Let's talk about Week 7... (Patreon)

This is going to be a long one.. buckle in!

For those of you paying attention, you know that Week 7 was a bit of a bear for me to get done. It came from a combination of feeling like crap and not coming up with an overarching idea for the episode itself. This was the first time I had literally no ideas going in, and that was the reason for the inspiration polls.

While those polls helped spur me into coming up with some match and segment ideas, I had a hard time having an actual reason for those matches to happen. Match 1 ended up being the most coherent. Two wrestlers of equal size, and I managed to come up with a reason to have them wrestle each other. Most times this wouldn't be a big deal, but in this case we were talking about a singles wrestler against one half of a tag team, so there needed to be a reason why.

Luckily I was able to flesh out the why, and the infighting of The Whitechapel Society is probably going to fuel weeks 9, 10, and possibly 11. This angle is by far (for me) the best thing to come out of Week 7.

Then we move onto match 2. A triple threat with three people who are part of tag teams. Again.. why? Well.. this time I didn't even try to come up with an idea for it. Matches 2 and 3 are both less wrestling matches than most matches that have come before, but match 2 is by far the most disjointed, for multiple reasons.

1.  Triple Threat match. I realized that I'm not good at knowing how these should be paced. This is actually the second triple threat match, but in the first one I came up with a reason for it to be 2 on 1 for a while, then eliminated one of the wrestlers by tying her to the ring post. Obviously, I went a different direction for this one.

2. Everything else going on during the match. I had the idea for the ATH to go into effect which would change a triple threat into a threesome, but that came with it's own problems. First of all, the announce team's promises of what they were going to do as soon as the ATH went into effect, plus deciding to have Mrs. Masters, Dee, and Donita out there as well. For those of you on the sharing path, there was also that other thing that happens during the match, which I had planned ahead of time, thus the setup during the previous segment.

Each of these things on their own are fine, but I had no idea on how to properly pace showing what was going on, thus there's just chunks of action here and there, and a lot of the parts just kinda happen and get over with asap so that I had less balls in the air that I needed to juggle.

In the end, match 2 feels sloppy and disjointed and is probably my least favorite match to date by a significant margin. Plenty of serviceable ideas, just couldn't bring them all together in a cohesive package.

Match 3 is a short, "cheaty" kind of affair, but in the end will serve it's purpose in The Whitechapel Society's story arc I mentioned above. It was obviously a squash match and was intended to be. I cheated a bit with just showing impacts at one point in time instead of fleshing out an entire match, and that's partly because I wanted to get it done because I knew there was going to be an extended post-match segment with the penalty. Add that into the mix, and the match is pretty much standard length, though I understand that it's probably less rewarding than most matches for those who are fans of the wrestling parts.

That brings us to the penalty itself. It was always going to be Ash and Justice finger-cuffing Penny, but I was apparently in a shitty headspace when I was making it because I started to go darker than I wanted to with it. Here's a shot of one of the original animations:

When I was making it, I had gotten the idea that the longer it went on, the harder Penny would be crying...

Then I went to sleep. When I woke up, I redid or removed those animations, rewrote the dialogue to be less abusive (now most quips involve her father watching), and tried my best to make a lesson in humility as friendly as I could. It doesn't make sense, really, but I didn't like the abusive vibe I had originally. Did it make more sense considering the "lesson?" Sure, but it didn't make sense when it came to the vibe of the NSFW.

You can beat the shit out of each other and say horrible things, sure.. but when it comes to sex I don't want to even approach rape-y vibes. I threw in Penny's "let's get this over with" line to signal that she accepted what was going to happen, but there's still a line I don't want to cross, and I was crossing it.

Now we're onto Week 8. I have ideas again. It should go a lot smoother than Week 7. I'll still have polls and whatnot about content (and boy, do I have a fucking doozy of poll about a character coming up that will be for everyone to participate in!), and of course I dropped hints about all kinds of possible one-offs that might be on the way, so look forward to those!

Congratulations if you managed to make it to the end!