Subject: re: mission
Author:
Posted on: 2021-08-09 03:25:32 UTC

Overall, I like the relationship you've set up between the agent pair here. Obviously, I've read veteran+newbie partnerships before, but Azeraath's over-the-top 1980s-weekday-afternoon-cartoon outlook on life makes this instance stand out as especially dramatic. You really got his headspace across, and highlighted all the ways that mindset is going to clash terribly with the PPC's methods. And the dialogue of both agents communicates the conflict between them well. I do feel concerned about Larry, though. Partners aren't obligated to get along with each other, of course, and there's no rule about writing mean characters in the PPC, but Larry's condescension towards Azeraath, coupled with the uneven power dynamic favoring Larry as the veteran, bothers me. Especially in lines like
"Yeah, if you’re stupid, Larry thought. 'Well, you have to,' he said to his new partner."
and
"His new partner was a puppet on strings, and Larry felt like king of the world controlling his emotions."
I know that later moment is addressed a few lines later, when Larry chides himself for manipulating Azeraath, but he still see no real consequences for it. And that's largely what I want to get across here: you can portray an unhealthy relationship like this, but you also need to show the consequences. What we're seeing here can't survive long-term. Whether it's going to be slow-burn growth of Larry's character, or Azeraath forcing the issue early to level the playing field, I leave to you. (And kind of tangential but basal to all of that: why is Larry a talking wolf with a complex for emotional manipulation anyway? I don't play Minecraft, but I'm under the impression the wolves there are just wolves. What made Larry sapient and also a jerk?)

A few details I enjoyed:
—I liked that, rather than stating that Azeraath learned the Potterverse by reading the books, as most spin-offs do, you made it an interactive moment between the two partners. It was a good opportunity to give them something fun to do together, while still teaching Azeraath information he needed for the immediate job. (Again, would have been nicer without the emotional manipulation thing.)
—I thought having Lily's resurrection stone spirit give the other Lily's author notes was particularly clever usage of canon elements!
—I was amused by the gag with the "home" button on the RA being a useless music player, while the actual button home bears the SO's face. Perfect! Although that does remind me, the action during that scene seems a little inconsistent. Larry drops the RA, it skitters over to Harry's body, and Larry tells Azeraath to get it. But Larry had just killed Harry, so it seems to me like Larry would have been closer in the first place? Then, back in the RC, we learn that Larry grabbed the element cloak before they left, even though Azeraath was the one who got closest to Harry to grab the RA. You might want to work on the "choreography" of that scene a bit.

I'm not a fan of the "pause fic" button. It feels like it gives agents way too much control over the fic, and could be used as an easy out of just about any dangerous situation. I'm not saying it can't exist, but it had better get balanced out by some good, old fashioned PPC tech reliability factor, and maybe some situations where it just can't work.

One question that's pure curiosity, because it's about the badfic and not your own writing: why is this set when Harry is seven years old, rather than eleven? It even recreates the start of the birthday scene from Philosopher's Stone, and the agents didn't comment on the age situation, so . . . was there a particular reason the fic started so many years before the events of the books?

Now it's time for doctorlit's typo extravaganza! Actually, my first comment is more of a formatting thing. Those [system] messages when the game part of the fic begins are in a really late shade of grey, which is difficult to read against the white background. I get you were wanting to differentiate that part from both the main mission text and the fic quotes, but I suggest getting that section a hair darker to make it easier to read.

There's a paragraph that got cut off mid-word,when the replacement Harry is reading his respawn screen:
"The Stu shrugged it off and returned to staring at the screen, which now showed the option to play again. 'So if I play again I can change what happened and if I don’

One nice plain vanilla typo:
"Larry pulled his hands away from his hears and out of habit checked them for blood, but only found a glob of Sar-Plasm."
Should be "ears."

And lastly, there's one punctuation error you made consistently throughout. When dialogue ends in a period, and gets followed by a dialogue tag, the period actually has to change to a comma, to show that both dialogue and tag are a single sentence. "Hello," said Bob. Just like that. The first time this shows up in this mission is in the sentence
"'That’s the name of the fanfic we’re going to kill now.' Larry exposited."
But it really does show up throughout the whole story; I can't really list them all here. Also, note that this rule only applies to periods. Any other punctuation keeps its original form:
"Hello!" said Bob.
"Hello?" said Bob.
"Hello . . ." said Bob.

—doctorlit, marching side by side against the darkness with Azeraath any day

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