I don't see butthurt. I see honesty. Tags you can reply to? That's well-written. Tags with introspection that gives the other player nothing to go off of for their character's reply? That is not good writing, prose or brackets! Unless I'm tagging with a character who's actually reading others' minds, I don't care for rambly introspection that doesn't give me anything else to go off of either!
The point is, if you take good writing and just delete the brackets, and put quotation marks around the dialog instead? That is called prose. It works just fine. Past tense, present tense, prose can be either!
The question here is over presentation, like the smalltext nonsense, or punctuation, brackets versus quotation marks. That is the only real defining difference between the two styles, in my experience.
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The point is, if you take good writing and just delete the brackets, and put quotation marks around the dialog instead? That is called prose. It works just fine. Past tense, present tense, prose can be either!
The question here is over presentation, like the smalltext nonsense, or punctuation, brackets versus quotation marks. That is the only real defining difference between the two styles, in my experience.