I want to poke and prod at Pursuing My True Self more, and was planning on consolidating it into one spot. Currently, it's in ~3 forms.
First version are the snippets in the thread. Version two is the snippets from the thread pasted into a file in chronological order (minus the teaser snippet and time skip snippet), made because I couldn't find my local file at the time I was writing the latest snippet.
Version 3 is my original local file, that was an attempt to break up the infodump scene by spreading between all the other scenes. It's basically, start scene, beginning of the Hokage convo through the appearance of the "playing card," Shadow-Ino scene, back to the Hokage convo through the reveal regarding the Sage of the Six Paths and 'Before', Naruto getting picked up by Inoichi, finish Hokage convo, latest snippet(, teaser snippet, timeskip snippet).
If I continued expanding on this, what would the preferred consolidated state be? Version 2 or version 3? I honestly dislike version 3 for the amount of flashback/scene switching/whatever and figure that it'd likely confuse the reader more than any problems that having an infodump scene would give.
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I have in mind the rest of this "arc." We have 2 more people (should be able to guess the two based on fic to date and that teaser snippet) to go dungeoneering in their mindscape, plus some aggressive information gathering, plot regarding plots (the Hokage convo involves a plot point for this~), possible show-down with a Big Bad, arc end, aftermath stuff. I'm figuring ~6 months from the starting scene to end of arc.
Alternately, I was thinking: one last snippet setting up some stuff, then skip forward a year or two for the rest of the arc. But that would likely leave Sakura as coma-girl that entire time -- though I might have an idea as how to swing it without her being in a coma all that time -- and I'm pretty sure she'd never graduate on schedule with that. ... Though that could be a workable change in events. Will have to ponder it. Suggestions as to which option to take?
I have no idea what arc would come next to cover from graduation up to a time skip (wherein Naruto goes off with Jiraiya for training -- mostly further in seals rather than Kyuubi chakra drawing and what not), though the idea of defeating a curse seal via Persona mindscape dungeoneering is intriguing.
My mental image of Anko's mindscape is a bright, cheerful, sugary sweet tea house with lovely feminine touches everywhere including uncountable numbers of dismembered Shadow bits which are arrayed in an aesthetically and feng shui pleasing manner and only adds to the bright and cheerful and lovely atmosphere and appearance. Just in case anyone was wondering.
(And for those wondering what TOKA was in that snippet... it's an 'acronym' (in the same way ANBU is an acronym) based on the Japanese name of a
group from Persona 3 -
tokubetsu kagai
katsudou-bu. Interestingly, among the definitions for 'toka' appears to be 'river crossing' and 'in the capital' according to dicts.info, and doing toka as a long 'o' gets definitions like 'lamplight'.)