Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27708312-20170202163909/@comment-31166511-20170223175305

YES!

Yesyes! Yesyesyes!! Yesyesyesyes!!!

That was effing AWSOME! I still say Rotten Redhead is my favorite of your longer pieces, but this one is just an amazing pack of cool tied with a bow of hilarity!

Shapeshifter Charades is pure genius. May I be allowed to bask in your otherworldly glow and protest my unworthiness?

No. Seriously it's terrific and compact and effectively written.

I didn't even notice any flaws after the first half dozen lines. My brain was far too distracted with being entertained. Well done.

When I read the line about Dipper "being slightly used" to Mabel's condition, I was a little frustrated that you were telling and not showing again.

Even after enjoying the entire piece, I still think the 'slightly' sentence is terribly flawed. The way that Dipper interacts with bug-Mabel illustrates that he is pretty used to her.

If Dipper is 95% comfortable with Mabel's condition, don't leave the reader to guess the reason for the remaining 5%. If you don't want to spend the time showing us that 5%, then spell it out.

Remember how Dipper's brain works. He isn't 100% sure of anything unless he is in Manic Obsessive/Suspicious mode.

In the eariler AU section, you said that bug-Mabel is made up of 400-some bugs. That seem way low to me.

80 pound girl, divided into 400 parts, equals 0.2 pound bugs. Or over 3 ounces per bug.

That's a pretty big bug. Especially when a group of them can form realistic surface details that look like the item being imitated and not a lumpy pile of beetles.

Granted, 1000 smaller bugs can join together to make a lot of 3-ounce bugs. And Mable could be pretty far off in her estimate, but I think it is more effectively creepy for Mabel to gain information and skills that are obviously foreign to her, except on account of this weird thing that happened to her.

Remember when Soos says to Waddles, "Let me scratch that one spot you can never seem to reach." That little bit is extremely effective in underlining the weirdness of his mind transfer experience.

Who we are and how we think are strongly affected by the arrangement of our physical bodies. Every time Mabel makes some unconscious observation it strengthen the story and makes the weirness more believable.

Hmm. What if all the little bugs that Make up Mabel's body made it easier for her to follow several trains of thought at the same time. Wouldn't this give her a more sympathetic understanding of Dipper's overwhelmed and detail-obsessed thought processes?

What if Dipper started to notice that Mabel was starting to act more and more like he does himself? Would he like it at first, working with someone with a brain that works just like his, but faster?

Would the twins make great strides towards a solution for Mabel's condition, but hit a brick wall because Mabel isn't capable of her old leaps of silly, but inspired illogic?

Could Dipper learn to teach himself to think like Mabel to make up for the lack?

Could Mabel's attempt to recapture her old ways of thinking be a significant step in returning her to her old self? Can intuition be subdivided digitally into individual function-calls and algorithms?

You might want to do a little research on AI and programming, or how analog and digital recording sytems change the very nature of the information they encode.

You could use some of this research for characterazation in describing how Mabel's way of talking and thinking is slowly changing as her old self degrades and mutates.

There is an online comic called "Girl Genius" by Phil Foglio. In a recent entry, a character is introduced that is the recorded personality of a Parisian woman shopkeep who passed away.

The system that simulates her personality construct uses a robotic puppet body with a medium resolution video globe suspended over the robot torso with support braces and a video cable. The shopkeep's disembodied head is projected on the surface.

The robot body can walk around her shop and handle items while the personality construct negotiates purchase prices. The shopkeep probably had an extremely good memory of the items in stock when she was alive, but now her inventory *is* her memory. She can reel off an exact list items sold last week and tell you to the millisecond the time they were sold.

The shopkeeper had a very warm and friendly personality, and was extremely diplomatic with her customers, but the robotic AI she has become is casually contempteous of human beings, their frailities and limitations. Each time there is a conflict between the blunt, cynical mechanical thought processes and the schmoozing style of the recorded personality construct, there is a discordant screetch from the robot's speakers that interrupts whatever blunt insulting comment she was about to make and a canned friendly and polite response is abruptly inserted into the gap in the conversation.

You can learn a lot more interesting things about the details of how a system works, if the system is a little bit slow, clunky, and inefficient.

Be sure to show Mabel making mistakes as she learn about her new body. Make sure to show that her old assumptions cause problems.

When Mable doesn't make any more funny mistakes (also good for keeping the readers entertained) that's when Mabel reaches the point of No Return.