Grading Session for Week 246

[Rob]

Group 3 -> Group 5 -> Group 2 -> Group 1 -> Group 4 -> Group 3

Group 1 (Will): 1st/5th/7th Divisions/Quincies
Group 2 (Lil): 10th/8th Division
Group 3 (Rob): 3rd/12th Divisions
Group 4 (Nico): 4th/11th Divisions
Group 5 (Hiren): AHs/Vizards​

Grades are due October 16, 2012 @ 11:59 PM ES​

 

[Rob]

Didn't see anything from anyone of you lazy-asses, if I'm mistaken, either update that gdoc or send me a pm asap.

Ketch - 149

‘sup Ketch, let us talk Purge. You already showed me the... majority of this personal chapter and I’m glad to see you taking my advice of not italicizing every other word. Seriously.

Not much else to say, although I am kind of interested in reading more about this!

Keep it up, brah.

Guest Grader: Raph – 480

‘sup Raph, let’s talk us some Rabbit Hole and why I feel like if you’d just apply what you said to Alexis... you’d basically get my own thoughts on it as well. Simply because it started out on a high note, Arano finally got his chance to have some alone time with Rairai and then, sorry to say this, Lilith and Igasho kind of came in and ruined the fun.

Solid writing, from every single one of you – save for a few hiccups, and pretty much the RH endgame *hint*cough*cad*cough*hint*, but overall it was good writing.

Just a shame how circumstances forced you to change plans, and kind of forced Will to change plans as well. And just overall changing of plans, again.

You can take full points, for your writing was très bien.



My piece of crap: http://www.mangaden.net/forum/showthread.php?36683-Week-246-As-the-Phoenix-Reborn-I

 

[Shun]

Since Wayne didnt write anything this week, I guess i’ll grade.

And the only person to write is.. Rob.

You get 50 div bonus for still writing consistently while plot missions are still going on (really hoping they come to a close soon)

As the Phoenix Reborn I: [51/51]
Anyways, onto the actual chapter, a burning manor? Well that must suck on top of everything else in Nana’s life. Seems like she has a lot of unknown enemies lurking in wait. Also lolwut, Nana’s “father” is actually her son? Well that is certainly a twist, you might have mentioned it in a chapter before this one, idk since I have not kept up with your work as much as I would like to. *shakes fist at college apps and school* You get full marks for this, nice to see that you also mention Haresuno so I’m guessing this is a prelude to an arc that you two have going or something?

That's all I saw. If I missed anything from anyone, pm or IM me with links. Also Wayne if you see this, I'll try to get you a turn ASAP. I didn't think life would get hectic again, but it has :/ don't worry though i will get you a turn..

EDIT: scratch that, switch wasn't graded last week.

For Writing on the Wall, you get [116/117] + 100 div bonus. I really liked Amaya here, there were lots of emotions but very appropriate reactions. Even at this time, masato still haunts her which is good to see, but I hope Amaya eventually overcomes that completely. I think it would have been a bit better if her injuries and falling down and then being able to threaten someone wasnt so exaggerated but at the same time it sort of makes sense since there was no absolute way of guaranteeing that she would wake up if she were killed.

To my grader: http://www.mangaden.net/forum/showt...k-246-Failure-to-Exceed-An-Approaching-Finale

 

[K3]

GROUP FIVE GRADING​

Moony: + 100 Division Bonus

[67/67]Nakazawa Noir:
Oh lord, so many analogies.

I love this chapter. Holy hell I think I stepped back in time with this one. Great wording, great analogies, great chapter. Sorry I don't have much else to say, but I really liked this one.

Tod: + 50 Division Bonus

[54/54]The Lost, Part IV
I feel like I'm terribly out of the loop.

After getting over the brief confusion of using the name Amaya, I came to enjoy this chapter. It was definitely a transitional piece, and keeping your dialogue brief and vague generated some interest from me. One thing I'd suggest - try and keep your pacing at a steady pace. When you're moving so many things around at once it can get a bit overwhelming. Remember to slow down every now and again to give the reader a chance to put things together.

Guest Grader: Mango

[459/459]Rabbit Hole:
In spite of all my frustration with this thread, I think that things were nonetheless accomplished.

Your work in this was good, yet a bit unstable. Lilith suffered from a bit of whiplash every now and again, which rather diffused some of the tension that had gone into this collab. You kept to the pace of the collab, and your grammar and narrative flow was as excellent as ever, but I keep getting the feeling that there was a lot more that could've gone into this collab that didn't.

