fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2132 ]

[ SECRET POST #2132 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2132 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 100 secrets from Secret Submission Post #305.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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14. http://i.imgur.com/81X6i.png

Maybe now you're at least Genre Savvy?

I hated them because they were horrible books and second person should never ever be used in a story because it's awkward and weird.

As someone who enjoys writing 2nd POV, I disagree. You can really get into a character's head in 2nd POV. However, I've never read one of these 'choose your own adventures', so I have no idea how they're written.

I got the Goosebumps ones and cheated mightily at them to get the good ending (you know, if you choose one option that leads to a bad place, just backtrack and choose the other option). I think I got turned into a jar of jam or something once?

Haha, same here. Though is wasn't as much 'get the good ending' as 'get ten different bad endings and give up'.

I was the opposite. I always managed to survive and I was completely bored by it. Oh, yeah, I lived...again. Not much of an adventure.

When I was 7 I read a CYOA and the first ending I got was one where I died from dehydration from drinking salt water. The description was remarkably graphic and haunted me for weeks.

So uh I know what you mean, OP.

I was shit at them as well, but I kinda liked the deaths? Some of them were pretty bizarre and creepy. TBH my favorite part of those books was probably just seeing how many ways I could die.

Me, too! I don't know why, but I kind of liked my tragic endings. I remember one of my favourites was when I wandered through the cave of time, then came out way way far in the future, when the sun is dying and the earth is cold, and I guess I just stood there and died. I don't know - I really liked those endings.

Re: ~Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right there dying with you~

elaminator - 2012-11-03 22:43 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ~Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right there dying with you~

(Anonymous) - 2012-11-04 02:41 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ~Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right there dying with you~

elaminator - 2012-11-04 04:45 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ~Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right there dying with you~

(Anonymous) - 2012-11-03 22:52 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ~Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right there dying with you~

(Anonymous) - 2012-11-04 02:43 (UTC) - Expand

I got a death where I went back in time, fell in some hot lava, and then millions of years later, my skeleton was exposed on a wall of the Grand Canyon to the bewilderment of scientists.

That was a lot less creepy and disturbing than the one from the same book where someone stabbed me in the back and the last thing I heard as I lay there, bleeding out, was my murderer's laughter as he walked away.

Re: ~Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right there dying with you~

elaminator - 2012-11-04 23:01 (UTC) - Expand

Me too! I always tried to die because it was tons more fun that way. *laughs*

Me too! They were all the rage among my friends and classmates, so I picked up one at the library and no matter what I chose, I always ended up dying horribly. (It's possible I picked one with no happy endings at all?) It was all so gruesome and depressing, I still can't figure out why anyone liked them.

The key to surviving in those books is to never take any risks at all.

Of course, that also makes surviving them dreadfully boring.

And the ways you'd die were always so stupid, even if you took the most sensible alternative. "You choose to take a walk down the bazaar. Oh noes! A herd of wild elephants is running amok towards you and you are ground into bloody paste. In your last seconds you contemplate the wisdom of the steps you have taken in your journey."

The only Choose Your Own Adventure book I ever read was that Animorphs one, and it was terrible. Your "character" was such a blatant, non-canon self insert that ruined any sense that you were really in the story and "making a difference" to the outcome. Also, it was boring. I never really got the point of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books because I'd read all the options anyway and make an informed decision from there. My character had the second sight, okay?

All I could think for the whole book was, "So, when do I get the chance to pull a David and betray everyone for kicks and giggles?"

Edited 2012-11-03 22:24 (UTC)

I read a few of them and then switched to Adventure games. Its really the same thing in a different format.

Still, it was enough of a background to get me into Problem Sleuth and later Homestuck.

Heh, I really liked those books, but they also frustrated me a lot, because I was too obsessive about following the different decision paths to just commit to one and see the story through. I had to keep track of each decision-making point with post-it notes so I could go back and see what would have happened if I'd chosen differently.

I do remember being freaked out by a few of them. Some of them had really dark endings. I still remember some of them.

I hated those, too. Because they seemed like a cheat to me. But instead of having one enjoyable, immersible, complete story, they had 30 really short, largely repetitive, sucky stories, most of which had extremely abrupt and unsatisfying endings. And having to flip a bunch of pages forward in the book to find the right place to continue really disrupted the flow. Even as a kid, I understood narrative structure and a story that seemed to wander randomly in search of a plot and that ended without wrapping up the loose ends didn't seem like a satisfying story to me.

I remember, back in 3rd grade, picking one of this books and dying horribly during an asteroid shower. It was traumatic enough to never pick up another book of those ever.

LOL! I'm sorry, I'm not laughing at your trauma - it's just... "dying horribly during an asteroid shower" - of all the ways to go, it just SOUNDS so funny!

P.S. Okay, maybe not so funny to a 3rd grader. Me = insensitive jerk. (But still snickering...)

(no subject)

ex_paola492 - 2012-11-04 04:20 (UTC) - Expand

I loved Choose Your Own Adventures until I read one that had an ending where you have a vision of your parents crying at your funeral.

Too much.

I feel for you, anon. I was torn between feeling discouraged at my decision-making ability (well, that ... could have gone better) and feeling like whoever wrote those books was a preachy, unimaginative, judgmental jackass. But looking back, I think it's the latter.

When you're getting much better outcomes in your life than you are in your light reading, like I was, there's something wrong. :p When there are more rainbows in the sprinklers watering parched, yellow lawns on your way home from school than there are in a stereotypically fantasy CYOA novel (+2 rainbow), there's definitely something wrong.

They were particularly disappointing when they were based on literary works of note, I think, because whoever wrote the adaptation seemed too cowed by the original story to add anything important to it. But ... er. Adding a protagonist? By definition, that's supposed to be important. So you were either stuck being a nobody POV character with silly, fabricated relevance to the real action being carried by the adults, or the story cut you off immediately if you strayed from the canon path. I think what I liked the least was that the idea of being able to choose something diffrerent from where the story originally went appealed to me powerfully, so the letdown when it was half-heartedly executed was bad. Fanfic isn't better than most whole genres, but for what-ifs and developed AUs, it blows all the CYOA books I've ever seen out of the water. I wish I'd known about it back then.

I always cheated and found the one ending where I lived, and then read the book backwards from there.

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