07-10-2017, 10:44 AM
I know I missed the deadline, but Ken gave me feedback before and I'm not going back on my word.
--
Ah, another ‘vintage’ thread. I feel like this might be a theme for this first wave of Hyper New Book Club.
Like the other review I made, I’mma focus on my big thoughts and comments here. At the end, I’ll include the notes and thoughts I had while reading the thread. I’ve spoiler-tagged those mainly because they go one and are for the sake of Ken and Dante more than anyone else.
So here we find Yu Kanda and Dante. This is, if I recall, after the Secondary Saga and before Ken (Yu Kanda) went on to help coordinate Heroes Graveyard? It took me through a bit of the thread to see that this was the foundation of Kanda’s dormant faction, the Black Order. Just like with the thread from last time, once I saw that ‘big picture,’ I was drawn into the remainder of the thread a lot more. It felt like a little moment of history, rather than just two friends and their pals slaying monsters.
In terms of big picture, I liked this thread. There were parts in the narrative where I found myself confused, and the pacing/transitions (particularly in the first handful of posts) made it a bit hard to follow. Let me clarify that. I felt like it went very quickly from Kanda landing (in Darkshire?) to running into monsters, to running into Dante on a motorcycle, to fighting monsters in a forest removed from civilization. After that initial confusion, I was grand.
Some of the stuff on akumas lost me. I know what the word means, but the levels and all that stuff confused me. After I got about halfway through the thread, I decided I’d check Kanda’s roster so I could complain that the information wasn’t there. Well it is – so thank you, Kanda. Yeap, they're demons.
Your roster’s a mess though (formatting stuff, not content) – you should polish that up when you have some time.
It goes without saying, though, that you’ve definitely grown as a writer. Your writing in this thread was in desperate need of editing (I know you’re an ESL, so I wasn’t flipping my computer over as I read), but when I compare it to the stuff you wrote as Batman, I am impressed at the lengths you’ve gone. Even stylistically and narrative-wise, you’ve grown.
As for you, Dante, you’ve always been a good writer. You were one of the five best writers in Dante’s Abyss. I enjoy your writing, and you should keep writing. Yet, even as I give you praise, I realize I have no idea what the hell your character has accomplished or done in the Omniverse. I just know his deeds through mainstream events. I should go see if your roster has a story list and see if you’ve done anything fancy. I’m curious to delve into the character a little more.
Final Note – I’d give Dante the Exceptional Bonus. Kanda’s writing is too green.
Stream of Consciousness Nonsense/Musings/Ramblings
[spoiler]
Yu Kanda 1
-Year and a half old post/storyline. Gonna make a note of that, let’s see how awful you were back then compared to your Batman stuff =p
-I think you’re looking for the word ‘ripple’ rather than ‘rumple’ … oh, wait, synonyms. Neat. I should have pieced that together, I often complain about my girlfriend’s bed sheets being rumpled.
-Yea, you have grown. You don’t have the tense/verb issues that I see in this first paragraph. The sentence structure is also pretty choppy, and it’s clear to me that you were still finding your voice as Kanda at this time (were you?)
-Noah is a guy in a top hat? With a propensity to grandiose gestures of villainy? I already like this guy.
-All in all, this was a very methodical post. You provide a breakdown of what occurred and don’t try to go overboard with description or get overly flowy with … the flow. While the grammar needs (needed?) work, I can’t complain about the story content of the post (although I won’t laud it either).
Dante 1
-I read the first sentence and my thought was “oh wow, you used commas to their max potential. +2 respect.” Not a fan of that jumbled sentence that follows next. Semicolons are a tricky creature.
-The same is true when I was reading you in DA, but I get a kick out of the fact that all of Dante’s weapons has names. It made me think back to those ancient stories where all the swords have names.
-All in all, very solid. When I read your work, I always feel like its pulled straight from the cover of a 1980’s heavy metal album cover or something. Like that Jack Black video game? That’s a compliment. I did, however, kind of get a little lost in the ancillary players in the scene. I lost track of them at a point.
Kanda 2
-Oh, Noah is a species of some sort and not a person? I am grossly unaware of Kanda’s canon.
