Law and Disorder - Judy Hopps vs. Chara (OOC)

[Sans]

Alright.

Just to let you both know, I am not using a point system for this. I am, for the most part, not someone who thinks they are something to be used for reviews, so it will work like this: Posts containing first, Chara's review, second, Judy's review, and third, the winner. I hope that makes sense!

First up, Chara!

[spoiler]I will not lie. The first two posts were not an easy read, and all for the wrong reasons. The third was marginally better, but not by much. You have a lot of areas that need to be improved on, which I will cover step by step.

First, grammar. This is a problem that plagues literally all three of your posts. Not once did I find a sentence that was grammatically correct in the slightest, which really hurt the quality of the posts. One reoccurring grammar problem was the dreaded "run-on sentence." Basically, a run-on is a sentence that is composed of more than one sentence without a punctuation break, like a period. Some posts had entire PARAGRAPHS, if you can call them those, that were composed of just one incredibly long run-on sentence. For instance:

As Chara swiped her knife at Carrots over there she couldn't seem to be able to hit her target and after each swing she felt her self strikes becoming more and more uncontrolled then judy pulled out what Chara could tell was a gun and started to fire Chara at the last moment "Glitched" out of the way and smiled grinning from ear to ear "What's so funny?"

I'm not even sure if this was going to be several sentences or not, considering you also capitalized your words at random, but this is NOT how to grammar properly. Now, this is an easy fix: every sentence you make, you add a period or a similar punctuation mark at the end of it. Doing this, you can turn that little piece of work into this:

As Chara swiped her knife at Carrots over there she couldn't seem to be able to hit her target and after each swing she felt her self strikes becoming more and more uncontrolled. Then, Judy pulled out what Chara could tell was a gun and started to fire. Chara, at the last moment, "glitched" out of the way and smiled, grinning from ear to ear, "What's so funny?"

Now, I still had to do several other things to make the whole paragraph at least readable; a testament to how poor the overall grammar is. Overall, the posts look like they were typed up in about two minutes or less and received only a cursory glance during editing. In layman's terms, they look extremely unpolished, and in layman's layman's terms, they look really lazy. This can solved by just reading over your work for more than a second, and actually spending a good amount of time on a post before posting it. Most of my posts can take a total of up to one full hour, and that's WITHOUT the editing.

As for descriptions, you and Judy share several problems, which are as follows: Repetition and Brevity. You tend to repeat words a lot in your posts, most notably the word "glitched," which shows up constantly. You also repeat descriptions as well. For example:

she nodded to her plan and started to stagger left and right in a line and started to pick up speed until she was running left and right at Judy

I do not need to be told she is running left and right because you had already said she was moving left and right (which I'm also assuming you mean left TO right?)

Repetition breeds contempt, which is why you should always reread your posts to ensure you don't end up repeating yourself. To avoid repeating words, keep a dictionary and thesauri on hand at all times while writing, so you can look up additional words if you find yourself repeating them. For repeating names, you can instead use descriptions based on the character. For example, instead of saying "Judy did X" or "The rabbit did X," say "The grey-furred hare did X" or "The flatfoot did X." For repeating descriptions like the one I showed you, just reread your posts and delete anything that looks like a repeat of a previous sentence.

As for the Brevity, don't take this as me saying less words = bad writing. This is not really the case. What I'm actually saying is that there isn't enough description for me to get a firm sense of what is going on. I have no idea what the environment looks like, the physical state of the characters, and ESPECIALLY what the moves look like. Stuff like this brings up atmosphere and makes it stand out, but your descriptions overall lack vividness. As a suggestion, walk around your room and find two or three objects in there you think stand out. Then, write down a description of your room, taking care to point out those three objects in proper detail. Leave the rest to imagination. This is a good way to start, I feel. You can also use the aforementioned dictionary and thesauri to help with this as well. This DOES get a bit better by the third post, thankfully, as you added in environment descriptions with the reddened floor and fountain.

However, by far and away the thing that hurt you the most, aside from grammar, was characterization. Not through lack of trying, I feel; you clearly made an attempt to have me connect emotionally with Chara and make her personality obvious. Now, you did do a decent job at it a couple of times, as some dialogue bits sounded rather Chara-like. For instance:

"I always win, It doesn't matter where my enemies go, I will find them and I will kill them."

Displays Chara's ruthlessness, confidence in herself, and her general nature. Nice job here.

However, stuff like that is few and far between in all of your posts, instead replaced by what I can only describe as "random emotional moments." Again, I appreciate the attempt to make Chara look like more than a raging psychopath, but every attempt falls flat on its face due to the fact that there is, A., zero build-up to each and every emotional moment, and B., some of said moments feeling shoe-horned in and just plain don't make sense. For example, take a look at this:

So Judy started to reload her gun and Chara had a flash back about Mettaton Neo and Frisk who gave the Undergrounds only star no mercy and right then and there her soul poped up out of nowhere and showed streaks of black in it she looked down, and she started to Laugh and cry at the same time.

First off, why? Why did Chara get a flashback to that moment in particular? And how in hell did THAT moment, of all moments, start making her laugh and cry at the same time? There is zero explanation/correlation here (further exacerbated for me personally, as I know for a fact that these two situations are two completely different entities; there is nothing here to make Chara flashback to Neo. Nothing. See what I mean about it looking ham-fisted?)

Also as an example:

"You know you will never be a real cop, no matter what you do I will never be the hero why should I when every one looks at me as a monster, and you should!"

This entire dialogue bit made absolutely no sense. What is she even saying? I'm not even certain if this is supposed to be one of those emotional moments I mentioned.

And finally:

"I guess I didn't get Frisk, if you ever meet a kid that is like me tell her that she," tears streaming down her face and between each word she is gasping for air "keep doing her pacifist ways and that she may escape this world and tell mom and dad to not cry"

Again, completely out of nowhere. If this had been executed well, this would've been a great moment, as it made Chara look sympathetic and humanized her. However, due to the lack of build-up and, again, no reason for her to think these things, it comes off as forced.

Nailing emotional moments isn't easy, but if you take some time to set up WHY a character thinks the way they do, even for just a paragraph, then you go a long way in connecting the characters to the audience and make them CARE. As for me, though, I did not connect with Chara, so I did not care about her.

Not much to say on story aside from two things: Lack of attention to detail, and it being tension-less. The actual premise is solid, and the story told in the fight is okay for the most part. However, what you suffered from a bit was a lack of attention to detail. If you've written before, you might be aware of the term "willing suspension of disbelief." Basically, the job as a writer is not to make a work realistic, but believable, and the audience willingly trades their disbelief on more fantastical elements in exchange for you being consistent. In short, as long as you remain consistent in any writing, you can get away with fantastic shit.

However, there were some times where the events of the story didn't match with the stuff I found on the rosters. For instance, how does Judy manage to fire more than eight rounds in her pistol without reloading? How does Chara manage to fire off the red slashes within what I can only guess is a couple of seconds when it requires a 10 second charge up? Minor stuff, but they break immersion.

As for the tension I mentioned, this is less because of description, but more because both characters got injured too FAST, I believe. Some of the more serious shit like the broken bones lose impact if they far too injured far too early on. Just wanted to add that in.


Overall, your writing definitely needs a lot of work. It'll get better if you keep trying, though probably only if you do what I'm saying you should do here.[/spoiler]