Subject: Permission Attempt
Author:
Posted on: 2020-05-10 06:08:33 UTC
We’ll see how this turns out.
And here you have a portal to royal pain. Once it gets dealt with, you’ll be able to rest easy tonight.
Subject: Permission Attempt
Author: Literature’s Hanafuda
Posted on: 2020-05-10 06:08:33 UTC
We’ll see how this turns out.
And here you have a portal to royal pain. Once it gets dealt with, you’ll be able to rest easy tonight.
Long story short, I don't trust you with the PPC universe yet. I think your writing is decent mechanically, but... I don't know if there's some cultural dissonance in play or what, but something just bugs me about your characters, and did in the last bit of your writing I reviewed, too.
The biggest "nope" moment I had here was in the first prompt. You've got Vanille, who is described as being the size of a child, who mutters to her daddy in her sleep, having been cuddled "like I was your baby" by her partner... and then she turns around and starts acting seductive. My eyebrows literally went up and the only thought in my head was a horrified "What." Thank goodness Bert doesn't seem to reciprocate at all, because that would be SUPER creepy rather than just plain creepy. You've coded Vanille very heavily as a child in this piece. Doing that AND trying to portray her as sexy squicks me right out, and I don't condone it.
That's not the only issue—Nova raised several good questions, too—but it's the one that cemented my decision.
I'm not really sure what advice to give you about this. Maybe you're a young person and you need a) more world experience to gain a better understanding of how people work, and b) more reading experience to gain a better understanding of what makes a good character. Maybe you should try writing some normal World One human characters for a while; figure out how to do that in a way that feels natural before you tackle the extra complications of writing anthros. Maybe all of the above.
Whatever you do, keep working on it.
~Neshomeh
Obligatory, not a PG warning.
So, overall everything looks OK-ish, I didn't look at your previous Permission Attempts when you posted them, and given that you've edited over them from the looks of things, I doubt that I will be likely to make comments on what, if anything has improved between then and now. Personally, I can't really find anything Wrong with your prompts, and while I would like to know why you keep changing badfics to mission first (as that's not the part of the Permission that is being failed, if you can even fail Permission on that), there's nothing wrong with taking that 'fic as your first mission that I am aware of.
One thing, that did strike me as weird when reading your prompts was how Bert spoke. In the Character Summary you did for him you mention that he speaks very formally, however there are contractions littered throughout his speech. Now this might not be something that you're not aware of, but I have always been taught that when speaking (or writing) anything formally, don't use contractions. So for me, that would be something to keep in mind when you're writing Bert in the future.
Another thing that irks me with Bert is his Bio. There's not exactly a lot there, although I do feel like his Personality section overlaps a little. What there is there for the Bio makes me confused why Bert is a PPC Agent. So, in my understanding of it he gets defeated by a monster, dragged by something through a plothole into HQ (Who, what, why? Give me more information here), gets healed by the Medical Team (I'm assuming he landed/got pulled through to the Medical Department, but there's no confirmation of any of that) and he's now working as an Agent to get holiday time to go back on his quest? That doesn't make sense to me. Why is he staying at the PPC, is it because he thinks it'll make him more powerful or gain allies to help the fight? Why doesn't he want to rush back to his world to save it now? What if he's too late, has that been thought about? What happens once he gets that holiday time (if he gets the holiday time)? Does he return to being a PPC agent (Would the flowers let him go like that)? And then that's it. That's the Bio. There's nothing to connect him deciding to become an Agent to where he is now. Why is he a Floater? Has he got any experience in the PPC before partnering up with Vanille? Why did he choose the name Bert? Why does he have this 'external behaviour' that means he speaks formally? How doe he speak formally in a language that everyone else understands?
Likewise with Vanille, her Bio gives us very little and what it does give raises questions we're not given the answer to. How did she get to the PPC? If she was just a drawing for a continuum that never came into fruition, is there enough of a plot there to form a plothole for her to get through to the PPC? How does she know her name? Was it given to her by someone or picked by herself? How did she know she needed paint (and how did she know what colours she needed to be painted)? Why did she need paint? Who painted her? How was she even painted? How did she become a bartender at Rudi's? How did she become an Agent? And why a Floater?
I think you've developed two characters, probably through a lot of RP on the Discord in Rudi's and the Courtyard (I should point out that while I am on the Discord, I largely ignore these two channels at the moment). That's all fine and dandy. But you need to develop their Bio, you've made them characters now, but neglected their characters before now. Give us a how and a why the characters have got from wherever they were to where they are now, make them believable. That's your challenge now I think.
Novastorme.