Posted by wolfSnack 3 years ago Report

This was a very well written piece of political intrigue.

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Posted by ObsidianSnake 3 years ago Report

Thanks!

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Posted by ObsidianSnake 3 years ago Report

I sincerely worry about you sometimes, fire238.

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Posted by FreezeRabbit 3 years ago Report

personally, i very much worry about the combination between your deep evident ability to write astonishingly thoroughly reprehensible characters, and your clearly evident inability to notice you have done so

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Posted by ObsidianSnake 3 years ago Report

Crossing a line into the personal here, stranger.

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Posted by Randomness 3 years ago Report

Strange; you have the same writing structure as fire238, your account was activated on the same date, and both of you have last logged in at the same time as well.

How bizarre

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Posted by Furryvoreonly 10 months ago Report

Nice alt account. Really shows your maturity when interacting with people online. If you aren't going to be constructive in your criticism, don't even say it at all. This isn't even criticism at this point, your just being mean for the sake of it :(

Do us all a favor and learn when to shut up and keep your vile thoughts to yourself.

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Posted by Furryvoreonly 10 months ago Report

Your comments on ObsidianSnake's stories are just horrible man...

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Posted by FirstOf71st 3 years ago Report

Every time I come back to your writing, I find something new to adore in it.

Like, the little things in this one. How Hyrof takes Oseri to a scenic highway vista as his "office," or everything about Dame LeFuere, the debonair vixen music teacher who elegantly wields a rapier in a street fight.

I also highly enjoyed Siran's little ramble at the end. A cynical politician who causes collateral damage to his community by recklessly stoking up the worst fears and impulses of the populace? It's a keen observation I can certainly relate to. As with the final conversation with the Provost - the implied idea that of all nations of Eanli, something about the freedom in Verria's particular predator-prey relations makes it powerful and dynamic.

Finally, the overarching narrative of a young intellectual learning that the world is a far, far more complicated place than any abstract notion of peace or justice is adequate to - it's something that can't be stated enough. Brilliant, brilliant work.

Hope I just didn't spoil too many of this story's high points with my arrogant opinionating for those nosing around in the comments.

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Posted by ObsidianSnake 3 years ago Report

Thanks for your kind comment, and I'm happy you enjoyed the story!

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Posted by DesertJune 3 years ago Report

Amazing story, your writing is so elegant yet readable to my sleep deprived brain, it’s simply outstanding! Loved all the characters and personalities at play here, it gives the story a very active yet reasonable attitude that’s really enjoyable.
I’m curious now, how long does it take you to write a story?
Also, I might be dumb, but I remember in previous stories there was reformation, but in here it seems there isn’t. Is that due to the story taking place in an area that doesn’t have reformation, or is this a separate universe all together?

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Posted by ObsidianSnake 3 years ago Report

Thank you, I'm glad that you liked the story. I've had a few people say that they don't like any of the characters in these, and I rarely see anybody else talk about them or how I handle character in general, so I'm relieved that you actually enjoy them.

I'm not sure how long it takes me to write a story. Shorter stories are faster, of course, but the time per page is proportionally shorter because they're far less complex by nature. Here's how it usually goes:
1. I already have a general idea, the plot, the themes, clusters of elements, some characters, the conflict, and so on. With that starting point, I transcribe those into notes, which then I formalize into a general structure that describes the story in a hierarchical way. Yes, this is writing! This is my chance to solve problems before the draft.
2. That's the next part, the draft. I only ever work on one at a time, and I try and write it quickly, around 1500-4000 words a day. It depends, obviously, on how challenging the passages are, what my mood is, how much time I have, my energy levels, etc. The worst outcome is probably my current story, which is a very small novel, but it's taken me months to draft... I took a sabbatical from writing and have had a hard time getting back into it.
3. After this revision. I don't usually change any major plot elements at this point, but that's due to my approach. Instead, I'm working on prose, improving dialogue, trimming out non-functional stuff, and doing a bit of re-writing here and there. This may take as long as the drafting step, overall. Sometimes, after the first critical pass of revision, I'll move a story to the scrap bin, and that's that, nobody is going to see it, because I don't think it's enjoyable to read, or it has such glaring problems with the plot that all I can do is learn from that, shelve it, and move onto the next.
4. If I decide to share the story here, I need to do some meta-stuff. Define tags, write the story description, and generate a thumbnail. Sometimes I get a bit stumped here. I make my own thumbnails. Mind you, I'm doing a bit of artistic chameleoning here, so that ways people don't recognize elements of style that they could trace back to my other presences on the Internet... so I do some weird stuff with the thumbnail art. Actually, I have a peculiar enjoyment of that, as I'm forced out of my comfort zone, doing things "wrong" on purpose. I know that the thumbnails aren't really THAT important to posting the story, but I do this anyway. I confess I do have a story that I'm willing to post that has sat at this step for months now. Oh, well!

