Subject: Not a PG, but familiar with Homestuck.
Author:
Posted on: 2012-11-15 23:47:00 UTC

With my my two cents about the troll agent, specifically.

Overall, she's pretty good. I like her speech patterns, and I like how you describe her accent shown by her quirk. Her personality looks good, but could probably be fleshed out a little better. Most of her character bio was taken up describing her quirk. In fact, her personality in the fic - while good! - didn't seem to reflect the character bio very well. Also, some character questions that might help solidify her personality, that most fantrolls state in their intro - How old is she? What's her blood color? What are some of her interests? And the more PPC-related - Being a bit character, does she remember Alternia at all, and if so, how has that shaped her?

The two major problems I have are actually the easiest things to fix: her name and her quirk.

For her name - Narciss Miner. Troll first and last names, at least when they're kids, are six letters long. This is a thing that we can be reasonably sure is universal. She can be Narcis Minner or Narcis Minerr or even Narcis Sminer. You could make the argument that the 6/6 thing hasn't been stated in canon to explicitly and always be true, but I would advise against deviating from the set pattern.

And second, her quirk. I really like the idea of the = in the spaces, but the letter replacements seem just awkward enough to make her text difficult to read. Especially as it's already got the equals signs, I would advise choosing one letter replacement, not all three.

Other than that, though, any other nitpicks I have could be explained by "we just haven't seen enough of her yet." For example, I was wondering - in her bio it says she "is protective of even vague acquaintances as she sees them as extensions of herself." She doesn't seem that way at all about Cale or the dead Sue, though. Is that just because she didn't like them? I was a little confused.

That's it for serious critique. If you don't know Homestuck, the next bit won't make any sense, and even if you do, it might be overly wordy and boring, but I just wanted to talk about one of my personal pet peeves: misuse of the word "pity."

I'd be careful about throwing around the word "pity." Only Karkat has ever used the word "pity" for positive feelings. Terezi, Vriska, Roxy, and the narration all use "pity" to mean the normal human definition of "pity," and the trolls certainly use the words "love" and "friendship" all the time. Note that in the incredibly long troll romance exposition, the word "pity" was not used even once. Most common fandom theory is that Karkat is as full of crap when it comes to romance as Kankri is when it comes to social justice, and his hate/pity stuff is a fringe nutcase theory, if he didn't come up with it himself. It would explain why he had to explain it all to Vriska that one time - if it were the standard accepted theory, wouldn't she know all that already? (For reference, the word "pity" is used in Act 5 twelve times: it was only used to mean "positive relationships" eight times, and those were all by Karkat, and six of them were in the same conversation with Vriska. On the other hand, the word "friend" is used by trolls something like 55 times, and "friendship" seven times, in Act 5 Act 1 alone.)(And I know it says "the word for friend is exactly the same as the word for enemy" but that clearly isn't true. So I don't know.)

Not to say you shouldn't use the word pity. Obviously "most common fan theory" isn't canon, not by a long shot. As it is in the fic, it works just fine - in fact, it was kind of amusing and i liked it - but I would just be careful and use it sparingly, and remember that when you want to talk about friendship and love, use those words - friendship and love.

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