I honestly don't really have an opinion on it. I'm not very keen on drabbles because, where I stand, they're not much more than a concerted effort to get all the accolades and praise for having written something without actually putting in the effort to write very
much, and they certainly (in my opinion) don't deserve their own thread. (Those, and posts along the lines of "I haven't written anything yet, but when I will, it'll go here!
" are the most annoying thing ever. )
Personally, I'm not a fan of the idea of a gender-swapped Katawa Shoujo, outside of fanart. Ren'Py isn't expensive, and there's free assets all over the place; if you want to write a whole new game, with all new characters and all new romances, you may as well just make a new one. Since so many fanfiction writers on the internet are uncomfortable working in a Japanese setting, that would allow them to move the setting somewhere they're more comfortable with, anyway. Rewriting the entire Katawa Shoujo plot just to reverse the romantic polarity of the characters is a pointless endeavor. You're essentially just removing everything people like about the setting but hoping to retain that setting's audience anyway.
Themocaw's an okay writer but for my money I don't agree with the choices he makes. When Meadows decided to take the opening of Themocaw's fic to start off his Miki route, I gave him what I thought was a reasoned, logical explanation for why he shouldn't have done that, but the response I got was basically "Derp you sure wrote a lot of text, I don't really feel like changing anything."
My story isn't meant to be a gender swap fic, and I take umbrage to people who'll claim otherwise. It's a What If scenario where Iwanako, a canon character, is forced to walk down the road Hisao goes down in canon, and to that end, I've tried my best to portray Iwanako the way I think she'd really be like. My writing is powered by the notion claimed by at least one of the KS devs that Hisao Nakai is the True Love of whoever he decides to romance in the actual game; Iwanako, well, isn't, and that's the whole point. This isn't
the Enigma of Amigara Fault; this hole is not Iwanako's and it wasn't made for her. It's an exploration of how things go differently when two characters swap tracks.
~~
On another note, since somebody decided to necro this thread, I guess I'll go ahead and ask the question I've been mulling over ever since the Fanfiction Archive was started. This is what this story's entry looks like in that thread:
Mean Time to Breakdown by
Leaty (ongoing, word count pending)
PoV: Iwanako;
Pairings: None (so far);
Begins: during prologue
Remarks: AU: Iwanako has the heart attack instead of Hisao
edit: accidentally hit "submit" instead of preview...
I don't have a problem with this entry—I didn't write it, but it's fine. What I find curious, though, is that the "remarks" section spoils the fact that Iwanako has the heart attack, which, at least when I wrote that chapter, I considered a major reveal. That, however, was a year ago. MTB's entry on TVTrope's "recommended fanfics" page does the same thing.
For what it's worth, this is my own description of the story on fanfiction.net:
In the end, defying inertia, she was never able to confess to him. The heart attack, the collapse, the subsequent hospitalization, it all foreshadowed a lonely, dismal, and tragically short future. But maybe there's something there, at Yamaku Academy. In spite of the odds, can you really rebuild your life there? Divergence fic with a protagonist you may not expect.
Keeping in mind character limits, this description, in my opinion, preserved the shock of the reveal at the end of the prologue. Of course, if you click on the "reviews" page, literally every comment spoils the fact that, yes, this is a fic about Iwanako going to Yamaku. And my thread title here, as well, spoils at least the fact that this is a fic about Iwanako.
So, my question is: how important is the shock of the first chapter to a reader's enjoyment of the fic? As the writer, I don't personally know this. When I wrote it a year ago, it was just a proof-of-concept, so the stinger was fairly important, but now this is becoming a full-fledged fic, and I'm wondering if maybe I should stop fooling myself. Should I be more open about the fact that this is a story about Iwanako having Hisao's condition?