Raph's Links for Week 246:
The Rabbit Hole

 

[Inks]

{GROUP ONE}

1^st, 5^th, 7^th, and Q


Hello again, boys and girls! It's me.

Hopefully I got everyone who needs grading...uh...graded -- but if NOT, then plz contact either me or Will-a-by and one of us will get you.

And by get you I mean kill you. We know where you live.

They'll never find the body.


...ANYWAY!



- Will/Ky -
[620 / 635]
​

Rabbit Hole[3,670]
[180/184]
[360/368] {PM}


Two things.

"I'm here to tell you... that I am your father."

Raifuku took a few steps closer, not cracking the slightest smile at Arano's expression. "I apologize. I thought we were trading clichés."

Man, I was so going to use a trade-off almost exactly like that one in one of my Rook/Rainier chapters. Oh welll. Maybe I'll use it anyway.

As Raifuku shook his head sadly at the oft-repeated and still-erroneous accusation, the sudden crashing of the wall pulled his attention over.

Re-reading this makes me giggle to myself all over again. Just admit it Raifuku. Prometheus? All your doing. He's your pet, secretly. Bet you keep him in the back room with March when you're not using them, that way they're both occupied.

NOW. I realize that when it comes to grading you, mostly I go 'lol ur will, obvsly u get full points now gtfo'. So this time, I'm going to do a teeny, tiny bit of poking at your writing.

Just the tiniest. Because, really.

The white blade collided with feng huo lun heavily.

He jumped back, gaining better footing briefly.

In the examples above, the adverbs I highlighted...they just don't feel...necessary. They can go there, totally, they fit, sure, but I feel like they would've been implied even without actually being there. It's hard to explain. I guess, the thought I'm trying to convey is 'if you don't need an adverb to describe something – really, really need it, as in 'otherwise there's going to be a misunderstanding' – then it's best to leave it out'. Something like that. That sort of thing happens very rarely with you (almost entirely during fight-scenes, in fact – and maybe I notice them more, there, because when it comes to action 'the more succinct, the better').

Muscles straining with superhuman exertion, the blade shot forth again and again and again.

Blood splashed across the white floor.

This is probably just me – but I (in my infinite knowledge and wisdom) think those sentences could've been merged, somehow. It's purdy obvious the whole 'blood-splashing' thing is meant to be a...a...dramatic moment, yes, but ending your post on it would've given it the dramatic impact even if it wasn't separated, you know? And, for some reason, it being on its own line gave me a weird moment of dissonance where I didn't connect the blood splashing to the fact that Raifuku was attacking again and again.

Then again, I'm a bit daft.

Those are...basically the only things that jumped out at me as flow-breaking. And I was looking. From a non-overly-critical, non-technicalpoint of view, you wrote well in this thread. There was a metric ton of talking, of course...and, let's be fair, Raifuku did instigate a metric ton of talking with his ranting and talking and asking questions and whatnot. He and Sayis seem to share the habit of going on long, drawn-out, overly-dramatic speeches about everything. They could start a club, man.

If, you know, March hadn't stuck a knife in Raifu's head.


In the Beginning[2,669]

[130/133]
[260/267] {PM}

Oooh, I'm such a dirty cheater. I already knew about this little bit of drama.

For a sort of...exposition chapter, I guess you could call this (or maybe an explanation chapter), this is fairly well-written. And I make the differentiation between this writing and, say, your normal writing for Sayis or Kyu (or even Raifuku) because it really does read differently. The characters are still strong, the emotions are still clear and understandable and easy to relate to...

But until I got to Kosei's and Issei's Happy Funtimes Extravaganza, it felt like you took a couple of steps back from everything as you were writing it. It feels just a touch...impersonal, in spite of the heavy family-drama aspect of things. Like we're hearing someone re-telling the story instead of witnessing things ourselves. It's just weird.

At the beginning of the chapter, there are also a few more miscellaneous style-type errors than I find in your usual writings. The writing feels more...stilted, I guess? Just a touch more awkward? For example, this,

Only years later was the truth discovered. Aiiku, Kousei's father, sought a healer for a private matter... and regretfully discovered that he was impotent... and always had been. The hatred and suspicion nearly splintered the family apart, accusations flying in every direction, before finally the truth came out: Ekisei had indeed been an adulterer, with Keifu.

There's just something about it that...reads...poorly. Maybe it's the result of telling us what happened instead of showing us. As a summary of events, it reads...alright...but it lacks the BAM and POW of your other stuff. Then again, it'd take a lot of time to write all that out, and I can understand why you would choose to summarize it instead.

