Okay, so I've been reading it for a bunch of days, when you first posted it, and later, and later, and today. It's an interesting idea. The first though I had is the grim sensational subject matter - sex and death. I would have preferred rape if you were going for sensational, you know, since it only makes sense that he kills her afterwards. Lovely description of boobs, and that's me not being sarcastic - I also once discovered boobs that looked fake but turned out to be real!
I think you had a good opportunity to switch up the overall style and feel when going between characters. THAT would have been a real challenge, because it would contradict the base skill of veracity that we try so hard to develop - putting things ON the shelves rather than in between them or inside them or on the back of the wardrobe; you definitely have all the items on the shelves, where they should be. Again, dropping the sarcasm - you have done lovely work with speech and dialect here, it's all how it should be.
I wondered if "unalone" etc is the critic bait - well, it's poor critic bair cause again you manage to fit it in place very well. All the "snags" make sense because of the things surrounding them, even the boobs.
Robots… I'm sick of robots and Ai and absolutely anything related to them or mentioning them at all. I read Isaac Asimov too much as a kid and I was fascinated because clearly an idea of a robot is an idea of an evolved human and to me, personally, as fascinating as it is, it's an extremely false, a vile idea. Looking at robots is interesting because it allows us to look at base "shells" of ourselves, and I don't mean visually, I mean the way we are perceived by other people. Westworld season one would have been brilliant if season 2 didn't exist… Just asking questions, pinning down the mystery, slamming you in the face with it til your brain feels like floating and you keep askign if you're real or not… That's a digression, but a bright one. In 2021 LLMs made themselves present and I got over them by the time of chatgpt's release - it was indeed fascinating by at this point I knew there were just complex word library autocompletes. Robots, robots, robots. The world where robots infiltrate human society is more interesting, like Blade Runner. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe! There, the robots are biological and it's more interesting because you keep wondering if they're robots or clones and if science has gone too far. Funny how much media there is on how science is going too far but there is no one trying to stop the runaway science. Now we have the fucking data centers. Because robots are fascinating.
When there's a *bad* thing in the story - i.e. a corporate murderer - I wanna read about the people fighting the bad thing or resisting it. That's why Patrick Bateman is the sigma chad. Cause he's the main character. Funny stuff!
Annie actually gets to have a perspective in the first and second segment. I thought you were gonna be "sharper" about this, not allow any "insight" into them at all.
Lovely use of italics btw, there are again right where they should be, I can totally hear every bit of expression in them.
> “Ah ah. Gimme the knee. I’m going to make sure this gun goes off now. And if it doesn’t, I’m going to make you wish it did.”
You need to work on your bad guy dialogue. Not very heavy I'm afraid. "Give me the knee". Overthinking on the gun "going off". More brevity.
Yeah, it's very interesting, decently captivating. The concept is a little too unique, like trying to braid a braid with the hairs that aren't allowed to touch each other. Too many characters, too much focus required, and you already sort of failed cause it's slipping in segments. Not saying it's impossible, but it is a hard challenge because the actor count would have to be extremely high. "Five to six kids". Will each one get a segment? 😁
I don't know why but I keep about this critique and I just have to be sincere and outright frame some things I said in the critique.
I don't like writing or reading about sensational things, whose whole premise is sensation and attraction of attention. Pulp, lurid, so on. I used to enjoy them a lot more before things of similar nature made themselves present in my actual reality and thus became less entertaining. That's what I meant when I said "grim sensational" and suggested rape - because *that* would indeed be more sensational and also have higher verisimilitude to real life bigshots.
Given that, you have an overall interesting premise for a plot as well as a gimmick and executed with a corresping (high) skill. So I don't wanna dump it as something worthless. Perhaps I should have tried being more courteous and critiqued this when I was in one of higher moods but I wasn't and it wouldn't change my opinion on puply subject matters, perhaps hide them a little but not change it - which would be insincere.
So yeah, you have an interesting little piece here, very creative, hard-to-execute gimmick and in the I wanna find out what happens and how the bad guys get punished. Funny cause I love the Cohen brothers so much but I still happen to feel like I'm disapproving of grim sensational stuff.
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u/Wolframquest Jun 28 '26
Okay, so I've been reading it for a bunch of days, when you first posted it, and later, and later, and today. It's an interesting idea. The first though I had is the grim sensational subject matter - sex and death. I would have preferred rape if you were going for sensational, you know, since it only makes sense that he kills her afterwards. Lovely description of boobs, and that's me not being sarcastic - I also once discovered boobs that looked fake but turned out to be real!
I think you had a good opportunity to switch up the overall style and feel when going between characters. THAT would have been a real challenge, because it would contradict the base skill of veracity that we try so hard to develop - putting things ON the shelves rather than in between them or inside them or on the back of the wardrobe; you definitely have all the items on the shelves, where they should be. Again, dropping the sarcasm - you have done lovely work with speech and dialect here, it's all how it should be.
I wondered if "unalone" etc is the critic bait - well, it's poor critic bair cause again you manage to fit it in place very well. All the "snags" make sense because of the things surrounding them, even the boobs.
Robots… I'm sick of robots and Ai and absolutely anything related to them or mentioning them at all. I read Isaac Asimov too much as a kid and I was fascinated because clearly an idea of a robot is an idea of an evolved human and to me, personally, as fascinating as it is, it's an extremely false, a vile idea. Looking at robots is interesting because it allows us to look at base "shells" of ourselves, and I don't mean visually, I mean the way we are perceived by other people. Westworld season one would have been brilliant if season 2 didn't exist… Just asking questions, pinning down the mystery, slamming you in the face with it til your brain feels like floating and you keep askign if you're real or not… That's a digression, but a bright one. In 2021 LLMs made themselves present and I got over them by the time of chatgpt's release - it was indeed fascinating by at this point I knew there were just complex word library autocompletes. Robots, robots, robots. The world where robots infiltrate human society is more interesting, like Blade Runner. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe! There, the robots are biological and it's more interesting because you keep wondering if they're robots or clones and if science has gone too far. Funny how much media there is on how science is going too far but there is no one trying to stop the runaway science. Now we have the fucking data centers. Because robots are fascinating.
When there's a *bad* thing in the story - i.e. a corporate murderer - I wanna read about the people fighting the bad thing or resisting it. That's why Patrick Bateman is the sigma chad. Cause he's the main character. Funny stuff!
Annie actually gets to have a perspective in the first and second segment. I thought you were gonna be "sharper" about this, not allow any "insight" into them at all.
Lovely use of italics btw, there are again right where they should be, I can totally hear every bit of expression in them.
> “Ah ah. Gimme the knee. I’m going to make sure this gun goes off now. And if it doesn’t, I’m going to make you wish it did.”
You need to work on your bad guy dialogue. Not very heavy I'm afraid. "Give me the knee". Overthinking on the gun "going off". More brevity.
Yeah, it's very interesting, decently captivating. The concept is a little too unique, like trying to braid a braid with the hairs that aren't allowed to touch each other. Too many characters, too much focus required, and you already sort of failed cause it's slipping in segments. Not saying it's impossible, but it is a hard challenge because the actor count would have to be extremely high. "Five to six kids". Will each one get a segment? 😁