I was a bit concerned that this person made a new DeviantART account just to say this to me. I really do not want people to feel that they can't criticize the comic because I'll be touchy about it. All feedback, positive or negative, is welcome and I will cheerfully discuss it with you. I love talking about the comic and I'll talk your ears off if you give me half a chance! I want Victory Fire to be good, and where there's any possibility for improvement, I want to be able to improve.
Now, VF doesn't really get a lot of negative feedback, so I got quite giddy about seeing this. I've sometimes wondered why I don't get negative feedback, whether there might be a group of people who viscerally hate the thing but never speak up. Until VF shows up on Bad Webcomics Wiki or something, I'm not going to know that for sure. But, there's this now, so let's break it down and see what we can learn!
"Mewtwo's overrated as hell"
Well, yes, it's Mewtwo, introduced in gen1 and still, despite subsequent power creep, on parity with Arceus as the most powerful Pokemon in the game. I'm not sure you can overrate that, and in fact I've had comments to the effect that VF Mewtwo hasn't been pulling his weight as much as he should
I wasn't really sure what this person wanted regarding the Mewtwo criticism, though if they're upset because they feel the current fight is going to be a curb-stomp... I'll be interested to see what they think of the way it'll actually pan out. In a later comment, they provided clearer explanation:
"Mewtwo becoming some destined "hero" with mega evolutions is about as cliched and typical as Ash being the main character on the anime."
I hadn't thought of it this way, but I have the advantage of knowing what's coming up. I can't defend myself very easily on this point as I'd have to give away major spoilers, but I will say that it's a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon comic, and the fundamental concept in PMD games is teamwork. Mewtwo has already failed once by trying to go it alone... do I make myself clear?
"you clearly don't like Victini and have to make it the bad "girl""
This one I'm disappointed to see, albeit not especially surprised.
It's not easy writing antagonist characters. I've run into problems with it before in older stuff I've done. In Victory Fire's case it's not come through clearly enough that Victini is also a victim. It's supposed to be a complex situation, but maybe I'm just not a good enough writer to bring that out sufficiently. Early on I did find that there was a fairly even split between people who thought Victini was too horrible, or not horrible enough. Maybe the scales tipped after the puppy incident.
I've said before that there are no villains in Victory Fire (well, except possibly for one character who hasn't even showed up onscreen yet
That said, I'm not going to stop trying. If Victory Fire ends up not working out, I'm taking the lessons learned and using them in future work.
As for me disliking Victini, honestly I have no particular feelings about Victini. It was picked as the antag originally because it was a good foil to Celebi, being fire/psy versus grass/psy. Much like Jen being an Audino because it was the right size and bipedal! There's no more to the choice than that! The only Pokemon I genuinely dislike is Skitty, because just... just look at it. Horrid little creature.
"467 pages is beyond enough"
Ohh yeah. Got me there. The comic should not have been this long, I've admitted it on many occasions. It's my first webcomic and it's been a learning experience. In my defense, I was originally co-authoring it with Night and in the earlier books it was more about the process--we were just having so much FUN figuring out how to design pages and tell a story visually. We were always working towards an endgame so we do at least have that advantage over other comics, but that endgame point changed a lot as the story developed. The result is that the story meanders. The later books don't have much to do with the earlier ones.
The truth is that at this point I could quite comfortably cut most of the early material and have a story half the length that would hold together much better.
But I'm not going to do that, because as I mentioned, Victory Fire is my first webcomic. Those pages happened, they are part of Victory Fire's history, people liked them at the time, so they're staying.
Maybe what we really need is a VF:Abridged! Any volunteers?
The larger question here is: To what standard do we hold Victory Fire?
I have occasionally been told it's the "best PMD comic" or even the "best Pokemon fancomic" on the internet. That... may not be great praise.
In an ideal world I would like Victory Fire to stand as something good in its own right. It can't really do that because let's be honest, it's a fanfic, that's all it is. But despite that, I still hope to make each page, judged artistically, a Good Thing. I try to make my layouts make sense, I struggle with perspective and anatomy, I keep folders of photographs of plants, scenery, architecture, etc. Basically, whatever it is right now, I want it to be just that little bit better next time update day rolls around.
I think perhaps I prioritize art over storytelling. When Night was still around, we'd spend hours each day discussing elements of story and trying to fit the pieces together in different ways. I don't have that luxury any more. Of course the flipside of that is that when Night was still around, the monstrosity got so gnarly complicated that most of what I've been doing since is looking for ways to slim it down and get the darned thing moving somewhere. That may be the real reason for the mismatch between early books and late. I personally feel that the later books have a strength which the earlier ones lack, but I'm hardly an unbiased critic.
On Criticism: A Lesson to Learn
The person who made the above comment subsequently sent me a private message from their real username, apologizing for their tone and stating that they'd only posted aggressively because they expected to be blocked/hidden. That's a shame, isn't it?
We're mostly not very good at taking critique here on DeviantART. Never be mean to someone who takes the time to write you a comment--even if that comment isn't positive. They cared enough about what you did to spend time writing to you, even if they didn't like it, and that is a precious thing. Talk to them.
Created at simplydevio.us
