Love Letter -Poll Game Comic

14/2/2023

Love Letter -Poll Game Comic

"It is Valentine’s Day, and seeing all the lovey-dovey couples, and that everyone who is interested in any sort of dating is already with someone, has Lance feeling down."

Love Letter is a fan comic based on the animated show Voltron: Legendary Defender (DreamWorks Animation Television, World Events Productions, Studio Mir, Netflix), created as a "democratically played visual novel" or "collective choose your own adventure" with the help of a very specific flowchart, social media polls, and fans of Klance (colloquial name of the relationship between the characters Lance and Keith) voting for their favourite outcome in the span of eight weeks.

I constructed the flowchart for the story before starting the game, outlining +20 possible routes. With every new update, I put up a poll on Tumblr with a question and two possible options for the readers to pick in order to decide what the next part would be.

The route that was chosen at the end had a total of 41 pages across 12 parts. Each of the 11 polls required ran for 24 hours on my Tumblr blog, where I posted the first part of the comic on February 14th and the last part on April 5th.

The Comic

My goal was to create a comic with a story that would be developed collectively. The challenge was to keep the characters and plot consistent, even when I didn't know exactly what would happen in the story or how it would happen.

The entertainment stemmed out of how many people came together to create something unique. I hope that they felt at least a little responsible for how the comic turned out.

The intrigue of which outcome was going to win kept both the readers and me engaged. As a storyteller, giving some of the narrative power to the readers left me experiencing the story in its own way. Judging by the fans' comments, they were absolutely hooked throughout the process, rooting for their favourite outcome every update, and even campaigning among friends to vote for their option of choice!

I published the comic in PDF format for free. After all, it was created by a fan with the help of other fans, and for the fandom. It is a transformative fan work, not associated or endorsed by the IP holders.

The Polls

Since the moment polls were introduced to Tumblr, I thought about how much people like to click a button to vote on anything--even more considering that they can do so anonymously—and how a feature like this can make an entire group participate freely in a coordinated project.

I’ve been creating fan comics in the Voltron: Legendary Defender fandom for years now, and I know that the fans of Klance in particular are very active on social media. Having the comic revolve around a popular event like the American Valentine’s Day also responds to the romantic inclination of this fandom.

Tumblr allows users to have polls active for a set time, after which they close and don't admit any more votes. Also, people can reblog the post with the poll, so it gets an even larger reach on the platform. Having these factors in mind, I planned the possible paths and endings of the story, but left the decisions of how to get there completely up to the votes.

With the idea of making this poll game work, be dynamic and entertaining, I set some rules for me and the participants.

Each new part has a poll about a question or reaction from the main character.
Polls lasted 24 hours from the moment I posted them.
I posted them between 4 PM and 7 PM EST.
I waited until the poll ended completely, even if the results were very clear, and updated the comic at some point during the next few days, which gave me time to draw.

This is how the poll results guided the flowchart and how it reflected in the comic:

PART 5 has Lance finding Keith, the other main character
POLL #5 has people decide what is Lance's reaction
The public chose "Lying"
PART 6 reflects that answer and leads to the specific outcome of Keith leaving angrily
POLL # 6 gives the readers the option to choose how Lance reacts

Segment of the flowchart that corresponds to parts 5 and 6 of the comic

The results for each poll:

The post on social media can be found here

The Flowchart

To create this one, I started with pen and paper to lay out the story. The structure of the flowchart was simple enough, I just used the formula: “If they choose _____, then _____ happens, so the next action will either be _____ or _____.” However, there's an issue with this framework, which is that it grows exponentially, putting me at risk of getting overwhelmed by having too many possible outcomes. To solve this problem, I made paths converge until there were only two options for the ending.

That the story would always end a certain way despite the choices of the audience wasn't detrimental to the game, as the journey of creating the story was what made the story happen in the first place. That was the fun of it for me! The whole point was that both routes behind each poll were equally plausible. If the audience chose one thing or the other, I was the one who had to justify it in the story via characterization, and this was a key element that guided me when planning through the flowchart.

The shortest route was about 9 parts and the longest was about 14. The readers didn’t choose either of them.

At the end, formulating the questions was the biggest challenge, since I didn’t want to reveal how the story would go, give the impression that one of the answers was the "correct one," or favour one option over the other due to personal bias.

HERE IS THE FLOWCHART ITSELF in its full glory!

Possible Routes

The big challenge of running a comic/game in real time like this is that I didn’t have the benefit of time to plan many steps ahead. Still, while structuring it, I set up the different outcomes clearly from a couple of rough sketches and the dedicated flowchart.

Some readers were very interested in how distinct the different outcomes were, mostly because I threw curveballs at them in the polls whenever possible. The fact that the comic was developed within an established fandom that knows the characters from the original source, and that has a series of consensus about them and the story, was an asset I could play with. We shared a basic knowledge and some preconceptions, and I had insight about what the audience like to see in fan stories, so I could balance that with what I found more entertaining to show them.