It's kind of sad seeing Cassy and Venus disagreeing about the urgency and importance of Arizhel's predictions. But they always have been very different in their ways of thinking, so I'm not totally surprised.
Toq and Steve both getting older (well, I suppose they all are), but the first ones to reach that age in this group. And they all seemed so young just a moment ago.
The conversation with Antaan was interesting. Cassy's analysis that the main variable making the situation (apparently or actually) hopeless is humans taking too long to act is pretty much right, I think. Interesting that Antaan (who claims to also have analyzed the calculations) is surprised by that statement. There are some pretty "close to real world" themes happening in this story.
However, since I am always most focused on the characters rather than the themes, I am now extremely curious about Arizhel and under what circumstances she ended up having a kid.
Florian's tendrils are indeed very cute. I was in doubt about whether to use them for Sirio instead or not, but I had to give up when I didn't manage to convert the cc file for toddlers and children. Anyway, Florian is probably in an even more difficult situation than Sirio ever was, that really is a quite complicated family... In the next few chapters there will definitively be something to say about it.
The response to Arizhel speech is indeed the kind of thing we see quite often also IRL, people definitively don't take seriously threats that don't involve themselves here and now.
As for Antaan instead, I wouldn't exclude the hypothesis that he actually has fun by being cryptic either XD
Cassy and Venus actually have rarely completely agreed on something, their choice of the college mayor and of career path were probably the most notable exceptions. Yet they haven't ever argued for real about their disagreements (at least, not up to now...)
And yes, Toq and Steve are elders now. Toq turned adult in the period he went missing, while Steve soon after Halley was born (if I'm not mistaken). This mostly tells that there can't be much left before the end of the generation, isn't it?
As for the conversation instead, I would say that Antaan (just like Arizhel and the other ancient sixamians) has so much experience with space travel and so little with relations with other countries to actually consider finding another planet as the easiest option. His analysis of that model (which, most likely, was a list of boring parameters) was probably based on a quite different viewpoint as well.
This is indeed an attempt to bring in another big "real world" theme into the story, even if it will take a while before being really evident...
The circumstances under which Florian was born are totally out of my understanding as well, in the following there will be more details about that particular family but I don't plan to make a flashback chapter from their POV (that would be tremendously demanding, as the underlying dynamics would be more difficult than the one behind Toq's chapters...)
You can follow the Legacy Miller from my blog and the forum thread, *Chapter 5.29 posted on the 18th of April 2023*
Oof, as the others have already touched on, the idea of "we have the science and technology to anticipate an upcoming crisis, and revert it, and the only thing stopping us is that we can't get humans to agree or care" definitely hits close to home. I appreciate that you don't shy away from real-world connections, such as in the political arcs in earlier generations and theme of xenophobia throughout, and I'm curious to see where this one goes. It's comforting that Cassy is being very rational about the situation and seems to even have a plan -- how much impact will she have, I wonder?
Hi @DeidreMahariel and I completely agree!
It can be hard to do that kind of thing without being preachy or out of character somehow. You do it so well in your story.
Cassy and Venus actually have rarely completely agreed on something, their choice of the college mayor and of career path were probably the most notable exceptions. Yet they haven't ever argued for real about their disagreements (at least, not up to now...)
This actually is what I was attempting to express, but I was tried when I wrote my comment and it didn't come out quite right. Venus and Cassy have always had a lot of things they disagree on, but up until now most of those things (except maybe the subject of Toq) have been minor things that are mostly just preferences and opinions. This time felt different, like a real rift is (or at least could be) opening between them. This issue is much bigger than how they like to spend their time, or what interests them, for example. Cassy is taking the matter very seriously, and Venus is kind of shrugging off both the problem itself and Cassy's concern about it. That's what felt sad about the interaction to me. It's well written, and I really like the scene.
This is actually something I like a lot about fantasy and sci-fi stories, even if the premises can appear absurd and completely different from the real world, at the end many dynamics present in our society are still present, and showing them from a slightly different perspective is often a good way to reason again on things we tend to give for granted.
Also, the climate change crisis is a big topic at my job, in this kind of setting it was hard not to think about it for me.
