Post by Deleted on Aug 28, 2019 1:07:17 GMT -5
I have no idea if anyone here even reads or has read it so some quick recap of the general premise and sequence of events real quick before I explode on this.
It's a webcomic that's been running since 2004 and ended tonight.
I started reading in the midst of book 5 about a year, maybe year and a half later - about an error in a filing system in a bureaucratic Heaven that turns a high school guy, Ash, into racing into a girl and makes someone else at the same school, Emily (who he.... only very casually knows at first but is later clumsily retconned to have never known because plot), two years younger. Long and short the comic really stopped being all that interesting really about a year after I started reading it, but I've stuck through it all these years anyway, mostly since the early stuff still really resonated with me and I still find that stuff good to look back on, and I have really been invested in seeing what happened to the characters in the end despite the obvious flaws the comic developed.
See, roundabout book 7 the comic introduced a new sort of secondary main character in Missi, just another random girl around the school. And that was.... functionally the end of anything of substance actually happening in this comic. Since then it's primarily been Ash racing a rotation of people who never matter after they lose to him in between being upset about his situation and desperately trying to find something for Emily to do after she decided she didn't want to turn back to normal with a bunch of aborted subplots that went nowhere like her mom doing drugs or her taking up racing herself. In between you saw a ton of the supporting cast, saw a lot with Ash's parents, Ash helped out a woman literally haunted by her dead sister and that led to her getting married and having a baby, basically just a bunch of personal drama and side stuff to the overall magical backdrop of the comic that largely went unexplored.
So eventually the author announced a sequel was in the works, and pretty quickly after securing financing via a Kickstarter (I have no clue why this was even needed but we'll come back to that) Misfile immediately started barreling toward a conclusion. Just all of a sudden, bam, main villain who's been occasionally alluded to is now firmly in the spotlight, the misfile itself is in a position to be fixed, and after ages of teasing the idea of Ash having to stay a girl to be with Emily - because for stupid reasons fixing the misfile would erase their memories of it without having some inconsistency there (thus the retcon I mentioned about undoing them having known each other already) - Emily just comes out and asks for Ash to stay as-is despite knowing full well how much he hates being a girl, and also despite the comic constantly drawing parallels between Ash's situation and being trans.
But! Fortunately they didn't quite go the memory erasing route or the stuck-as-a-girl route. Nope.
They contrived this whole weird thing where Rumisiel, the angel who caused the whole thing to start with (notice how I've been able to go this whole time without actually mentioning him?), fixed the situation by exploiting failings in the filing system to make a copy of Ash who's a girl who did all of the stuff that happened as a direct consequence of the misfile and doesn't remember anything about having been a guy (basically keeping the timeline in check while not having the lingering angst from it), while turning the boy one back into a guy, with using an oversight in the system to leave Ash with his memories.
And then.... That's it. This situation is just explained after a jump forward to the future showing Ash about to have a race and hooked up with Emily, you see girl!Ash there as well, and you just get page after page after page of sloooowly explaining this solution, with the author comments even saying that this isn't perfect and that the sequel will be revisiting the subject down the line (but not right away, with them not as the central characters of it). After tons of focus entirely on Rumisiel Ash gets one single line of dialogue as a guy, while girl!Ash - this effectively brand new character introduced at the finish line as the big resolution to the core conflict of the climax - gets literally none, the end.
So basically after writing this story for the past 15 years the author just got bored and threw it to the wolves in a completely unsatisfying manner so that he could hurry up and start the sequel once he was sure it could make money. And by the way the sequel starts tomorrow so absolutely no downtime between the end of one and the start of the other.
Yeah. I needed to rant a little after wasting my time reading this shit for this long just to get a, "Read the sequel LOL!" for my trouble.
It's a webcomic that's been running since 2004 and ended tonight.
I started reading in the midst of book 5 about a year, maybe year and a half later - about an error in a filing system in a bureaucratic Heaven that turns a high school guy, Ash, into racing into a girl and makes someone else at the same school, Emily (who he.... only very casually knows at first but is later clumsily retconned to have never known because plot), two years younger. Long and short the comic really stopped being all that interesting really about a year after I started reading it, but I've stuck through it all these years anyway, mostly since the early stuff still really resonated with me and I still find that stuff good to look back on, and I have really been invested in seeing what happened to the characters in the end despite the obvious flaws the comic developed.
See, roundabout book 7 the comic introduced a new sort of secondary main character in Missi, just another random girl around the school. And that was.... functionally the end of anything of substance actually happening in this comic. Since then it's primarily been Ash racing a rotation of people who never matter after they lose to him in between being upset about his situation and desperately trying to find something for Emily to do after she decided she didn't want to turn back to normal with a bunch of aborted subplots that went nowhere like her mom doing drugs or her taking up racing herself. In between you saw a ton of the supporting cast, saw a lot with Ash's parents, Ash helped out a woman literally haunted by her dead sister and that led to her getting married and having a baby, basically just a bunch of personal drama and side stuff to the overall magical backdrop of the comic that largely went unexplored.
So eventually the author announced a sequel was in the works, and pretty quickly after securing financing via a Kickstarter (I have no clue why this was even needed but we'll come back to that) Misfile immediately started barreling toward a conclusion. Just all of a sudden, bam, main villain who's been occasionally alluded to is now firmly in the spotlight, the misfile itself is in a position to be fixed, and after ages of teasing the idea of Ash having to stay a girl to be with Emily - because for stupid reasons fixing the misfile would erase their memories of it without having some inconsistency there (thus the retcon I mentioned about undoing them having known each other already) - Emily just comes out and asks for Ash to stay as-is despite knowing full well how much he hates being a girl, and also despite the comic constantly drawing parallels between Ash's situation and being trans.
But! Fortunately they didn't quite go the memory erasing route or the stuck-as-a-girl route. Nope.
They contrived this whole weird thing where Rumisiel, the angel who caused the whole thing to start with (notice how I've been able to go this whole time without actually mentioning him?), fixed the situation by exploiting failings in the filing system to make a copy of Ash who's a girl who did all of the stuff that happened as a direct consequence of the misfile and doesn't remember anything about having been a guy (basically keeping the timeline in check while not having the lingering angst from it), while turning the boy one back into a guy, with using an oversight in the system to leave Ash with his memories.
And then.... That's it. This situation is just explained after a jump forward to the future showing Ash about to have a race and hooked up with Emily, you see girl!Ash there as well, and you just get page after page after page of sloooowly explaining this solution, with the author comments even saying that this isn't perfect and that the sequel will be revisiting the subject down the line (but not right away, with them not as the central characters of it). After tons of focus entirely on Rumisiel Ash gets one single line of dialogue as a guy, while girl!Ash - this effectively brand new character introduced at the finish line as the big resolution to the core conflict of the climax - gets literally none, the end.
So basically after writing this story for the past 15 years the author just got bored and threw it to the wolves in a completely unsatisfying manner so that he could hurry up and start the sequel once he was sure it could make money. And by the way the sequel starts tomorrow so absolutely no downtime between the end of one and the start of the other.
Yeah. I needed to rant a little after wasting my time reading this shit for this long just to get a, "Read the sequel LOL!" for my trouble.