Choice of media for my next story

[tekuno]

I've been giving some thought to the next longer story I want to write, which will be a "happy ending" version of my earlier story (which definitely did not have a happy ending) A Word Out of Place. As I've been thinking about it, I have come to realize that I'm imagining it in terms of, well, manga. Like maybe Akagami no Shirayukihime, or some of the stuff that Dongsaeng has posted, such as Prince Amon* (although my prince isn't going to look like that at all). The story itself is going to be relatively straightforward fantasy, but with some muscle growth (and, incidentally, sex) thrown in (because otherwise why would I be bothering to post it here?).

*(That link is to something he posted to his Y-Gallery account. Since it's adult, in order to view it, you'll need to have an account there and turn off the filters and leave it logged in. If you don't have an account, it's probably not worth getting one -- every good artist I can think of offhand who has an account there has either stopped posting or also posts to a blog or tumblr account or something. That may have something to do with the fact that the Y-gallery moderators frequently seem to suffer from cranio-rectal inversion.)

Obviously, even though I can do better than the unfinished stuff I've posted on FurAffinity, I'm not a good enough artist to pull off something of that caliber (I mean, geez, Dongsaeng draws some crazy hot guys) -- buuut I wouldn't mind making a bit of an effort in order to do some artwork. I'd even be willing to try drawing manga-style -- although if there's going to be a bishonen character -- which I'm not at all confident I can draw, period -- it will be the bad guy. (Pretty boys in anime make me puke.)

On the other hand, I know that drawing takes a lot more time than writing. By several orders of magnitude. In the time it takes for one issue of the average comic book to come out, I could easily finish a story which would take more pages in print than the comic would, and that's me working alone where the artists generally have people to ink, color, letter, etc. So would feel bad about saying "I'm going to do this as a comic and spend all my time drawing for the next however-long-it-takes"; maybe most people would prefer plain text, or something in between.

So I'm leaving this poll here. You get to tell me what form I should use to waste my time on writing muscle growth fetish porn. I'm giving lots of options because there are a whole range of possibilities, not just "text" or "cartoon". I could just include illustrations (FurAffinity permits cross-site linking if you do it right) instead of actually drawing the whole thing. Or I could go with the way Erfworld has adapted to the difficulty of cartooning, and just do a few scenes as cartoons when I think it would be most effective, and the rest as text.

If I were to do the thing as a comic, though, it would also be tempting to make it a bit more humorous than I would normally do with the same story as text. There are just so many ways you can play with the characters in a comic which you can't pull off in text, such as breaking the fourth wall. (Or, at least, you can do that very well in text... I remember a fantasy novel once where one of the characters shouted "And I'm getting really tired of all the footnotes!")

This poll will close when any one of the three stories I'm currently posting ends, which means it ought to have at least a couple of weeks to run. (If the choice is to do any significant amount of art, I want to have some run-up time to pull together the process and materials.) Since, as I recall, there's no way to stop a poll in vBulletin, I'll post the winning option when I close the poll. If there's a tie, then I get to choose the winning option. Nya ha ha ha!

As for the delivery of artwork: I will post any necessary images on my account at FurAffinity, and maybe somewhere else as a backup. (It would be a pity if the whole thing became unreadable because one site goes down, don't you agree? Maybe I'll set up a blog or something.) Unless the winning option is either pure text or text with occasional illustrations, the story will be delivered as a single thread, and any new artwork/textual parts will be added as replies to the thread. (So you'll have to pay a little more attention than usual. Sorry!)

[tekuno]

Heh heh... Work, slave robots!

That video is a heck of a lot funnier if you've watched Twin Signal, but frankly Twin Signal is so twee that that's almost a punishment.

[tekuno]

I forgot to post that this poll is now closed. The winner was "Plain text with occasional cartoon pages -- I want to see the characters grow. (And fuck.)"

I'll get to this in a few weeks, once the other stories are finished.

[Rarity]

This oughta be interestin'.

[tekuno]

I hope so, at least.

If not, then it will be good practice for drawing, and maybe I can do something else with similar format. If I get fast enough to complete a reasonably "finished" drawing per day, that would be an extremely useful thing.

Now I just have to figure out how to host the images, since FurAffinity apparently doesn't want me to embed them here.

(If worst comes to worst, I can always use Tumblr and hope for the best, since that seems to work. My plan is to produce a regular, uncensored version which will be on FurAffinity, and then use the embeddable source with a censored version, and link the images so you can click and see the whole thing. It should keep the hosting people happy, at least -- maybe the image will show Teh Homo Sexxings, but with appropriate black bars where needed so they can't claim I'm doing nudity or something.)

[Rarity]

Just make a link to your page. You don't have to emb the picture for us to see it, just put it in order when you do the url links.

[Ogun]

Originally Posted by tekuno

Heh heh... Work, slave robots!

That video is a heck of a lot funnier if you've watched Twin Signal, but frankly Twin Signal is so twee that that's almost a punishment.

I've READ the first tankoubon of twin Signal, but never seen the show.

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by Ogun

I've READ the first tankoubon of twin Signal, but never seen the show.

The OVA (if there's a full TV series, I don't know about it) is almost painfully bad. You can tell that the manga might have been pretty good, but it relies too much on "this kind of character is a cliche so we're not even going to bother telling you the details" type of characterizations, the pacing is bad, and it can't decide whether it wants to be a gag-based comedy with occasional action scenes or an action show with some humor.

That's why the outtakes were so funny -- after listening to the dub voice actors (*shudder*) spend all this time being deadpan about this ridiculous premise, hearing them screw up repeatedly, often deliberately, is great. (That company added dub outtakes to some other titles -- I watched a few of the ones for Rurouni Kenshin, IIRC -- but none of them were quite as funny because most of the other series didn't have the right combination of failed humor and self-importance.)