Back to the story, Cassy seems very confident, isn't it? In the next few chapters it will definitively be interesting to see if she is rightfully so, or just overconfident...
Thanks a lot! I'm glad that scenes like Arizhel's speech are not too preachy. I hope this will also be the case with the next generations, this is not the only instance I will address this topic...
You can follow the Legacy Miller from my blog and the forum thread, *Chapter 5.29 posted on the 18th of April 2023*
I see... In my mind, the greatest disagreement between them this time is that Venus was like: "someone will find a solution, it's not up to me", while Cassy couldn't stop thinking about it because she felt like she already had all the information she needs, but she can't visualise the scheme to put it together to solve the issue just yet. I would actually say that Cassy in there was more frustrated at herself for not having found a solution yet than at her sister, that is worse than not being able to find the right chess move to win the game!
They both seem to believe that it is possible to find a solution in time, though.
Also, I keep having the impression that, with that kind of dialogue, I often struggle to pass the right tone for the various characters in English. The fact that this time I'm translating something originally written in another language just makes it worse. In Italian we are so much more straightforward when talking to each other, and from the outside this is sometimes interpreted as being more aggressive than intended. This probably mostly applies to characters like Venus, I think.
Getting the dialogue tone right is often harder than grammar for me, be patient :P
You can follow the Legacy Miller from my blog and the forum thread, *Chapter 5.29 posted on the 18th of April 2023*
I like the scene, whether I interpreted it the way you intended or not. Your characters are all so interesting and lifelike to me. I very easily care about them and what happens to them.
Getting "tone" right in writing is difficult, even for native speakers of English. So much meaning and intent in English is conveyed with emphasis, tone of voice, body language, and face expressions. Writing the words down instead of saying them out loud, all of that is lost. It's very tricky getting the words of a story dialogue to carry the same meaning as all the non-word stuff would carry in a spoken conversation.
Readers also bring their own personal experiences when they read the story. Those experiences affect how they respond to things in the story, probably more than how the story is actually written. I've already had several instances of my readers reacting to scenes or characters I wrote completely differently than how I intended, and also completely differently than how my test readers had reacted. In some cases the reader reactions have taken me completely by surprise. Because readers all have their own different emotions. I think this is pretty normal, though, and it's likely to happen no matter how good of a writer you are.
I think you are doing a fantastic job of translating your story. I can imagine it feels frustrating at times that you had expressed something more clearly in Italian, and the translation feels less accurate to you. I have had a similar feeling when I speak/write Spanish. I've actually attempted to write stories in Spanish (especially back when I was living in Spain and my Spanish ability was closer to fluent than it is now) but I got very frustrated with how limited I felt compared to writing a story in English. I eventually lost interest in trying to do it. I'm impressed that you are sticking with it, and I really love your story a lot. Since I don't speak Italian, I am glad you have put in the time to translate it, because I would definitely be missing out on a fun story if you hadn't.
I absolutely agree with @GlacierSnow -- translating is incredibly challenging for people who speak both languages at a native level, as there will always be words, ideas, figures of speech, etc. that just don't translate directly, and there is so much creativity that goes into conveying the same meaning in a different way. That challenge just goes up exponentially when you're stronger in one language over the other. Translating something this long is impressive, and you both have my monolingual envy.
While on the subject (sorry if this question or some variation has been asked before!!), I've been curious for a while -- Writing a story around a legacy challenge requires quite a bit of improvisation, and you already know your story, the plotlines and their aftermaths, quite a bit ahead of the English translated version. Do you ever change or revise aspects of the story while you're translating? Or do you try to remain very faithful to your original meanings?
Yes, I agree that the achievement of the "right tone" isn't easy at all. I suspect that in stories like mine (or even yours) where there is minimal description alongside the dialogue (or the comic-like bubbles) it may even be a bit harder than for more text-heavy styles. On the other hand, though, the simslit also allows to include pictures, which really can help a lot on the "non-verbal" communication side with expressions and so on. I can definitively see how the interpretation of the reader always plays a huge role as well, and how people with different backgrounds could focus on different details. As long as the reactions are not too negative it's actually a quite funny part for me, the way different readers react to the same chapter.
