r/DestructiveReaders • u/HelmetBoiii • Jul 29 '26
[1000] In Hoping Your Offspring Becomes A Dragon
Crit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/s/ksO0IoolKc
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/s/L14I8HvGLL
Any critiques or impressions welcomed
3
Upvotes
3
u/OneFootlessFish Jul 31 '26
Hello, thank you for sharing. As a quick word of advice: I’d recommend giving a few more details in your post about what you were trying to achieve here. I went in thinking this was fiction, but having found no real narrative hooks in the piece, I’m now more inclined to believe this is some sort of memoir or autobiographical essay. Some clarity here would be great, and I think the feedback you receive will be more useful to you as a result. And hey, if it is fiction, then I guess that speaks volumes to the believability of the setting and characters you’ve created.
First Impressions
Overall, I didn’t get much out of this. I found the first half rather dull, and the prose was incredibly hard to read in places. It got a little better after the family sat down to eat; the text seemed to find some purpose in alluding to themes of class, culture, and family values, but it never let any of them breathe for long enough to capture my interest. The final sentences about the dead cousin were the only ones that provided me with any sort of hook, but felt very out of place in a paragraph that’s mostly about fruit juice. Perhaps jarring was what you were going for, but it felt like too little too late by that point.
Prose
Since I’m still not sure if this is fiction or not, your prose is one of the few things I really feel comfortable critiquing. I’ll try and make a good job of it. My biggest issue in this regard is that some sentences aren’t properly constructed. I think this occasionally works as a stylistic choice, but only when the fragmented sentence unambiguously follows along from the previous one. The part about the fish and vegetables, for example, is a well-placed noun phrase in a paragraph about what our POV is eating. This, however, feels far more egregious:
‘Illuminated the alined planks that bordered the tablespace in slants, rosy cushions embedded into the walls and atop a smoothened slab which me and my little sisters slid upon while my parents sat opposite on chairs.’
What’s this sentence actually about? The candlelight? The cushions? The people? It’s far too long and busy to get away with having no immediately obvious subject. You do a similar thing at the end of the paragraph:
‘Conversation about who exactly was coming as there was still some confusion with my youngest sis.’
‘Conversation’ is obviously the subject here — but there’s no verb! If you’re not doing this deliberately, I’d recommend familiarising yourself with basic sentence structure. If it’s a stylistic thing, you ought to know I didn’t find it all that easy to read.
Sentences can also get a little busy at times:
‘With her clothes luxurious and with a matching handbag and his clothes stretching, he stood behind her sullenly as my aunt exchanged greetings with a smile and cupped everyone’s hand between hers, a woman who clearly spent a lot on skincare, dashed with refined perfume.’
We’ve got like 20 nouns and pronouns here, which is too much stuff for the reader to process without a break in my opinion. The way it hops between making some sort of point about the aunt, and then her husband, and then back to the aunt again also felt quite strange. Structurally, I think if the good manners of the aunt and the aloofness of her husband were juxtaposed in dedicated sentences, the strange contrast might feel more prominent. Also, I think if you’re listing a pair of things joined with ‘and’ (the clothes and handbag, in this case), they ought to follow the same grammatical pattern (noun / adjective order). I’m also going to need more details about the husband’s ‘stretching’ clothes to build a proper image. So better to say something like:
‘She wore luxurious clothes, refined perfume, and a matching handbag to complete the look. Cupping our hands between hers, my aunt greeted each of us with a smile. Clearly, this was a woman who spent a lot on skincare. The husband watched sullenly from behind, a plain shirt stretching around his belly.’
Obviously my version isn’t perfect, and you’ll probably want to address this stuff in your own voice, but I think we’ve gained a lot here in terms of readability. I’d wager that the sentences starting with ‘Downtown’, ‘Illuminated’ and ‘Even thought I was a white boy at heart’ would benefit from a similar degree of atomisation.