The timing of that process depends. I've produced a few of the 5-7k word stories in a week, or about a week. There's one 10kish story that took me over three weeks, because I really fiddled with it, and also was breaking to generate notes for future stories during that time. There's also times when I'm not doing much writing stuff at all, including when I have an active draft, like the last few months.

Short version: it just depends on what I'm writing and what else is going on.

I've noticed that professionals that write full-time, when they're writing prose, write between 2k-4k words/day, overall. That's including everything, not just writing drafts, so in reality, there's some days where some individuals write 10k in draft. Those are pros, though. These are people that have written thousands of pages at that point, and have structured their life around it. I wouldn't try and do that. For most of us here, this is a hobby, and for me, it's one of a few.

Regarding the reformation technology, or lack thereof here: it hasn't been developed yet at the time of the story. I tried to put in some markers to denote period, but I suppose that they're kinda subtle. It's sorta their equivalent of the 1970s here. In fact, one of the necessary component technologies to... well, Dr. Rivers contributes a part to that, although she would fairly assert that all credit should be shared with the research team that she formed and played mentor to.

Personally, I like messing around with time and region like that. I apologize if it gets confuses how the stories relate to one another. Writing stories with a sense of period is extremely fun for me, and something I wanted the Eanli Cosmos stories to allow me to do. I need to have an excuse to spend hours researching 1970s American fashion, locomotive design circa 1890s, the geology of coastal east Australia, and theme park planning. Anyway, I've gone on a bit here, haven't I...?

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Posted by DesertJune 3 years ago Report

That's a pretty detailed writing progress! I find myself following similar footsteps, but without thumbnails and a few month breaks in between lol.

Ahhh, that explains it. I noticed the setting wasn't as advanced as the other ones, but it has been a hot minute since I read that, so I didn't remember if the time was stated in them. Now thinking about it, Anonymouse Sources has a VR rig, and My New Old Fur has building plans for other dimensions, a little past reformation technology lol.

The difference in time isn't too confusing don't worry! I'll admit I got confused due to reading it around 4 AM, but also I haven't read all of your stories, only a select few, but I'm getting there!

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Posted by TestAccountPleaseIgnore 3 years ago Report

You know, there are so many little instances of unstoppable, near-existential horror in this that I'm not sure I can do them all justice.

- First off, we all know what this is leading up to in another story, but to focus on the fact that Rivers eventually is incrementally responsible for that particular crime against peace and sanity would be like eating the cherry off the sundae and then throwing the actual drink away.

- The idea of walking into your best friend's shop and finding them with a fucking railway spike shot through them. You know, sitting here in my metaphorical armchair smoking my metaphorical pipe, living in a world where hundreds of thousands of people aren't being eaten each day, I'd like to think that if that happened to me, it wouldn't result in me doing what Rivers did - i.e. later killing people who weren't responsible for your best friend getting murdered - but I think everyone has something that could make them do that. If it's not your best friend, it'd be your pet, or your kid, or your spouse, and people don't behave like idealistic caricatures when someone they care about gets harmed; they do stupid things.

- Her friends - Meadowborne, Hyrof, etc. - rope her down the path to eating people constantly, not because they're some mustache-twirling villains, but because (a) that's just what they do, being predators and all, and (b) because they genuinely think it's a good way of healing her, sort of. And it apparently is, she seems much better for it during Our Tears In Daylight. If it hadn't been for her buddies - well, she'd be dead, but if she'd broken off from them right after the story ends, she might not have gotten into hunting, and might have just kept eating her expensive bugs and seething in a pit of unrepaired mental trauma. Sure, a bunch more people live, but it's fucking horrible for her. Can't blame her for sticking around the people that actually care about her, or at least the ones that aren't dead.

- The risk of being incinerated with a flamethrower, but that's kind of peanuts, isn't it? It's just death, if a particularly horrific one. Death ends. Living as a shell of yourself whose best friend died in their arms doesn't.

- Oh, wait, she nearly died to a flamethrower because her other friend locked her out of her house to kill her. Sure, maybe Marigold didn't trust Rivers to save her, but that had absolutely no bearing on whether or not Marigold let Rivers into her house. That wasn't cowardice, that was an attempt on her life via inaction.

- The subtle little bit about how insects aren't affordable enough for everyone - Rivers can only live off of them because she's small, and even then just barely. Imagine having to choose between your own death and killing people. You know what? I guarantee you there were plenty of predators in-setting that choose the noble death over having to kill other people to live, it's a statistically had to have happened. But here's the thing: they all died, and didn't have children. The ones who lived and passed their ideas on were the ones that killed other people to survive.

