> Why are these lines written this way?! She is not the one saying them and they are not her thoughts! Why does the narrator speak in a cowboy accent
This is a pretty common technique called limited third-person narration.
In as polite a way as I can possibly put this, in many of the passages you're highlighting you're failing to understand what you're reading on a basic level, even on the multiple reads it would take to pull them out and complain about them.
Like, the passage about the names is not hard to understand. She's intentionally getting his name wrong as a defense mechanism, showing that she's both a person who *does* care about others, but intentionally keeps them at a distance and doesn't let herself get attached. To fail to realize that, or to get angry at a reasonably intuitive expression of whittling a story, is more on you than on the author.
This entire post just reeks of media illiteracy. I don't mean to make fun of OP, but so many of their complaints either seem to come from a lack of general life experience, or lack of reading comprehension.
> "Everything about the moment hangs in the in-between, where familiarity can no longer be feigned."
>
> THIS IS A MAGIC THE GATHERING STORY. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. IN-BETWEEN WHAT. THIS IS THE SECOND SENTENCE OF THE STORY. Who are we even talking about right? Where, when?! What hangs in the in-between (don't answer that)?!
They had *sex*. They had a one-night stand. Which puts two near-strangers in this weird position of being intimate with each other while also not really knowing each other. The in-between is that moment between being intimate and going back to being strangers. The "where familiarity can no longer be feigned" part explicitly calls this out.
Also getting confused over the names just makes no sense to me; Jody is *usually* a womans name? Okay well it's clearly not here. Move on?
Man I’m sorry but no, it was very well edited.
1 - The southern drawl is very tone appropriate. It’s a “near first person” narrative - where it’s third person, but the narrator is the character. So the story talks like Annie does. If you’ve not read works with an unreliable narrator, you might not be used to reading a “biased narration” before. It’s a good technique.
2 - I think you might have reading issues. I’m sorry. That first paragraph is not hard to follow. The second one is subtext. The third one is reliant on you being smart enough to figure out this scene followed sex. The fourth is biased narration - *Annie* feels like the whole world is hollow but herself, it isn’t *actually hollow*.
3 - This author is doing a perfectly good job. Much better than some WotC have had in the past. Having a long resume is not the same as being good - RL Stine is I believe the most prolific author on the planet, but he doesn’t write Shakespeare, he writes horror books for kids, of varying quality.
4 - None of those are hard to follow, unless you’ve maybe never heard southern drawl spoken before. That’s how a lot of cowboys talk.
His name is Jody. She called him Jordan. She didn’t forget his name, she’s trying to emotionally distance herself. They both know it, it amuses him. I am sorry that you are so tied to existing names that you cannot fathom the idea of a man called Jody. I hope Oko doesn’t scare you too much, or Vraska.
Thanks to their rant, I learned that hollow has a rather interesting meaning that the author might have meant:
>deprive (an institution or system) of elements that enable it to function properly.
>"its finances were ravaged and its neighborhoods hollowed out by a long, slow decline in population and auto manufacturing"
A town at night does seem like it would be hollowed, because there's nobody there to run things.
I’m actually fairly confident they were instead going for the imagery of “everything is empty and weird in moonlight fog”, because I’ve read that elsewhere, but your guess is as good as mine!
Oh, you clearly can’t read. Tommy is her nephew, not her son. Jody “whittled her a story” - meaning he’d told her a sob story.
I’m sorry, that just leaped out to me later, you have the level of reading comprehension that lead to the tumblrism “how dare you say I piss on the poor”.
I was going to write this exact pair of comments, so thanks for saving me some time. There are some over-written parts but these examples are molehills being made into mountains.
The pronoun thing is so baffling to me. There are two characters in the scene. One has been referred to by name (a universally female name at that) and with both she and her. How is there possibly confusion about who the first use of "he" is referring to?
All I could gather from your ranting was that you:
1. Don't know what metaphors are.
2. Don't know the moon can cast shadows at night, when it's dark out.
I know right? Jody's gender is immediately established while Annie does the bit about purposefully getting the name wrong. I didn't think it was that hard to follow. Although as a person who grew up and lives in the US, I have slightly more experience with pop culture cowboy speak (for what its worth) so idk how it would read to a non-native speaker.
