Live Blogs The Great Nitpicky Live Blog of El Goonish Shive

MrAHR

AC Drawings:

Ellen is not making sense here, I swear this "This is my battle thing" is no better than when anime do it.

I mean Greg would've won and had this finished quickly!

AHR:

Good point. I had assumed it was her wanting to find one last thing to be important about. Or, I dunno, the same logic used when I yell at Cakman when he used to refer to this as "our" blog.

Heh. Guess I'm too wrapped up in weeabooism to notice some of the bad clichés. Good catch.

AC Drawings:

My obsession with ensemble casts allows me to catch on stupid anti-teamwork/anti-main character cliches that make me want to set the creators ablaze. Unfortunately even Shive is not exempt sometimes though he is somewhat better about it than most in terms of screen time and significance.

AHR:

Now that's a nice pet peeve to have. It leads to better made fighting arcs. Mine tend to suck because, while I don't do the whole 'this is my fight' schtick, I get all jumbled up and not know what to do with the lesser characters.

AC Drawings:

Yeah, though it's a pet peeve that helped obliterate any enjoyment I had for Naruto, Bleach, and Dragonball Z, and has made One Piece slightly unbearable.

I get what you're saying, trying to get lesser people to be more important or significant can be hard to work with. When i get that feeling I ignore the main ones for a little while and focus my thoughts on the lesser ones.

AHR:

I can understand that. I don't even read One Piece for the boss fights, and I friggin love that series. At the least, it does have a bit of an eigen plot, which is nice.

As for EGS, well, Shive kinda sucks at making climactic battles in general, so to ask him to do team work well is like asking him to make a meal, he makes instant ramen, and you complain there isn't enough seasoning in it.

AC Drawings:

Very nice metaphor, Think you have it right on the money there.

e X:

Yeah, me three.

The way fights and teamwork are handled in your typical shonen anime/manga doesn't really suits my taste. I get that the main character is , well, the main character, but that doesn't mean he has to fight every single major enemy on his own. Especially when no other reason is given than This Is Something Hes Got To Do Himself *. It also doesn't help that i find the main character most of the time to be the least interesting one.

Gilphon:

I'm just dropping to comment that the difficultly of writing a fight scene = ((n-1)!(s+1))/d, where n is the number of active participants, s is the ratio of the largest participant's size to the next largest participant *, and d is the skill of the writer.

So in this case, where we have a large value for s and a relatively small value for d, some massaging of the value for n is needed in order to keep this possible to write.

e X:

You forgot a=angle, which can marginalize size.

Noxilicious:

Hey, it's me, the chick that got a 30 page thread on how she got banned on the EGS forum!

I just wanted to chime in on the whole issue of that deleted thread. The thing is that Dan probably had no part in the decision to delete it. Dan actually has a bit of a weird relationship with criticism. On the one side he seems to have some modicum of appreciation for criticism and occasionally does try to improve based on criticism. Remember that period when EGS was done in black-and-white? The fan-reaction was so vehemently negative Dan eventually went back to grey-scale. When people complained about the pacing and exposition at the end of Susan' road-trip story-arc, he even started a thread to get some feedback on how to fix his pacing issues.

And then on the other hand, Dan is awfully protective of his work. There was that one time one forumite in particular kept suggesting that the minutiae of EGS' magic system should be explained in EGS:NP or the Sketchbook instead of cluttering up the main comic with it, you know, like how some webcomic authors explain this sorta stuff with a formspring Q&A or like Sorcery 101's Ask Danny section (a comic whose author I hold in high esteem if only for the sole reason she actually hires an editor to improve her comic). Dan, being the non-confrontational person that he is, eventually posted on his twitter account that if he were start doing something like that he might as well quit doing his comic altogether.

Oh, and on the matter of Lord Tedd? Dan actually once said on the forum that Lord Tedd totally never meant to kill the other Tedds. You know, despite sending nigh-indestructible assassins after them. He said that a considerable time after he declared the Painted black story-arc "too dark" for EGS, but the two statements go hand-in-hand as far as the main characters never facing any consequences is concerned.

AHR:

Noxy, I presume? We had assumed Dan had no part in the thread deletion, or at least, I had. But I did notice some other indicators around the forum, as well as thinking that the mods had to have gotten their policy from somewhere. But as for the thread, I doubt he even saw it. Interesting information though. Thanks!

222: Wow, that goo blob is losing a lot of blood. Maybe if we ignore it it'll bleed out on its own?

223: What's wrong with Sarah's reaction? When she thought it was Elliot her reaction was "what's wrong with Elliot? I should try to help him?" When she is told that that is not Elliot (which is in a sense very close to being an accidental lie) her reaction is "Ugh some stranger kissed me! What's up with her? Anyways, we should still go help her." Seems pretty reasonable to me.

224: Where ARE they? Did they get swallowed by a giant serpent or something for that fourth panel? For god's sake, that hallway's a tube!

225: Given context I always assumed that this REPLACED her old "Ki" powers (that Elliot never uses anyways), because she clearly attempted to use a power of some kind there and was not expecting that one.