In re: Skysaber's "My Gilded Life"

[jpub]

The proselytizing did get on my nerves, especially with the hypocrisy he engages in. For a guy who professes to be a devout Mormon* he really plays fast an loose with his interpretation of the scripture.
I also find the morality of his 'memory charms fix everything' approach to be highly questionable, and his bizzare treatment to Daddy Granger - both as a writer and as his character - to be disturbing.
*Some of the things he's said in this and other works, particularly his thing against tea/coffee/soda/alcohol seems very Latter-Day Saints-ish to me. If I missed, my apologies.--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel
"Camaraderie, adventure, and steel on steel. The stuff of legend! Right, Boo?"

[Necratoid]

I'm part way through chapter 7 now and I think I've figured out what it is that bothers me so much about this (minus the hypocracy and self rightious bookreport Literature homework bits). Basically, he refuses to drink some things for religious reasons... yet he has less that no problems with sucking down memories. Remembering sometthing Harry said to Dudley in book 7 I figured out what it is at the most basic level. Harry tells Dudley that the Dementors were not after his life... they are only after his soul. Which means to me that the body lives on afterwards, at least till starvation or exposure gets it.
So what a soul does in the Potterverse is not keeps you alive, but keeps you mobile and responsive... in otherwords what Skysaber is doing is mantaining a fairly stead diet of souls. That which makes you, you. So while he won't drink non caffine tea for religious reasons, souls are perfectly okay.
Looking at the first chapter, I think he ate GL's soul in his sleep and the part of him that freaks at absorbing all those memories is a man being eaten alive in his own body.
More disturbing in the author's notes he states this is a self insert of himself... meaning by his own admission Skysaber is a sociopath that wants to eat souls and kill fictional fat children in cold blood for the sins of his parents and set the parents up for the murder... which means he should by his own words be locked up and the only reason he hasn't killed people is fear of getting caught.
My favorite bit is that he talks of his mental strength gained by being mentally shattered repeatedly... read getting bad reviews on other stories. At least that is what it looks like to me.
Also after 6 1/2 parts we haven't actually seen him get challenged in any significant way.

[Bob Schroeck]

First off -- the 12th car has just shown up for the wreck. I haven't read it yet, so I can't comment on it.
Secondly...

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More disturbing in the author's notes he states this is a self insert of himself... meaning by his own admission Skysaber is a sociopath that wants to eat souls and kill fictional fat children in cold blood for the sins of his parents and set the parents up for the murder... which means he should by his own words be locked up and the only reason he hasn't killed people is fear of getting caught.

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I think you're reading far too much into this, Necratoid. Many self-insert characters make mass mayhem and commit numerous acts of violence; that doesn't mean their writers are sociopaths. Otherwise, I should be locked up for Looney Toons, who's already said in a DW5 chapter that he has more blood on his hands than he can atone for.
It's more that Skysaber has a combination of a) low impulse control as a writer, meaning that when an idea seizes him he runs with it regardless of its effect on the story he wants to tell, and b) a history and habit of writing grandiose world-changing insert stories.
Now maybe he'll surprise us -- maybe this whole thing is a setup for Gildesaber's corruption and downfall. But I doubt it. More likely it'll be abandoned when he gets tired of it, or when enough readers start saying bad things rather than good things in the reviews.
ETA: Okay, I've quickly read through a copy of chapter 12 during my lunch. Gah. The story is not only off the tracks, it's rolling cross-country through scrubland. If Skysaber is indeed a Mormon, it looks like he's gearing up for a good old-fashioned "Big Love" scenario involving Hermione's mother and Bellatrix LeStrange of all people. And I can see no reason whatsoever for having Gildesaber give the children "The Talk" except that Skysaber seems to have seen a passage on it in another story and got permission from its author to make use of it. Regardless, it came across as extremely creepy. Again I say, Gah.

-- Bob
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The Internet Is For Norns.

