What are you reading?

[thepanda]

Was reading Cast in Gold -- Shinji as an exalt (Zenith, evidently).

Got to the limit break.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

The Shinji-just-shy-of-rape bit or something else?

[Brian]

I think Limit Breaking is a crappy mechanic in general, but in that story, it just came across as literally out-of-the-blue.  Limit Breaks are supposed to be a stress reaction, not a response to an evening of having fun followed by a single moment of a given character behaving pretty much exactly the same way she has the entire story thus far.  It's not even internally consistent.  "Oh, no, Misato came on to me!  Time to flip out and molest everything I can reach (while also running away from her at top speed)!"

Then it's followed by some of the most eye-rolling wangst I've ever seen -- seriously, my vision is now rotated 90 degrees clockwise from the eye-roll that provoked -- not only from Shinji, but Misato?

While the story was mostly okay, it was already going pretty slowly at that point, and frequently underwhelmed me with the lack of progression in the plot/amazing volume of chapters/passing months with no angel encounters.  It really just felt like the author went, "I don't know what would help the story, but who cares?  Here's an exalted mechanic I can finesse in with my favorite finessing tool -- the 9-iron!"

I have an ability to tolerate that a bit, but bleah.

The Limit Breaking, aside from being totally unjustified in happening in the first place (instead of removing Shinji's built up stress, it instead gave him tons of it), just failed to make sense.  His pacifism is more his defining trait than his prudishness; he's portrayed as a Compassion exalt, generally, not a Temperance exalt.  So his limit break should invert his Compassion, not his Temperence.

That was treated as an incidental note to the, "Muwahaha, fanservice -- Shinji molests all of teh wiminz and is also dumb in this mode!" fiasco, which was especially terrible thanks to the tounge-in-cheek author's tone of, "But it's okay because he's so awesome!  And even hates himself for it afterwards!"

I still have the fic open, but I kind of don't know if the high-powered bad-guy crushing antics are even worth it at this point. :\

I guess it's Bile Fascination, now.  Oh, well.

[thepanda]

I still have the fic open, but I kind of don't know if the... antics are even worth it at this point. :\

I guess it's Bile Fascination, now.  Oh, well.

Me with this fic

[Brian]

...yeah, I hype backlash too hard to care about MLP.  It and Nasu are both just 'not for me' because the ravings of the fans have guaranteed my expectations can never be met.  Both of those works would need to cure cancer, fix the economy, and then find the missing pieces of my soul for me to care.

[Rayearth]

I have to ask: why are there so many Naruto crossovers in existence? And why does every single one use the "Naruto somehow appears in X world" template? I struggle to find a crossover that does the opposite (that isn't Harry Potter or Ranma) or, just maybe, have more characters than just Naruto get yanked over to the other series' world.

Really, more crossovers should have group to group interactions instead of just one-to-many.

[Anastasia]

Naruto's a huge fandom, that's why. More stories, more crossovers, more crummy writers banging out crap stories.

[thepanda]

...yeah, I hype backlash too hard to care about MLP.  It and Nasu are both just 'not for me' because the ravings of the fans have guaranteed my expectations can never be met.  Both of those works would need to cure cancer, fix the economy, and then find the missing pieces of my soul for me to care.

Heh. I only started watching it because my niece just turned old enough to pay enough attention to it to sit still while it is on.

Not a bad show, but it won't cure cancer. ^_^

[Brian]

I have to ask: why are there so many Naruto crossovers in existence? And why does every single one use the "Naruto somehow appears in X world" template?

I've seen a few that buck the trend, just importing x characters into Konoha.  But the answer is 'because it's easy'.

[Dracos]

I have to ask: why are there so many Naruto crossovers in existence? And why does every single one use the "Naruto somehow appears in X world" template? I struggle to find a crossover that does the opposite (that isn't Harry Potter or Ranma) or, just maybe, have more characters than just Naruto get yanked over to the other series' world.

Really, more crossovers should have group to group interactions instead of just one-to-many.

Um, because group to group interactions are Hard.  I mean it's one thing to say the reverse is easy, but even in singular canons, dealing with group to group interactions is difficult.  You know those mangas that have 50 odd characters but still focus almost solely on like 6?  Why don't they do 12 often?  Because doubling the active cast size is a huge deal to keep awareness.  It's also why large casts often get interpreted as Groups with suddenly homogonous belief/action sets no matter how they might've bickered when they were front and center.  Because it is difficult to find the time to keep people being people and still move the plot forward at a meaningful rate.

