A look back on a crazy OCT

    The final judgement for the OriginsOCT is finally in. I was going to leave a comment on the actual judgement itself, but it was going to be way, way, WAY too long to be acceptable, so I figure why not make a journal to get my thoughts out there? I mean, I'm sure nobody cares, but this is really more for my own benefit than anything and a way for me to get my thoughts out there.

    Origins has been a really, really, REALLY crazy ride (as some of you know ). In the beginning, I wasn't even sure who I wanted to enter...
    ...and Dnias and Yang PROBABLY weren't the best characters to enter, to be honest
    Don't get me wrong. Dnias and Yang are interesting characters, but, quite frankly, they had so little development behind them to get the ball rolling for an OCT that I really have no idea why I ever chose them in the first place (I've said before that Dnias is probably the least-developed of the "seven Jakes" as a whole). Starting this OCT, I realized very quickly that Dnias is a very flat character with very little motivation to go on, so every action he took didn't feel like he was ever really motivated to do it. Yang, on the other hand, switched motivations rather suddenly, but we'll get into that later.
    If I could go back and enter any other character, I'd enter Reath. I feel like his character is a lot more complex than both Dnias and Yang and I could do a lot more with him over the course of the tournament than I could with Dnias and Yang. The Yin-Yang duo made for some interesting subplot, but I feel like Reath would have been the better choice overall.
    Really, with Dnias and Yang, it was beginning to get to the point where I'd be uninspired to write them, leading to sloppy entries and careless mistakes. I don't even know how I hade it to the final round, to be truthful. I still did end up learning a lot about what I need to do with the duo for LS2, though. I need to bring Dnias' status down a little and make it so that he and Yang play off each other better. I'm still a little lost on where I want to go with Yang right now, but he shouldn't change TOO much...

    Enough about that, though. It's about time I talked about the OCT itself.
    My audition seemed innocent enough, but I think that's where some of my problems started. I feel like I only barely glossed over what exactly was going on. This may have been because, at the time, I didn't fully understand it myself.
    My first round with ASP-Ian's Phinnic and Pallet, if I'm going to be completely honest with you, was a complete train wreck for Dnias' character. I didn't fully flesh out anyone's motivations and anything anyone did felt really forced. My least favorite part of the entry, though, was when Dnias threatened to torture Phinnic, then immediately backed off once Yang started suggesting murder. I absolutely despised it because I felt like Dnias' character wouldn't have allowed the scene to happen in the first place, as Dnias is a manipulator that tends to stray away from violent situations. I also feel like, for the same reason, Dnias would have never listened to Yang about fighting Phinnic and Pallet.
    Round 1 was actually the only round I wrote ahead of time (as in before the day of the deadline), which brings up my biggest regret for Round 2 against lynzinitus' Murok and Frost. I ended up getting freaked out trying to finish before the cutoff time that I rushed the ending big time. As a result, Dnias found a door out of nowhere and Murok and Frost kind of fell by the wayside, which I'm really sad about. I wish I'd given myself enough time to really flesh out a real interaction between Murok, Dnias, and Yang instead of simply having Murok as the opponent with no real spoken motivator. I didn't use Murok to his full potential and it's one of my biggest regrets of this OCT.
    If Round 2 had too little thought put into it, then Round 3 had way too MUCH thought put into it. The minute I found out I was against Courageous-Kyla's Cameron, I began stressing out BIG TIME...so much so that I MAY have tried a little too hard to win. My original plan was, if I got to the final round, to switch Dnias and Yang out THEN during the final confrontation. Instead, I forced Yang into a role he was never meant to and never supposed to fill and, in the process, caused Dnias to become nothing more than a mere plot device throughout the entirety of the OCT. I'd intended for this to be Dnias' OCT to make up for what happened to him with his Nightmare Manor gig (AKA another story for another day), but, instead, with one false move, I switched the focus of every round I'd done thus far from Dnias to Yang, a horribly underdeveloped character with little to go on other than his connection to Dnias. That and an absolute HORRIPILATION of an anticlimactic ending put the nail in the coffin of my ever winning this OCT.
   
    This brings me to Round 4. For the final round, instead of trying to win, I changed my objective. All I wanted to do for Round 4 was finish the story I'd started. Nothing more. That's why I took as many risks as I did with Round 4. Bringing Phinnic and Pallet back in was borderline illegal and I knew it, but I did it anyway because they were the most convenient way for me to get Yang where he needed to go. I also wanted to give Phinnic and Pallet a second chance after the disaster that was Round 1, so their spectator entry was the perfect door to doing that (even if it was taken out of the group eventually, for one reason or another).
    Even with my new goal, I still have SO many things I regret about this round. For one, I regret ONCE AGAIN putting it off until the last minute. The ending was rushed again and I didn't have enough time to properly portray noodlesqueen's Cassie. I also, despite making it my goal to finish Yang's story, NEVER ended up tying up the loose ends with his character OR bringing Dnias back in any way. It's something that I really SHOULD have done, but I didn't, leaving for an ending that leaves a lot of things hanging and really resolves a whole lot of nothing.

    Overall, this OCT, for me, has been one disaster after another. Neither Dnias or Yang worked to my advantage as characters and everything about the storytelling was off in one way or another. I'm not proud of this OCT, but I am proud of how far I've come and how I can realize what I've done wrong and strive to change it. I've learned a lot about myself and my writing and how I can improve them both, and that's something I'm happy with.

    That said, I'm really, really, REALLY happy that noodlesqueen won. In fact, I would have been angry if I'd somehow won the final round. I knew coming into the final round that I was NOT worthy of the victory whatsoever. I was rooting for noodlesqueen the whole time and her entry ended up being GORGEOUS. I wasn't trying to win at all. In fact, I'd about given up trying to win by Round 3 (I never thought I'd get as far as this, to be honest). I firmly believe that noodlesqueen deserves her victory and I'm 100% behind the final judgement.

Congratulations, noodlesqueen! And a big thanks to ASP-Ian, lynzinitus, Courageous-Kyla, and Cendrell too! All of you have helped my time in this OCT to be a good one, no matter how hectic it was!