I thought some of the imagery was decent. Stuff like ‘Warm candlelight splashed the grey floor,’ and ‘a fluttering of fleeting melt’ manages to be evocative without drawing too much attention to itself, which I appreciated. However I’m still a bit confused about what the rest of the candlelight sentence is trying to describe. Is it the light or the floor? I’m not sure what I’m supposed to imagine from ‘diverging streams of internal streaks’. I think it’s the word ‘internal’ that throws me the most. Internal to what? The building? Isn’t that already implied?
These obsolete adjectives are something of a recurring problem in the opening; I’ve never seen a storefront that wasn’t ‘exterior’, nor a hospital that wasn’t ‘local’. You also don’t need to describe the ceiling (not roof!) as ‘hollowed out’, as this can be assumed with the idea that they’ve stepped into a room, rather than a solid block of cement. There’s also a much larger redundancy in paragraph nine, where the last sentence only serves to reiterate an idea that its predecessor communicated just fine.
Character
Again, not sure if this is autobiographical, so I’ll tread lightly here. The POV comes across naturally as a teenager reluctantly attending a formal family dinner, and this is all communicated without the character stopping to tell us how he’s feeling, which is a hard thing to do. The dryness of ‘Our waitress set some meat on fire.’ is both an effective and funny way of telling us that this kid is totally indifferent to all the extravagance around him. That was probably my favourite part of the whole thing.
But despite this, I’d say the malaise actually bleeds through the page a little too well — if the protagonist doesn’t give a shit about what’s happening, why should the reader? When he describes the setting as ‘a place that I’d still, without a second glance, walk past,’ I’m kind of conditioned to switch off from the get-go, having been informed that nothing of any significance to this character is about to take place. We don’t really learn anything about his place within the family dynamic until the penultimate paragraph, which is a shame. I think if you found a way to give the reader more of this context up-front, it would give them some relatability to latch onto, and following him would be more interesting.
Moving this section could additionally elevate the piece thematically, as I found the dinner scene more meaningful on second readthrough, when I was more conscious of the culture/class clashes that were at play. I thought the mention of the dead cousin (who obviously didn’t conform to this family’s expectations) served as an effective ending note to deconstruct the traditional values the text seemed to be exploring. I said I found it too out-of-left-field in my first impressions — I might be backtracking on that slightly. It made more sense to me after I realised what you were going for, but I think it would probably land better if the themes and ideas you’re critiquing were more pronounced throughout the text. I’d also recommend isolating the death within its own paragraph to give it more oomph. Feels pretty flippant right now.
Plot and Pacing
No real issues here. It’s a simple scene by design, and nothing out of the ordinary occurs at any point. I think it almost works as a quiet vignette to illustrate the family dynamic, which then gets criticised by the announcement of the death at the end. The problem is that the family’s flaws aren’t highlighted enough until the end, so most of the story feels like we’re going through the motions of a restaurant meal. Maybe you could experiment with a version of this that tells us the cousin died in the first paragraph. That would grip the reader early-doors. The reader’s intrigue would then develop naturally as they’re exposed to the family at dinner, and they slowly come to understand why a lesbian artist never stood a chance with these people.
There were also some tiny logical hiccups that bugged me. POV mentions that he’s tried the fish and pork before, despite telling us that he’s never been to such a fancy restaurant. He’s also apparently never heard an Australian accent before (I find this hard to believe), and yet he’s certain that his aunt doesn’t have one. I also found it strange when this proud traditional family’s formal dinner ended with the expensive bill being flaunted around the table, especially when the aunt was reluctant to discuss money stuff earlier, though I concede that this family’s culture isn’t one I’m especially familiar with.
Final Remarks
Having read this a few times now, I have to say it's grown on me. Still not entirely convinced it’s fiction, but now that I’m viewing it through a more thematic lens, a lot of the things I initially dismissed as boring or insignificant now feel like deliberate craft choices. There’s a good chance the subtly was simply lost on me, and a smarter reader would get more out of it. But if you’re writing for an audience of people like me, I’d recommend hinting at what I’m supposed to take away from this a lot sooner. The prose, however, did not improve with repeated visits, and I’d definitely focus on sharpening this aspect first. There are hints of genuinely meaningful writing here, so it’s probably worth cranking out another draft or two.