Should I put it in or scrap it?

[cdo947214]

Quite a while back, before all the controversy with The Frontier and the "sex with lizards" thing, I wrote some lines of dialogue for my Fallout 4 mod that I have yet to put in. I was wondering whether or not to scrap it. The conversation goes as follows...

 

ALLISON: This from the guy who has flashbacks of a "previous life"?

RALPH: Hey, there were freaking dragons everywhere. I'm sitting in a bar. The bartender is a freaking lizard. I've got this woman over in the corner with warpaint on her face repeatedly yammering about her "hunting expeditions". She's trying to convince me to search a freaking trap filled ruin for her lost sword. I've got the freaking...

ALLISON: *messing with Ralph* You had sex with her, didn't you?

MAJOR SHEELY: *laughs* Who? The woman or the lizard?

ALLISON: *laughs*

RALPH: Ahh, the hell with you all.

[SKKmods]

Totally depends why you are doing it. If its totally for your own pleasure you do you.

 

If its to avoid reddit and youtube hate, best make it 100% anodyne and politically correct. No references to gender, race, sex, age, Fallout lore, nationality, children, religion, politics, cats or well anything at all so it will be safely ignored by the neck beards and crazies. OFC if you get more than ~10K uniques then you will start to get axe murderers and crazy hate in the audience anyway, but that's just the unavoidable bellcurve of inclusivity.

[VIitS]

From my (limited) understanding, the lizards thing was not the biggest complaint people had. And even if it was, there is a difference between having it be something you can have your character do, and crass humor of people making fun of someone else. And since it is a reference to a specific character from Skyrim, anyone complaining about it should be ignored.

 

Honestly, if anyone freaks out about the dialogue you quoted, the proper response is to roll your eyes and ignore them, they are not going to manage to get significant outrage stirred up over something like that.

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

Wait, what?

 

This is the FO4 CK forum, right?

What is all of this "skyrim" stuff doing here (dragons, "lizards", ...)?

 

 

I am confused ...

 

But to answer the question: Do what you want!

I am personally working on some mods that I would never publish, because they are just for "personal use" and they would be very much "frowned upon", if you know what I mean ...

 

Just keep in mind that if you publish something, everybody in the entire world can see it and talk s#*! about it.

If you want to avoid "conflicts", you would have to upload an empty ESP file and even then you would get hate ("this mod does not do anything")

:laugh:

[Greslin]

The Frontier melodrama didn't start with the lizard thing, and it went well beyond it. Setting aside all the crazy things that came out, it basically came down to the Frontier dev team making themselves a giant target (long dev time, hype, a bit of audience antagonism, etc.) and other people taking shots at it. Few mods are ever going to have that combination of high profile, high expectation, weird hidden nonsense, and just flat-out unfortunate turns of events.

 

Writing-wise, the best "should I cut it" story rule I've ever heard is this: if it doesn't reveal character or advance the plot, cut it. Does this dialogue directly move the story? Does it reveal some aspect of the characters that we'll need to know in order to feel immersed in the plot?

 

If not, it serves no purpose other than you getting a kick out of it being there. Cut it. At best, it's a weird random side joke.

 

If it does serve a purpose, keep it and let your audience think whatever they want. It's your mod, not theirs.