User blog comment:Gideoncrawle/LTDI Update: Character Theme Songs and a Major Milestone/@comment-5424252-20160314002144/@comment-1874924-20160314061201

It's never too late for new readers, but the sooner you start, the more influence your reviews can potentially have. The next chapter may or may not reach the "halftime show", which is the eating challenge (canonically "Brunch of Disgustingness", although I call it "The Tale of Disordered Eating").

The spotlight shifts from time to time, as it must with such a large cast, but it won't be hard to figure out who the mains are. (Group scenes do tend to have an "everyone gets their turn" flavor so certain supporting characters don't become too minor.) Using how often characters are mentioned by name as a reasonable proxy for screen time, the Eagles (nee Gophers) consistently get about 60 percent of the screen time, not counting reps for staff characters such as Chris. This is because the Eagles are a more fractious group than the Muskies (nee Bass) and so have most of the conflicts, as per canon.

The key things you should know before reading are:


 * 1) LTDI's premise is, "what if TDI had been played for drama instead of laughs?" The result is something like and yet unlike the original. (For example, back in 2011 I previewed my verson of Heather and Leshawna's quarrel on the cliff to illustrate how minor changes to the scene could create a major difference in tone.) Unlike many "TDI My Way" stories, LTDI is neither intended nor expected to "improve" the original, so readers who judge it against that standard may be disappointed.
 * 2) LTDI is stylistically quite different from most competition stories. For example, chapters end with cliffhangers, not eliminations, because The 1,001 Nights is LTDI's structural model. To date, the story is averaging about 1.5 chapters per episode, but there is no fixed ratio. Also, unspoken thoughts largely replace the standard confessional spots for the sake of smoother narrative flow, resulting in a True Omniscient POV where the reader can get inside everyone's heads.