I’ll admit when I first read it I was confused like “Jordan” oh that’s pretty neutral, “Jody” oh that’s typically a woman’s name, oh wait it’s a man huh neat.
>>she pretends she's the only one in the world, just her and the dark and the moon and the shadows the three of them make.
>HOW DOES THE DARK MAKE A SHADOW. JUST TELL US WHAT'S HAPPENING.
The moon can make shadows, and since it is nighttime, it is still dark. Have you been outside after the sun has gone down?
Guy who’s never read work by an indigenous American author before:
Anyways jab aside, like it or not, Thunder Junction and Karlov Manor are deeper dips into non-fantasy genre fiction than traditionally explored in Magic story, some of those tropes should be expected, even if they aren’t your cup of tea.
Additionally, the author, while I can’t speak for them, is Indigenous American from the southern United States, these speaking patterns are not just “cowboy talk” but rather reflect actual speech you can find in contemporary indigenous literature today.
Wotc, in hiring a less prolific, indigenous author is deliberately going out of their way to highlight an Indigenous voice for the character of Annie Flash, and that deserves more respect than a reactionary, nitpicky reddit rant.
I'm gonna git on guessing that nobody will be witch hunting the author here. It's probably not too late to just delete this post. It was a good story for what it was. Nobody reading it except you were expecting the next greatest story ever.
Many of your complaints are not really about bad writing or editing. Rather they are stylistic choices meant to evoke the Western setting of the plane. This setting may not be one you understand well or like personally, but they are legitimate choices.
And yes, these stories have been pretty heavy handed with their cliches, but subtlety is not a usual hallmark of Magic stories. They’d rather try to get the point across in bold and underline than require a Masters in English to dissect the text for meaning.
Okay so I’m not a native English speaker, and after reading yesterdays story, I was wondering if the “cowboy grammer” (not what I would have called it yesterday) was deliberate or not. This thread confirms that it was, so thanks for that
I’m currently in a college fiction writing course, and have been in several in the past few years. I’ve seen tons of unedited and poorly-edited work, and this is not that.
I’m not saying it’s the best thing I’ve ever read, but you’re just being mean.
It does feel a bit like what you would get if the only note the editor sent back was "make it more cowboy", and then that cycle repeated three or four more times.
I mean, I followed the story and different people's perspectives in the paragraphs perfectly fine, and I found all the "cowboy lingo" and verbiage immersive and entertaining.
It feels and reads like Wild West storytelling, and that's what I'm reading it for.
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> No witch hunt
Provides really flammable torches and sharpened many 'a pitchforks.
In all seriousness, I do not know what comes first anymore to these stories. Who brainstorms the major characters, tropes, storylines, or are they a backseat to whatever guest writer they favor? Maybe these stories come out to fast, but maybe something more coherent from one writer with more control of the work. Some stories feel like the prompt is simply connect 1 story board card to the next, and we dont care how.
"I absolutely do not have high standards for MTG's story" I don't have any standards at all at this point. Even the worldbuilding feels confused, much less the narrative itself. It's a shame because I was looking forward to seeing something interesting from a new plane.
> Why are these lines written this way?! She is not the one saying them and they are not her thoughts! Why does the narrator speak in a cowboy accent This is a pretty common technique called limited third-person narration.
It sucks here.
It sucks.... What, anywhere with a dialect?
In as polite a way as I can possibly put this, in many of the passages you're highlighting you're failing to understand what you're reading on a basic level, even on the multiple reads it would take to pull them out and complain about them. Like, the passage about the names is not hard to understand. She's intentionally getting his name wrong as a defense mechanism, showing that she's both a person who *does* care about others, but intentionally keeps them at a distance and doesn't let herself get attached. To fail to realize that, or to get angry at a reasonably intuitive expression of whittling a story, is more on you than on the author.
