EP430: Heart of Joy

[TrishEM]

Yeah, the dancer droid seemed like a trick gift to me too. I suppose it could have been a simple case of "Feon likes dance, let's give him a mecha dancer," but it seems soooo much more likely to have been a malicious act.  Perhaps some kind of secret assassination as some have suggested, perhaps merely a subtle slap against Feon's taste for the imperfectly shaped human dancer, but at the very least, a designed distraction.
And although we don't have any evidence for this, that's not because someone went looking and it wasn't there. Luci, being shut out and taking the snub to heart, just left. Mind you, if she had stuck around and somehow found evidence of malice despite not being any kind of detective, the interpretive dance she would have created to explain this would have been dismissed as mere jealousy.

[Dem]

Anyone else find themselves sitting up to attention during this narration? I love Andrea's clipped and clear enunciation but it was a bit like being read your bedtime story by a Regimental Sergeant Major!

[matweller]

She was a bit severe in parts, but I think it was a very good first effort and I intend to book her again when the time is right. I like booking voice actors because they have good equipment and because they are good at animating, but there are some hurdles they have to overcome moving to long-form narration. I know, because I made all the same mistakes, may you all forgive me.

[Unblinking]

I didn't have any problem with the narration--I was largely unaware of it which means that it didn't drive me to distraction.  I think she did just fine.

[Dem]

She was a bit severe in parts, but I think it was a very good first effort and I intend to book her again when the time is right. I like booking voice actors because they have good equipment and because they are good at animating, but there are some hurdles they have to overcome moving to long-form narration. I know, because I made all the same mistakes, may you all forgive me.

Always forgiven - I can't get through a reading of my own flash pieces without krawking like a 50-a-day smoker by the second paragraph!

[tpi]

I though Feon was completely unbelievable, and thought throughout that he was just putting one over on Luci -- but no, he was just a jerk. Then, when it turned out he was dying, I thought maybe the automaton was some kind of hidden weapon, given to him by the Ashaians to slowly kill him. But no, nothing so interesting.

My thoughts exactly. I was expecting some sort of clever twist and I was disappointed that the only twist was that there weren't any.


 

[matweller]

A "clever twist" that everybody is expecting isn't very clever, is it? If it had gone that way, we'd have twice as many people on here complaining that it was too predictable.

Regardless, I'd agree that if the direction that was taken had been fleshed out better, we may not be thinking about this at all. If you're going to take the romantic path, you need to lay on the smarmy passion and make it a real tearjerker or it's going to feel half-assed. Even just building the scene more completely would have given the climax more of a building, important feel. It was just lacking.

All that aside, to take it in your direction, it would have been kinda cool if either the automaton had been an assassin sent by the competition, and Luci figured it out and swooped in to save Feon at the end and they became an unstoppable force (a la the MC and his wife on House of Cards) and crushed the competition and took over the quadrant -- BWAHAHAHAHAHahahaha! OR if it turned out at the end that the gift had actually been benign and at the end Luci whispered the betrayer's confession in his dying ear that she had altered the robot dancer to be toxic in some way.

We need to start collaborating on some Choose Your Own Adventure short stories for grown-ups...

[Unblinking]

We need to start collaborating on some Choose Your Own Adventure short stories for grown-ups...

That's totally a thing, actually, under the blanket term of Interactive Fiction, and there are ways to share it with people such as the annual Interactive Fiction competition.  I'm working on a piece that I'd like to submit for IFComp this year,  though it's on the text-adventure Zork-like interface rather than a CYOA interface.

[Fenrix]

I had date night a while back where we went to a ballet. Both me and my companion fell asleep. Never made that mistake again.

[Unblinking]

I had date night a while back where we went to a ballet. Both me and my companion fell asleep. Never made that mistake again.

I've been to one ballet which was supposed to be an adaptation of Dracula.   Got free tickets, and it was worth every penny! 
I think that ballet is much the same as most poetry to me--the communication medium is not foreign to me but I don't understand the message.

[SF.Fangirl]

I'm in the "meh" camp.  I'm not a big fan of fairy tales and didn't know the story.  I don't know the point of this fairy tale was, but I was bored.  I expected a twist that didn't come, but the non-twist ending was utterly unsatisfying - nothing freaking happened.  Dancer flew halfway across galaxy/solar system/whatever to be back at his side in time to watch him die.  So she danced for him; I did not care.  I was not moved by his death or her loss at all.

OTOH I am a reader and not at all a visual person.  Dance does nothing for me, but I sure don't understand how dancing for him at the end made him or her feel any better about their break-up which was caused by both of them being stupid and not communicating. This seemed to be a story about two flawed people making bad decisions and being boring.

[Unblinking]

Dance does nothing for me, but I sure don't understand how dancing for him at the end made him or her feel any better about their break-up which was caused by both of them being stupid and not communicating.

But they reunited to fail-to-communicate one last time!  She once again sent a message he didn't receive.  And he once again watched pretty dancing, oblivious to the communication within! (Okay, yeah, I wasn't moved by the ending either, but it seems consistent in some ways with what came before)

[CryptoMe]

Well, I liked this. But then, I don't fall asleep at the ballet. Maybe there's a connection....

[hardware]

Hmm, this was OK but not much more than that. Having a daughter in the right age I gathered  pretty fast that this was a version of the Nightingale story. I have always found that story kind of odd, and some of the more odd parts had been taken out here, and other have been added in. Like some, I did find the stereotypical gender roles a bit tired though, I felt that the story could have worked without the love story. In the fairy tale, the bird goes back to the forest, living a much happier life just singing to itself.