Chapter 232
by 
Somburliss
End of Part 7
Part 7 Afterword *POLLS TO VOTE ON*
Hey everyone! It’s Somburliss, here with another one of these pseudo-blog posts. If that’s not your thing, feel free to skip this chapter and I’ll see you in Part 8 BUT THERE ARE SOME POLLS FURTHER DOWN THAT I’D LOVE FOR YOU TO VOTE ON.
As always, I want to thank everyone who’s continued following the story so far. You’re all being very patient with me as I move at the speed of a snail. I’m really sorry about that, too, and I’ll talk about it more below. I really appreciate everyone’s comments, too, even if I don’t reply to each one. It’s encouraging to see everyone’s interest in the story! Thanks so much!
Like I mentioned in the Caution Tape chapter, Part 7 had a bit of a more serious tone, and had a more dire situation going on than usual. Please don’t let this drive you off from the story if you didn’t like it, or if you skipped it entirely because it seemed too sad. Emilia won’t have any lasting trauma from this, and neither will her allies. I may have fun dropping Emilia into bad situations, but it’s no fun unless she dusts herself off and charges into the next challenge, just as reckless and foolhardy as ever. All this means is that Emilia hates Team Rocket more than ever now.
Remember when I said I’d try to speed up with writing this story? Pffffft. I did not accomplish that, and it’s mostly on me. I imagined, like most people probably did, that the year 2021 would be very different from 2020. Turns out, it wasn’t. That had some effect on my inability to get Part 7 finished in a timely manner, but again, there’s not much room for me to rely on excuses. Most of the delay was the result of me saying, “Hey, I’m going to work faster,” and then deciding to write drastically different things from what I’m used to writing. Plot-wise, Part 7 doesn’t follow the pattern of past parts very well, so I was in new territory while writing practically the entire thing. The general structure and plot of the story were way different, and I had to come up with solutions to problems that I normally don’t encounter (e.g. How do I write a jailbreak? And how do I incorporate a pokemon battle into it?) In addition, touching on Emilia’s relationship with Stump required a different tone than usual, and it took some tricky balancing to keep things somewhat serious, without devolving into highly emotional sob material, which doesn’t really belong in a smut story and I didn’t want to write anyway. The smut itself was difficult to write as well, since wrangling with the “fauxcest” theme was something brand new, and balancing the tone remained important and challenging. Stump’s reunion with Emilia went through several revisions because I just didn’t feel like I was getting it right. To top it all off, I think Part 7 has more smut than any other, with nine different scenes in total. All this to say, I bit off a lot more than I could chew, at least in a reasonable amount of time. With this in mind, Part 8 will be a “return to form” and will much more closely resemble past parts, so my hope is that I’ll be able to write it faster. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still happy with how Part 7 turned out. It was a great opportunity for me to try my hand at writing something that was rather different, but still something I wanted to write. I think I managed to create something significantly different than usual, without sacrificing the quality too much. But I’m even less happy with how long it took than I was with Part 6, so that’s something I need to fix.
Like last time, I have a few questions for anyone who’s willing to vote in some polls. You can pick just the ones you want. You don’t have to answer them all (or any, for that matter, though I’d appreciate it if you did).
For Part 7, I published a spoilers chapter to help readers determine if the upcoming content was something they wanted to read or not. This probably sounds strange, but this whole thing is a reeeeeeally big deal to me. I don’t really want people to read the spoilers, unlike every other chapter I publish on this story. I only posted it out of courtesy for a number of readers who I assumed were a minority in the story’s total audience. I jumped through some hoops to try to ensure the views on this chapter were as accurate as possible, and they’re still fairly high. If you respond to the poll below, it will help me understand my audience a bit better. You can only vote for one option, since they’re mutually exclusive.
Related to the last question, I’d like to get some opinions on just how “serious” Part 7 was compared to the rest of the story. Obviously I was worried enough to post the extra chapters warning people about it, but what do you think? Were things different enough to justify a warning? Let me know below. You can vote for only one option, since they’re mutually exclusive.
Part 7 had a POV switch in it, featuring a few chapters and smut scenes from Professor Stump’s perspective before switching back to Emilia. I’d like to know what people thought about it. I’ll emphasize that there are NO more POV switches planned for the remainder of the story, so I’m not about to go overboard and start putting POV switches in every part, even if the poll results are positive. This is just so I know if people liked how I wrote the POV switch, and how they feel about POV switches in general. I may use this to guide Interlewds, or other stories I write in the future. You can vote for only one option, since they’re mutually exclusive.
And lastly, I’d like to run another character popularity poll. I’m sure there are some new readers since last time, and opinions may have changed over time. Please keep in mind that multiple votes are allowed because I’m not just looking for your favorite character. I’d like to know all the characters which you’ve enjoyed reading about, whether it’s because you like their personality, you like how they behave in smut scenes, you like how they act as an antagonist to Emilia, or whatever else makes you enjoy them.