review and was not nearly as great as she boasted).

Sorry for being so critical. This is just my opinion and I'm sure plenty of others feel very differently.

Posted by Fischie 4 years ago Report

I get what you mean, but I did not think it was such a huge flaw. If that forum was a surviving online community it cannot subside on 3 or 4 preds. In my view this was only a bunch of threads Anny showed her friend as an introduction to the whole place. But I agree that some of the other nice preds would probably have a difference of opinion here and there. But then again why should she show those to her coworker?

Posted by juicefox 4 years ago Report

Hmm, you make a good point. It certainly isn't unrealistic. When someone is very well liked whithin a community, people whithin that community tend to dogpile on anyone who is critical of them. I guess my main problem is that I just found her extremely unlikable based on her conduct in this story.

Getting pissy when a stranger takes one prey while she takes the vast majority is greedy and calling him a prey theif then doing the same is hypocritical, and bragging how she's so superior to someone she has never met and knows nothing about then going on to lecture everyone on how to conduct themselves and what to think is arrogant.

It's all a matter of personal taste. I just don't enjoy spending so much time with characters who behave like this. So, while I know people do behave in this way in real life, I prefer not to have these people as protagonists in stories.

Posted by helenarlet 4 years ago Report

Thank you very much for your input. You feelings on the matter of Anny's behavior is actually very helpful and I will be sure to take all of what you have said into account as I continue writing.

Now that being said... I would like to say that I never claimed that Anny was a perfect person. If it looks like Anny is behaving like a high and mighty cyber bully with a high opinion of herself, going out of her way to correct others while not seeing that she is making the same kind of mistakes herself, that's probably because she is. However, that doesn't mean she realizes that's what she's doing.

If you have been reading the Miss Smalls stories from the beginning, you may have noticed that the common theme I like to play with in this series is taking a character who is not a very good person, and putting them through a series of events that explores their character growth and development. Miss Smalls started out as a very cold-hearted and callous predator who ate her own son just because he got a rabbit pregnant. Now she has a whole household full of rabbits of her own that she is actively trying to take care of and protect. She still has conflicts and her growth as a person isn't finished yet... We don't yet know how things will turn out for her. But the journey so goes through as she slowly changes and figures things out has been the primary narrative of the series.

Anny is similar to Clawdette in that she has her own problems, has made her own mistakes, and done things she shouldn't have. But at the same time she is different in that unlike Clawdette, she is blissfully unaware of her faults.

No one is perfect. Everyone screws up sometimes. But that doesn't mean we can't learn and grow from these experiences. If we had no faults at all then we would be TRUE Mary Sues.

If understanding this doesn't change anything for you, and you still just hate the character, well... This is just a three story mini-series. I'm sorry you weren't able to enjoy it, but at east it won't drag on forever.

Posted by juicefox 4 years ago Report

I don't hate the character. It's fine that Anny wasn't able to see her own flaws, the issue I had was that no one else seemed able to see them either (except the anaconda, but Anny's negative assumptions about him were vindicated in the end, so his perspective was easily dismissed). If her flaws cause her difficulty or lead to conflict, my feeling toward her would likely change.

Posted by helenarlet 4 years ago Report

Well I hope you'll give the rest of this little miniseries a try as I post the second and third story here in the near future. I'd love to hear your opinion on Anny once this story is finished.

And I do see what you are saying about the others not calling Anny out and everyone treating her like she's the best thing since sliced bread. I want you to know I'm not ignoring what you are saying about that. I was kind of drawing on my own past experiences on online forums where I sadly see this same kind of behavior all too often. Mind you I'm normally on fish and reptile keeping forums. Not prey looking for predator forums... But the general experience is all the same. I can't tell you how often I see someone giving outdated and flat out wrong information and lording themselves over everyone like they are the home aquarium gate keeper, and because they are a well known member of that particular forum who has been around for a long time, all the other users continue to worship the ground they walk on.

But I'd also point out that you were only seeing one thread on what was a larger message board. Yeah, Anny was dominating that thread and really making it her own, but there were plenty of other threads on the board that we weren't seeing.

I hope you'll understand if I didn't feel the need to create an entire website with a fake message board filled with threads just to tell this story. *Winks* Would have been quite a feat in unconventional storytelling methods, but it's a little beyond my technical capabilities.

And now I'm rambling again and probably making you feel like I'm just being argumentative. Sorry. I'll stop now. Just not every night someone genuinely wants to discuss the finer points and implications of one of my stories and I got excited.

Posted by juicefox 4 years ago Report

Yeah, I'm not going to stop reading just because I'm not that keen on one chapter.

And I understand that her conduct would have probably been different in other threads, which is why I said that she came off poorly in this story rather than she is a bad character.

A story is just a snapshot of an author's imagination, but it's all we have to go on when we try to imagine the world the writer is trying to present to us. With such limited information, we have to make assumptions in order to form a clear picture in our heads of the world, the characters, and their relationships with each other.

So, for me to imagine Anny and how she fits into the world, I have to assume that the snapshot that I see is representative of who she is and how others generally react to her. My impression of her would probably change when there is more information; snapshots that show her in different lights and from different angles. Basically just saying that this story as an introduction to the character was, for me, a bad first impression.

Posted by juicefox 4 years ago Report

Edit: To clarify, my bad impression was about how others reacted to her and not Anny herself. To me a character is both the person and how others react to them. I know I'm being confusing. I'm not used to other people wanting to talk about storytelling either, so I'm not the best at explaining.

Posted by Fischie 4 years ago Report

I really adored the idea with the forum posts. It gave so much insight in such an unusual creative way. Anny really is a gem. And then ran into a brick wall with Clawdette. Also the very end made me chuckle, so I think this whole thing was awesome.

Posted by helenarlet 4 years ago Report

Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it. Anny is a fun character to write about. (For me at least) I'm enjoying this chance to explore her a little more in depth than just "that snake Clawdette works with".

Posted by temporos 4 years ago Report

Nice premise, but I'm not sure how that would work from an economic standpoint. If the prey maxed out their lines of credit to be eaten, then how does the bank end up getting their money? From the estates of the prey (probably the best option)? Do they go after the preds (ethical issues)? Do they just write off the debt (economically self-destructive)?

I'm thinking to hard about this. XD

In other news, Annie sounds like a great snake. Wish I could meet her. ;3

Posted by helenarlet 4 years ago Report

All very good questions. And I think the answers to those questions in the mind of the prey offering such things are, "What do I care? I'm not going to be around to deal with it."

Although now the idea of a story about a bill collector in this world sounds very amusing...