When I think of successful stories that involve group to group interaction, they are either Fusions: So a lot of the cast is auto-separated into existing small clusters; or they are Incident fics: Some dramatic event happened that is the focus of everyone's attention so it is easier to move the plot forward in relation to that event.  Someone got killed or saved or something.

Many fairly good fics can count the active speaking cast as less than ten.  Not because 'it is easy', but because going from 10 to 20 is really hard.

[Jason_Miao]

I have to ask: why are there so many Naruto crossovers in existence?

Because it's the popular series of its time.  Was HP.  Before that was Ranma/Tenchi/Sailor Moon.  Probably a few others in between, when I wasn't paying attention.

And why does every single one use the "Naruto somehow appears in X world" template?

Because most aspiring writers have this perverse notion that that not-writing unimportant details (such as background, characterization, plausibility to maintain suspension of disbelief, etc), is better than writing those details.

I struggle to find a crossover that does the opposite (that isn't Harry Potter or Ranma) or, just maybe, have more characters than just Naruto get yanked over to the other series' world.

<insert standard answer to "someone should write this story" post here>

Really, more crossovers should have group to group interactions instead of just one-to-many.

Since Drac already gave the answer, a slightly more numbers-oriented explanation (but which really just amounts to the same thing, so if you're not interested, feel free to skip the rest of this post):

If you add a character to a group of N characters, you have to account for N additional potential relationships.  For two characters, you start with one possible relationship.  For three characters, you have three possible relationships.  For four characters, you have six possible relationships.  And so on. 

Luckily, one of the crutches available by the nature of writing fanfic is that the relationships between characters are already established by the source material.  A writer doesn't usually need to mess with most of them.  So, a writer who is writing about the Sailor Moon world and wants to write about the 11 Senshi+cats (7 planets + 1 moon + 1 kupier belt object + 2 cats = 11) has 45 potential relationships (the sum of the range 1 through 10).  But the writer can pick and choose which relationships are being changed by the plot, so might only be focusing on two or three actual relationships.

Crossover time: If a writer wants to insert only Naruto into the Sailor Moon world, the writer can just hand-wave all the relationships between Senshi and cats as just-like-cannon, so has to develop up to 11 additional potential relationships.  Maybe Naruto's presence changes the relationship between two of the SM cast (e.g both cats fall in love with Naruto, so now they hate each other), but that only adds one relationship to develop, bringing the total of relationships to 12 - still plausible for the writer to write and the reader to keep track.

But replace Naruto with all of Team Seven (so, instead of adding 1 person, the writer is adding 4), and that's 50 (the sum of the range 11 through 14) new potential relationships.  And worse yet, it's pretty unlikely that writing about two flashy groups like screaming ninja and overpowered magical girls interacting with one another won't change the dynamic within the groups, so the assumption that one can automatically hand-wave most relationships within the groups no longer applies.  Having to figure out how to deal with 95 potential relationships (45 of the original SM cast plus 50 added by inclusion of a few Naruto characters) can be a bit much.

[thepanda]

Don't forget settings!

Naruto's world is developed in such a way that dropping strangers into it almost guarantees a "strangers vs the 'verse" scenario. Naruto is about the world he inhabits as much as (if not more so) it is about him. Any fic set in that world which ignores or sidelines that stuff is going to feel off.

[Grahf]

I think Limit Breaking is a crappy mechanic in general, but in that story, it just came across as literally out-of-the-blue.  Limit Breaks are supposed to be a stress reaction, not a response to an evening of having fun followed by a single moment of a given character behaving pretty much exactly the same way she has the entire story thus far.  It's not even internally consistent.  "Oh, no, Misato came on to me!  Time to flip out and molest everything I can reach (while also running away from her at top speed)!"

I'd chalked it up to the final straw that broke the camel's back when Misato told him that he was her weapon. Then again, given what had been happening and the fact that he seems far more aware in this iteration I don't think this really should have come as a shock to him.

And yeah, I was trying to figure out what that virtue flaw was, and came to much the same conclusion.  Just seemed like it was inserted for the sake of drama without even managing to create that much.

Spoiler: ShowHide

It also does eventually get Shinji an OC girlfriend, so we'll see where that whole thing is going.

But yeah, without an exalt having other, antagonistic exalts or behemoths (which I guess are sort of played by the Angels this time), there's really not a hell of a lot that can stand in their way.

[Anastasia]

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8326543/6/Subtle-Variations

Subtle Variations updated.

[Yuthirin]

Which one?

[Dracos]

Huh?  What are you asking Yuth?