hungryanhorny | How's my driving?

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Compliments, critiques, comments - anything you'd like. I just want to get the voice right. :)

I have a bit of crit that's really for all your characters, actually.

Firstly, I've noticed that you give the impression of voice bleed. I'm not familiar enough with each character to give you advice on individual voices, but having played with most of your characters I can say that they all seem to talk similarly. By this I mean the way they structure sentences when speaking - for example, all your characters tend to leave out the subject of the sentence, or otherwise shorten their sentences however they can. This is a pretty distinctive trait for most people and I think I recall Faith doing it in canon, but like I said, I'm not really familiar. So I suppose my question is, how purposeful is that?

The second thing is one I think has been addressed before but maybe not in a very helpful way, and that is the shortness of tags. It's not that long tags are more desirable, per se, as much as it is that your tags sometimes seem to be missing something. Especially in your action tags, you tend to rely solely on conversation and leave out any physical aspect, which leaves other characters at a loss when the conversation fizzles out. If you could, maybe work on making sure you always note when your character is moving? For example, in a thread with Medusa and Red, you could note when Red is making a certain face, or crossing her arms, or shifting uncomfortably. Even if the conversation does fizzle and turn awkward, the characters showing that it's gotten awkward leaves a lot more to work with than just a "..." or a "Hmm." Some characters will drop into silence naturally, others will look relieved by the silence, still others will look uncomfortable or like they want to say something to fill the silence. This sort of information is useful for how to proceed with the thread.

Not as purposeful as it should be, for the amount I'm doing it? :|a A lot of my characters do it, but I'm afraid some of it's just me. >,>

I've gotten that before - it's something I keep meaning to work on, and sort of... fail at. Red in particular has an *extremely* expressive face in her canon, she's always shifting expressions and postures - I guess I need to work on expressing that right. ^^;

It's maybe something to canon review, in that case. It's really noticeable to me because, like I said, I play with pretty much ALL of your characters, and a good half of the characters I play take an effort to make speak in appropriately complex sentences with appropriate vocabulary. The hazards of playing a computer girl.

It's not something that's entirely mandatory, but it might help with any characterization worries you have as well! I know I feel better when I can describe the exact face my characters are making.

I hope this all helps! ^^

I do a lot of canon reviews with them - it's not that, so much as... needing to focus more on taking myself out, I suppose. :|a

Like I said, a lot of them do shorten - Faith, Willow (...red doesn't so much shorten as not complicate? :|a ) I've heard about the bleed before, a little - and I do want to get them right....

So both are things I'll need to try and work on. ^^;

It might help to take notes? When I'd been playing Steph about a year I went back and noted specific phrases she used a lot and that really helped. And AJ had some excellent advice about adding length to action tags, to imagine yourself having the conversation and pay attention to what body language you use.