[Sarai and Samiel]

After a bit of time and rather too much thinking on this by anyone else's reckoning, I finally have come up with a coherent and comprehensible response to what Wyborn has been saying.

As a writer, and more importantly as an imaginative person, I am always coming up with new things. Because I come up with new things, I want to try these new things out, to see what happens.

This carries over to my writing, as I suspect it does with a number of other people. The upshot of this is.... well, here, let's start from the other end.

The first problem I have with predetermining the winner is that it requires, basically, that both authors agree. In order to do that in most cases, both authors will have to fully reveal to each other every last pertinent detail about the characters involved, to be sure that a winner can reasonably be chosen. Setting aside those cases where an author likes to have something significant about their character remain unrevealed unless absolutely neccessary, there's also the fact that a complete character is a very complex thing, and writers will often either skip or forget details on a temporary basis that they would not when thinking from the perspective of that character in order to write what said character would do in a given situation. Despite the typically relatively insignificant nature of some of these details, some of them can mean a very big difference in terms of which character is more likely to win a fight with the other. This means a change, possibly mid-fight, in which character would win, which can turn things around entirely- and is basically what happens anyways when a winner is not picked beforehand, so why bother doing it in that case? Doesn't make much sense.

Of course, there's also the characters who a writer likes to maintain some air of mystery or other about, and therefore does not wish to reveal all, or even any, of the details that they don't have to (See my character Cora for an example). Characters where the mystery is a part of the 'feel' of the character as a whole, and where one gets a very different experience out of writing about that character when those things are revealed than they do when such things are not explained beforehand.

Thirdly, though, is the most important thing. Keeping in mind that we're assuming that not all characters are equal, but that the characters that wind up getting thrown into the fight are approximately equal because some sort of sensibly non-exacting power rating or other has been assigned to them. Now, as I said before, I and probably most of the others here are very imaginative people. This means that tactics, strategies, and moves will be thought up as the fight progresses, in response to what is being shown.

Sometimes, these strategies, tactics, or moves will result in a win or a loss, or will should result in one, to seem grammatically incorrect but to be literally accurate. For instance, when Dragoon (Not Inferno Dragoon, but the Hyren guy) pulled out an Order/Chaos attack against Akane, or when Horror punched a hole in Selene (Deity)'s aura. Had Dragoon not pulled that out- and he didn't have to, he had plenty of other options, Akane would have kept fighting for quite some time and probably made hash of him. Had Horror not come up with those two innovations regarding Selene (Deity)'s aura, the fight would have continued quite a bit longer, and she might have pulled out the final attack I alluded to in that same fight.

Deciding a winner or loser beforehand basically means one of two things about such innovations to me: Either I have to stop coming up with them (I'll be dead when that happens- literally), or I have to forego using them until a later fight with the same character (something I never even know if it's going to happen at all, nevermind when or if I'll still remember whatever innovation when it does).

In essence, then, what you have is at best a limited fight, and at worst a choreographed one- neither of which seems like any fun to write to me at least. I'm not sure how others think.


As far as 'copycat' characters are concerned, I'll reiterate my stance on that once.

The only reason I, personally, would use one is if I simply couldn't come up with anything else. Whenever I see one, I want to knee-jerk react that whoever it is using them is just lazy or lacking in imagination.

However, I know that this is only *sometimes* the case, and a pretty fair portion of the time, whoever-it-is is only paying homage to or fiddling around with that character because they really like them and want to demonstrate respect, interest, or what they would do if they were [insert character name here]. So while I don't particularly care for it, I always forebear on judgement of it until I see what the person does. Because someone can always do what Erdawn did with Mario this last tournament, which is actually pretty original and interesting, despite being about someone else's character. And that's *not* being lazy or lacking in imagination, it's putting a new spin on an old icon or demonstrating innovation and respect for an idea at the same time.

Finally, as far as my use of 'gorram' is concerned:

I'll swear how I ****ing like, Erdawn. You're starting to get WAY the hell too arrogant and it's really getting annoying. I wanted that word because I didn't, at that particular instant, want to convey any more than a mild irritation. Furthermore, I was using 'gorram' before I ever even heard of Firefly, nevermind saw it (which would be about five episodes total and within the last two months).

Snob off.