Welcome to Doc’s substitute grades: where the points are made up and the comments don’t matter.
I don’t have much to say about any of the over 5000 words I just read. Take full points and good job.
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NAW FOR REAL THOUGH, WE IN THERE
Tis But A Flesh Wound! - Gloam
I wanna start by admitting I have the unfortunate disadvantage of not having read Ren’s previous encounters with Mister Saraf. Thus, I may have (most likely did?) missed some of the nuances that developed between them naturally.
From the get-go this piece is doing something I was guilty of not so long ago (read: last week) and that’s providing a bit of background for what’s happening. The very first thing it’s missing is an indication on Ren’s part that she was called/notified something was up beyond the narrator just flat-out repeating what’s mentioned in the dialogue. I understand that taking three setup turns just to make things ready can be tedious, though.
In the future you could possibly try using small cues to imply to the reader at least the method of communication used to get Ren’s attention – in my opinion you could do something like dropping the throwaway line “Ren flipped her phone closed” which both implies that it contains the message that pulls her away from work AND shows that she rocks a flip-phone like it’s 2004. Win/win.
Onto the meaty steak portion. For most of this piece we have a good example of a medic doing what a medic does, and there’s even evidence that Mikhael has actually tried to carry out the “Tracking” part of “Tracking & Assassination.” It’s nice to see evidence of shinigami actually doing the jobs assigned to them by their divisions.
Other than that what we’ve got here seems like a noir detective novel starring Mister Saraf with occasional assistance from a magician. This piece seemed largely directed by Dil, and that’s fair but I feel like you could’ve squeezed out more Ren. I don’t mean to suggest that every collab ever written needs to be a cinematic display of a character showcasing the very pinnacle of their core principles, nor that Ren felt generic in any way.
My main issue with a this type of piece: could Mikhael have gotten the same results of Dil had invented a Fourthie of his own, or could this have only been done with Ren specifically – as a healer and as Mikhael’s friend? I want to emphasize again that it didn’t feel like that all the way through, but it can be important to ask oneself that question.
Fourthies get invented by people injuring their characters every day, sometimes more! If it means putting more effort into a turn that was previously just a description of actions, or showcasing more of your character’s little quirks (like Ren of the Ebony!) then so be it, I say. Competition is fierce.
NOTE FOR DIL: As a Ninthie, I don’t appreciate your disingenuous assertions!! It’s not nitpicking it’s called being detail-oriented!!ELEVEN!
Death’s Unfortunate Offspring and A Complete Family – Resh and Gloam
Now instead of making separate points for the both of ya’ll, I’m going to combine the reviews for these two collabs into a section I’m renaming just after having created it
SUMMERSLAM 2014 FEATURING RESH ‘N GLOAM
And it’s not even Spring yet!
For reference I read “A Complete Family” before “Death’s Unfortunate Offspring” so that’s where I’ll start. Right off the bat I can say without a doubt that in almost half of the wordcount generated by Flesh Wound I saw twice as much Ren in Family and it’s very refreshing. Seeing Ren interact with the child she’d just saved and decided (rather quickly, more on that in a minute) to take him in really put her on display. It made her the star of the show especially towards the end.
Having said that, both Reshin and Ren seemed to adapt to parental habits really quickly. It’s not necessarily a negative thing. My issue is that Aiden isn’t directly related to either of them and I think both of you, particularly Gloam due to Ren’s decision, could have elaborated just a bit more on the transition from savior to mentor to parent.
It’s fine if a character wishes to take on a parental role for an orphaned kid, but for something that seems so emotionally impacting what we readers need are details details details. Flesh out the decision and the impact. Give more time for us to empathize with Ren’s desire to take on a maternal role. You don’t have to reach deep into her past or her every thought, but you can certainly give us more cues regarding her mindset on adopting a child.
While I’m on the topic of emotionally impacting I’d like to take a look at Mister Izukawa. There was a whole lot going on between Aiden and Ren, and if you happen to be writing for one half of that interaction I can understand if you felt too awkward or drained to give Reshin something meaningful to do each turn while writing Aiden take the spotlight.
Somehow, though, it’s gotta happen. For all that we get of Aiden, his excitement and his wanderlust, we deserve more Reshin. Even during Ren’s big emotional display the most we get is how much he’s totally not feeling that much, and how he’s “a child of the river Styx”. I can see here that Reshin is meant to be emotionally cold, but in a brief appearance prior to that point he was clearly concerned about Aiden.