Also, I didn't know you lived in Spain, that's cool! And I can also see why attempting to write simlit in Spanish could have been quite frustrating... Ten times the effort you would need to write the text in your language and you still obtain a worst result, isn't it?
I actually decided to make the effort for two main reasons: i) Italian is not a very popular language at an international level, which means that the online communities are quite limited. In my knowledge, there isn't a single active forum in Italian with active simlit users left (some of them moved to Instagram, but I don't like that format); ii) I have to write texts in English all the time for work anyway, so this could actually be a useful exercise for me.
I didn't manage to translate a few jokes the way I meant, but for the rest (most of) the text of this legacy is quite simple also in the original form, so it is actually quite feasible for me to keep going with this translation. Afterwards I will probably try to start a new project directly in English, I like the community in here and I plan to stick in here for a while...
Luckily enough this legacy is written in a quite simple and straightforward way also in its original version, so at least it is easier than translating a novel (to make an example) XD
As for changing sections of the legacy instead... Uhm, so that every single event always connects with the following part, I cannot completely change a part without replaying everything that happened afterwards. In the translation I mostly decided to change a few names of the secondary characters (most of the sims generated in my game have names like Giovanni, Sofia, Chiara, Marta, Matteo etc... and keeping so many Italian sounding names in an English text would sound too much like a telenovela to me), and then I decided to add a few scenes (if not chapters) to make certain events and choices more meaningful and also understandable. For example I added a few scenes in Gen 1 about Luna and her friends discovering about the Earth conquer plan, in Gen 4 to show a bit better now Luke and Misty got closer, and now in Gen 5 with the Toq's POV chapters.
In the original chapters I'm midway through Gen 10, so I know already most of what is going to happen already. With the original chapters I really write each update without really knowing what is going to happen next (at most I can have vague ideas), but now that I know instead I definitively modify a bit some dialogues to foreshadow a bit more about the following. I think that in this revised way the story should flow a bit better, but I would not say that I'm really changing its meaning to a deep level.
If I really wanted to analyse the story I would definitively find plotholes and "not really smart choices from the characters", but I never decided to remake several chapters just to solve the problem. If it was a free story I probably would have, but with a legacy I think that part of the charm is also in following the sims' "logic".
You can follow the Legacy Miller from my blog and the forum thread, *Chapter 5.29 posted on the 18th of April 2023*
I think I had some comments I as I was reading, but then I read your final note about Sirio and Florian being cousins, and my mind just went blank. I did not expect that.
Actually, the bit about Florian's memory being wiped by Arizhel is very interesting, and concerning. What could she possibly have felt needed to be erased? Especially if remnants of those memories are what give Florian the feeling that she cared. An intriguing question.
Teleportation to mine a star! Totally scientifically plausible, of course. I love this story.
I'm not used to make any comments about the possible ships in my stories, but I really thought that specifying those two are actually cousins was quite an important detail to know in this case.
Actually, Sirio hugs others quite often for many different reasons, but at least with his empathy he should be able to spot whether he's approaching any boundary quite quickly...
Btw, an explanation about why some of Florian's memories have been erased really sounds like an important point to address in the next few chapters, isn't it?
As well as the feasibility of using teleportation for mining purposes, of course XD
Cassy's reasoning here was literally: "Well, if we can't reach that star, let's make the star reach us instead." Totally plausible, isn't it? XD
Post edited by HermioneSims on
You can follow the Legacy Miller from my blog and the forum thread, *Chapter 5.29 posted on the 18th of April 2023*
I'm probably a terrible person, but something about "he's been feeling down since his mom went to colonize a planet" made me laugh -- utterances only the Miller family could make!
I definitely appreciate the transparency about Sirio and Florian being cousins -- I'll admit I thought they were super cute together during their little hug. In any case their relationship is very sweet, and I'm glad they have each other for support. Them choosing to wear hats together, even when the other people who care for them were skeptical of the decision, just goes to show how other people may not understand their unique circumstance and how it makes them feel.
