Just a little poll (Patreon)

Hello, dear readers.

I'm not going to mince words here: I feel like I'm having a bit of an adverse relationship with the Simulacrum as of late. It's not a straight up writer's block, but close enough, and it stems from the pacing. 

Right now, we are still in this "calm before the storm" segment, and when I started this post-Elysium arc, the core concept was to have Leo be overwhelmed with all of these different events and plots going on in parallel all at once, which would cause some things to slip through his fingers until it would all add up into a big kerfuffle, leading us into the endgame of the series.

However, I might've overdone it a little, because I introduced so many plots (Valentine's day, Savir doing her thing, Mensah doing his thing, Moose and Mike doing their thing, the homunculus project, expanding on the arch-mages and the Assembly, Angie and Josh, the potential assassination plots, Percival, The Predator Moon, Tajana, her Fauns, the thing going on between Naoren and Rinne, and so on and so forth), that I'm the one starting to let things slip thought my fingers instead. I set all of these up, and I really, really want to resolve all of them... but I feel that doing so would take at least ten to twelve chapters (read: about five months of updates) of mostly characters talking and scheming without any major shift in the status quo.

Now, granted, I'm technically incentivized to do that (five months of slicey-lifey updates -> five more paychecks), but I feel that the pacing is going to suffer if I do that. As such, I would like to ask about your opinion on the matter. Should I just go with my original plan and keep the plot slow and steady, with some minor excitement (like a small Bel episode) here and there, should I increase the pace a little while letting some of the plot-threads fall to the way-side, or should I cut the Gordian Knot and trigger the arc finale early? Or alternatively, should I do the latter in a way that it shunts all these plot-threads into the future, and then dedicate an entire mini-arc (about the length of the hot-springs episode) to Leo getting serious and systematically taking all of them off his bucket list in preparation of the last arc?

Please do vote, and/or give your opinion in the comments.

Thank you for your support,

Egathentale