Hello, Everyone,
It's been a while, hasn't it? I apologize for the lack of activity, the fact that the last time I updated this was back on Christmas Eve stares me square in the face quite often. Life has gotten very complicated as I finish up my degree course and start moving into my future profession, and I have ended up diverting a lot of my time and energy into other projects outside of ; DND servers, 40k armies, even starting to map out ideas for my own little book series that probably will never get off the ground. But it's come at the cost of leaving the few people who are interested in this story high and dry; those of you who have been willing to stay with this story are great and I appreciate it so much that my story was actually entertaining enough to stick around with.
With that said, I find myself caught between a rock and a hard place; the pace that this story is coming at is nightmarishly long, to the point that if I were to ever reach equivalent events in the series, I would be writing until I was an old man. I'm already 5 years older now than the self-avatar I threw into the story in spring of 2017, and the more I look back on the story and the reviews I get, the more I realize three things:
1: I am spending too much time on interim stuff, adding too many characters and interaction, and making way too damned long chapters. As a result, doing the ~18,000 word chapters has become draining and daunting and I imagine kinda boring. Chapter 41 itself is stuck in a limbo state with only a harsh discussion between the OC and Blake down on paper, with me unable to figure out where really to add from there.
2: The main character is not likeable. Like, on principle. I wrote him in a way that would be more intuitive to the plot than as an actual character; a vector for plot points to continue, almost literally. In the process I made him complicit in in-universe terror events as well as other more personal things (The critiques of him not stepping in to help Velvet in Volume 1 were valid despite my in-house reasonings). He's hardly that likeable the more I re-read him, and the more that I ponder the plot; hell, I wondered if I could play with that around Chapter 30, with him becoming rightly ostracized after things went down, but even then I realized that meagre ostracization is not enough in-story to account for everything he would do, even among the 40k characters in the story. It's something that would fit well among the Eldar, not as much the Space Marine Chapters and Imperial Guard Regiments that he's surrounded by. It would feel disingenuous and already has driven a lot of people away, understandably.
3: Speaking of lack of proportionate punishments, I have to consider RWBY of late too;
I don't like RWBY any more.
I still love a lot of the characters and concepts from Volumes 1 and 2, even some characters from the later seasons, but the show has left a sour taste in my mouth ever since Volume 5. Pyrrha was but the first sour note, but then came the Maidens just being unexplainable magic, the weird take on the Brother Gods, the direction they went with Salem, the majority of Volume 5's pacing, the climax of Volume 5, Volume 6 doing the painful memberberries scene with Pyrrha's statue, Most of Volume 7, JNPR's sidelining, RWBY's hypocrisy, the existence of Robyn, the complete assassination of Ironwood's character, Winter getting hit with the stupid stick, Salem getting hit with the stupid stick, Cinder getting hit with the stupid stick, Qrow getting hit with the stupid stick, the fact that Salem's most interesting lackeys are almost all dead, Adam getting killed off so early, the constant ship-baiting with Bumblebee that's never gonna go anywhere, sidelining Maria and Pietro for no damn reason, the bad internal logic on most fights (looking at you RWBY vs. Ace Ops), the un-alluded-to Deus-ex-machinas, the fact they brought Penny back just to make her a real girl in the next season (undermining their message about her) and then had the gall to do the 'Killing Her Off For Realsies' thing in the form of assisted suicide, the blatant political circlejerk in Volume 7 and to top it all off the fact that Team RWBY did Salem's job for her and were indirectly the cause for the destruction and displacement of an entire Kingdom.
God, I wish they had stopped after Monty died.
But still, a lot of those tidbits I started brainstorming ways to maybe make it better, maybe do more with it in this story; I want to say more about them but first I have to decide on my next course of action. That's where you all come in.
I have three options I can feasibly see before me right now as I enter the second half of 2022. Only one is physically easy but emotionally harder to do, and I am at a loss on which to do:
1. Continue with this story as is, dragging it out as long as I can
2. Rewrite this story, condensing it and trying to make it better.
3. Scrap it all.
I want to hear everyone's opinions in a review of this, however long you want, to this 'chapter.' I'm sorry that I am dropping this on your plates after so long, but I want to know what people think; is The Random Hand of Fate salvageable, should it continue as is, or should I treat it as garbage and discard it (maybe making an abridged plotline on a New Story)? As it is now, I fear that it is falling into the same terrible pitfalls of RWBY itself and I will create a story that is just as gross to me as the newer Volumes have been.
I hope to hear some honest opinions from everyone. Thank you for your patience, and I hope all of you are well.