The two emotional states don’t necessarily mesh. However, I won’t be a brick wall and say “pick one: robot or human being.” If you want to show that Reshin has the capacity for concern but has difficulty being moved emotionally, don’t be afraid to play it up in the background while you’ve got Aiden being all gleeful.
Since he’s so young and jovial, having Reshin either brooding all dark like or struggling internally between burgeoning concern for the child and his “river Styx” apathy would provide a very striking contrast if done correctly. There’s nothing wrong with a cold or unfeeling character as long as they’re consistent and if not, the reader is given a reason for their inconsistency.
Before moving on I’m going to address one more really important note: The Narrator. The narrator is a magical, all-seeing, all-knowing force that we all use in our third-person-perspectives. There are little quirks to every writer’s style that modify the narrator, but for the most part it serves as a (usually) unbiased perspective that describes things.
In this piece I caught numerous instances of the narrator breaking neutrality (I’m not going to name names) and taking place of what probably should have been written as the thoughts of individual characters.
Passages like “an infinite amount of times better looking” are not only a little awkwardly phrased, but could probably be either separated into thoughts or preceded by “To Aiden,” so that it’s obvious that any descriptors are attached to a character and not stated by the narrator – otherwise it’s as if the writer is stating an opinion as fact which is a little silly.
The narrator also committed a big no-no, and though it occurred more than once, one particular incident really stuck out to me.
“...Demonstrating the proper method of using the kendo, and afterwards handed the kendo back to Aiden...” – This is the cardinal sin of telling instead of showing. I understand that we’re not all kendo masters, and describing exact stances and sword techniques may not immediately come naturally.
However, stating to the reader that something happened instead of describing the action is not a good habit. Even if it’s only a little blurb – just something vague enough to give the reader the sense that the action is occurring (not that it already happened and it’s cool but you can only imagine it without any help) is a good start.
We’re not done yet! Death’s Unfortunate Offspring is up!
And! But! Let me begin by telling everybody that can read this text the following: don’t start sentences with either of those words. Please don’t start sentences with and or but? I’m beggin’ you not to start sentences with and or but. Or end sentences with them either. Both are super wrong.
In the same way that Family provided an answer to an issue I had with Ren in Flesh Wound, it so happens that Offspring solves part of a problem I had with Reshin in Family. Part of it. In this piece there seems to be a lot more Reshin to go around and he seems more well-rounded as a result of it. The kind of reactions that are presented here – particularly when Reshin compares his own past to Aiden’s loss – are what help build a rounded character.
Of course, this creates a problem of its own because in this collab we have Reshin reacting like a human being with emotions and motivations for the most part, but in Family (which I assume takes place afterward) he suddenly becomes this emotionally immovable “child of the river Styx.” These two things contradict each other and because I’ve got an example of Reshin feeling genuine emotion I have to become a brick wall and say “pick one.”
I have nothing against a character that’s meant to be written as anything other than the definition of “stable.” Any archetype is fair to shoot for but a character’s personality has to be reliable.
Even if to the outside world Reshin seems inconsistent and changeable, we as the readers need to be able to understand why he’d be so changeable – his transition from empathy to apathy needs to be observable. Otherwise, you need to decide on one single persona for him. Anything in between makes Reshin feel too disjointed to be believable.
Overall this collab doesn’t particularly stand out among the scores of hollow fights that I’ve seen and been a part of. Other than, well, taking place in outer Rukongai which I personally have not seen too often.
While I’m on about the setting, though, it seems to fluctuate halfway through. In the beginning it’s described as a smoldering village but later on it’s described as a town that they had managed to save by evacuating. If there was meant to be a transition to a new location (which should take a bit, each district is the size of a small city and they get larger the further out you go) it should be made more evident, otherwise it looks like this was a bit of a mistake.
This was another good look at Ren. In the midst of the three collabs I’ve read for her I’ve seen a pretty decent sampling of the “vampire queen”. As a medic, as a prospective foster mother, and as a combatant, Ren’s shown to be rather versatile.
Ultimately, this tells me that there was absolutely something missing in Flesh Wound. Both collabs written outside of it do a better job of showcasing Ren. Not only was it thanks to her being the mainline force against the hollow, but her constant use of kidou and Fruit of Labor really made her stand out.
What I’ve seen that could be improved over the course of reading your work is that you have the ability to flesh out and describe what’s going on in Ren’s head, and make her stand out as a character, but sometimes you hold back. If it’s for speed or due to energy I can’t/won’t try to say but if you read your own writing half as harshly as I have then you know you have it in you too.
