Prequel (webcomic)/YMMV

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• Broken Base/Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Katia's constant losses and fall-backs have lead readers to stop following the series, unsatisfied with the slow progress of the story. The ones who stick around to voice their objections end up derided by remaining readers for whining that the story hasn't gone exactly the way they'd hoped and cluttering the command submission thread with unhelpful complaints.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: Katia's depression and problems are much closer to real life than many common fictional portrayals. Just because things have been going decent doesn't mean she doesn't still have problems.
• Crazy Awesome: Asotil.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome/Crowning Music of Awesome: Asotil's entrance.
  • The full song. You're welcome.
  • After worrying about what Katia would do after this cliffhanger update, more than one reader admitted to cheering out loud at what happened next.
• Completely Missing the Point: Some people think that audience suggestions should qualify as absolute commands that Katia must follow unquestionably. Others believe that the audience is there to give Katia advice and to steer the story by offering her suggestions and encouragement that she may or may not accept depending on her current character and situation. Kazerad's past use of the audience's input suggests the latter.
• Deus Angst Machina: Sometimes it seems not just that Failure Is the Only Option, but suffering is the only option.
• Fandom Nickname: "Adventures in Making a Cat Cry", "The Sad Cat Chronicles", and so on.
• Growing the Beard: Once it starts developing longer chains of updates and separates itself from MS Paint Adventures in style a bit, it gets noticeably better in quality.
• Manipulative Bitch: Sigrid.
• Memetic Mutation: Just about everything Asotil does.
  • "Sometimes, criminals are dogs." "True Justice is that lighty beacon of light in a world of prejudice and disorder, where not even the innocent are safe."
• Moral Event Horizon: Gro-Upp at first seems Affably Evil at worst, or even a sort of cheerfully amoral Punch Clock Villain. Then he slaughters Dmitri for mentioning a Noodle Incident. As bad as that already seems (Dmitri was probably an Anti-Villain at the worst), it seems far worse from a reader perspective of denying Katia another potential friend and mentor.
  • To be fair, Gro-Upp had just killed Dmitri's friend and was probably planning on killing him anyways.
  • Sigrid tricking Katia, taking all of her belongings, and denying her ice cream.
• Reset Button: Often, leading to Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy.
• Tear Jerker: For Katia at least; just about anything.
  • Perhaps most striking after the Mages Guild Incident. After Katia has been robbed blind of all her possessions, including a letter she needed to deliver to Quillweave, she decides to retrieve an earlier copy of the letter from a waste barrel on the other side of town. Then the rain starts. After a momentary Heroic Blue Screen of Death, she sprints across the city, pursued by hateful reader comments about her worthlessness and inability to succeed. She literally tackles the barrel in her haste and reaches inside...to draw out a damp piece of paper that falls apart in her hands.
• Wangst: The various Deus Angst Machina, Failure Is the Only Option, and so on mentioned elsewhere can take Katia's various hardships from sad to tiresome.
• The Woobie: Katia exemplifies this. The mileage probably won't vary much on this point, since she is designed to be seen as either that or a Chew Toy... (The advertising sig-banner for the story contains the tag lines "Making a Cat Cry: The Adventure" and "Everything is [...] Trying to Make You Miserable".)
  • It's possible for it to vary, especially when the author seem perfectly happy to make Katia suffer in accordance with the most self-destructive of the submitted commands. In some cases this apparent philosophy of Failure Is the Only Option can turn the woobiness into Wangst.

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