Subject: HAH! There ya go, mate! :D
Author:
Posted on: 2016-04-20 20:55:00 UTC
PARTY TIME!
Subject: HAH! There ya go, mate! :D
Author:
Posted on: 2016-04-20 20:55:00 UTC
PARTY TIME!
After about 20 days since my last attempt I am once more ready to present Matthew and Ajax of RC# 637R3K7M8.
Once more my planned fic is Annabet's Brother, where you know it's bad when whatever Matt Cipher is gonna call this Mini is spawned by the title alone.
Special thanks to SkarmorySilver, eatpraylove, DCCCV, and Bramandin for providing their beta services.
After I've had my tea and breakfast. It'll be nice to do something normal.
If another PG gets here first, though, they should feel free to have at it.
~Neshomeh
It is now my pleasure to say: Permission Granted!
It's not perfect—your betas unfortunately missed quite a few technical errors and some general clunkiness, such as the "quest" line somebody else mentioned—but I'm sure that will all improve with time and experience, so I ain't fussed.
The characters look fine; my only comment is that I'm not sure you understand the two parts of tsundere. The tsun tsun side is the aloof, angry side; the dere dere side is the sweet, lovey-dovey one.
I'm very glad to see you've reined in the ADHD shenanigans without dropping that aspect of the character, him being a self-insert and all.
Specific comments on the prompts follow.
Random Prompt
I love this bit:
He kept moving, dodging and occasionally chopping food out of the air with a stale baguette or shielding himself with a trashcan lid. He found that the deeper he went the more of a selection there was of food. Case in point; an agent who’d stuck a stick into an entire watermelon and was using it as a warhammer.
“Really?!” Matthew complained, blocking the (very sticky) blow with his trashcan lid.
I don't know where Matthew got a trashcan lid, but I don't particularly care. The mental images are great. ^_^ (To point out one of the technical errors, though, that semicolon should be a regular colon. Oh, and a comma would be very welcome here: "the deeper he went, the more of a selection" etc.)
Does the grape-themed guy with the grape-themed gun use grapeshot ammo? ... I guess he doesn't. But he should.
This piece contains lots of descriptions of moves and stuff from franchises I don't know. I found a bit tiresome, but not exactly bad.
The narrative style is inconsistent, though, and that made it an odd read. I'd recommend either going with a hardcore story-telling narrator or introducing your exposition more naturally in future pieces. Either way can work. It could be a lot of fun to have a snarky, all-knowing narrator talking directly to the audience, a character in its own right. It's just weird and intrusive when it only happens sometimes.
Control Prompt
Overall, this piece feels much more polished and has a consistent narrative voice. It's not as fun, but that's okay. I do really like the censorship joke. (Did I comment on this before? I feel like I did.)
And... that's that. So, good job! Work on the SPaG and whatnot, but otherwise, go forth and spork with goodwill!
(And I'll get around to fixing Matthew's blood type soon. Making any changes requires redoing the whole thing from scratch, is all.)
~Neshomeh
There it is!
Well, I guess you are perfectly welcome to use my beta services anytime. I promise I will do better. *donthurtme*
Good luck with your first mission! :D
On the Random Prompt: The Narrator being his own character was always a plan for my stories.
(On the agent cards: The images I included are also updated, so you should probably use the ones I included with the email)
-Mattman, who is gonna go and create his character pages on the wiki.
Here, have a Valkitty to chase all of those congaing rats.
PARTY TIME!
And a gift too: self-updating guidebook from all the deathtraps in the multiverse. For giving the glitterbags the karmic death they deserve anywhere your agents will go! Or kill them in a way you won't have to worry about corpse disposal.
Good luck with your fist mission. And all the other which will follow.
Today, replicating texts and programs seems more and more easy. Could give one to the Department of Experimentations someday. I'd found interesting to know how many glitterbags would need to die to reach the finaal piece of the Tombs of Horror. (And I hope I'll find a glitterbag who can be dropped in this Tomb despite it's a D&D module.)