As a side note, I love all the looks of this generation's little gang of teenagers!
Also, your science makes perfect sense to me (the person who knows little to none about astrophysics or energy conversion), so I think you're good on that front!
Comments
It's kind of sad seeing Cassy and Venus disagreeing about the urgency and importance of Arizhel's predictions. But they always have been very different in their ways of thinking, so I'm not totally surprised.
Toq and Steve both getting older (well, I suppose they all are), but the first ones to reach that age in this group. And they all seemed so young just a moment ago.
The conversation with Antaan was interesting. Cassy's analysis that the main variable making the situation (apparently or actually) hopeless is humans taking too long to act is pretty much right, I think. Interesting that Antaan (who claims to also have analyzed the calculations) is surprised by that statement. There are some pretty "close to real world" themes happening in this story.
However, since I am always most focused on the characters rather than the themes, I am now extremely curious about Arizhel and under what circumstances she ended up having a kid.
@SnowBnuuy
The response to Arizhel speech is indeed the kind of thing we see quite often also IRL, people definitively don't take seriously threats that don't involve themselves here and now.
As for Antaan instead, I wouldn't exclude the hypothesis that he actually has fun by being cryptic either XD
@GlacierSnow
And yes, Toq and Steve are elders now. Toq turned adult in the period he went missing, while Steve soon after Halley was born (if I'm not mistaken). This mostly tells that there can't be much left before the end of the generation, isn't it?
As for the conversation instead, I would say that Antaan (just like Arizhel and the other ancient sixamians) has so much experience with space travel and so little with relations with other countries to actually consider finding another planet as the easiest option. His analysis of that model (which, most likely, was a list of boring parameters) was probably based on a quite different viewpoint as well.
This is indeed an attempt to bring in another big "real world" theme into the story, even if it will take a while before being really evident...
The circumstances under which Florian was born are totally out of my understanding as well, in the following there will be more details about that particular family but I don't plan to make a flashback chapter from their POV (that would be tremendously demanding, as the underlying dynamics would be more difficult than the one behind Toq's chapters...)
Forum Thread - Blog Chapter Selection
It can be hard to do that kind of thing without being preachy or out of character somehow. You do it so well in your story.
This actually is what I was attempting to express, but I was tried when I wrote my comment and it didn't come out quite right.
@DeidreMahariel
Also, the climate change crisis is a big topic at my job, in this kind of setting it was hard not to think about it for me.
Back to the story, Cassy seems very confident, isn't it? In the next few chapters it will definitively be interesting to see if she is rightfully so, or just overconfident...
@mightysprite
They both seem to believe that it is possible to find a solution in time, though.
Also, I keep having the impression that, with that kind of dialogue, I often struggle to pass the right tone for the various characters in English. The fact that this time I'm translating something originally written in another language just makes it worse. In Italian we are so much more straightforward when talking to each other, and from the outside this is sometimes interpreted as being more aggressive than intended. This probably mostly applies to characters like Venus, I think.
Getting the dialogue tone right is often harder than grammar for me, be patient :P
I like the scene, whether I interpreted it the way you intended or not.
Getting "tone" right in writing is difficult, even for native speakers of English. So much meaning and intent in English is conveyed with emphasis, tone of voice, body language, and face expressions. Writing the words down instead of saying them out loud, all of that is lost. It's very tricky getting the words of a story dialogue to carry the same meaning as all the non-word stuff would carry in a spoken conversation.
Readers also bring their own personal experiences when they read the story. Those experiences affect how they respond to things in the story, probably more than how the story is actually written. I've already had several instances of my readers reacting to scenes or characters I wrote completely differently than how I intended, and also completely differently than how my test readers had reacted. In some cases the reader reactions have taken me completely by surprise. Because readers all have their own different emotions. I think this is pretty normal, though, and it's likely to happen no matter how good of a writer you are.
