a story about things that start with n
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omg! hi!hi.
I saw your fic posted in an updates thread a few weeks back. I don't really have any critical feedback or anything, as I haven't been reading much fiction and also struggle to elucidate my thoughts. (and yet, in hindsight, this may be the most expressive I may be.)
I just wanted to gush about chapters 1 and 2, 'nominal' and 'notorious'. The structure, the flowing pacing, the descriptive similes, the grave atmosphere of what I've read so far--that's what I'm gushing about, in as many words. Everyone is connected and rending each other apart. And Vaselva and Wave are so vibrantly alive.
hey! I really appreciate you taking the time to review things, haha. Absolutely no rush; I sorta got the feeling that this wasn't going to be most people's cup of tea anyway.Okay, I am actually reading this. But, stuff's been a thing. I was going to drop it all at once, but I may as well drop this for now.
Well knowing you, not surprised we're opening with a BAD END here, although how bad it is in the end remains to be seen.
it's true, but is emboar really any better? Samurott is probably the only redeemable Unova starter, fite me.- Of course that's why Hilda lost. She chose the second-worst if not worst starter in the entire series.
yes rip, had to piss off the FFN people somehow!- What the heck second person???
lol- If only Serperior really was a Dragon. Then it'd suck less.
I don't really know how to deal with canon Ghetsis' personality in a more serious story--he's so cartoonishly evil that it's impossible to put him anywhere, so I write him out as early as I can lol.- Interesting conversations here that are implying Ghetsis may be a nonfactor.
It really is a good quote!- Shoutouts to the pursuing your dreams bit.
nahhhhh everything is FINE she is FINE this is FINE- Man this Serperior is really messed up.
thank you for stopping by! I appreciate itA solid start. Or end, as it were. I'll read more after the big rush now that I'm not busy and/or delirious from pain and/or antibiotics.
Entirely valid here. Fwiw most people don't exercise that restraint on this story so at this point I'm very amenable to debating the weird nuances, but I respect if you don't want that and I appreciate that you took the time to point out the bits beyond that. I do agree that under fanfic rules I have a lot more flexibility to set up the rules of the world as I see fit and then debate under them, so it does create a really uneven discussion field.I read up to Chapter iii. I had intended to read all of it, but for complex reasons I'll try to unpack, I ended up stopping there. The question I found myself asking was "How do I go about reviewing this?". What I'm reading here really is a political story. The inevitable consequence of this is that so much of what I could say becomes me debating your point. While I do appreciate that you explicitly accept reviews of that nature, personally, I rarely engage in political debates online for a reason. I just don't feel comfortable giving a review like that.
This one is definitely a stylistic choice I've gotten a lot of pushback on, and at some point it's one that I think either works for a reader or really doesn't. It's confusing and throws the reader into a lot of things at once with no context--which, in a sense, was the point, since that's usually how we're exposed to problems irl. Primarily this is a story about why things happen and not what happens; it follows the plot of BW more or less (at least more closely than any of my other adaptive work does) and I don't expect to shock and awe any readers by revealing that the protagonist summons the big dragon and N summons the other big dragon. The motivations for getting there are what I focused on reframing here, and as such that's what I try to use to create tension. But "I made the story difficult to read as a stylistic choice" isn't really an airtight justification and I won't pretend it is.First point is that going backwards in time doesn't do this story much good. It's like making the argument in reverse - we have to sit through the conclusions that N and Ghetsis come to before we actually see any potential justification for that. It's a bit like the experience of reading 1984. It's not fun to read, but then it's not meant to be. But it does make it hard work to keep going through it.
This one is fair, and I imagine ties into the first problem at its root--creating tension with a foregone conclusion, trying to set up emotional stakes for a climax and then enact them in a single chapter. It's a fraught line and it's landed well for some people and not others; I've since trimmed down some of the more rambly bits but likely not in a significant enough way to change this observation.Second point is I thought these chapters have a strong tendency towards rambling. Chapter i does this most clearly. It's mostly a long conversation where neither side really listens to the other or says plainly what they mean, interspersed with the narrator fearing it's going to explode any second. And it doesn't. You're trying to maintain a taut tension over the better part of 4,000 words. It comes down to "less is more", I think.
Likewise here, I agree but also agree knowing this is the hill I chose to die on. It's pointedly xenofic and each narrator picks apart at a problem--for example, I'd sum up the second chapter's conflict who gets to watch vs who has to watch, so the reader making that realization was almost part of the intended point there? But again, "I stylized it to be illegible on purpose" is a bold stance to take and I'm not going to pretend that I'm galaxy-brained enough to consistently pull it off successfully. A reader of mine on a different site did suggest putting little icons for each chapter's narrator which I think is quite cute and also helps with this confusion a bit without sacrificing narrative, so that's the best I can do on this front.Third point is you could afford to be more explicit at times. The narrative regularly becomes confusing, not because of the chronology, but because you're so caught up in the point of view that you forget the story's being read by a human. Chapter ii starts off confusingly because it takes a while for us to realise that the narrator isn't in the battle, but is filming it. I couldn't tell what species everyone was in iii until you told me. The story's already hard-going - at best you're breaking the immersion while I try to parse it out, at worst it becomes frustrating.