User blog:CheeseBurgerGuy/The CYOA Conundrum

Hi everybody. I was really hoping that I wouldn't have to make this blog, but I feel the best way to adress this whole thing is within the community tself (espically aince none of these conversations are private unless you never check message boards). We recently had a similar situation with the Hurt or Heal games, but I feel this could be a different situation so I'll explain this in it's entirety.

As many of you know, in the begining of October, after reading Raised by Wolves' series from a few years prior, I decided to start a fairly successful CYOA series. This series stared Hiero as the only playable character, having the members of this wiki control most of his actions (larelgy a blank slate protagonist otherwise). We got up until the end of the Big Sleep, afterwhich I took a break due to the 10 roadblocks in said episode. During that break, I wrote a variety of other blogs, specifically a uncompleted Community Choice for Total Drama Island (still plan to finsih that one day), and a abandoned Total Drama My Universe Series (I do want to also do something with it, but the amount of work it takes for My Ways and repeating many of the same things due to it almost always being Island kind of got old).

Of course, many of you now have probably know me for Choose Your Own Roleplay (CYOR), a variation of the oringal concpet but a bit more ambitious. While I do have some mixed feelings on the blog due to the amount of work it entails (thank god I'm on winter break), I'm satified with it as a whole. However, this game prevented me from having the time to also update the orignal CYOA game.

Since the game went on hiatus, two other CYOA games got started. The first was Wawanawka Massarce, which takes the basic ideas of CYOA games and throws the Total Drama Cast into a horror movie (or will I'm guessing). I feel that our two CYOA perfectly co-exist without any problems due to being very different beasts and that is not the reason for me writing this blog.

The second is where things get...well, confusing. Project MIR's CYOA has been fun to wittness unfold, but there are obvious similarites outside the genders of our protagonists. I realzied quickly that our two games couldn't co-exist as easy as it could with Massacre, and came up with an idea.

I talked to MIR about the idea of combining our CYOA blogs into a single universe. One would follow Hiero (who would be on one team) and Thalia (who would be on the other). I spent time talking to them in depth about the idea, and they seemed to be on board with it, as this would give me and himself motivation to continue the series.

However, as things unfolded, I noticed that there were distint differences between MIR's season and my own. I expected that, but it seemed entire things were retconned, ranging from Trent campaigning for team captian and Leshawna not, Owen siding with Trent instead of being Hiero's second closest ally, no argument between Heather and Leshawna, and most importantly, Heiro being the mastermind of the deal between himself and Thalia.

That difference, while it made sense, also threw me for a loop. I tried to protray the offer as the right game move, but forcing Heiro to go against his word. This was further enforced by the idea that Courtney was actively betraying her own ally by even proposing the deal. And while not exactly the same, Hiero offering it puts him in this antagonistic position.

So I decided to talk about all this with Project MIR, in order to talk about how he imagined this compromise was going to work. I thought that maybe I had misunderstood his understanding of my concerns and what I was suggesting. Part of me still thinks that. Yet my response is just that MIR wants to just use Hiero. I know Hiero is more everyone's character than my own, but with also ignoring your choices, it feels like MIR has been turning Hiero into his character.

This made me remember the accusations that went against MIR when he was still going by Flecther. The idea he was against others doing Hurt or Heals due to him bringing them back. How certain members of this wiki beleived he was partially doing things for attention. Looking back, evidence for this still exists with MIR having boost comments to simply get his comment count high enough to be in the most popular blogs list.

Add this to feeling like I've been lied to, and I feel like I've been pushed into a corner. If I let MIR continue to use Hiero and continue his game, I feel I wouldn't be able to conitnue my own series. I mean, people would be confused about why Hiero is in two different games and is acting completely differently. People might feel that they have to play Hiero how they're "supposed to". It also might confuse them why Thalia isn't present. But even though I went on break it doesn't mean I don't want to conitnue the orignal. Furthermore, I'm concerned everybody wouldn't even want to play either of them due to being so similar even if MIR removed Hiero. There's no point to hositng a game nobody wants to play.

I want to know what the community thinks. Should I just give up on the CYOA and Hiero and basically hand that over to Project MIR? Should I ask him to stop this version of his CYOA and resume mine as soon as I can? Can both co-exist? If they can, what needs to be done?

I know Prject MIR wants to work something out considering his most recent messages, but I'm not exactly sure what exactly I feel should be done about this. As such, I want to talk to the community about this because it concerns you. These are Choose Your Own Adventure games. You can always Choose not to go on the adventure, so I feel you should all have a say in this. Thank you all if you took the time to read this.