Welcome to Gaia! ::

I'm satisfied with my last post, though I hope the fight continues past tomorrow.

-smokes his pipe and lounges in his chair-

Ah good... the kids are getting along.

-crosses leg and reads paper-

Mm quite... -continue to smoke his sour diesel-

Tagging you both on the response to this one.

We'll start with the tone of the posts. Athena's first post came out pretty much with exactly the tone I expect you were going for. "I am here, I am glorious, and I have no time for you." Brown's (second, as the first was accidentally written over) came off as a display of shameless cockiness that I could believe was entirely in character... for that one post.

The issues cropped up starting after the first attack. Brown's posts continued with the "b***h please" tone and Athena's combat post # [2] started off the entire first paragraph as thinly veiled "I won't overtly call you on it but that was a bullshit response" and it kind of continued from there. In general it seems to have started off with Outlaw making snide remarks in the narrative and Athena replying with thinly veiled condescention. Much like with Eric vs Tres, if one person goes into a match with an antagonistic attitude it can spread to the other player pretty quickly and turn the whole thing into a groan-fest.

As far as the actions in the combat have gone... Athena threw a hammer, Brown threw it back. Athena charged in, Brown shot a thing at her. Athena took a swing, Brown used six powers that included reflecting the attack and trying to bring the fight into a very WTF Japan place by wrapping her in manipulate-able chains. Athena answered with "s**t no, son" and took a step back.

In my head I can't help but imagine (partially based on the avatar) that Brown is this dark sunglasses-wearing hungover guy standing there with his arms folded pacing back and forth talking about how awesome he is while lasers fly out of his pockets at Athena who is disco dancing in a 1970s jumpsuit.

It's pretty abundantly clear that Athena is being portrayed as The Strongest Woman in the World because she carries herself with the attitude of "I figured you had a trick up your sleeve, but you won't win with only tricks" and I can get behind that. Even with the constant additions of "stop underestimating GLORIOUS Athena" into the subtext of each post it's still there. Just needs to tone back a bit on the thinly veiled hostility and it will feel that much more natural coming out.

On the other hand, I'm firmly convinced that Bojuka Brown is Jecht.

Well, the thing is, I'm not trying to show hostility in my posts. It's basically more of Athena's feel that I try to portray in them, which...comes off as hostile because that's what she is as a character. I wasn't aware I was feeding into the trope of getting angry with someone in my writing when that's something I'm against whenever I'm on the judge side of the fence.

I'll have to make sure to watch out for any future posts.

I'll have to use more italic thoughts from now on then. And separate narrative from Athena's words.

*coughpeppacough*

Continuing the thought from above, it's basically in the same camp as some of the other things that most people generally have an issue with in free-form...

- "Hi, I'm Charles Xavier" high-level telepathy type abilities pretty much deny the possibility of any character doing anything at all that this person doesn't like unless they have something specifically in their profile that counters against mind-based attacks.

- "Use the Force, Luke" high capacity telekinesis (essentially anything over 200 lbs) gives the character a free ticket to point their finger at someone and spin them around in the air until they get bored. Want to fight back? Can't do that unless you're jet propelled.

- Generalized psionics (at least the way that I used to see them played all the time) would do both of the above as afterthoughts to their already wizard-type reality shaping abilities which they can use instantly by thinking about it.

- And "that guy" who has some type of anti-magic "thing" that negates any powers used against him, but also has superman levels of speed and strength and skin made of iron. "The only way you can beat me is with magic, but I'm immune to magic. Oh ho ho ho." This pretty much extrapolates onto any type of character design where they have a very specific secondary defense against the ONE THING that they aren't already immune to.