HKYA! HKYA! RP - Letter From POISON

damn dude

good crap

you truly buried me in your promo

i know i didn't respond to your last piece but you are a damn good writer dawg

i like the approach of having the story told through a letter as i don't think it's a very regular method of storytelling. i do have to say i thought it was odd that poison was all, "the referee counted fast" that doesn't sound like something a character like poison would say based on how you present him

really good crap right here, glad to have you as my first opponent

lol I know the feeling.

*looks at interview segment Alex still refuses to edit*

Hey man,

So I feel like this is a better outing overall from last show, and I think that's a good thing. What I really enjoyed here was how you framed POISON's message with the curiosity our concierge experiences. I think that framing and using him as the means to tell that story is actually really smart in developing a universe for POISON you can draw from. You've been around and seen that a lot of players have a rich universe to draw material from, easter eggs and callbacks, and I think you have a good opportunity to so with this. You'll see if you keep doing it how much richer your stories become, so I want to see you double down on the effects it has on Matt. I'm glad to see you took that suggestion to heart and applied it here.

The promo itself did what it needed to do, and like what was commented on in your last outing, the brevity of the message is one of the more appealing things. I think the comment about a fast count for the match was a missed opportunity and I think had you spun it a different way, would've served better for the overall goal you have for POISON. Like check this example out:

"I was having a blast inflicting pain on MESH. She may look innocent, but she enjoyed it too. But maybe we were having too much fun, and that's why the ref acted that way. He was trying to be a hero, because he saw what I was extracting from her. And WFWF can't allow their next great star to become a monster we're all destined to be."

Or something like that. Feel free to use it as a template or even borrow it.

When you opt to go brief with your promos, you gotta make that time you allow count. So how you choose to frame your statements can tell us a lot about POISON without actually saying it.

I absolutely love the Tests of Karate Steve section of the promo. That was really the highlight of it. Need more of those kinds of things.

Like I said at the beginning, this is a better outing. I think you're starting to find techniques to incorporate with this character to establish his purpose and voice. That's going to be a scary combination when you get everything firing at the same time. Just make sure you're allowing yourself the time in the writing cycle to get the most out of what you're doing.

Nice work man.

As previously mentioned by everyone, I liked the structure of the body of the monologue coming in the form of the letter. Additionally, I thought the monologue was solid and I came away with a clear sense of the main points POISON was making as well as a general sense of his mindset. I also think this monologue, in that regard, was a slight improvement from your last outing against MESH which while I enjoyed, I felt the monologue was less clear.

With that said, I think, similarly to your last RP, there was a lot of room for expansion. The monologue made its points but did not do much to elaborate much further than that. Now, granted, being in the form of a letter, it likely wouldn't meander as much as people do when they speak but I think its worth fleshing out some of these ideas. Right now much of what POISON says feels like bullet points and I am very interested in getting the supportive thoughts to those bullet points.

My other main point is I think its really clear you have a strong visual sense of things. Your formatting is already solid. Your use of different colors to separate who is speaking is a simple and effective touch, your use of the crimson red for the blood stains and all that, are all good things. What I would say is I think you can go farther. One simple touch would be to format the descriptive text differently in some way than the dialogue as by having it all be bolded it prevents the dialogue from popping quite as much. That might mean keeping the action unbolded, underlining it, adding brackets of some kind to the sides, etc... but I think it would help. veronicanrana uses bold for dialogue and if you check out her work, she has a cool way of differentiating the dialogue from the action.

Continuing along those lines, while I liked the letter format quite a lot, I think I would have liked it even better had the body of the letter been formatted differently. Perhaps the font of the letter being different, something like...





... I think what I put together above would have made for the reading of the letter feel more immersive, and then if you wanted to occasionally have Matt's inner thoughts break in periodically, IE him reacting to the letter as he reads it, you would be able to do that while preserving the clarity of what is the letter and what isn't. That also lends itself to some even more extensive ideas such as using graphic inserts (check out my RP from the last show for a bunch of examples of that) as opposed to relying entirely on the relatively limited scope of forum formatting. Imagine if the letter were actually presented as appearing like a written letter on paper with the blood stains and everything? Granted that does require some graphic design skills but I just wanted to throw it out there that, with RPing being such a distinct medium, ideas like that are available to you.

Overall I think this was improved from your last RP in some ways which probably has as much to do with getting back into the groove of RPing in the first place. I continue to look forward to seeing what you come up with next, possibly delivered via carrier pigeon.