After that, though, once you get step closer to the characters again and start showing their interactions, all the stuff Issei and Kousei went through together, how they affected each other, just how close they, everything goes right back to normal (and by normal I mean 'awesome'). There's just a spot of otherness there in the middle.

This commentary makes so much sense SHUT UP.

- Ry -
[70 / 73]
+75 Div Bonus
​

Yup, Still a Still [pt.II] [1,463]
[70/73]

Jesus balls.

I think, last week, I said I didn't envy Raurer's hands at the end of the day.

At the end of two days? Fuck that.

Also, there's no way in hell that anyone reading this p-chapter will ever, ever not be able to see the dramatic mood-shift. There's not just 'a difference' between drunk!Raury and sober!Raury...they're like two entirely different personalities, separated by a ridiculous...sort of...booze buffer.

It's a little depressing, in a way, because it's easy to think of Raury as a simple, easy, always-happy-for-the-sake-of-being-happy guy. Then he sobers up some and you're like 'Oh woops, nevermind, he's just as horribly fucked up as everyone else. My bad.'

And then you go cry yourself to sleep at night over fictional characters.

And then you're me.

I guess it makes sense, though. The retard never stops drinking long enough to let himself get over his emotional hardships in a normal, healthy way, so when he's forced to go sober everything just sort of...crashes down on him all at once.

So then he drinks again to get rid of all the Sad, offers readers a first-hand example of mood whiplash, and forgets it all again. Until the next sober strike. Look at this. Look at this horrible cycle. You should be ashamed, putting your character through this.

On a critical level, by the way – this chapter seemed...a little worse than others in terms of 'disjointed, disconnected sentences'. Usually I'm all for sentence fragments to illustrate a character's stream of thought...but sometimes (and this will sound weird) it feels even more disjointed than stream of thought, and I think that has to do with missing punctuation. Yeah, you heard me. Sometimes you forget punctuation, you asshole. Look at this.

Or was it breakfast? fuck it, things to do. Finding a proper spot, he saddled his wine gourd and held the flask high. truthfully, he had no clue what was going to happen. he would have to treat this carefully. unless he wanted to prove spontaneous combustion.

Just look at it.

The confusing thing is that, because it's Raury, I'm not even sure how you could go about cleaning up his stuff. He's just...he's so...he lends himself to that sort of crazy, wild, hard-to-follow-unless-you're-drunk-too writing style, I suspect.

Oh well.

PS: “Raury do bad?” He asked no one. It took another moment or two before it sank in that he should probably do something. “Oi, shit!”

Hopping into action, Raury did a little earthbending to toss a smothering blanket of earth on the mess.

yesssssss

- CADDERS -
[225 / 234]
+75 Div Bonus
​

Rabbit Hole[2,348]
[113/117]
[225/234] {PM}


In my book, Igasho immediately gets a kudos for manhandling March throughout the thread. Still, it's a shame no one thought to get the gun from him before he shot someone with it. Oh, well.

Compared to the other characters in the thread (Raifuku, Lilith and Arano, specifically), Igasho seemed pretty content to just kick it in the back seat (with March). Don't get me wrong – he's there when he needs to be there, which is what matters...I just mean that he's mostly...observing. Listening in. Waiting to have something to do. Which, considering just how much talking the other three were doing, is probably for the best.

There was too much talking in that thread already.

Of course, once it was time to get jiggy with it, Iggy was all up in dat shit. And, man, lemme tell ya –g\his frustration at the end, when he's all 'gdi my attack it did nothing', made me feel frustrated for him.

One thing I thought I wanna point out to you, though: When referring to Iggi-bop, you tend to use descriptive nouns (the warrior, the prisoner, the former assassin, the reaper, the stoic, etcetera) in over-abundance. Now, there's nothing wrong with a little descriptive noun-ing (I, myself, love me some descriptive noun-ing)...but when they're used too often, or when too many of them are used in lieu of your character's name or a pronoun (he, him, his), it can either,

A. confuse the reader on just who you're referring to in a sentence (in those cases where you sometimes used two different descriptive nouns within heartbeats of one another), such as,

The warrior looked on, troubled at how much harm had come to the mystic - almost as if he knew it wasn't fair, considering how the prisoner seemed to fare better at that point.

or,

Somehow, the prisoner’s power was once again activated without his intentional command and he was able hear Lilith’s thoughts. In that instant, however, the warrior was surprised to hear not only the mystic’s thoughts but Raifuku’s.