Understand, first of all, that you should take my advice with a grain of salt, especially if a PG disagrees. That said, this is the PPC, and you guys have this weird habit of letting me be critical of things, so let's dive in:
In the random prompt, one of the first lines refers to "said quest." It's possible that I simply missed it, but I didn't see any previous mention of a quest and/or mission. Not a huge problem, but I'm somewhat surprised it slipped past you, since it's near the very beginning of the story.
Continuing the discussion of the random prompt in particular, the explanation of the Dragon Shot simultaneously went on longer than I would have expected, and left me more confused than when I went in. You set up the rest of the scene well enough that if you had simply said "He had more pressing matters to attend to, like a grape-themed gunslinger about to unleash a powerful finishing move, the nonlethal Dragon Shot." it would still have conveyed your message without pulling away from the action to explain what's going on.
A more minor point though: the part where Matthew explains to Ajax what a Sengoku Driver is fits alright, as it's before the fight starts, so taking time to explain doesn't pull readers out of the action, and having one Agent be confused about a specific part of a continuum is a generally accepted way to tell the reader what that specific part is. However, since Ajax has been in the PPC for a longer period of time, and the rest of Ajax's actions indicate that he's well traveled from his time as an assassin, AND you later saying that they're one of only a few teams that work in the Kamen Rider canon, shouldn't he already know what a Sengoku Driver is?
Also, you forgot a comma after the interjection Yes at the beginning of the paragraph where you explain what Matthew and Ajax are doing.
One last thing about the random prompt: why refer to the Agents that Matthew and Ajax fight as replacements? The Nora replacement especially seems like it would have been easier to just say she was a hammer-wielding Agent, and indicating that every Nora replacement have a corresponding Ren replacement came across as plain weird. And while it makes sense that the easiest way to justify having a Kamen Rider in the fight would be to make them a former replacement/Sue/background character/whatever, I don't see why you tell us what particular character our grape-blasting-friend was based on after he's already been defeated. If you really wanted to communicate this fact, it probably would have been simpler to either include it as banter between him and Ajax, or have Ajax deduce the fact in a similar manner to how Matthew decided his opponent was a Nora clone. This last one would also serve to further indicate how much knowledge Ajax's experience with the PPC has granted him.
One problem I have with the control prompt is how often you abbreviate things. I understand not wanting to write out Puzzle & Dragons every time you mention it, but spelling it out once or twice before switching to an acronym would be helpful. Similarly, it seems odd that Matthew's internal thoughts/the narrator would abbreviate Ironic Overpower. The fact that Ajax says it normally later on, and that these are the only two instances of it being mentioned, further convinced me that it would be more clear if you simply called it the Ironic Overpower. I'm more okay with using PJO, since it's Ajax and Matthew talking to each other, so if they understand the acronym, it makes sense they would use it.
Speaking of the Ironic Overpower, you seem to imply that it doesn't apply in DI. I know it's the Department of Improbabilities and all, but this seems just a bit too improbable. Actually, after going through a bit while looking at this point, your description of DI leads me to believe you have it confused with one of the Internal Departments. If that isn't the case, I actually have further questions about why you believe DI (the Department of Improbabilities) has offices, and would have only had Matthew reading about Sues, and not actually going into fics.
Another thing from the same general part of the story that strikes me as odd is how you use "speaking of which" to segue into the console going off, but then it takes two lines of dialogue and a whole paragraph between them to actually get to the console making its usual ruckus. Using the segue usually indicates an immediate action based on the segue, so this delayed reaction just feels off.
In the last line of the control prompt, by the way, you forgot an apostrophe in "partners."
The only real critique I can think of for the bios themselves is the format. I think it would have served you much better to avoid the columned approach you used, and to have instead put headings into the text to indicate a change in overarching topic. That, and you misspelled four as for in the explanation of Ajax's powers.
Overall, I noticed that you have a plethora of one or two sentence paragraphs. Sometimes, this is not only acceptable, but puts a helpful emphasis on what's happening, such as during the food fight where, "The rider charged without hesitation." The brevity of this description is a nice parallel to how instinctively and quickly the rider fights, and highlights the action well. Other times though, the sentence doesn't denote an action of enough gravity to warrant its own line. An example where you probably could have combined the sentence with the previous paragraph with ease would be where you describe Matthew's keeping pace with Ajax. Yes, it's a rather long sentence, but it ties in with the event of the last paragraph, and isn't a heart-pounding action line, so it doesn't really need to be isolated. These super short paragraphs often indicate to the reader that you're padding to make the story look longer, which I honestly don't think is what you were going for here, so I don't want you to give off the wrong impression.
