“fighting the medium” is an excellent phrase! Never played Firewatch, though I have made some stumbling attempts at creative writing, and it’s made me realize that certain things are very difficult to convey organically in words. How do you get across to a first time reader that an alien isn’t actually shrugging or winking or pointing with an index finger, but expressing the same thing through non human body language? And then how do you do it over and over and over again, because when posting stories to a forum you have to assume this is everyone’s first time reading.

In a visual medium like a webcomic, it’s super simple to convey it through a combo of dialogue and visuals. Even the nature of the story itself has to fit the medium. With a comic, people expect short self-contained scenes or character interactions that may or may not connect to form a story arc. This is what I like to write about, little snippets that serve to build the world, just a few lines of dialogue or a paragraph describing a scene, but that’s not what people expect from prose. They want meatier stuff.

Makes me wonder what would be impossible to express altogether in one medium vs another.