Or it can,

B. make for writing that just doesn't flow as well as it could. Descriptive nouns are like...like spice, good when sprinkled throughout the work...but too much can overpower the rest of the work. Usually,I go with a pronoun if it's already obvious to whom I are referring, the character's name if it's not, and descriptive nouns if I don't know the characters name or I want to emphasize a certain aspect of the character for (like I sayed) spice.

I guess.

Additionally, there was like, one, maybe two typos in the thread, so I of course took off a billion points for each of them. You know how it is.

- Shun -
[96 / 102]
​

Failure to Exceed: An Approaching Finale[1,024]
[48/51]
[96/102] {PM}


Because,

A. I am retarded, and,

B. I am lazy,

I had little to no idea what, exactly, the circumstances surrounding this chapter were. Your descriptions and scene-setting gave me a little bit of insight (Ryoujin's chillin' with Manzo and some ballin' medics, trying to decide whether to go back to the Raifuku party or keep hangin' with his homies in Say-Ray-Tay), but that's...mostly all I have to go on.

For the most part, this seems to be a big ole' chapter of introspection. And waiting. And Ryoujin being indecisive. While there's not much content at all in terms of 'what happens to move things forward' in this p-chapter, it's a good reminder that not all the warriors are still tangled up in the middle of things on the front lines (or other front lines, or other other front lines, GDI Raifuku). Some (like Ryou) are, in a way, removed from all the craziness – or at least removed enough to have a moment to sit back and think on things. It's a good break from the PM-craziness that's been happening...without actually breaking from the whole PM plot in its entirety.

Not all character decisions are 'should I stab this with my sword...or stab it harder with my sword?', after all. Some are 'should I go stab something with my sword...or stay back and wait to see what happens?'. Some. Mostly it's the 'stab or stab harder' question though, let's be honest.

I do wish there was more to this chapter than just Ryoujin's indecisiveness (though at least he comes to a decision in the end), it reads well enough that I won't whine....more than I already have. Keep up the good work, you, and for the love of god when are these PMs going to end, never, it's never, they'll always be going forever and ever and---





FO GRADER, YO: Here are my link: Rabbit Hole

Inks OWT.

 

[lilmangoseed]

This Week's Announcements: Write more Group 2. kthnx. <3



Katie – 72 + 183 + 150 Div = 405

D’awwww. I really enjoyed this chapter. It made me smile, and I thought it was much needed after the whole depression Hamlet rendezvous in Meiro. Like Adelaide, although her healing isn't complete, I felt a small spark come back alive. That fieriness that makes Adelaide so lovable was good to see again. Unfortunately, there were a few distracting grammatical errors – things I’m sure a quick proofread would have caught. Also, Lash started to circle a bit:

“Your sense of unworthiness leads to a hopeless despair, which in turn causes you to make terrible mistakes in your vain attempt at relevance, which backfire horribly because they exist only to get someone to momentarily reflate your ego. When they backfire, some colossally, they leave you with a sense of unworthiness, which bottoms out at hopelessness and despair. Cycle after cycle. If only reincarnation were so efficient.”

I lost you at "relevance."

But anyway, I’m just nitpicking now. And I’m only nitpicking because everything else was awesome. Overall, this was a great chapter, so yay! Take the full div bonus too. And random note to you, I forgot to mention this earlier but I also bought us a collab bonus from last week’s Sapphic Support collab. I’ll be adding another 183 points (last week’s grade) to your score this week so that you can easily include it in your stats.

The Road to All Right – 72/73
150 Division Bonus
183 from Last Week’s Collab Bonus​

Berri – 326

I have to say, since I’m at a very privileged position to really know the value of March in these PMs... You. Did. Awesome. Before I learned stuff, I probably would’ve said, “Wtf, Berri? Why are you crashing in on our collabs and killing all our epic bads with your loony, immortal NPC? I know March and Sayis have the love connection going on, but really, keep that ish where it belongs.”

Noowwww I knoww. And because of that, I thought you played March’s purpose perfectly. To just be there since, well, you know... Artifacts and necklaces and collars and smthsmth. And how just being there and not doing anything is actually really characteristic of what his inevitable goal is. Oh and knives! How brilliant! You and Will, man, *knee slaps* you make a great team. So subtle. So delicately placed. And the thoughts! A lot of the times, it’s like, “Berri... This is a collaboration with two pplz. Not a collaboration just inside your character’s head." But this time, March's thoughts said a lot. With not really saying anything. And so, March just comes off as crazy. What else is new? When really, his craziness is also his closest march (see what I did there?) to sanity.

Wabbit Hole (PM) – 326/326 ​