-Something you may have already sorted out, but is Akuma a proper noun or not? You go between capitalizing it and not capitalizing it.
-A trick that you might want to consider is breaking up paragraphs for dialogue. Even if it’s the same speaker, it helps to give a little more gravitas and adds to the flow, ESPECIALLY in an action scene like this one. You have two people speaking in one paragraph in this post, and that took me a few moments to figure out.
-Did Kanda land in Darkshire? You guys traveled really quickly to a forested area, so I’m not sure.
-I liked the section with Klaud commenting on the fact that “this is Omni’s world” when you spoke about God’s cleansing and whatnot but again I found myself lost in the side characters that I didn’t know where there. I remember (albeit vaguely) Klaud from the Secondary Saga but that’s about it (and even then, I don’t really remember who Klaud really was – I think you used a lot of German in her text, though, which was something I remember noting at the time as ‘pretty cool’)
-The rest of the post was fine, but you did have some grammatical things you could/should have caught with a quick edit (uncapitalized first letters of paragraphs). But again, I know this was early in your writing.
-Here’s an exercise. I’m snatching the last paragraph from your first ‘perspective in post 2.’ Kanda defiant against the akuma (Akuma?). I just want to show you some of the small things that I would have done that (in my opinion, obviously) may have increased the flow of the section. I am going to assume that akuma is not a proper noun.
While I did re-arrange some stuff, my main intention was to just show how to chop up a blocky paragraph to enhance the narrative (there’s also stuff in there that’s probably ‘Alex tropes’ like the dash and the fact that I like to alternate dialogue in stand-alone sentence). I also must admit that I didn’t like the sentence I italicized in the original, so I chopped it to pieces.
Dante 2 & 3
-I’m a fan of the ‘half-something and half-othersomething’ phraseology. I use it every now again, so it’s nice to see I’m not the only one.
-When I have “Dialogue”-break-“Dialogue,” I tend to have a period before the second spoken segment. I think that’s the grammatically correct way to do it. *waits for half a dozen people to get all up in his face rambling about artistic license nonsense*
-To relate to dialogue again, I feel like you can maybe tone down the surrounding sentence structure. Aside from one or two one-word interjections, I felt like every single bit of dialogue had some associated action or twitch or something that occupied the rest of the line. While that’s an excellent device when you need to add a little bit of action to the narrative, it can quickly bog down the pacing when it’s just extra description of tone and twitches. Just something to consider.
-(from your third post) “They two of them began to limp forwards together, and collectively faster” – This sentence took me way too long to decode.
-Okay, the scene where Dante gets impaled and goes HAM was some fantastic stuff.
-Should I know the difference between the levels of akuma or is it just as clear and blatant as it sounds? I’m familiar with other media that classified demons, so I’ve just assumed. Is it a steep climb from 1 to 3? Is this stuff in Kanda’s roster because I 100% didn’t go there before diving into this thread and now it’s far too late.
-Weird, you had a paragraph start without dialogue but included a period prior to the eventual dialogue after that line of text.
-Oxford commas. +1 respect
-The progression of this fight is a little lost on me (but not to the point where I’m struggling to follow along).
Kanda 3&4
-“The three warriors stared into the yellow-red flames flickering in the night, as they mourned for their lost companion” – should be two sentences, personally
-“Kanda sighed as he threw another log onto the fire, sparks danced through the air as the log landed onto the pile.” Instead of ‘log landed onto the pile’ you may want to go with ‘settled into the flames’ It’s something about using the word onto twice that felt off (may be my personal tastes though)
-Kanda scraped his throat before addressing her," How long have you been here General?" Scraped his throat or cleared his throat?
-Oh, okay, is this the Black Order foundation story?
-"Soo, what is a black order ?" Dante asked semi curious. ~> With this, I think you would have been better served to just have Dante tilt his head or lean closer. Both are common ways to show someone is interested in hearing what you have to say.
