Downvoting for the wholly unnecessary and uncomfortably explicit sex scene.
if your reading this your gay
Sex scenes are not any more inherently unnecessary than violent action scenes.
Not to say that there aren't reasons to personally dislike it or find it jarring etc etc.
Just tired of seeing this particular strain of bad feedback (not from you, Scantron, and not from this site, where sex rarely appears, but from other amateur arenas).
It's the equivalent of having a very gory description of an action scene in the middle of a tale that doesn't need to have any action at all. Really unpleasant to have it dropped on me when anything else, or even the same thing described more tactfully, could have worked just as well.
There are very particular times and contexts where I want to read about people having sex, and this tale fits none of the prerequisites. I powered through the rest of the tale after a break anyways, but none of the rest of it was engaging enough for me to reconsider the downvote.
if your reading this your gay
You know, I was going to skip this tale entirely, like I do with the rest of this alleged canon, until I read this comment on Recent Posts.
Sex scenes do have their place in media, and entire forms of media can be built around them. However, the way it's presented here is cringe-worthy; who are these characters? Why are they having sex? Who is the peeping tom? Maybe this is explained in other parts of the canon, but let's have a little thought experiment.
Let's pretend I am a new reader to this canon- which, technically, I am, since I don't give a damn about this whole project. I need some kind of context as to who these characters are and why I should give half a damn about them. Simply jumping from one scene with characters to another scene with completely unrelated characters going "Suddenly, sex!" is jarring. Why the hell should I care these people are having sex? Were they in some kind of relationship? If so, why should I care?
That's one of the main problems I have with the Resurrection canon, and it can be summed up in eight deadly words: I don't care what happens to these people. The Senior Staff Author Avatars featured in it are inherently unlikable, the whole thing involves trying to revive an aspect of the site and Foundation history that should stay dead, the new characters that are introduced aren't very well-characterized. I know nothing about any of the characters shown here, and quite frankly, I don't want to learn anything more about them.
That is a failure of the writer.
-1.
My feelings about the sex scene (or even this tale in general) aside, I don't think it's fair to jump to the… Let me count… 27th story in a series and complain about a lack of context.
To be clear, as far as I'm concerned you're free to dislike the canon as a whole; hell, that's kinda the point of having canons. You're also free to dislike the characters and/or the characterization used. All I'm saying is that if you jump into a character-driven series and expect to understand and enjoy all the aspects of what's going on, you're going to be disappointed.
I suppose an argument could be made for all stories having to work as self-contained units, but I'm certainly not going to be the one to make it. What can I say, I like persistent, character-driven narratives… That's why I'm reading Resurrection in the first place.
I'm with Ihp and the guy with the unnecessarily political username. I read every tale before this and I don't get the context for the sex scene. honestly I don't understand most of what's going on here, even excluding the sex scene. the timeskipping thing just makes it really confusing for me
it's extremely necessary actually
if your reading this your gay
While I am usually all gung-ho about this canon, I'm going to agree with the sex scene being completely unnecessary and earning the downvote. One of the reasons I like this site so much is that there is very little of that stuff on here, and that's how I like it. Gore and whatnot is accepted (and sometimes expected), but this is a bit to random and unwanted for me. The other stories in this tale I don't have a problem with, and would change to an upvote with it gone.
Gore and whatnot is accepted (and sometimes expected),
And that's why the sex scene is in there.
It is gratuitous. Immensely so. The purpose of Noah sitting in a closet jerking off while watching people have sex has a purpose that will be explored further in the future, relating both to him as a character, the nature of the amnestics that he was given, and a deeper theme of who we as humans become when the role that we're best suited for is taken away from us as even the barest option of how we live our lives. All of the characters are symbolically masturbating in a closet to some extent before they're reactivated; Ritchie's wasting his time in a menial job, watching himself get fat and contributing nothing of value; Bea's working out compulsively and adopted a daughter to distract herself from the things about herself that she doesn't want to face; and Billy's fucking awesome and you don't get to see what Damarcus was like. But the intensely detailed sex scene wasn't necessary.
