Defying Viewers are Geniuses

I am writing a Web Serial Novel The Gaiad and in it I find I have a big problem with Viewers Are Geniuses while I wanted to make it into a Genius Bonus or Unconventional Learning Experience how do you recommend I change my work so that it avoids these problems?

Maybe focus less on long strings of name-drops and references, and focus on more thoroughly explaining a smaller number of subjects?

I think that is a good way to do it. The issue I've had is that I want people to read it slower than they typically do, so I'm thinking about changing the font to be less legible to accomplish that too.

Could you explain why you want people to read your story slower? And call me a purist, but I wouldn't hinge the effectiveness of your story too much around formatting that wouldn't be possible in a plain text file.

I don't think making your text less legible is the answer to anything. The main issue I'm seeing so far is that your references lack the coherence and nuance to really stand up on their own, so they come across as a perfunctory grocery list of real-world/mythological concepts rather than a cohesive story. Take your Sutra 2 for example:

Okay, so right at the beginning we already have a problem. Who are Adonis and Neutra? I mean, yeah, you already spelled out in the preceding section that Adonis is a personification of elemental hydrogen, and so it would follow that Neutra is neutron. But who are they in the context of the story? Do they have any powers? Distinguishing features? Any personal motivation other than the contrived hots for each other?

Personification is a powerful literary device, but it only works if what you're writing actually comes off to the reader as, y'know, a person.

Alright, so now you're just listing the various isotopes of hydrogen and helium. Here's the thing: you don't have to be a genius to know these names. The vast majority of readers would have recognised them on some level, STEM background or not. And there's nothing inherently wrong with naming characters after common nouns or concepts.

But here's the problem: these aren't characters. Again, without character traits, there's nothing to make them register as people to the readers. They're just, well, real-life concepts, written in somewhat fanciful language.

Any reader who's still following along at this point wouldn't simply enjoy the story as-is and come back later for the references. They'd just open a Google window to figure out what you're talking about.

Now we're getting somewhere. Mithra is obviously carbon (you kind of spelled that out pretty explicitly), but he's got the beginnings of some character traits for a change. "Four arms to bridge all gaps" is certainly one way to turn a real-world concept into metaphor; there's room for exploration here, but personally, I like it.

The rest is... element formation in the stars? Not sure if they happened in that order, but prose-wise, it reads well enough. Narratively, it still jumps from one string of exposition to another, but this time we actually get to know a bit about who these people are, so fair. Going back to the subject of references, however, I think you miiight have gotten your metaphors confused with Florina. Is she a Group VII element or a person? Does she need a man or an electron?

There's a fair bit of sophistication in this here passage, and I honestly rather like it. But "need[ing] a man to fill that last electron" isn't a phrase that makes sense unless you already know exactly what concept it refers to. You don't want to confuse your readers into Googling every other word; you want them to be able to enjoy the text as-is, even if they run into an obscure reference here and there. And to do that, you need to make sure that the basic flow of events makes sense on the surface level.

Aaand there it goes. To a reader who's already read a little on elemental formation, this is just the same thing but with human action verbs thrown in. To a reader who hasn't, this isn't a story. It's a rapid-fire description of events, like a foam board full of newspaper clippings where "Golden Retriever missing" is right besides "Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or threesm ok".

And of course, any reader could tell that you're making one reference after another here. But why should they care? Why should they root for any of these people, when we know barely anything about any of them, what they want, what they feel?

The problem is that you're not telling a story with a few hard-to-catch references. You're telling a story made up entirely of references.

Apologies if I came across as too harsh there. Since you're writing poetry, though, you might want to look at features unique to the medium - what makes it tick where plain prose wouldn't.

Poetry obviously has its share of Reference Overdosed. Going through the last passage there, I'm reminded of the Catalogue of Ships in The Iliad, where Homer name-drops a litany of countries and big men that wouldn't make a lick of sense unless you already grew up hearing oral retellings of the Trojan War cycle. Yeah, yeah, it's a classic of world literature, whatever. It's not something you read for fun unless you're some kind of masochistic ship nerd. This is bad. Don't do it like Homer. But the rest of the poem has characters that you know and care about. And that makes it worth it to read on even as you stumble upon strange names and places you don't recognise. From the very first stanza:

You don't know who this guy was. But you know that he went ham and he went ham bad. So what did he have to be so mad about? Well, let's dive in and find out!

Can you make your audience ask questions like that? Can you show them a glimpse of what your characters want, what they're after? As long as your readers care about them and want to see what happens next, they'll roll along with any reference no matter how obscure. And if they get it? Well, that's what makes the Genius Bonus a bonus.

P.S.: Just recognised your avatar. Nice one.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jun 4th 2020 at 7:23:34 AM