im trying to practice a tighter weave & to go slower since teach said its all over the place and I go way too fast, but I still feel like theres other issues that I dont know how to control or fix, any tips?
READ THE FULL POST!
Hello, you guys may have seen me from my countless comments talking and discussing about the Story Rewrite that Demo 5 Introduced, mostly in defense of the majority of the rewrite and especially in Chapter 3. I’ll be referring to the current iteration of the story as the Re-Rewrite for convenience.
To recap my opinions for chapter 3 specifically, I acknowledged that Hatred was mostly flanderized (not poorly written just poorly conveyed) and that Fear’s BATTLE DIALOGUE specifically was, for lack of better words, pretty mid, not bad but definitely not great either.
However, for a majority of the Chapter 3 Re-Rewrite the story is fine, I do have a bit of a problem with the story being more self-contained again instead of adding to the overall narrative that encompasses block tales, but I cannot deny characters like Greed and Fear are a lot better compared to their rewrite and pre-rewrite counterparts, i’m going to go over my reasonings why in this post in a few seconds but I just wanted to preface it by saying that yeah the re-rewrite is overall better and is the best of both worlds, but it falls short in some areas.
GREED:
No need to explain anything, greed has never really been relevant to the dream world story, he got a lot more relevance in the rewrite but it wasn’t really anything special, it just gave you more lore about the player that arguably should’ve went to sorrow/solitude instead depending on your viewpoint, I still think that the rewrite was for the better though because the time machine is arguably way more important to the narrative than tix is to the player, and it’s also a unique definition of greed still encompassing a selfish desire but for an actual reason.
I would like to mention while i’m on this segment that the Re-Rewrite changed the story mostly back to how it was before the rewrite, where builderman is “intentionally” seeking out your emotions to have you supress them instead of the rewrite which was you projecting your emotions to protect yourself while hatred is inconvenienced because he’s trying to get to the centre of your soul through the path of least resistance, with that in mind I think this scene is slightly nerfed because its using the rewrite fundamentals & scene with the pre-rewrite story and to me that doesn’t really add up because “Builderman” still behaves here in this scene like he did in the rewrite, where he’s visibily inconvenienced (rewrite) instead of it being something he planned (pre-rewrite).
Overall Greed is way better infact he lowkey might be the best emotion now writing wise, but there are still some mild things you can criticize about it.
SOLITUDE/SORROW:
The worst emotion now, they barely tried to blend the rewrite into the Re-Rewrite, its practically identical to the pre-rewrite story now which, incase you guys didn’t know, is a bad thing because:
Skinwalker builderman is back to being an obvious blatant skinwalker (although less blatant than pre-rewrite) and solitude/sorrow is back to spoiling the reveal before its supposed to happen by referring to Hatred as “YOU” in big red text again immediately after referring to the player, almost just like the pre-rewrite (so instead of saying YOU twice, once in orange text and once in red text so you KNOW they’re talking about the builderman appearance, they just namedrop the player so you know for sure they aren’t talking about you.) The reason this is bad is because not only is it taking away from a key reveal thats supposed to happen via FEAR, or through subtle hints in the story (like builderman tweaking or getting more and more annoyed with you/the other emotions in the rewrite), Solitude is immediately back to raising the alarms and telling the player and “Builderman” is immediately back to doing the most blatant thing in existence to intentionally summon your emotions just so you “confront” and suppress them so he has more control.
I also mildly dislike how the new solitude is handled, though this is a cherrypick so ignore this segment if you’re just here for objective stances instead of general opinions; for starters, greed and solitude now basically share the same dialogue LOL, in fact its probably handled better by greed than it is solitude here, solitudes new way of expressing everything and their beliefs to the player is so little its actually annoying, it’s no longer about the weight and responsibility and its no longer a story about how their forced to carry the swords, its just back to being generically “lets find eternal rest and solace because we’re outcasts of time also hi hatred!” like genuinely HOW is greed a better written emotion both narratively and visually? GREED? How do you actually sell the bag this hard on solitude to the point where the emotion that before the rewrite had like basically 2 lines of functional dialogue and after the rewrite had like more story relevance due to the retro toolkit but still was objectively the weakest emotion because the others were that much better? What a fall from grace dude.
FEAR:
He’s fine. I prefer the rewrite over the re-rewrite for specifically buildermans dialogue here but overall this is mostly the same, basically nothing changed with fear and honestly if you told me fear specifically was different I probably wouldn’t even notice because like the only thing he lost was telling you that there was another way out compared to where builderman was taking you and builderman was tricking you, but even then he still technically does that just in a different way (saying that if we run now he knows the way). I don’t have some crazy analysis on this outside of the battle dialogue being way better than before. It’s still fine.
HATRED:
Arguably the most anticipated part of this story change, considering he was poorly conveyed and the common consensus being that he spoke like a disney villain, the writing was there in the rewrite but it doesn’t matter if you cant accurately show what you wrote down. So how is it now?
Eh? Probably the hottest take here but I prefer the rewrite if it means we get an actual story & motive for hatred doing what he does instead of being generically evil again with subtle reasonings in the re-rewrite (He does say stuff like how “Denial wont change this” and “Virtue wont change that”, or how “wandering wont get you home” but its still not enough compared to what we had before in the rewrite), in the rewrite he had like actually good reasonings to the point where it didn’t matter if you won or not, deep down the player always knew it was right, which is due to rewrite hatred making it explicitly clear that you’ll eventually give in as the burdens grow heavier and the people around you start seeing you as a tool instead of a person trapped in an unfortunate circumstance (also foreshadowing chapter 4 possibly? maybe thats a bit of a stretch, though).
If the devs are going to prioritize giving the emotions aura to appease fans and quell criticisms instead of actually writing a story, atp why are they even changing it at all if they aren’t going to put the overarching story first? just edit the hype moments and aura in block tales compilation already.
OVERALL:
I would still rank the chapter 3 re-rewrite dream world segment slightly higher than the rewrite but thats mostly only due to Greed & Fear, and like technically Hatred doesn’t sound like shit anymore, he’s just written like shit instead, a worthy tradeoff to the average block tales fan who doesn’t and cannot read the story for the life of them so as long as hatred retains his aura its fine I guess!!!
If anyone disagrees feel free to post in the comments how you feel I guess, obligatory mentions for people who are open to discuss the story: u/Shedestkey , u/Kipdid , u/Unknown_Cameraman , u/AxoE_e , u/ReliefExcellent3773 , u/Extreme_Relation8255
Which version of the story do you prefer for Chapter 3’s Dream World?