SSSD Postgame

That’s a wrap. 52 chapters for 52 weeks, one year of heroines in the cold. Thanks for reading and participating. In no particular order, some stuff about the story. In Act 1 the votes were all about relationships. In Act 2, there were basically two types of votes once we got into survival mode. One type was right/wrong which would increase or decrease a counter that affected casualties. The other choices all determined who would die. An example of this was the hunt/lockdown choice. “Hunt” was “Correct” in that it did not cause the **** counter to go up. And then we have choices like go with X or Y to determine who “Could” be a Thing.

So in the end, when Marit, Ro, Alison, Signe, Linda, and Julie are all together in the snow—the story “Ends” there no matter what, but depending on choices, one or more of them might be Things. The way that it played out was that they were not. Readers voted correctly on one or two key things and I made it pretty forgiving because we’re here to have fun, not to be depressed. Trusting Linda was a pivotal decision. A certain number of people were going to die no matter what, and the readers couldn’t stop that—they could only make choices that would affect who died. Two out of three Niv/Golda/Birgitte were going to die in any case. We ended up losing all three, but no more. That’s a pretty positive outcome.

Had there been a Thing among the final six, the epilogue would have been different. This was the “Good End” from Ro’s perspective in context. The ‘Happily ever after’ love interest for Ro was actually outlined to be Niv (occupying a similar cool/nice older woman role to the Signe/Alison dynamic, but the votes didn’t go that way)—Marit was not looking for a scrawny American wife, especially not with the way that things played out. Ro was disadvantaged by being the secondary heroine; she didn’t have as much time to develop a relationship. If the readers really want to see her find true love, I’d be willing to bring her back in another story—if people wanted it—to give her a second chance.

To save people the trouble of asking, I can verify this with my notes if it means a lot to anyone, but the progression of Things was roughly this: GOLDA breached the lab and was assimilated by the RAT. GOLDA gets to NIV shortly after; she has plenty of opportunities. BIRGITTE sees that happen and has a breakdown. One of them gets to BIRGITTE while she’s alone in the infirmary, or BIRGITTE is infected and turns from the inside out. Marit had a lot of time offscreen at this point and Things had opportunities to get her—if the counter had been high enough, she would have been the next to be a Thing, but it was not. Same with Julie. No one else turned due to choices and the counter. NIV broke herself out of the office.

Someone mentioned in the comments that a lot of stuff happens offscreen; that’s literally the movie. It’s a cool movie. Ever since I watched those “Alien” movies for Alien vs Futa I’ve discovered that I really like creature features. Not sure what’s up with that.

On the story itself, I thought to myself: “A) The Thing movie is well regarded; people like it and B) the paranoia and distrust and finger-pointing will work well in votes.” Well… in execution, it was hard to blend that effectively with lewdness. That’s why we ended up with basically Act 1 and Act 2. I don’t think that’s awful, but it’s not optimal. More on that later. The other thing about this story choice for me is that keeping it tight with all these moving parts was probably a little more work than I planned on. As neat as whodunnits are, they are labor intensive and this story has the same word count as a modest novel. So I don’t feel like the whole thing clicked together the way that I’d have wanted it to, and I’m going to be mindful of some of the lessons here in future stories.

Now prizes. Nothing fancy, as usual:

1st Place Grand Prize – If you want, pick any VFU couple or pairing, canonical or otherwise, to be included in the Christmas vignettes this year. I didn’t do a Christmas special last year and I regretted it. This year we’ll have one.

You also get to semi-create the main heroine of the next weekly story if you like.

Finally, if you choose to, you’ll get to make a unilateral decision about the direction of the next weekly story once the readers weigh in and we narrow down our options. This is bigger than it sounds, but the 1st place winner in this case has earned this moment of godlike power.

2nd Place – Pick a VFU couple/pairing for the Xmas episode and design a love interest for the next weekly.

The other regular participants can choose between nominating a couple/pairing for Xmas or they can create a character for the next weekly, up to them.

I’ll DM everyone who won or is eligible individually soonish.

But you don’t need to have won anything to give feedback on the story, and if we do another weekly, everyone is free to vote as we figure out the setting/premise/vibe/whatever. I have some thoughts about where I’d like to go with another Yuri story, but let’s talk about what’s working and what isn’t. Do we need to shift away from horror? Lower the stakes? I’m happy to do another weekly voting Yuri story, but it doesn’t have to be SSS and it doesn’t need to have anything to do with college. We can do pretty much anything. I feel like at the very least, whether we change the setting or not, we need something that works better as a vehicle for lewdness and we’ll probably have some POV hopping in the future. Personally, I think a strength and weakness of my approach to these stories is that I demand that lewdness be contextually semi-believable, which limits it a lot if we’re locked into a single POV. But if we’re jumping around a little, there are more opportunities for naked people to be onscreen. (The Thing as a setting was admittedly not a great choice in this department) Anyway, if you have thoughts, please share and then we can start to narrow down what to do next. Until the next story begins (if people want another) Saturdays will just have another daily chapter of FF1 or whatever’s going on. Thanks for reading, everybody. Let me know what you think.