- Siran. His actions lead to hundreds (maybe thousands, depending on how big Sprucerocke is by the time of OTID) dead, and they were just for the sake of scoring political points - he basically funded a KKK cell as a political ploy. But what really got me was that bit about battleships and Aphernian listening posts. Sure, everything else he mentions is just him playing off of what are essentially racial tensions in order to stay in power, but that once instance stuck out to me. That's the most justified use of military funding to ever exist - I mean, seriously, they're apparently in a cold war with people who want to conquer them and literally turn them into livestock, the moral victor there is pretty damned clear - and he just laughs it off as a joke, because who gives a shit if everyone else dies? To him, he's all that matters. Judging by other works of yours, if people like him had been running the show a half-century to century earlier, Verria would no longer exist.

So, yeah, between Rivers - completely understandably, though not really justifiably - going off the deep end, her friends nudging her along out of the legitimate goodness of their hearts, and two or three social factors, you have this perfect storm that leads her participating in what's basically a completely legal massacre of people that had absolutely nothing to do with Vilisiti's death. Grief and anger are one hell of a cocktail.

I'd have added yet another one dash concerning the ability of the predator-run nations to farm bugs rather than eating people but choosing not to, but I have no information in that department. Apparently, it's relatively expensive, but I legitimately have no clue whether that's artificial scarcity (high-class Verrian prey, i.e. the ones running the show in Verria, seem to treat predators as a disposal mechanism for everyone else) or just a consequence of the process, sort of like how caviar isn't cheap.


As an aside, did you intend for there to be at least slight similarities between Louyi and Rivers? Both are (a) intelligent young students who (b) initially started out as not-horrible people (although Louyi was apparently a bad person to start out with, if not a murderer) and then (c) got roped into doing horrible things by a bunch of their peers - specifically, (d) horrible things that lead to a complete breach of the Verrian social contract. The major differences are that (a) Louyi's messed up even beforehand, and (b) the people nudging Rivers along weren't trying to manipulate her, they were genuinely trying to help her.

And, boy howdy, did they succeed...

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Posted by ObsidianSnake 3 years ago Report

Due to time constraints, I'm unable to respond to every point, but thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Regarding the cost of live insects:
I am aware that there is an apparent divergence of worlds here between our own and the one in this story. 5$USD can typically procure ~300 grams worth of night crawlers at a local retailer that sells such things. With some specialization and incremental ingenuity, surely Eanli would leverage that as a solution, right? Well, they do, and there's entire industries involved, with Vilisiti's little store being one of the outlets of it. Insectivores are able to tend to their own needs. Obligate carnivores of the hunting predator mold also tap those resources. That's the "bug meal" that has been mentioned a few times in other stories; that's desperation or/and self-modulation. Predators like Oseri did not evolve to subsist on insects. Long-term dependence on arthropods has some detriments to creatures not evolved for that. This isn't an Eanli thing, it's something from our world. Additionally, that low cost of things like crickets and night crawlers is because they're kinda like by-products of other agricultural industries on Earth. It's actually quite labor-intensive, too, to raise them in extremely large numbers. There's a shocking number of individual crickets in a kilogram. It would take a staggering transformation of prey-controlled Verria to allow the raising of insects on such a scale to feed the predator citizens within. It's possible, but it would be radical, too radical for their market-guided system to do on its own. There are technologies that can (and eventually do) disrupt that equilibrium.

Anyway, all those poor insects. For what it matters, they're measurably more intelligent than their Earth counterparts. They may be short-lived, they might not be able to resist the will of larger creatures upon capture, but they have their own little perspectives. Perhaps best to not linger on this point...

Oh, Louyi. I think everybody that's gone to college has known a Louyi: the one that graduated in the top 10% of their high school, the one that was occasionally the best student in the class, and they're unusually aware of that. These kinds of young men typically consciously recognize too late that everyone in the undergrad seminar with them is as smart as they are, give or take. Whenever one stakes their self-esteem based upon how clever they are, every small failure, every missed quiz question, every public revelation of the limits of their knowledge -- it all stings so bitter. Then, all the bitterness, the excuses, the insecurity, and the feelings of being lost. That's Louyi, basically.

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Posted by TestAccountPleaseIgnore 3 years ago Report

Anyway, all those poor insects. For what it matters, they're measurably more intelligent than their Earth counterparts. They may be short-lived, they might not be able to resist the will of larger creatures upon capture, but they have their own little perspectives. Perhaps best to not linger on this point...

Oh, come on. Here I thought there would be a morally easy solution to things...

