[quote=@Muttonhawk][hider=Monohawk's Muttonlogue Featurette]This is just a quick reflection section. Feel free to skip it. I just need to sort a few thoughts out regarding this arc. I made several mistakes and would like to learn from them.

I feel as though I was trying to do too many things at once and had my priorities backwards. Originally, this whole thing was solely purposed for Minus to explore the strange behaviours it expressed in its various appearances.

Minus was meant to be an emotionless flesh-and-clay golem who, paradoxically, could fully emulate emotional people as disguises. Its behaviour was only meant to glitch out due to Toun's deliberate shuffling off of various corrupting thoughts. The full motivation for this beyond what has been revealed in this last post is still technically spoiler territory. Regardless, I wanted those dances and weird feelings of Minus' to be drawn out to the point of conflicting with Toun and Majus. There was also lots of ambiguity to explore with regards to personal identity (can Minus' tell the difference between its disguises' feelings and its own feelings? How will either change or be influenced by the other? etc.).

This main idea could have been executed much better. I blame that mainly on lack of forethought in planning and the wobbly-armed changes I made to the story partway through. That is to say nothing with it competing with Cinead and Inga trying to work out where the hell they are, how the hell they got to where they are, what their powers are as essentially living artefacts, and who the hell Minus actually is.

It didn't help that I really should have developed Inga, Cinead, and Minus with another few posts before getting them together. I even could have made up for lost ground by having the characters have flashbacks at the beginning of some of the posts in this arc. Perhaps I will still do that later to flesh them out. The characters are not being retired, after all. Other conflicts are coming up soon.

Hell, I could use Minus and Cinead's lack of development to flesh out into a conflict between them and threaten their relationship. That could redeem it a little. It would also make their bond (and Mira's new panoply of feelings) more realistic.

Anyway, moving more specifically to Cinead. He was originally meant to be a shallow foil for Minus' development. That was a mistake. He needed to be developed properly to bounce of Mira realistically. As a result, their relationship, while feeling sincere enough in the prose (I have to be nice to myself for some things), is lacking substance. It's a kind of fiat love, not backed by much. Cinead's due for much more development in the coming posts, not least of which because his nature as a primarch may impact him a tad harder soon.

Inga was a secondary character but still a rogue element. I feel she was developed better in personality, but she was held back by her friggin' twin brother being two-dimensional, as I outlined above. I had to treat her carefully, and I think she came out okay. She may get her own little arcs in the future. Of all the characters in this arc, I'm happiest with her, ironically. Her thought processes make the most sense to me in the way her anxieties have influenced her. God damn is she annoying to write dialogue for, though.

So, in the end, perhaps a couple of extra posts to flesh things out could have been added, the characters needed a better foundation to arc away from, and Cinead and Mira's relationship will have to pay for itself with a few bumps in the road. This isn't so bad in hindsight. It's all learning. Even if I should have done better, there were some outside influences that caused be to rush some aspects of this arc. Me moving countries soon is the biggest elephant in the room. I should recognise such things next time and set more realistic expectations for myself.

But were there good things? I think so. The prose seemed okay, the pacing was better than my other attempts at romance arcs, I filled a bunch of plot holes as they arose, and the arc has ended right about where I wanted it to. Hell, Niciel now knows about Toun's previous crush on her, that's a win! If nothing else, I can use this foundation to make the next changes to these characters more noticable in their coming arcs.

Most importantly, this was still fun. I can keep having fun off the back of this.

Anyway, if any of you guys read this rant for whatever reason, please let me know if you have an opinion. I do want to improve and this was a bumpy ride. Maybe you guys can learn from my mistakes. At the very least, I hope this arc was enjoyable, even if I'm not sure I gave Minus the full justice it deserves.

Pfeh, I'll explore it later, I guess. No need to act too seriously about a play-by-post where we all pretend to be insecure gods in a dysfunctional, destructive celestial family that routinely genocides mortals (mostly hain) in the wake of our domestic incidents. I need to get back into the rotation of my other stories and get them up to date with the latest turn timeline. Read you later, dudes![/hider][/quote]

You may not have noticed, but I have been watching Minus' development since I read the episode with Mafie (WHICH WILL COME BACK TO HAUNT YOU - EXPECT A PM ._.), and I must say Minus/Mira's development and storyline has been very nicely executed. Maybe I'm a bit of a sucker for thing romantic and tragic ([i]maybe[/i] >.>), but I honestly did not understand why you were so uncertain of the story. Obviously we can always do things better (there were definitely aspects of the Shaqmar-Layla arc that I would have liked to do differently), but we are necessarily constrained by our limited time and energy reserves. This Minus arc has been perfectly respectable, moving at points (the part where Cinead first saw Minus dancing moved me for instance). At this point, I've almost forgiven what Minus did to Mafie (ALMOST. I HAVEN'T.)
I was actually really quite tempted after reading the first one or two posts in this arc to just skip ahead and read all the posts in one go, as they were interesting and relatively self-contained, before going back and reading other peeps' posts. But I didn't and kept reading every in order, tempted as I was not to.
I agree with you that Cinead was perhaps the least developed of the three, but at the same time his time spent speaking with Minus and hunting with Mira gave us some insight into his character. I'm sure you could have delved more into the situation he found himself in, but I didn't feel it took away from the arc as a whole. I certainly believed that he loved Mira (the fact that he noticed her smile for instance and loved that about her speaks as much about him as it does of the beauty of Mira's smile). It was also made plenty clear that he can be headstrong to the point of idiocy XD
I rather liked Ingra - even in the posts where there wasn't much focus on her, her sass came through (her watchfulness, the way Cinead spoke to her, how she didn't fall for the Mira disguise as easily as Cinead).

Overall, definitely a beautiful arc that can be proudly put up there with all the other fantastic arcs Divinus has pumped out. Look forward to seeing what the future holds for these three :)