[Foxboy]

Well, sometimes it is cathartic to just rip into badfic without feeding the author's psychoses through the review function.
That is, I don't want him abandoning Gildeysaber in favor of romping yet again through his "Ranma One-note" set of anime fiction.
That said... I almost want to see him respond to pro-Akane fiction based off of his version of Ranma 1/2 as written by "Gilderoy Lockhart." Let's see how the hypocrisy keeps buiding from THAT.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[Necratoid]

True, I may be reading to much into it... but its not just the AN or any one thing... every thought he writes down, every attitude he expands upon, every time he explains something in his charicter's head, every time its how he rationalizes his decisions all of it is consistantly sociopathic. Looking at his previous works I'm well aware that he has poor impulse control when writing... in this one he can't stop himself from doing long speaches of ranting bookreports, for half the chapter. That and his development of Macgonal's charicter that has her a 7 year old (meaning she doesn't have any real magic to speak of and likely no wand) wandering around warzones stealing a tank shooting at people... which came up in a story about how she was used as payment to a japanese sub captain wandering around in European waters. So she is worth a sub full of critically needed gear, but let wander around warzones? To the point she gets a tank, one near enough to steal. I know he trainwrecks things.
Part of it is I don't give him enough credit as a skilled writer to pull off writing a consistant sociopath. That the style of thinking extends through the rants as well. Which means that for the first time every he is doing the chapter eating rants in a manner that isn't OOC for the charicter.
That he keeps going on about his confusion over how come Rowling keeps saying she meant one thing and her charicters keep doing some things that aren't what she says she meant... means he hasn't quite figured out that stories sometimes write themselves and ignore what the one writing them actually intended to have happen. Which is a root of a lot of his problems keeping a story from imploding.
Its his consistancy of writing the story as a sociopath that sticks to me the most. From the consistant 'people are mindless tools' mindset, to the utter lack of conflict of note in 7 chapters that means obsticals fall like grain before a flaming scyth, to his bafflement of why it is that Ted doesn't want to have over a decade of his memories rewritten by someone he has known less than a week (Muggles seem to have a resistance to his combo SI and GL originated Aura of Smooth), to how everything he does gains him spiffy benifits he didn't intend. The charicter is a sociopath plain and simple.
That he falls into the role and stays in the zone (writing through the eyes and mind of a sociopath) for chapter after chapter, means he has a rather easy time emulating a sociopath. Also, if he has sociopathic tendancies it would explain why he implodes for a while everytime his stories start getting bad reviews consistantly ('sheep' blowing off their Aura of Smooth does that to sociopaths), how he manages to actually stays in charicter for his frequent mid chapter editorial columns for once, and it goes quite nicely with my eariler comment of how he creepily seems to want to make Akane so terrible that no one else would want her... leaving her as his personal puppet for whatever creepy reason he wants her isolated.

[Necratoid]

As much as it annoys me to double post, I thought I'd direct the GL trainwreck discussion here.
The moment I felt it was trainwreck time was when he got the Ocean (Med Sea) to act OOC for around 50 years to herald his coming. By this I mean when he found intact recognizable corpses 50 years later in a flooded submarine compartment... he goes so far as to comment that the room and bodies are bullet ridden, that the wood in a cane suprizingly shows no sign of rot, and that the sub is playing the part of a coral reef from the wildlife.
The purpose of these corpses plotwise was so he could feel good about delivering them to a graveyard and reporting them as I.D.ed bodies... how which was largely glossed over... though at best the muggles can take this as a prank call... a subcrew found in (glossed over description) graves.... spontaniously I.D.ed after 50 years? Way to be subtile, Dave. Subcrews lost at sea just don't end up buried in land graves.

[deadpan29]

For me it was when he had two of his essay-rants in one chapter, one of them being the position of the Church of Latter Day Saints on drinking tea.
It wasn't just the rants. It was way his character-narrator was sermonizing from scriptures when earlier he killed all three of the Dursleys and burned their house down.
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No, I don't believe the world has gone mad.  In order for it to go mad it would need to have been sane at some point.