Alora Fane

I've added two more episodes/conversations/whatever to the Divine Dreams thing I mentioned in the previous post, and would again like to hear what you think!

I've been planning to write a longer post about it, about various thoughts I've been having recently about the creative process and the fears of presenting very idiosyncratic work to people - how harsh and discouraging critical judgement can be and all that - but it's taking me a while to get around to putting my thoughts into words, so I thought I'd show these first since they're essentially done.

Or rather, they're what I'd consider a first draft; I'm still very much playing around with things and have yet to get to the point where I feel like I comfortably know what I'm doing (I wonder if such a point would ever come, though). I might revise them drastically later; they're far from set in stone.

I'm more proud of the music than any other aspects; I have to resist listening to it again and again and again. I wonder if other people who make music do this? But I know that it - like the writing - deviates from what's typically popular in form, construction, style, etc, so I wonder how it sounds to ears that aren't mine.

I'm enjoying what I'm doing, but I'm also aware that it's all... well, as I said, idiosyncratic. So I know that minds that work differently to my own might not find this appealing, as I do.

I mentioned in a couple of comments on the previous post that the appeal I'm trying to explore with this project is less like the eager following of a flowing narrative, to find out 'what happens next', and more like a sort of (non-sexual) voyeurism; I'm trying to engage the sort of curiosity you might feel about listening into other people's conversations, even into their minds, to see how they work. So it's less about a story (though there will be one) and more about just watching people 'be themselves' in what I hope is an interesting way.

I keep thinking of Homestuck as an example of this. Are you familiar with that? It had sections which were long, rambling text-based conversations between not exactly 'realistic' characters who each had their own unique, entertaining voice, and I found them appealing to the point where they come up in my mind fairly often. I've read comments by other people saying that those long conversations were 'no way to tell a story' and that the dialogue was 'garish leetspeak' that they just skipped over, whereas others made finding their own definitive font colour and 'typing quirk' - like these characters - a key part of their day-to-day identity. So it's all very subjective. But if you ever... experienced Homestuck ('read' isn't quite the word) and found those conversations exhausting, or off-putting, then Divine Dreams would not be for you.

Out of curiosity, I was reading criticisms of Homestuck recently, and things like this caught my attention:

I read somewhere on the MSPA website that the way Andrew Hussie writes Homestuck is that he just thinks of an idea he likes, stuffs it into the story, and then explains it later (in excruciating detail, I might add, interspersed between pointless wall-of-text dialogues which the story could do without, such as ∞ this lovely conversation about lactation between a pair of sunglasses and the guy wearing them ∞. Seriously, we don't need that, it doesn't build the characters and it doesn't drive the story)

I mention it because I've come across that attitude before, that all content that doesn't develop either the plot or characters should be omitted, because it's just a frivolous waste of space if it doesn't 'achieve' something. It seems like a very goal-oriented mindset. I wonder whether people who think like devote every waking moment of their own lives to furthering their career or important relationships in a meaningful way. Whether they omit any 'pointless' entertainment because it's simply a waste of time that could be better-spent. Does spending time with characters have to 'achieve' something in their world in order to be worthwhile? Can't it be entertaining in itself, as spending time with a friend is? I for one found the dialogue the comment linked to quite amusing (though largely because it's a cleverly-written meta thing, addressing (but not really) the fans' questions about why the non-mammalian troll species have breasts; it might not further anything in the story, but it was certainly meant to engage the audience in a meaningful way).

...I'm touching there on what I wanted to ramble about in the post I've yet to write, but I've got other things I need to do today, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

So yes. Again, you can find Divine Dreams at ∞ divinedreams.net ∞, and again, I'd like to hear what you think!

(I still need to draw expressions/poses for the characters; I planned to do that for the first two episodes before moving on, but the allure of composing new music was too hard to resist!)

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