Darklord Rooke

Oh wow, never thought they'd bring out another season of Full Metal Panic 0.0

Modern western writing is built a lot on conflict, and writers are constantly told to add conflict into novels. Act 2 of the 3 act structure many writers use is literally called confrontation. In comparison the Asian 4 act story structure of Kishotenketsu is built without conflict. That isn't to say there's no conflict in these stories, but it's not built into the actual structure for one. It's a very different style: Act 1 - introduction Act 2 - development Act 3 - twist (might be poorly translated) Act 4 - conclusion I'll quote from an external source here: The basics of the story–characters, setting, etc.–are established in the first act and developed in the second. No major changes occur until the third act, in which a new, often surprising element is introduced. The third act is the core of the plot, and it may be thought of as a kind of structural non sequitur. The fourth act draws a conclusion from the contrast between the first two “straight” acts and the disconnected third, thereby reconciling them into a coherent whole. Kishōtenketsu is probably best known to Westerners as the structure of Japanese yonkoma (four-panel) manga; and, with this in mind, our artist has kindly provided a simple comic to illustrate the concept. Each panel represents one of the four acts. The resulting plot–and it is a plot–contains no conflict. No problem impedes the protagonist; nothing is pitted against anything else. Despite this, the twist in panel three imparts a dynamism–a chaos, perhaps–that keeps the comic from depicting merely a series of events. Panel four reinstates order by showing us how the first two panels connect to the third, which allows for a satisfactory ending without the need for a quasi-gladiatorial victory. It could be said that the last panel unifies the first three. The Western structure, on the other hand, is a face-off–involving character, theme, setting–in which one element must prevail over another. Our artist refitted the above comic into the three-act structure to show this difference. The first panel gives the reader a “default position” with which to compare later events; and the second panel depicts a conflict-generating problem with the vending machine. The third panel represents the climax of the story: the dramatic high point in which the heroine's second attempt "defeats" the machine and allows the can to drop. The story concludes by depicting the aftermath, wherein we find that something from the first act has changed as a result of the climax. In this case, our heroine sansbeverage has become a heroine avec beverage. http://stilleatingoranges.tumblr.com/post/25153960313/the-significance-of-plot-without-conflict

Death row. I escaped, though some wish I hadn't. Kill a guy loudly and messily, during the day, in a public area and weirdly people just won't stop screaming. Then the cops arrive and they're even louder ...

The disappointing thing is if no.6 does get translated, it'll likely be of Chusingura quality

Oh no, proper stalking can only be done in real life. Anything else yields unsatisfactory results. It's on page 1 of the Stalker's Handbook

Really? I don't see the resemblance to be honest :S Apart from the avatar, I mean.

Out of sheer curiosity, about how many times has Tay broken the forums?

And a joyous Lupercalia to you

So smutty stuff with some light gameplay elements? Eiyuu Senki (light strategy) Hunie Cam (light sim from same people who made Hunie Pop) Lightning Raidy (light RPG)

Anything by Key (is Angel Beats out yet?) Most Moege (Majikoi and all its sequels) And anything Tiag thinks is 10/10 (what recently released game did he think was absolutely stellar?)

I almost always turn the voices off. I like to read quickly and with voices off I can progress text boxes without having to wait for the voices to finish speaking, because if voices are on and you don't wait for the voices to finish you end up with this sort of scenario:

Every day in every way, VNs become more and more like interactive comics

You should probably just walk away. You can't force advice onto people, and they're clearly not good enough (and don't have the proper mindset) to recognise and take on board the points people are saying so it will just be an exercise in frustration for all involved. Oh hey, congratulations. It's not everyday someone will butcher the sayings of Confucius to score points in an argument you're involved in, you certainly don't get that in conversations with Japanese companies, so that's a positive I guess

Usually games where grades are important are dating sims rather than VNs. Mainly because a school grade is a "stat" and dating sims focus more on raising stats than VNs. You might get one or two VNs where grades are important, but you'd have more luck with dating sim games imo.

Not Outlaw Django?

Heh, only the most awesome theme on the forums :3 It seems that, at the moment, 'likes' only work with one theme ...

There is one theme that always works perfectly. Just sayin' :3

It's difficult to get into. If you're playing the english translation ... it really isn't

This is why "headcanon" is so useful a concept. Eroge ruins your anime maiden? Pretend it doesn't exist -> problem solved But it's perfect the way it is. I fall in love every time I use it :3

The verb changes are gone too I don't believe parentheses are needed to make things clear. Hopefully the final product will be a smooth read. We'll see xD ... 0.0

IIRC (and I'm sick so my memory is worse than usual) Nocturne Illusion did that. I'm removing the parentheses in my edit. I honestly just don't see the point of them xD

You're welcome Native speakers may or may not know. I've been concentrating on writing for about 10 years now so I've picked up a couple of things It's pretty much involved me down at the library reading through tons of books going "how do they do that! Why can't I make words dance like that! What secret potion are they drinking and how many animals did they sacrifice to before they got this good!!!!!" That was in the past though. Can't do that anymore ... I got kicked out when I tried to sacrifice the local librarian to an obscure Pagan God xD

Italics to denote direct thoughts are really only used for third person fiction. With omnipresent you use a tag as well, whereas with limited (or close) no tag is needed. The italics and/or tags (tags as in "Roberto thought") are used to just indicate to the reader that those are direct thoughts of a certain person. Generally speaking narration in a first person novel are all the thoughts of the protagonist. You could also call these inner thoughts. Because these are both inner thoughts it’s sometimes thought to be inconsistent to narrate what are essentially the protagonists thoughts in the past then suddenly switch to the present for inner dialogue. There are people that do it, but the advice often given to writers is “don’t” xD. For example: For first-person POV, there are not often instances when you’d even need to use a thought tag to identify a character’s thoughts, much less use italics for those thoughts. Still, most often the thoughts of a first-person narrator will blend seamlessly into the surrounding text [...] Note that without the italics, I kept the verbs in the past tense to match the rest of the narration. This is a deliberate choice. It maintains consistency for the reader, keeps her from wondering why the writer changed from past to present tense. I just grabbed this piece from the internet from freelance editor Beth Hill, but it tends to match up. Unlike 3rd person, the writer doesn't need to clearly identify what are and are not the protagonists inner dialogues/inner monologues/inner thoughts because the reader will know that they are all the protagonist thoughts. Because of this, all those methods of distinguishing them (italics, tags, and change of tense) are really not needed

Oh, okay I just noticed something (it's still early over here and I need some caffeine xD) If it’s a past tense novel, in first person narration, thoughts tend to also be in past tense. Basically because everything narrated is also the protagonists thoughts, there doesn’t need to be any differentiation between the tenses. If the main protagonist narrated everything in the past, why would his thoughts suddenly be narrated in the present? So it would never really be “I am going to go”. Check this excerpt out: [...]at least I had the balm of this simple, ordinary life to console me. I could look forward to years of Christmases with this girl in my arms, the privilege of growing old in this unfamiliar skin of mine. I knew that. I had everything. Notice how everything is in the past tense in this section of inner monologue despite her talking about the future and the present? Some literature writers could switch between past and present for inner thoughts in first person past tense, but it tends to call attention to the writing and most of the time genre fiction likes a smooth experience.

The way I understand it, I think he's still in the process of making the decision. If he's walking through the decision and talking about a hypothetical event in the future then MG's prose should be fine. If he's already made the decision and has left, then you're correct. But it's really hard to tell on a screenshot like that xD. That could just be an inelegant bit of prose. They might have meant "Yes. From now on I would go to school alone." You never know with these sorts of translations