-“The dark words provided by Kanda made Dante quiet, no smart comments, no wise cracking jokes, no sarcasm.” Colon would have been best used here. “…quiet: No smart comments, no wise-cracking jokes, no sarcasm.” Or, if you wanted to be extra-stress-the-point. You could have them each be standalone sentences after Dante falling quiet.
-I think this is my first time reading someone expend this much effort in the summoning process (both in-character and reading a writer detailing it to this extent). Lots of time people just gloss over this (I do, because it can be boring), but you have a background scene to rely upon, which helps add some more gravitas to the narrative. It’s a very cool series of scenes for sure.
-Your fourth post (the #8 post in the thread) was very well-done. Initially, I was going to complain about the super paragraphs at the start, but you quickly started to switch up the structure. The bit at the end with the saying was a nice bookend for this post. You managed to provide this scene with the drama it required without making it too cheesy.
Dante 4
-Excellent post. I got a little confused with the transition for this last scene, but I figured it out.
Kanda 5
-I feel compelled to link you to some of my old writing to show how I struggled with block paragraphs, so you don’t think I’m just yammering stupidly. I don’t know if this is a Kanda thing (because he is so exposition-heavy) or what. I’ll have to spot some of his recent work. Your stuff with the Batman didn’t have this issue (but then again, you had a lot more dialogue and your Batman posts were smaller than this).
-But honestly, this was a nice conclusion to the thread. Your writing definitely improved by writing alongside Dante (who is grade-A throughout), but you still had some common mistakes in the last post. A lot of these I didn’t find in your Batman work, so I imagine that you’ve since mastered the art of editing and revision.[/spoiler]
--
Ah, another ‘vintage’ thread. I feel like this might be a theme for this first wave of Hyper New Book Club.
Like the other review I made, I’mma focus on my big thoughts and comments here. At the end, I’ll include the notes and thoughts I had while reading the thread. I’ve spoiler-tagged those mainly because they go one and are for the sake of Ken and Dante more than anyone else.
So here we find Yu Kanda and Dante. This is, if I recall, after the Secondary Saga and before Ken (Yu Kanda) went on to help coordinate Heroes Graveyard? It took me through a bit of the thread to see that this was the foundation of Kanda’s dormant faction, the Black Order. Just like with the thread from last time, once I saw that ‘big picture,’ I was drawn into the remainder of the thread a lot more. It felt like a little moment of history, rather than just two friends and their pals slaying monsters.
In terms of big picture, I liked this thread. There were parts in the narrative where I found myself confused, and the pacing/transitions (particularly in the first handful of posts) made it a bit hard to follow. Let me clarify that. I felt like it went very quickly from Kanda landing (in Darkshire?) to running into monsters, to running into Dante on a motorcycle, to fighting monsters in a forest removed from civilization. After that initial confusion, I was grand.
Some of the stuff on akumas lost me. I know what the word means, but the levels and all that stuff confused me. After I got about halfway through the thread, I decided I’d check Kanda’s roster so I could complain that the information wasn’t there. Well it is – so thank you, Kanda. Yeap, they're demons.
Your roster’s a mess though (formatting stuff, not content) – you should polish that up when you have some time.
It goes without saying, though, that you’ve definitely grown as a writer. Your writing in this thread was in desperate need of editing (I know you’re an ESL, so I wasn’t flipping my computer over as I read), but when I compare it to the stuff you wrote as Batman, I am impressed at the lengths you’ve gone. Even stylistically and narrative-wise, you’ve grown.
As for you, Dante, you’ve always been a good writer. You were one of the five best writers in Dante’s Abyss. I enjoy your writing, and you should keep writing. Yet, even as I give you praise, I realize I have no idea what the hell your character has accomplished or done in the Omniverse. I just know his deeds through mainstream events. I should go see if your roster has a story list and see if you’ve done anything fancy. I’m curious to delve into the character a little more.
Final Note – I’d give Dante the Exceptional Bonus. Kanda’s writing is too green.
Stream of Consciousness Nonsense/Musings/Ramblings
[spoiler]
Yu Kanda 1
-Year and a half old post/storyline. Gonna make a note of that, let’s see how awful you were back then compared to your Batman stuff =p
-I think you’re looking for the word ‘ripple’ rather than ‘rumple’ … oh, wait, synonyms. Neat. I should have pieced that together, I often complain about my girlfriend’s bed sheets being rumpled.