I’ve gone far beyond my legal right but I swear I’m nearly done. I’m going to be that guy and bring up the fact that a hollow was tearing up Rukongai districts all the way in the 50s but the ones sent to dispatch it were a Medic and a Spellblade. It’s fair that as shinigami it is up to everybody to take care of hollows, and 50s is sorta far out but with the level of destruction it caused you may have danced too close to the line between believable and unbelievable.
It’s not a criticism really? I suppose not. You didn’t do anything wrong, I hope you learned your lesson!!
Eve and the Serpent – Resh
It’s just you and me, buddy. No more Evergloam to get in the way. It’s gonna get deep. Yeeaaahhh.
There are so many different ways I could open this up. I’ll start with a point I mentioned earlier. It’s about our favorite disembodied storyteller: The Narrator. There are a number of points I spotted that would have been better served as Reshin’s direct thoughts rather than plain descriptions.
“This girl’s attitude was something that would’ve been more expected of a teenage girl on her period, rather than a chick who just got done mauling a group of soul craving creatures.”
What I’ve quoted above is the most obvious example I could find of a biased description that should have been noted as a thought. I understand bending the narrator a little bit, but calling Choko out for acting unkind by implying she’s on her period is something belongs in a thought bubble. It’s also fairly sexist and so far Reshin hasn’t been displayed as a person that thinks that way, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
In general the best approach is to keep your third-person narration as close to neutral as you can, and if you come across an observation (such as whether a woman is or isn’t on her period) you may want to think about describing her as rude, or just gate it within a thought-bubble for Reshin and then go wild, I guess.
There is also a little issue I spotted in your turns: fluff. Some of the time you’d have Reshin speaking and then immediately summarize your own dialogue. If you find that you need to clarify your own dialogue, then you need to flesh out the dialogue, not add a summary of it in the paragraph. Anything that resembles retreading over your own turn looks like fluff, and nobody likes fluff. Turns are like steak: don’t play around trying to be a fancy chef, just give us the meat.
One more thing: thoughts should be italicized like this so that they aren’t mistaken as dialogue.
Onto the same point I’ve been harping on since forever: Reshin’s many faces. In Family he was described as being concerned about the child, but difficult to be moved emotionally. In Offspring he displays a gamut of emotions like a human would in the midst of fighting a hollow and protecting a child. In Eve he’s...a calculating detective (in some ways, more on that in two minutes).
Throughout this collab he seems bent on talking information out of a human he’d just met, and carefully lying to see what he can get away with. This deductive personality is kind of a change from the other two examples. Even after dispatching “a horde of hollows” with extreme ease he’s very quick to get information, and he’s not what I’d call an apathetic “child of the river Styx” that briefly showed up in Family. Without a doubt we need to see some kind of consistency from him for his character to be believable.
Let’s change gears for a second here. While trying to con some random human Reshin met that happens to have a zanpakutou, he reveals more about the Gotei than he has any right to. Going on about the Gotei Thirteen, the division structure and the laws aren’t how things are run – even if Reshin disagrees with them he is still subject to them. It’s not great that he let her get away while holding a shinigami’s zanpakutou, either, considering that those aren’t toys that get handed out to the humans.
I’ll give it to you that you did try to forcefully take it away, but going on about the Gotei’s inner workings isn’t great. You’ll probably never hear about this again, but in the future try to keep the information a bit more locked up.
Other than that I find it a tad odd to leave a collab on a cliffhanger. I can understand if your schedules meant that you’d need to post it quickly so you don’t miss the deadline, so you don’t need to take this as any kind of criticism, just an observation.
Overall this collab felt a bit weird if only because it wasn’t super clear that the both of you were sure about where it would lead. Almost all of the bits with the hollows broke it up a bit since the collab seemed like it was meant to be about Resh taking Hikaru’s zanpakutou from the woman. Anything outside of that, such as fighting “a horde of hollows” in the middle of a collab about talking really does uncomfortable things to the flow of the collab.
If there’s anything I’d like for you to take a look at, regardless of who grades you in the future, it’s how to keep Reshin’s personality at least recognizably consistent, and to try to lighten up on any fluff that belongs in Reshin’s internal monologue.
FADED MEMORIES and Eve and the Serpent – MINJA
You thought this was over!? NOTHING IS OVER!
For the most part this chapter felt like a biography spread into a narration. There’s nothing wrong with a little background work, especially with a character over four hundred years old. What I found was that vast swaths of this chapter seemed to fall out of the internal monologue you gave Hikaru earlier on.