One other thing that affects your writing overall that might be seen as an issue is the tone. I, for one, think that your narration style is fun, and its lighthearted nature shows that you do enjoy what you're writing. However, while I like it in general, it is generally discouraged to use the narration as the delivery for your jokes too often, and the more comical style you use might make people especially apprehensive about this. As such, I recommend scaling back a bit, and writing in a slightly more objective fashion. A lot of your parenthetical asides, while amusing, could probably be cut out without affecting the tone or events of the story, and would reduce what some readers might see as forced humor. In addition, there are a few cases where you address the audience directly, which you should either avoid entirely, or use significantly more. Using the narration as a character can be a useful tool for comedy, and that seems to be your primary goal, so I won't say it has no place here, but you should bear in mind that this is not the style that PPC usually uses, which would make potential future crossover missions more difficult, and that this style is much harder to find a good balance for than simply ditching the idea entirely.
My final critique (I promise, I do go over some of the things I liked after this) is something I touched on earlier in specific examples, but I think applies to your writing as a whole: you explain a lot of things, but leave some other things unexplained. I, for one, am not familiar with Kamen Rider or Puzzles & Dragons. Walking into these two stories, I knew very little about either canon. Despite this, I think you explained things far too often, especially in your random prompt. The format for the prompt samples didn't help with this, as you're supposed to have a reasonably brief story, but especially in the middle of a fight scene, it pulls the reader out of the story when you take time to explain what something is or does. Yes, there are cases where you'll have to explain how something works, and sometimes you won't have the ability to deliver that explanation naturally through dialogue, a character's inner thoughts, or some other in-story method, and you'll have to tell the reader in the narration. You should only do this sparingly though. Look at the part of your story where Ajax activates his Talaria. I have no idea what a Talaria is. I assume from the context that it is some kind of magic that either makes Ajax faster so he can track down the rider, or stronger so he can actually fight the rider once he finds the poor sod. Immediately after typing that sentence, I googled what it means (winged sandals, for anyone who made it this far without looking it up themselves), and I was pretty much right. What I'm trying to say is: you've done a good job of establishing what's going on, so when you come to a part that you suspect a reader might not immediately understand, you should ask someone who you're reasonably sure is unfamiliar with the concept (probably a beta reader, possibly just a friend or family member) if they can guess from the context. If they can't you should consider explaining the idea, but you should usually ask first and explain later.
Now, to prove I'm not a totally cynical jerk, here are some things I like about your stories and bios:
A positive I found in the random prompt, was that I like the idea of just footnoting visual references. While I would normally suggest just describing the item, the images you used indicate that it would take more text to describe than would really be worth the effort, so in order to still convey your vision of the scene in a succinct manner, I think you made a good decision.
One thing that I see that I think is very important is that Matthew has a personality. Based on him being a human from World One named Matt and you being a human from World One named Mattman, I'm guessing he's basically you. A mark of a lousy character writer is where the author's avatar in the story is just an every-man, and isn't particularly interesting. There's a fine line between being a drama hog and being bland, and I think you succeeded in finding it. I do want to ask though, while your bio says that Matthew sometimes "might sound like an asshole," I didn't get that impression of him from the writing samples, except for maybe the part where Matthew leaves a note for a hypothetical genderbent Ren to take better care of her husband. Was this due to the prompts you used simply being a bad fit for showing this character trait, or does the bio overstate his rudeness?
