I'll be honest, I usually don't rate either. A lot of times if I don't like a story it's because it simply wasn't written for me. For example, I hate reading high fantasy. I love watching it, but the stilted language people tend to take on in order to convey the setting is just frustrating for me to read. There are a handful of high fantasy threads here, and I just avoid them and acknowledge that other people see something in them that I can't.
I don't get that feeling from Passive's branches. It's not a genre or style issue, it's that Passive has come up with a concept without bothering to think of a story. You know in Star Trek, towards the end of the episode where they say something like "what we need to do is exchange the plasma signature of the warp coils while distributing exhaust through the Jeffries tubes so that the biocells will cycle" and someone else goes "like a humanoid body generating a fever to fight an infection!"? Imagine that dialog was the entire episode. It's writing for the self, writing to feel important, because look at this complicated thing I wrote, instead of writing for an audience.
I'm not looking for great writing on FB. But I am looking for something that was written for others. Passive's branches tend to get 4's from me because they don't pass that smell test. And that makes them frankly boring.
I'll contrast with another writer who has surprised me: sonnyjimjr's earlier episodes would probably have been rated a 6 if I'd rated them. While the technical "writing" aspects were iffy, his branches were always about telling a story, even if they stumbled during that process. However, he's improved greatly, and at this point I'd give most of his branches solid 8's, sometimes even 9's.
The Guest and Anonymous 51 both tend to write stubs a lot, which are sometimes necessary but can't really be rated. When they do write more in-depth, they both tend to be strong 9's, and sometimes 10's.
Burke Rakers is an example of an author who writes solid 10's in my opinion. Even when the branch is disgusting, it's somehow disgustingly beautiful. Shout out to that episode where Karyn is a Republican who's into scatology for some reason?
I don't know. I'm going back and checking out more of Passive's older posts as I write this, and the more I read, the more I'm surprised any of them are rated above a 5. Part of me suspects that Passive has been doing precisely what they have accused others of, and created multiple accounts to rate stories with 10's to artificially inflate scores. But who knows. I'm not gonna lose any sleep over it, myself.
