Yes...at last! FREEDOM!!

Surprised? I suppose I wouldn't be if you were.

Of course, you are are probably tired of seeing all these announcements on people's journals about how the group quit, though I'll make one too anyway, just to reduce the amount of people who'd ask me about it.

See, when I first joined PMD-E, it was all the way back in April of 2011 when I was figuring my way around the group system of dA and happened to see it advertised in some other PMD group's journal. (And saw a friend join it.) I had no idea what the heck it was at the time, or even the fact that it was considered an "RP group" (maybe it wasn't...IDK), but the whole interactive aspect of it was fascinating, so I joined with Team Pecha just for kicks and giggles to test out what it was like, and to see just how hard it would be when it came to "prizes". Turned out to be way harder than I expected, but what do you expect with a group that had like 1,200 members from the get-go? It still seemed like something I wanted to try, though, since I was so bored that it wasn't like I had anything better to do. Also made Team Paion and Team Nighty Knights shortly afterward just to test out some new 5th gen Pokemon and just in case the Rescuers and Rogues had fun things too.

It was great fun while I was in there, especially in its first year, when they released Missions 1-5, with me making major comics per mission as fast as I could. Team Pecha even won first place in Missions 3 and 4, and I got a prize that I still use as my desktop background to this day:

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The second year was alright, but the plot became much, much slower. On the bright side, I was able to do three comics for Mission 6 and think of other cool plots that summer...though when fall came, that's when things started to go downhill...

I wasn't particularly thrilled with how I was unable to really focus on my coursework because of the insane amount of work Mission 7 required, and was even less pleased with the direction the story took in Mission 8 AND how it happened at the same time as my spring semester (as did a lot of other people's, I'm sure). Furthermore, the past two years, I'd been perfectly comfortable writing for child characters and didn't want to have anything to do with adult characters, but then that started to change. So I wished that I could just drift away and quit then and there, and the perfect opportunity came when Pokemon-of-Avalon started up. Starting off with a single character made me realize just how many unnecessary characters and how much trouble the whole "team" format was giving me.

I suppose that was when I actually quit, so the fact that the group itself finally quit is actually good news to me since that means that now I won't feel pressured into doing any more missions. Plus, I'd made it my goal that I wanted Team Pecha to participate in every mission and event, and now I have~!

So what do I do now? Simple. Rallen and Jody and In the Shadow of the Empress, of course! I actually was FINALLY able to figure out the tricky middle bit of that latter story thanks to the help of a friend. The entire story is now typed up, but since it's a prose-with-picture sort of deal that's being collabed on with said friend, you'll just have to wait and see~. I'll be working on Rallen and Jody at the same time, too, and I actually finally thought of what Team Pecha and Paion can do after the guilds' closures. You'd have to wait until the end of that story to fully understand their reasons for doing so, however. And then after that? Short little original comics~! About time I finally started drawing out some works of my own creation, anyway. This was all good practice, though.

Looking back on it now, PMD-Explorers had both benefits and drawbacks:

I got to meet tons of new people who are now my friends even to this day~.
I learned how in-depth characters of mine could become, and more importantly, how to be more character-oriented than plot oriented, as because you weren't allowed to come up with the basic scenarios, that was pretty important.

I'm getting very comfortable with drawing directly into the computer, as opposed to drawing on paper first and scanning it in after that for lines and coloring.

A ton of more watchers, I guess...

Urgh. Collabs. They could be fun, but they could also be SUCH. A. NIGHTMARE. And it really doesn't help that my drawing speed is almost as fast as PK's, which seems to be a very rare exception among even a lot of the artists here. I really felt left out and isolated that I'd always be the one who'd start on comics right away and finish them like two or more weeks way ahead of deadlines while everyone else waited until the last minute. Had to learn a harsh lesson that people who are friends don't always make for the best collab partners, just like PK and Marl learned.

So many more random people bugging me. Guess it's inevitable, though, but fame really is pointless if I'm not getting paid for it...which I'm not, so far, since no one commissions me. (Except for like one person so far.) Hopefully, the fact that I'm in lower-profile groups should ease up on that. 

Most importantly, however, is that I've been finding that even after all this time, when I make my own storylines, those are still far superior compared to the storylines I make in response to group prompts, though at least in Pokemon-of-Avalon, I've been able to successfully weave them into the background stories of my characters instead of making my characters (literal) slaves to said prompts like back then. Part of the reason may be scope: I'm limited to just a short story when it comes to missions, whereas with my own stories, I can make really long epics in which I know everything that happens ahead of time. One of the things I really hated the most in PMD-E was not being able to know what would happen in the storyline ahead of time, and while the same may be true in PoA, at least it's to a far lesser extent. 

So brace yourself for slam-dunk storylines (that I thought both of since two summers ago) and more PoA stuff, because that's really the best and most relaxing, at my own pace things for me to work on as I do my best during this final year of college.