Subject: A couple of comments
Author:
Posted on: 2013-03-06 09:50:00 UTC
Interestingly, they tie in to my two unanswered points:
-"He had hoped he could reason with the oversized daisy, but it refused to listen to logic. ‘Just goes to show you’, he thought as he walked in the general direction of Bad Slash, ‘you can’t reason with a Flower’. Marvin wandered HQ, not paying much attention to anything, even his destination. If he wandered across HQ, what did he care?"
That's two 'reason with's and two 'wandered [...] HQ' in the same paragraph. There's another 'wandering' a couple of paragraphs later, too. Obviously I'm not suggesting wild thesaurus abuse, but a little variety goes a long way.
--Actually, as a note to the above: wandering HQ without caring where he was going would probably have taken him straight to his RC. It's not necessarily wrong (and you do throw out a 'perhaps it was HQ's strange architecture'), but it raised at least part of an eyebrow.
-Printworthy seems a bit too accepting of... well, a fair few things. 'Oh, a human - I thought they were a myth. Cool'. Um, if I ran into a centaur or something, I'd be rather more flustered about it. Of course, this may be the sort of reaction you'd expect - I'unno the canon.
More key, I think, is that little conversation about plotholes:
"Sounds to me like you fell through a plothole. They appear when something that should not be able to happen does, without any explanation. You must have stumbled across one and came here.” [This is fine. Fairly standard blase PPC reaction. 'Oh, yeah, she's your evil doppleganger and you're a character in a story. Surely this is obvious?']
“A plot hole? That’s a storytelling mishap, they’re not real.” [This is... okay. That 'they're not real' feels a little too accepting to me. Printworthy appears to be assuming Marvin's made a silly mistake, rather than - more logically - that he's stark raving bonkers]
“Oh, don’t they? Plotholes, the Narrative Laws, and the Ironic Overpower all don’t exist?” [This line feels pretty stilted. Neither of the latter two had come up. I'd probably have something like "Oh, don't they? Seems to me like you just fell through a plothole because the Ironic Overpower decreed it, and landed on me of all people through the Laws of Narrative Comedy...", which slots back into the blase PPC approach, with a hint of irritation at not being believed, and still gets everything across. Obviously that's an Agent Dafydd line, not a Marvin line, but you get the point]
“Now hold on! You speak as if literary laws affect reality, and that ponies, or humans, are governed by them, like mere characters in a book!” [Which is actually a pretty good response - but I'm not sure it's a response to the previous line. :P Still, it's the sort of reaction I'd expect]
This overflows a little into the following section - one mention of badfic, and Printworthy instantly believes everything Marvin's saying.
But - and it's a big but - as you've said, this isn't a finished piece. Those two are the sort of thing I'd flag up if I were betaing your story (and would get extremely frustrated if you kept on doing the same thing story after story, just changing the specific examples I cited to my specific example alternatives... sorry, got distracted there, not talking about you. Remember, girls and boys, betas are there to help you improve, not to do your work for you). They're certainly something to watch out for, but if you do keep an eye on them (see what I did there, avoiding repeating 'watch out for'?), they're not a problem.
As a general commentary: your description is good, and (usually) not stilted, you have some genuinely funny moments (yes, Marvin, drop a Star Wars reference on the innocent horsey-thing...), and with a few exceptions your dialogue works nicely. So unless VixenMage or someone else comes by with a powerful argument against, I'm going to say Permission Granted. Here is your official nothing, keep it safe, we are not made of nothing.
hS writes too much