-Yea, you have grown. You don’t have the tense/verb issues that I see in this first paragraph. The sentence structure is also pretty choppy, and it’s clear to me that you were still finding your voice as Kanda at this time (were you?)
-Noah is a guy in a top hat? With a propensity to grandiose gestures of villainy? I already like this guy.
-All in all, this was a very methodical post. You provide a breakdown of what occurred and don’t try to go overboard with description or get overly flowy with … the flow. While the grammar needs (needed?) work, I can’t complain about the story content of the post (although I won’t laud it either).
Dante 1
-I read the first sentence and my thought was “oh wow, you used commas to their max potential. +2 respect.” Not a fan of that jumbled sentence that follows next. Semicolons are a tricky creature.
-The same is true when I was reading you in DA, but I get a kick out of the fact that all of Dante’s weapons has names. It made me think back to those ancient stories where all the swords have names.
-All in all, very solid. When I read your work, I always feel like its pulled straight from the cover of a 1980’s heavy metal album cover or something. Like that Jack Black video game? That’s a compliment. I did, however, kind of get a little lost in the ancillary players in the scene. I lost track of them at a point.
Kanda 2
-Oh, Noah is a species of some sort and not a person? I am grossly unaware of Kanda’s canon.
-Something you may have already sorted out, but is Akuma a proper noun or not? You go between capitalizing it and not capitalizing it.
-A trick that you might want to consider is breaking up paragraphs for dialogue. Even if it’s the same speaker, it helps to give a little more gravitas and adds to the flow, ESPECIALLY in an action scene like this one. You have two people speaking in one paragraph in this post, and that took me a few moments to figure out.
-Did Kanda land in Darkshire? You guys traveled really quickly to a forested area, so I’m not sure.
-I liked the section with Klaud commenting on the fact that “this is Omni’s world” when you spoke about God’s cleansing and whatnot but again I found myself lost in the side characters that I didn’t know where there. I remember (albeit vaguely) Klaud from the Secondary Saga but that’s about it (and even then, I don’t really remember who Klaud really was – I think you used a lot of German in her text, though, which was something I remember noting at the time as ‘pretty cool’)
-The rest of the post was fine, but you did have some grammatical things you could/should have caught with a quick edit (uncapitalized first letters of paragraphs). But again, I know this was early in your writing.
-Here’s an exercise. I’m snatching the last paragraph from your first ‘perspective in post 2.’ Kanda defiant against the akuma (Akuma?). I just want to show you some of the small things that I would have done that (in my opinion, obviously) may have increased the flow of the section. I am going to assume that akuma is not a proper noun.
Quote:"There is no victory for you here, only death." The red colored akuma spoke with a grin, quickly followed by the green one next to him, " There are more of us then there are of you. The innocence will die with you." They duo helped their fallen ally up, it was a scary sight, three level 3 akuma's standing next to each other with a Noah in the back. Kanda knew he was in trouble, but he is was an exorcist, this was what he was chosen to do. Getting up from the dirt he took a stance, both swords vibrating with innocence energy, grabbing his swords tight and his game face was on. With a loud battle shout he charged the three powerful opponents, knowing full well, he could meet his end.
Quote:Alex-ified
The red-colored akuma grinned. "There is no victory for you here, only death."
A moment later, the green one next to him spoke. "There are more of us than you. The Innocence will die with you."
The duo helped their fallen ally to his feet. It was a scary sight—a trio of level 3 akuma's standing next to each other with a Noah in the back. Kanda knew he was in trouble, but he was an exorcist. This was what he was chosen to do! Sliding into a stance, he clenched his swords tightly as they vibrated with Innocence energy. Kanda put on his best game face as his adversaries loomed tall before him
With a loud battle cry, he charged the three powerful opponents, knowing full well that he could meet his end.
