Subject: ((Oh! I forgot something...))
Author:
Posted on: 2019-12-24 20:13:34 UTC
((The fic I want to mission is The Forgotten Queen. It's a fairly standard Harry Potter Suefic where Harry's uncanonical twin sister replaces pretty much everyone with rich, spoiled snobs and breaks several thousand rules of the world. Also, Draco is wearing the Leather Pants. Again.))
This is absolutely NOT a Permission request. I do NOT want Permission. Don't even bother reading any further, PGs. It isn't. Trust me.
I mean, think about it. There are three main components to a Permission Request: Agent bios, a control prompt, and a random prompt. Does this post have any of those things? No. It does not. Which means that, by simple logic, this cannot be a Permission request.
And anyway, do you think I, Neo Skate– sorry, I mean, King of Procrastinators, would be able to actually get any of those things done?
In short, this is not a Permission request, so you can feel free to ignore it, PGs.
(( – Skater is hoping the PGs will realize he's joking and really is requesting Permission))
Sorry this one took so long for anyone to respond to, but so you and everyone else knows for the future—PGs aren't going to drop family time during the holidays to check over a Permission request, so timing it a little better would be a good idea going forward.
I'm going to be blunt and say off the bat Permission denied.
SPaG: Overall, it was fine, but there were quite a few little typos—dropped punctuation, incorrect capitalization, etc., that a beta should have caught. I seem to recall in the Discord that one of the people who beta'd for you had no experience in it at all and didn't beta alongside anyone with more experience, but since you didn't credit any betas I'm going to just have to assume you didn't use any. Something to keep in mind next time.
General writing: Label which prompt you're doing for the control, please. And I'd have made it clear in both the bios and early on in one of the prompts themselves what species Leo was, because I was assuming he was an anthropomorphic winged cat and was confused where dragons were coming from until I caught that he was the dragon.
Keep in mind you have a lot of very short and unvaried sentence lengths, which causes the writing to come off as rather stilted. Paragraphing was fine in the prompts themselves, but I kept finding my eyes glazing over the walls of text in the agent bios. And speaking of...
Agents: Pare down Skater's bio to the more defining traits. I can tell just reading this that Skater's the more... defined of the two, just by writ of being a self-insert, but the recommended max length for bios is ~400 words and you wrote 723—which is not only incredibly long for a PG to read, but it's also a lot more than Leo's 497. It already creates an imbalance of power between the two agents' importance, making Skater the protagonist and Leo the supporting character, rather than the two of them being deuteragonists. (I talk about this a little more below.)
Leo came off as a very one-note "straight man" and I couldn't get much of a sense for his character past that. I'd take him back to the drawing board and start thinking about how to round him out. What makes him tick? Is he ever not the "straight man" archetype? Why is he like that? Who is he when he's not being annoyed by his partner? Because as of right now, his character reads like he was created specifically for Skater to have someone to lift him up.
Skater has a somewhat more nuanced portrayal of the two, but he's also a fairly flat character whose main trait that I've really gotten from the bios and the prompts is "lol quirky!". He also comes off as... rather unpleasant at times (Skater tried to muster as much guilt about this as possible so he wouldn’t come off as insincere.) which I'm sure is just you making an attempt to show that he's awkward. It really just takes practice at that sort of thing—just be mindful of the impact your words hold and how a reader not familiar with your thought process would interpret them.
So... you've got a lot of work left to do with these two. I feel like you've gotten into a bit of a rut in the #rudi's channel in the Discord because you don't usually play off characters who will challenge you to write growth into your agents. Try bouncing them off different people, do some more of the prompts for practice writing, flesh these agents out into characters and not caricatures.
And a few last notes (edited to add)—include which department you plan on putting these guys in, and which badfic you want to spork for your first mission, when you make your next request, too. :)
You've got the bones of something good here. Let's put some meat on them (and use a beta next time!).
Though at this point, I might get there (hopefully within a few days, though I'm not quite sure and it could be longer) if no one else does. I've done a preliminary read-through, but am not yet sure when I'll have time and energy to do a more thorough read and type up what I think. If someone else has that time and energy now or in the near future, you're more than welcome to step in.
(Also, Neo, the first couple chapters of that fic are like reading a Mirrorverse. Wow. And then it kind of goes off the rails more. In case I don't do the response or forget by the time I get there: in a mission I'd also emphasize what it did well; the beginning wouldn't be too bad as original fiction or an outright Mirrorverse AU, with a little editing. The main problems in the first chapter or so come from the fact that it is set in the Potterverse and everyone's personality has been turned on its head with no good reason given...and some things make no sense...and then we get into a set of tropes like played up Ron-bashing and the Mirrorverse AU feeling mostly stops. Still, there's definitely some good in there to point out. I think the writing also wasn't too bad, though I could be misremembering or it went downhill once it got into copy-pasting territory--which reminds me, there are pieces taken straight from the book and sometimes not actually edited properly to reflect the different context. Entering Diagon Alley has the barman's wand turn into Hagrid's umbrella, among other things.)
Anyway: if someone else wants to respond to this request, please go ahead. If that doesn't happen, I may get there within, say, a week? If possible? (You see why I'm putting it out there that someone else can step in! You've already had a wait because of the holiday season, Neo; I'm sure you'd like a response as soon as possible now it's over.)
~Z
((The fic I want to mission is Elysian Potter: The Forgotten Queen. It's a fairly standard Harry Potter Suefic where Harry's uncanonical twin sister replaces pretty much everyone with rich, spoiled snobs and breaks several thousand rules of the world. Also, Draco is wearing the Leather Pants. Again.))