Especially towards the end there were a couple passages that read like thoughts or narration and felt more like a description that belongs in the Biography field of an application. I’ve gone on quite a bit about using the narrator to provide a neutral viewpoint and to always show and never tell if you can avoid it. My point stands here, although it’s fair that you can’t painstakingly describe a character’s entire life story without bloating the chapter.
That being said it may be that the backstory inserted into this piece was unnecessary. Given that the wordcount falls below the 1000 word threshold to which we usually adhere, saying that it could trim some parts may seem a bit cruel. In this particular case it may have been better to play down the description of Hikaru’s memories of the house and his childhood, and the stories about his family and to instead play up his experience when he got to the house.
There was surprisingly little about Hikaru’s reaction to the home he thought destroyed somehow standing pristine in the middle of outer Rukongai. Perhaps we could have gotten more about how Hikaru felt about his family or the horror that took everything away, or a sequence in which we follow him walking through each room and then reminiscing about what had happened in each room.
You could take something like that and turn it into a sort of clip show of memories instead of having to just dump it all out in a few expository paragraphs. In this way it feels more natural because readers can go with Hikaru on a journey through his past more organically rather than just be told what they need to be told, like it’s some kind of dossier.
Other than that I want to point out something I mentioned in my comments for Offspring. Every district of Rukongai is the size of a small city and they only get larger the further out you go. By the time you get to “the utter edge of Rukongai” you’d have traveled quite a distance. It’s not necessarily something that one can do on a lark in like ten minutes.
While I’m on about the outer districts of Rukongai I also need to mention that not only do the districts get larger as you go further out but they also become more violent. By the time you’re on the outer edge you’re dealing with some fairly violent individuals that can literally get away with murder because there’s almost no policing in those districts by anybody.
It seems to me that there’s more going on with this storyline than you’ve let on so I’m not going to penalize you for any of that. In the future it may be best to keep these details in mind and if you’re ever not sure don’t hesitate to ask. I can’t speak for whomever will grade you in the future.
Now onto Eve and the Serpent
I would have smooshed your section in with Resh’s up above but it’s too late now!
Some of what I had noted in my comments for Resh still stands here. I really feel that having the random hollow fight when for the most part it was about a conversation broke the flow. If the intention was only to use the hollows as a method to show off the zanpakutou there might have been better ways than to include “a horde of hollows”.
I also want to step aside for a second – the sword Choko had was in the shape of a heart. Is that supposed to be in its shikai state, or is it just in an unusual form? I ask because the former is impossible without the wielder at least nearby and the latter requires a feat. The fact that she has a zanpakutou at all is rather shocking but plot is as plot does.
I must say that I noticed a dramatic difference between this piece and what I saw in your chapter. Right off the bat I’d like to briefly mention how odd I find it that Choko seems to be wearing nothing but a bra and pants – that’s not really a way that any real person would dress, is it? I think not.
Otherwise this collab suffers from the same issue I brought up in your chapter in that it goes out of its way to explain backstory without any prodding. It’s one thing for a character to explain something to another, or to think back on something because they were suddenly reminded but for a turn to suddenly break into exposition really makes it feel like unnecessary padding.
If you’d like to have Choko think on her encounters with Hikaru it might be safer to minimize it outside of a chapter. In a collab the focus ought to be on interaction rather than become two characters writing out their own chapters one paragraph at a time.
You also have a tendency to blend narration with your character’s thoughts, whether Hikaru or Choko. In the future I would suggest gating them in thought bubbles and using italics like this to ensure it’s clear which part is a thought and which part isn’t.
Overall though I thought your part as an evasive Cerberus agent was reasonable. I found the entire encounter to be a bit strange by nature, but that’s because (as I mentioned before) it wasn’t obvious either yourself or Resh knew where the collab was going. A scene about two characters trying to out-guile one another could have done with a bit more direction. Because of that lack of direction the end of the collab felt really abrupt.
Since the collab ended on a cliffhanger I’m holding out hope that the next one can be paced a little bit better. If it’s going to immediately escalate to violence there needs to be a better buildup. I will grant you that Reshin largely started the escalation but it’s up to everybody in a collab to make sure that everything flows well and doesn’t feel sudden.
Gloam
Tis but a Flesh Wound – 92/94
A Complete Family – 47/48
Death’s Unfortunate Offspring – 85/85
Resh
A Complete Family – 47/48
Death’s Unfortunate Offspring – 84/85
Eve and the Serpent – 82/85
Minja
Faded Memories – 47/48
Eve and the Serpent – 84/85