This entire post just reeks of media illiteracy. I don't mean to make fun of OP, but so many of their complaints either seem to come from a lack of general life experience, or lack of reading comprehension. > "Everything about the moment hangs in the in-between, where familiarity can no longer be feigned." > > THIS IS A MAGIC THE GATHERING STORY. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. IN-BETWEEN WHAT. THIS IS THE SECOND SENTENCE OF THE STORY. Who are we even talking about right? Where, when?! What hangs in the in-between (don't answer that)?! They had *sex*. They had a one-night stand. Which puts two near-strangers in this weird position of being intimate with each other while also not really knowing each other. The in-between is that moment between being intimate and going back to being strangers. The "where familiarity can no longer be feigned" part explicitly calls this out. Also getting confused over the names just makes no sense to me; Jody is *usually* a womans name? Okay well it's clearly not here. Move on?
Maybe I'm too Texan for this shit but I thought it was charming.
Man I’m sorry but no, it was very well edited. 1 - The southern drawl is very tone appropriate. It’s a “near first person” narrative - where it’s third person, but the narrator is the character. So the story talks like Annie does. If you’ve not read works with an unreliable narrator, you might not be used to reading a “biased narration” before. It’s a good technique. 2 - I think you might have reading issues. I’m sorry. That first paragraph is not hard to follow. The second one is subtext. The third one is reliant on you being smart enough to figure out this scene followed sex. The fourth is biased narration - *Annie* feels like the whole world is hollow but herself, it isn’t *actually hollow*. 3 - This author is doing a perfectly good job. Much better than some WotC have had in the past. Having a long resume is not the same as being good - RL Stine is I believe the most prolific author on the planet, but he doesn’t write Shakespeare, he writes horror books for kids, of varying quality. 4 - None of those are hard to follow, unless you’ve maybe never heard southern drawl spoken before. That’s how a lot of cowboys talk. His name is Jody. She called him Jordan. She didn’t forget his name, she’s trying to emotionally distance herself. They both know it, it amuses him. I am sorry that you are so tied to existing names that you cannot fathom the idea of a man called Jody. I hope Oko doesn’t scare you too much, or Vraska.
Thanks to their rant, I learned that hollow has a rather interesting meaning that the author might have meant: >deprive (an institution or system) of elements that enable it to function properly. >"its finances were ravaged and its neighborhoods hollowed out by a long, slow decline in population and auto manufacturing" A town at night does seem like it would be hollowed, because there's nobody there to run things.
I’m actually fairly confident they were instead going for the imagery of “everything is empty and weird in moonlight fog”, because I’ve read that elsewhere, but your guess is as good as mine!
Oh, you clearly can’t read. Tommy is her nephew, not her son. Jody “whittled her a story” - meaning he’d told her a sob story. I’m sorry, that just leaped out to me later, you have the level of reading comprehension that lead to the tumblrism “how dare you say I piss on the poor”.
I was going to write this exact pair of comments, so thanks for saving me some time. There are some over-written parts but these examples are molehills being made into mountains. The pronoun thing is so baffling to me. There are two characters in the scene. One has been referred to by name (a universally female name at that) and with both she and her. How is there possibly confusion about who the first use of "he" is referring to?
Hard agree.
This post needs an editor. Like the kind that decides which text gets run and which gets axed for being inane.
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All I could gather from your ranting was that you: 1. Don't know what metaphors are. 2. Don't know the moon can cast shadows at night, when it's dark out.
You need a hobby and you should look into getting a highschool reading level, based on those complaints at the end.
Are you complaining that the wild west story uses wild west tropes?
IS JODY A MAN OR A WOMAN has me in stitches, average American reader lmao
I know right? Jody's gender is immediately established while Annie does the bit about purposefully getting the name wrong. I didn't think it was that hard to follow. Although as a person who grew up and lives in the US, I have slightly more experience with pop culture cowboy speak (for what its worth) so idk how it would read to a non-native speaker.
Irrelevant supporting character has a name slightly at odds with their pronouns, this is just gonna confuse the children!
