Subject: Go go gadget commentary!
Author:
Posted on: 2021-10-06 10:33:03 UTC

I'm going into this cold, without having read your character profiles. I'm also not offering any sort of official opinion - just comments as I read. :)

  • Omigosh it's only 8 pages. - Seriously, I'm growing to love short missions more and more. (And I say this as someone whose missions tend to balloon out of all control on a regular basis.)

  • I quite like the formless narrator. It's a fun device.

  • "... Kaguya was just done remarking how cute Momoka was when she blushed at his poetry reciting when the [BEEEEEEP] went off and armageddon broke loose." That's a very long clause; the two 'whens' jarred me out of it. I think the sentence could probably do with breaking up - in fact, you could break the paragraph as well!

In the two-room RC [...] Kaguya was remarking on how cute Momoka was when she blushed at his poetry reciting, when--

[BEEEEEEEEP!]

Armageddon broke loose. [...]

Something like that. Big block paragraphs tend to make people's eyes glaze over, so breaking them up can help.

  • The last paragraph before the [Ch. 1] header contains another rather run-on-y sentence (the one that jumps from the crash dummy to portal shenanigans). I think you're trying to carry the reader breathlessly along, but I don't think it's quite worked. Not really sure why. :) In general, use long sentences only when they're for stylistic reasons, not because you need to fit more in.

  • Linguistic coincidence: "ohayo" looks like it sounds like a childish English greeting: "Oh, hayyo!"

  • You seem a bit dubious on whether the agents know why they're floating. Kaguya spits "Read the Words, look at the spacing" at Momoka, which implies he a) understands, b) recognises that she doesn't understand, and c) thinks she should. But then the narrator tells us they don't understand.

  • Please don't have your agents yell at the author. Fanfic writers are deluged with flames telling them to stop writing, and the PPC works very hard not to contribute to that. (Similarly, don't describe it as "taking someone's fanart as a design for your character" - make it "yourself", and make it clear that it's the character who's being charged. As written, Momoka is charging the author.)

  • Nonsense asphalt roast chicken to you too. ^_~

  • I continue to enjoy the formless narrator. The structure you have, where you show us the lowest point in advance, then lead us to it and help us recover from it, is really good.

  • There's something very amusing about Momoka thinking of herself as the inexperienced one, but doing all the work while her partner just spins and rambles.

  • Problems with run-ons: at "two tea man", there's no way of telling whether it's Momoka or Uguisumaru and Mikazuki who's giggling. Could absolutely go either way.

  • The start of Ch 5 is a good use of a blocky paragraph: you want to be hitting us with a string of horrors. Kaguya's parenthetical asides help break it up just enough. Well done. :)

  • I like the way you stuck with the posters thing, and used it in the assassination. Working a running joke into the narrative like that is good.

  • Overall, the mission feels like it's the story of Momoka Coping - with having to do everything herself, with her partner being clearly unstable, with her own feelings of inadequacy, and with her expectation that anything that goes wrong is going to be seen as her fault. (This is borne out in the ending, where Kaguya manages to turn "I literally did nothing except yell and spin" into "you struggled a lot", verbally diminishing Momoka's achievement.) I think that's what you were going for, but be aware that it means Kaguya isn't overly likable at the moment.

hS

(PS: I said no official opinion, and I stand by that, but for my tuppenceworth, this is plenty good enough to be going on with. ~hS)

Reply Return to messages