BoM/TWS Message Forum

"Stealing a Friend"  -> "Breaking and Entering" 

And we went back to anima bands, for a commission.

I don't have much to say about these chapters that isn't said above, both my myself and other commenters. The interest, at least for me, is in switching POVs. But I get exhausted by the complications of undoing what "Will Prescott" has been up to, and starting up a new plot with the new POV character. So these five chapters, for me at least, were like trying to chop my way through a jungle with a weed eater. Not much finesse and not much progress, either.

"Counterfeits and Originals"  was an especially rough one to write (it went through multiple drafts) because (1) I wanted to mass-jettison the plot up to this point, so it wouldn't hang over anything that came next, but (2) I felt like I had to justify Oliver's ("Woliver's"?) ability to put everything back in place. So it had to balance between a step-by-step explanation of what was going on while not getting bogged down in details.

The most fun for me in this run, I think, was trying to think younger than Will or Caleb typically do, while trying to come up with character-feels for the new guys. I don't know if that came across. I probably did overdo the use of "bruh" to differentiate the Oliver and Owen psychologies, but I think it did help me to forget Will and Caleb while tryiing to write these chapters.

Ultimately, I think Will has proven to be just about the best possible POV character for a story like this, which makes anima bands as a POV-switching device rather pointless. He works because he has sufficient agency to get himself in trouble, and to pull others into trouble. But he is also cautious and passive enough that he can easily be dragged into trouble by others. This means that you don't need to switch POVs in order to explore all the possibilities. You just have to pair Will up with someone who has an itch for one particular use of the masks, and let that person set the pace. Compare, for instance, what Sydney, Chelsea, Gordon, Caleb, the YouTube crew, and Laurent & His Gang of Sports Clowns get up to with them. A new POV, as here, is either going to be very limited in its approach to the masks (as the aforementioned are) or will simply recapitulate Will's usage as a flexible observer and modest contributor.