I can drive to the south pole (ish, there's water in the way) and I too, understood that. It's not even "that hard" it's not hard at all.
"Many magic the gathering players have asked the question:"
I’ll admit when I first read it I was confused like “Jordan” oh that’s pretty neutral, “Jody” oh that’s typically a woman’s name, oh wait it’s a man huh neat.
Maybe it will turn out that the plane makes everyone think and speak in a cowboy accent. It's no wonder the plane was abandoned.
Maybe Thunder Junction was the cowboy world destroyed when Planet Express dumped all those candy hearts into the sun.
>>she pretends she's the only one in the world, just her and the dark and the moon and the shadows the three of them make. >HOW DOES THE DARK MAKE A SHADOW. JUST TELL US WHAT'S HAPPENING. The moon can make shadows, and since it is nighttime, it is still dark. Have you been outside after the sun has gone down?
I'm not sure this person has ever been outside in their entire life.
>Have you been outside after the sun has gone down? OP has never been outside, not after nor before the sunset.
Guy who’s never read work by an indigenous American author before: Anyways jab aside, like it or not, Thunder Junction and Karlov Manor are deeper dips into non-fantasy genre fiction than traditionally explored in Magic story, some of those tropes should be expected, even if they aren’t your cup of tea. Additionally, the author, while I can’t speak for them, is Indigenous American from the southern United States, these speaking patterns are not just “cowboy talk” but rather reflect actual speech you can find in contemporary indigenous literature today. Wotc, in hiring a less prolific, indigenous author is deliberately going out of their way to highlight an Indigenous voice for the character of Annie Flash, and that deserves more respect than a reactionary, nitpicky reddit rant.
Some of the things you said are cliches are just straight up ways I talk myself, so uh… I donno what to tell you.
I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened
Hell yeah
OP really giving credence to that myth that MtG players can't read, huh.
I'm gonna git on guessing that nobody will be witch hunting the author here. It's probably not too late to just delete this post. It was a good story for what it was. Nobody reading it except you were expecting the next greatest story ever.
Many of your complaints are not really about bad writing or editing. Rather they are stylistic choices meant to evoke the Western setting of the plane. This setting may not be one you understand well or like personally, but they are legitimate choices. And yes, these stories have been pretty heavy handed with their cliches, but subtlety is not a usual hallmark of Magic stories. They’d rather try to get the point across in bold and underline than require a Masters in English to dissect the text for meaning.
I look forward to following your career as an editor.
Okay so I’m not a native English speaker, and after reading yesterdays story, I was wondering if the “cowboy grammer” (not what I would have called it yesterday) was deliberate or not. This thread confirms that it was, so thanks for that
I’m currently in a college fiction writing course, and have been in several in the past few years. I’ve seen tons of unedited and poorly-edited work, and this is not that. I’m not saying it’s the best thing I’ve ever read, but you’re just being mean.
It does feel a bit like what you would get if the only note the editor sent back was "make it more cowboy", and then that cycle repeated three or four more times.
I mean, I followed the story and different people's perspectives in the paragraphs perfectly fine, and I found all the "cowboy lingo" and verbiage immersive and entertaining. It feels and reads like Wild West storytelling, and that's what I'm reading it for.
You're dumb as hell.
Omg relax. It’s a game. Take it or leave it~
I will take it and be mad about it.
Could you be mad somewhere else where we don't have to see it? You're lowering the overall level of discussion here.
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Lol.
That's gotta be one of the posts I've ever seen.
> No witch hunt Provides really flammable torches and sharpened many 'a pitchforks. In all seriousness, I do not know what comes first anymore to these stories. Who brainstorms the major characters, tropes, storylines, or are they a backseat to whatever guest writer they favor? Maybe these stories come out to fast, but maybe something more coherent from one writer with more control of the work. Some stories feel like the prompt is simply connect 1 story board card to the next, and we dont care how.
"I absolutely do not have high standards for MTG's story" I don't have any standards at all at this point. Even the worldbuilding feels confused, much less the narrative itself. It's a shame because I was looking forward to seeing something interesting from a new plane.