Speaking of less than outgoing Agents, let's talk about Ajax. First of all, his powers are understandably complicated, but your comparing them to the more generally understood Pokemon types was a good idea, and I think it let you communicate your idea clearly. Further, while I can see his hydrokinesis and umbrakinesis being very powerful, most of his actual powers seem to be focused more on status effects or helping his team, so he strikes me as a support mage character, which assuages some of my concerns. But Ajax isn't only his powers, which is a point in your favor all on its own. His personality does not immediately remind me of darkness, water, or Hermes, and while it wouldn't be disastrous if he did, it would pigeonhole the character into being the darkness/Hermes guy instead of just being Ajax. And who Ajax actually is seems to be consistent, relatable, and fit with his history. Basically, you knocked it out of the park. He strikes the right chord of being experienced and jaded, but not emotionless, and being stoic and cynical without being spiteful and unlikable. Long story short, good job on Ajax.
On the note of your Agents, they get along well, but not like best friends, which I can see leading to some good stories. I imagine it will take a while for Ajax to fully warm up to Matthew, but I just described Ajax as stoic int he last paragraph, so that was probably going to happen anyway. Plus, exploring how Ajax copes with having a loose cannon (compared to himself and Levy, at least) as a partner in the wake of almost losing his last partner/best friend/leader/potential love-interest will be useful to grow him further from his, as you put it, "rudimentary personality."
In fact, and this isn't really positive or negative feedback, just advice, the one potential issue I see with these two interacting is that Ajax clearly has more going on. That's not to say that you should make Matthew more complicated, just that you should keep in mind that, while you clearly have plans for how Ajax will grow as a character, you should ensure that Matthew has his time in the spotlight as well. You seem to have done a good job of that so far, with the random prompt clearly favoring Ajax (though, that should only be expected when your options are to follow the gamer/student or a god/sorcerer in a fight) and the control prompt letting you show things more from Matthew's perspective.
All in all, you definitely have a few kinks to iron out, but they're not to major, possibly excepting the tone and explanations, so I can only hope I'll be seeing Ajax and Matthew in a full mission soon. Good luck.
On the point of the Sengoku Driver and the Kamen Rider verse: The Kamen Rider verse is a lot like the Super Sentai, and by extension the Power Rangers-verse (in fact Kamen Rider and Super Sentai share a 'verse), each season cycles in a new cast, theme, and costumes. So while Ajax has operated within the 'Verse before, it was mostly in fics where it's the Mary Sue is an orginal creation, as per usual in the 'verse.
On the Nora replacement: I was already blatantly homaging the RWBY Volume 2 premiere episode, so I had to include a character from that somewhere. Also Ren because Nora doesn't do anything without him for the most part. Also the note was a tongue in cheek joke on how they really should be together, but not.
On Levy: Yes
I skipped the random prompt, since I don't really like reading fight scenes, but I read the control prompt, which seems competent with frequent flashes of good, and thoroughly in the spirit of the PPC. My thoughts as I read:
-I like your description of Matthew being bored. An impatient agent is going to be funny to read about. Saying "How did he know this?" seems a bit superfluous to me, though; most people can tell when they're bored.
-This might just be me, but I think it's better not to use tautological descriptions unless you're trying to suggest that the thing being described is confusing or that the character doing the describing is inarticulate, because, well, they're not very descriptive. I've read about RCs of many different sizes, none of which I would compare to any of the high school classrooms I've been in. This didn't actually get in the way of my imagining their RC, but it was slightly irritating.
-Some of your sentence structure is a bit odd, but the more I look at it, the more it seems like a character quirk of Matthew's or just an eccentricity of the story. Either way, it doesn't impede reading and is rather nice, actually.
-Are you censoring your characters or not? Decide; having both threw me for a moment. Creative curses seem to be PPC standard, but I guess it's up to you.
-Matthew's only seen the movie?! Or is the fic movieverse? Either way, this is going to be hilarious. (I've been warned away from the movie, so I haven't seen it, but if it includes a scene with Aphrodite's daughters in a hot tub with a bunch of satyrs, and this is the scene that establishes that there are many demigod siblings. . . I suspect that's all I need to know).
Overall, I feel like Matthew's character came through very strongly here, and he seems like someone who it will be fun to read about. Ajax is not as sharply drawn, but he seemed to show up more in the parts of the random prompt I read/skimmed. I hope you get to make this spinoff.
--Key, who doesn't even have Permission
I didn't really do much. School stuff really got in the way. If things still don't work out, I will try to actually help this time, promise.