tomhur comment 1, draft 2

>>5189254
Luckily, I was front-loaded on this by my colleagues, so I am ready to respond calmly, firmly, and without mercy.

Understand that when I refer to "you," I am frequently referring to your riffing group participating in the riff and not you specifically. This may be inconsistent.  (I'm [i]really[/i] wishing your group had a name I could use instead of just "your group" and "you guys.")

[quote]You got mad at us for repeating the same arguments over and over again  but the thing is that's exactly what happens when you riff Mykan because  he goes over the same points every time.[/quote]
And this means [i]you[/i] have to? I've riffed Mykan myself when F/F/T3K did so, and we find different things to rag on instead of ragging on the same like three points like fifteen times. Even without that, your statement boils down to "I'm doing it because this guy I hate is doing it." It feels more like a lack of effort on your part.

[quote]The riff by F/F/T3k[/quote]
[quote]I feel like you and F/F/T3K took things too seriously[/quote]
I do not speak for F/F/T3K. This is about [i]my[/i] riffs. Which, given I spoke in part 2's end rant about how you guys are taking "End of Ends" too seriously, I'm not certain you've done more than glance at.

[quote]I had fun working on the riff and the reason I brought the characters in was because it was fun using them.[/quote]
You had fun, but did your audience? I don't have anything against character riffing by itself, but it requires a sense of individual characterization and cast economy that you need to have for those characters to be [i]characters[/i] and not just alternate mouthpieces for yourself - and by yourself, I mostly mean Legend. The ponies make the bulk of Earth pop culture references, so the first is shot; and the first two parts alone have over a hundred characters between them (I've yet to pool them and remove duplicates to find the exact number), so you don't have the second either. The end result is an overcrowded sockpuppet show.

When doing a collaborative character riff, it also makes sense for each real person to designate a character as theirs to write, so their mannerisms and character are consistent. This was also not done here, as evidenced by likely your "Spider-Man" and definitely Legend's "Spider-man."

[quote]I feel like the riffs were too cruel to Legendbringer attacking him like  he's some kind of horrible person and monster who's a bigger punching  bag than Mykan.[/quote]
Legend-"I HAVE TJHE BRAINS"-bringer writes hatefic that paints the object of his hatred in the worst light he can manage. His riffs here, if not his writing, feature obvious strawmen that exist only to be beat upon and proven wrong by the "good" characters. He is also inherently contradictory; as an example, he claims in part 2 both that Equestria runs on D&D rules, and that all dimensional travel causes your body to change to match the target dimension - even though the equivalent of dimensional travel in D&D, planeshifting, does not do that. There is evidence that Dark Conquest was not originally his character, and he took him from a different fic and made him not only a card-carrying villain and multidimensional conqueror, but an all-out rapist. As the cherry on top, his typesmanship is abysmal, as I've seen here, when F/F/T3K ran some of his Christmas stories, and on his Twitter. And this is omitting all the subjective points I think about him; all of this is quantifiable, if not by me, then by someone else. Of these five points, the last two do not apply to Mykan (at least not to such a large degree).

As a final (admittedly post-riff) nail in the coffin of the idea that Legend has not become "He Who Riffs Morons," Ring shared with me a bit of a PM that Legend sent him recently as a fellow editor of him: "It's why I throw every joke at te wall and see what sticks, allowing my editors and other people to remove the ones that don't work." This is more or less the [i]exact metaphor[/i] I used to describe Mykan's writing style in my end rant for part 1 of the MLU anniversary riff.

Regarding my own riffs, on this basis, I feel any of my cruelty towards him was just the right amount. Honestly, after hearing that he completely offloads his quality check on his editor instead of checking himself, I should probably go harder.

(Protip, by the way: Having a caricature of a [i]real person[/i] come in to be a strawman in a riff is [i]terrible form[/i]. Your group does not look good doing that.)

[quote]He's just the kind of guy who doesn't hold back when making jokes no matter the topic.[/quote]
Creativity thrives in limits. Your group is writing a riff, which calls for a specific style of comedy focusing on fast quips. Multi-character Nostalgia Critic-esque sketches involving a museum tour of infamous fic lines is [i]not[/i] that style. Neither is two-to-three page rants about how the author isn't writing gore right, which itself isn't actually a joke, nor is several paragraphs of straight-up [i]actual fanfiction[/i] taped into the riff like Kammy in the bootup cinematic of [i]Paper Mario[/i].

[quote]And he always likes to play it off like he has a huge ego.[/quote]
This is a portion of the Internet where the primary means of communication is text, with no possible indication of tone. In spaces like these, there is no effective difference to those on the outside between playing off like you have a huge ego and [i]having[/i] a huge ego. It's more than possible to have a huge ego and not be aware of it, the same way people can be too stupid to realize they're stupid.

[quote]What I'm trying to say is I thought I made something pretty good and fun  that was a good critique of Mykan and it sucks when you realize no one  liked it as much as you did.[/quote]
I sympathize with wanting to creating something good and fun that comes out wrong, but the amount of presentation problems in the first two parts of "End of Ends Riff" say that you had fun and don't care how any non-participants take it. Off the top of my head, I straight up don't understand why you didn't change the text color from FIMFic's chalkdust-gray to black, especially since Mykan doesn't use different text colors. I especially don't understand why [i]your own riffs[/i] are in the same color. You could have had fun while producing at least something that [i]looked[/i] decent with just a keyboard shortcut and two mouse clicks, and you just... [i]didn't[/i].

Regarding the critique thing, in my own personal opinion, riffers aren't critics. The job isn't to point out the intricacies and flaws in the work; the job is to be entertaining, primarily through jokes. In the spirit of the original [i]Mystery Science Theater 3000[/i], I believe that a riff should be as entertaining, if not more, than whatever it is riffing. What I've read so far of "End of Ends Riff," especially Legend's contribution, fails to be as entertaining as the Mykan fic it's riffing. I honestly believe I would have a better time reading "Friendship is Failure #10- THE END OF ENDS! (2017 Revision)" by itself than I would reading your riff of it.

(Also, I don't know why you have never listed the full title of the actual fic you're riffing. There's multiple versions of "End of Ends," so it's lazy and unhelpful to just say "End of Ends.")

[quote]These harsh riffs really hurt my feelings and I'd be fine with it if it was all in good fun but it feels like you weren't.[/quote]
As I said before, I'm not mad at you. I'm just disappointed that you allowed riffs that you hosted to turn out so bad. I'm not going to blame you entirely for this; I understand well enough that you don't always pay attention to your co-riffers while you're riffing something, especially if you're further in the fic than they are (which seems to be the case with how many of your lines start riff blocks). I will, however, hold you accountable for your laziness as a riff host. You failed to produce the best work you could, in substantial part because of your seemingly unwillingness to make it visually pleasing or discipline Legend.

Please produce more entertaining content in the future. A good start would be telling Legend to stop bringing in random characters and try to keep his lines below like three sentences. And turn the text black. Thank you.

P.S. I actually thought this would be in PMs.