While I did re-arrange some stuff, my main intention was to just show how to chop up a blocky paragraph to enhance the narrative (there’s also stuff in there that’s probably ‘Alex tropes’ like the dash and the fact that I like to alternate dialogue in stand-alone sentence). I also must admit that I didn’t like the sentence I italicized in the original, so I chopped it to pieces.
Dante 2 & 3
-I’m a fan of the ‘half-something and half-othersomething’ phraseology. I use it every now again, so it’s nice to see I’m not the only one.
-When I have “Dialogue”-break-“Dialogue,” I tend to have a period before the second spoken segment. I think that’s the grammatically correct way to do it. *waits for half a dozen people to get all up in his face rambling about artistic license nonsense*
-To relate to dialogue again, I feel like you can maybe tone down the surrounding sentence structure. Aside from one or two one-word interjections, I felt like every single bit of dialogue had some associated action or twitch or something that occupied the rest of the line. While that’s an excellent device when you need to add a little bit of action to the narrative, it can quickly bog down the pacing when it’s just extra description of tone and twitches. Just something to consider.
-(from your third post) “They two of them began to limp forwards together, and collectively faster” – This sentence took me way too long to decode.
-Okay, the scene where Dante gets impaled and goes HAM was some fantastic stuff.
-Should I know the difference between the levels of akuma or is it just as clear and blatant as it sounds? I’m familiar with other media that classified demons, so I’ve just assumed. Is it a steep climb from 1 to 3? Is this stuff in Kanda’s roster because I 100% didn’t go there before diving into this thread and now it’s far too late.
-Weird, you had a paragraph start without dialogue but included a period prior to the eventual dialogue after that line of text.
-Oxford commas. +1 respect
-The progression of this fight is a little lost on me (but not to the point where I’m struggling to follow along).
Kanda 3&4
-“The three warriors stared into the yellow-red flames flickering in the night, as they mourned for their lost companion” – should be two sentences, personally
-“Kanda sighed as he threw another log onto the fire, sparks danced through the air as the log landed onto the pile.” Instead of ‘log landed onto the pile’ you may want to go with ‘settled into the flames’ It’s something about using the word onto twice that felt off (may be my personal tastes though)
-Kanda scraped his throat before addressing her," How long have you been here General?" Scraped his throat or cleared his throat?
-Oh, okay, is this the Black Order foundation story?
-"Soo, what is a black order ?" Dante asked semi curious. ~> With this, I think you would have been better served to just have Dante tilt his head or lean closer. Both are common ways to show someone is interested in hearing what you have to say.
-“The dark words provided by Kanda made Dante quiet, no smart comments, no wise cracking jokes, no sarcasm.” Colon would have been best used here. “…quiet: No smart comments, no wise-cracking jokes, no sarcasm.” Or, if you wanted to be extra-stress-the-point. You could have them each be standalone sentences after Dante falling quiet.
-I think this is my first time reading someone expend this much effort in the summoning process (both in-character and reading a writer detailing it to this extent). Lots of time people just gloss over this (I do, because it can be boring), but you have a background scene to rely upon, which helps add some more gravitas to the narrative. It’s a very cool series of scenes for sure.
-Your fourth post (the #8 post in the thread) was very well-done. Initially, I was going to complain about the super paragraphs at the start, but you quickly started to switch up the structure. The bit at the end with the saying was a nice bookend for this post. You managed to provide this scene with the drama it required without making it too cheesy.
Dante 4
-Excellent post. I got a little confused with the transition for this last scene, but I figured it out.
Kanda 5
-I feel compelled to link you to some of my old writing to show how I struggled with block paragraphs, so you don’t think I’m just yammering stupidly. I don’t know if this is a Kanda thing (because he is so exposition-heavy) or what. I’ll have to spot some of his recent work. Your stuff with the Batman didn’t have this issue (but then again, you had a lot more dialogue and your Batman posts were smaller than this).
-But honestly, this was a nice conclusion to the thread. Your writing definitely improved by writing alongside Dante (who is grade-A throughout), but you still had some common mistakes in the last post. A lot of these I didn’t find in your Batman work, so I imagine that you’ve since mastered the art of editing and revision.[/spoiler]