But it was fun as shit to write. I've written Christ knows how much gratuitous torture, death, mayhem, dystopia, and nightmare fodder, with nary any significant outcry, as have most of the writers on this site at one point or another. Violence-for-shock-value is an almost completely accepted tool of writers on this site. Out-and-out torture porn is frowned upon but still, as you say, somewhat expected. People are only bothered by that because it happens so fucking commonly that it's boring to read now. But two people in a loving relationship, growing and developing as people through mutual self-exploration? You can't find any of that on the site, and I wanted to see it done.
It is gratuitous. If material in general being gratuitous or generally existing for reasons other than wholly to further a plot bothers you, this is a completely acceptable downvote. But deep down, if gratuitous sex is more bothersome than gratuitous murder, I think that's a serious cultural failing. Not on your part, but on the part of a modern popular culture that trivializes death, violence, and suffering, while making loving, consensual sex some kind of inviolable taboo.
And that disturbs me.
Your armchair thesis aside, the number of people who have now called attention to this scene as problematic should likely give you pause at this point. Once you're on the defensive this much about a part of your piece, maybe it's time to admit that part isn't working—not continue to insist that everyone else is "reading it wrong".
The entire piece is more set-up for the promised wonderland that Resurrection will become someday. You're going to, by default, have your block of authors/voters who have inexplicable faith in a time when these characters and canon will somehow be interesting, but they need to be interesting *now*, and they most certainly are not.
I am very interested in any suggestions to make the characters more interesting, or any specific suggestions about what is uninteresting about the characters as is. Of course, I have no ability to force out any answer more detailed than "they didn't grab me", which is as unhelpful as it may be completely true.
However, I had plenty of time in the draft stage to consider how I felt about the sex scene, and I kept it based on those considerations, and I haven't heard any arguments against it that have persuaded me otherwise. I have seen a quantity of disagreement; I haven't yet been persuaded. I am as open-minded towards receiving suggestions as ever, but as with any creative endeavor, the suggestions do not necessarily or automatically inform how I feel about the product. I may be convinced later by different arguments. I'm not at the moment.
(account deleted)Horror and Action tales felt like the staple of this site when I first started reading here, then something happened, something dark, a game came out and flooded the enjoyable site with a massive amount of darkness and the action stories I enjoyed and the material that supported them started to become unacceptable, the taste had changed.
If I were to relate this in terms of fandom it is like being a fan of the Third Doctor from Doctor Who and watching some one write a story for the Eleventh Doctor in the style of the Third.
Yes it could potentially be so perfect but on the other hand it feels so wrong.
+1 in hopes of seeing this evolve into something wonderful…
Sometimes the worst Horror is the down time between the squick.
Downvoted on the casual nature of the Montauk callout. Invoking that thing that needlessly is as bad, if not worse, than yet another callout to the overgrown reptile.
That was, of all things, an attempt at bureaucratic rationalization. Procedure 110-Montauk is disgusting to us from a human perspective, but it's one of several, possibly hundreds, of similar procedures (sharing the unique identifier "Montauk") from a bureaucratic perspective. I chose to give a meaning to "Montauk" that made sense to me ("containment situation involving minors"), and made up a new one, one substantially more innocuous. Because we may be human, but the Foundation most assuredly is not. A procedure is a procedure is a procedure to them.
That's exactly the message I got from it, and it was one of the more positive aspects of the tale in my opinion.
I initially upvoted this for three reasons: the not-quite-fridge horror of the Foundation just casually creating then destroying entire lives; the worldbuilding thing where the name of Procedure 110-Montauk was explained; and William "Billy" Abrams, human tank, Spec-Ops badass, and diva extraordinaire (I spelled that wrong, didn't I?). However, I'm canceling my vote because of the above complaints about the sex scene (side note: I will say it was handled very maturely, regardless of what else must be said of it) and another reason I am not comfortable explaining on the forums.
I may reread at a later date and reconsider.
This is a notice that version 4 of this article was reverted for unnecessarily correcting the spelling of the word mnestic. Please remember to check with the author if a spelling error is not completely unambiguous or if you're not sure.
Yeah, sorry 'bout that.