I guess the protein printers that appear later in the setting are that. Got a bit overshadowed by ones capable of printing people, though.


the one that graduated in the top 10% of their high school, the one that was occasionally the best student in the class, and they're unusually aware of that. These kinds of young men typically consciously recognize too late that everyone in the undergrad seminar with them is as smart as they are, give or take. Whenever one stakes their self-esteem based upon how clever they are, every small failure, every missed quiz question, every public revelation of the limits of their knowledge -- it all stings so bitter. Then, all the bitterness, the excuses, the insecurity, and the feelings of being lost. That's Louyi, basically.

Yeah, when you base your self-worth off of your biological or personal traits, it's a bit of a tacit admittance that the ideas you hold are worthless. It's the motivation behind every "-ism" there is out there - "I've done nothing of note in my life, so I need to base my identity around an inherent trait of mine.".

Now, that is kind of muddled because he clearly did do a fair deal with his life before turning into a terrorist, but I can see how he was utterly ripe for doing so.

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Posted by Mourtzouphlos 1 year ago Report

I can't help but read this as a temptation in the wilderness story. One that Oseri fails. She seems like she hasn't really examined her own beliefs fully, and has mostly drifted into them because they sound nice on the surface, but hasn't thought about how they'd interact with the world and the full implications for her own life. This is definitely a coming of age story, but its focus is on her crashing headfirst into things she hasn't thought about before in the worst possible way. She's forced to see that her ideals are implicitly or even explicitly opposed by pretty much everyone, and sticking with them will mean a lifetime of hard, bitter, lonely fighting for the merest glimpse of a distant, better future, and that all she needs to do to avoid that and give herself a life of pleasure and companionship is: give up. Abandon her ideals. Go along with everything in society that her philosophy opposes.

And she does.

The end of the scene where she does has a really good parallel, where she asks Marigold how she can be friends with someone she just realized is willing to kill her - right as Marigold realizes her friend wouldn't be willing to kill her. Oseri has finally gotten a taste of what a prey's life is like, and she immediately rejects Marigold, because it hurts too much. She doesn't empathize, doesn't reflect on why she did it or how their situations parallel, she doesn't even see the similarities. I just want to grab her by the shoulders and go 'Join the fucking club', but nobody does. It's just her, thinking about herself, how much she was hurt, and how she just wants the pain to go away. For the first time in her life, she has to choose whether her ideals are worth sacrificing for, and she decides they aren't. She lacks the courage of her convictions. She was weighed in the balance, and she was found wanting.

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Posted by ObsidianSnake 1 year ago Report

Well put! Though on this topic I would also add that love+support and also hate+rejection were a critical part of why Oseri accepts this version of the status quo. No weasel is an island, after all.

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Posted by Mourtzouphlos 1 year ago Report

That's true. I get the feeling that if she had someone on her side, as it were, the decision would be significantly more turbulent (and dramatic). As it is, there's no real internal conflict: everyone around her is either pushing for this outcome, or trying to kill her, and she doesn't have the moral center to push back. Two opposing sides, both offering comfort and surety, but implacably opposed? She'd have to make an active and conscious decision on what she believed and who she'd spurn, with no way to avoid at least some further emotional cost. Ah, the drama!

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Posted by Furryvoreonly 10 months ago Report

Amazing story! I especially liked how Oseri's new predatory friends comforted her after all the fighting had ended and they were back in her house.

The way you described how she felt as she ate her first prey was just phenomenal. I really want to feel that way too; to experience the predatory joy and satisfaction that comes from eating a live squirmy meal and making them truly yours. Alas, I was born human and not as a fox... :(

The reason for that rabbit rejecting Oseri at the beginning was really silly and illogical, but I suppose normal life is to. You'd think a rabbit would like that she didn't eat prey. Well I guess in our world, we have the equivalent to that with people holding beliefs and protesting for stuff that really just amounts to "Chickens for KFC!".

As for Oseri's and the other predator's actions during "Our Tears in Daylight", that was pretty messed up. Not the eating people part (They have to do that to live), but the whole betraying society's trust part. What they did was cheating, amoral, and deeply reprehensible. It was also especially bad because it took place in a time before reformation technology existed.

I honestly can't blame Lus for not wanting to trust predators ever again after what he went through that day. Breaking the social contract like that is just next level scummy.

It was kinda nice to see Oseri over hoard food as weasels and stoats are ought to do though. At least she seemed happy...

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Posted by ObsidianSnake 10 months ago Report

Something I often explore in the Verrian stories is the complexities of overlapping dynamics. Commonly, predator/prey and class. That provost has invested himself in the common view of his self-perceived class: predators keep the rabble anxious and orderly.

Sure, the way different groups and needs are leaning against each other might appear as a house of cards to us. Though, with how plastic the connections are, maybe it's better understood as an ecosystem.

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