Crit Request: SSS draft (4.1K words)
http://wanderers-sandbox-2.wikidot.com/crow-cat-s-wl-sandbox-2-0
General impressions? Do any scenes/sections feel like they could be improved?
Crit Request: SSS draft (4.1K words)
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» Crit Request: SSS draft (4.1K words)
The anticlimactic end to this is a nice touch and this has potential, but I think this needs a lot of work before it's ready.
Firstly, while I think you intended to have him come across as immature, Rav-vana comes across as so juvenile and petty that it strains my suspension of disbelief. For instance:
“Yeah… yeah… you remember me?” The Exile hobbles over slowly, “Remember our fight? Remember how you cheated?” He spits the last word out like a bitter taste. “I remember clearly. You claimed your magic drew directly from your god’s grace, and yet all I witnessed was you performing the same motions sorcerers have used for ages. You’re a charlatan!”
As the reflection of paternal abuse slams down on the symbol of motherly protection, Rav-vana the Exile uses his newfound telepathy to relay one message to the town: ‘This is what you get for looking at me weird.’
How could a caravan be important? Maybe it donated to towns with bad economies. To dumb kids who would shoot snot at him if they saw him. You little kids are gonna starve, with caved in bellies hahahaha.
If he started seeming more serious and degenerated over time you could use this to show how petty and pointless his goals always were. But instead, from the start he comes across as a teenage Internet troll who got godlike powers, and while teenage Internet trolls exist, they tend not to be very competent because they lack self-discipline. This guy is destroying cities basically single-handedly. I would suggest either making it clear that from the start he is being played by Pazunia and used as a convenient puppet or making him seem more mature and gradually revealing how petty his motivations are over time.
Secondly, is Rav-vana supposed to have done all this over the span of one year? Because on my first read through, I'd assumed this was happening over a more extended period of time. You might benefit from having his actions be smaller scale. The Caravan is probably (at least on paper) a soft target… they're not a special mage academy or militarized force; they've got guards but by the point that this guy has started blowing away entire cities he can handle them.
The Caravan wiping the memories of those who travel with it also seems odd and not well developed—is there something specific you're thinking with this angle?
Lastly, there are some spelling and grammar issues. Most notably, you should spell out numbers when you're writing fiction unless you're quoting an in-universe technical document or something similar. Even then, smaller numbers such as "one" are generally written out in technical writing. You also have a lot of sentence fragments and they make your prose too choppy.
The angle I was going for with Rav-vana was him losing himself in his quest for revenge. The reason he gets more and more petty is that revenge becomes his sole motivator, due to it being his true desire when making the deal with Pazunia. In the end he completely forgets about why he went on this revenge quest in the first place, forgetting about the Caravan. It’s also meant to be slightly comical that he’s doing these horrible acts for progressively ridiculous reasons (never got recognition in his hometown > lost an argument with someone > perceived slight). Is there something I could do to make these more clear?
Him being super powerful was mostly just cause I wanted to write about a powerful wizard using evil magic. It was also to show how powerful things don’t last forever, but the Caravan does. Also how revenge is self destructive. This is meant to take place over a year, so I’ll try and make that more clear in the beginning.
The memory wiping aspect was something discussed during the brainstorming phase on discord. This story was an idea I had before the hub went up, and was too stubborn to change it. I’ll fix it to remove the Caravan memory wiping aspect, and change it to mages on the Caravan removed his knowledge of the dark spells he learned.
Could you give an example of one of the sentence fragments?
The angle I was going for with Rav-vana was him losing himself in his quest for revenge. The reason he gets more and more petty is that revenge becomes his sole motivator, due to it being his true desire when making the deal with Pazunia. In the end he completely forgets about why he went on this revenge quest in the first place, forgetting about the Caravan. It’s also meant to be slightly comical that he’s doing these horrible acts for progressively ridiculous reasons (never got recognition in his hometown > lost an argument with someone > perceived slight). Is there something I could do to make these more clear?
I get it, but I think you start with him being too petty for this to work. The way he's introduced to us is forming a pact with a demon and then killing everyone in his home town in an agonizing manner and using their corpses as zombies; he's already lost himself. I think this would work better if you have him start by killing one person--perhaps the elder--whom he was especially angry at in a fit of rage, then have him grow pettier and more vicious (and more powerful) more slowly). You need to go from one to one hundred and you're starting at ninety.
Could you give an example of one of the sentence fragments?
Sure:
Burning sensation ignored in favor of cold revenge.
I know sentence fragments are sometimes useful to create choppy text deliberately, but here it feels like it doesn't flow right.
plilt's criticisms largely mirror my own. i will add: i think the connection between the two stories is too thin. sure, they intersect at the end, but thematically, they have next to nothing to do with each other. the story of a weird species evolving underground doesn't really enhance the story of some guy using demon magic for petty revenge in any meaningful way. i could maybe see an evolution vs devolution angle, but that would require significant revisions to really click, i think.
poet
The two stories are about powerful entities that overpower certain systems in the desert (one attacks the people, the other the ecosystem). I also thought it would be neat to have these alien, generic fantasy creatures interact with the native, unique alien looking animals. Did those things come through, or is that something I need to revise?
i suppose i can see that link now that you've pointed it out, but i want something more. the themes, crow! i crave the themes!
poet
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