I think you are doing a fantastic job of translating your story. I can imagine it feels frustrating at times that you had expressed something more clearly in Italian, and the translation feels less accurate to you. I have had a similar feeling when I speak/write Spanish. I've actually attempted to write stories in Spanish (especially back when I was living in Spain and my Spanish ability was closer to fluent than it is now) but I got very frustrated with how limited I felt compared to writing a story in English. I eventually lost interest in trying to do it. I'm impressed that you are sticking with it, and I really love your story a lot. Since I don't speak Italian, I am glad you have put in the time to translate it, because I would definitely be missing out on a fun story if you hadn't.
While on the subject (sorry if this question or some variation has been asked before!!), I've been curious for a while -- Writing a story around a legacy challenge requires quite a bit of improvisation, and you already know your story, the plotlines and their aftermaths, quite a bit ahead of the English translated version. Do you ever change or revise aspects of the story while you're translating? Or do you try to remain very faithful to your original meanings?
Forum Thread - Blog Chapter Selection
@GlacierSnow
Also, I didn't know you lived in Spain, that's cool! And I can also see why attempting to write simlit in Spanish could have been quite frustrating... Ten times the effort you would need to write the text in your language and you still obtain a worst result, isn't it?
I actually decided to make the effort for two main reasons: i) Italian is not a very popular language at an international level, which means that the online communities are quite limited. In my knowledge, there isn't a single active forum in Italian with active simlit users left (some of them moved to Instagram, but I don't like that format); ii) I have to write texts in English all the time for work anyway, so this could actually be a useful exercise for me.
I didn't manage to translate a few jokes the way I meant, but for the rest (most of) the text of this legacy is quite simple also in the original form, so it is actually quite feasible for me to keep going with this translation. Afterwards I will probably try to start a new project directly in English, I like the community in here and I plan to stick in here for a while...
@DeidreMahariel
As for changing sections of the legacy instead... Uhm, so that every single event always connects with the following part, I cannot completely change a part without replaying everything that happened afterwards. In the translation I mostly decided to change a few names of the secondary characters (most of the sims generated in my game have names like Giovanni, Sofia, Chiara, Marta, Matteo etc... and keeping so many Italian sounding names in an English text would sound too much like a telenovela to me), and then I decided to add a few scenes (if not chapters) to make certain events and choices more meaningful and also understandable. For example I added a few scenes in Gen 1 about Luna and her friends discovering about the Earth conquer plan, in Gen 4 to show a bit better now Luke and Misty got closer, and now in Gen 5 with the Toq's POV chapters.
In the original chapters I'm midway through Gen 10, so I know already most of what is going to happen already. With the original chapters I really write each update without really knowing what is going to happen next (at most I can have vague ideas), but now that I know instead I definitively modify a bit some dialogues to foreshadow a bit more about the following. I think that in this revised way the story should flow a bit better, but I would not say that I'm really changing its meaning to a deep level.
If I really wanted to analyse the story I would definitively find plotholes and "not really smart choices from the characters", but I never decided to remake several chapters just to solve the problem. If it was a free story I probably would have, but with a legacy I think that part of the charm is also in following the sims' "logic".
There is quite a lot going on this time... Quite a lot of screentime for Sirio, as well.
I think I had some comments I as I was reading, but then I read your final note about Sirio and Florian being cousins, and my mind just went blank.
Actually, the bit about Florian's memory being wiped by Arizhel is very interesting, and concerning. What could she possibly have felt needed to be erased?
Teleportation to mine a star!
Actually, Sirio hugs others quite often for many different reasons, but at least with his empathy he should be able to spot whether he's approaching any boundary quite quickly...
Btw, an explanation about why some of Florian's memories have been erased really sounds like an important point to address in the next few chapters, isn't it?
As well as the feasibility of using teleportation for mining purposes, of course XD
Cassy's reasoning here was literally: "Well, if we can't reach that star, let's make the star reach us instead." Totally plausible, isn't it? XD
I definitely appreciate the transparency about Sirio and Florian being cousins -- I'll admit I thought they were super cute together during their little hug.
As a side note, I love all the looks of this generation's little gang of teenagers!
Also, your science makes perfect sense to me (the person who knows little to none about astrophysics or energy conversion), so I think you're good on that front!
Forum Thread - Blog Chapter Selection