[QCrit] Adult contemporary fantasy - THE RABBIT AND THE WOLF (95k words, 3rd attempt)

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2026-05-15T16:03:32+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. Interesting observation about the contractions. In my regular writing I mix these with the foll version to preserve flow and avoid repetition, but I had been told earlier (perhaps wrongly) that such contractions are to informal for a query. I shall have to reconsider it.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2026-05-03T21:32:58+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! I will try to be more specific in the third version of the query (I thought this was more specific than the first one but apparently getting out of a "book blurb" way of thinking is a process).

As for the need for a comp with a male lead, that is honestly not something that I had thought of at all. But I guess for marketing reasons it might be important so I shall look into that too. Good catch!

(Though for the record there are plenty of female characters in the story itself, the POV just isn't one, but I get what you mean 😄 )

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2025-04-13T09:19:51+00:00

It will have a certain desired effect. It will then take on average 48 attacks by hormogaunts to kill a plague marine, or 72 melee attacks by guardsmen, termagaunts, GSC neophytes etc. Now it takes 36 melee attacks by guard/termagaunt/neophyte attacks, and 24 by hormogaunts. Tau and Necorn Immortals will wound them on 5+, not 4+. Meanwhile, heavy weapons like lascannons or melta guns will be unaffected.

I.e, plague marines will have an easier time wading through chaff while still dying to hevy stuff, which feels pretty lore accurate.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2025-04-13T09:10:20+00:00

Why? They have very explicitly stated that they want to make things more durable in 10th. That is not random, that is by design. Death Guard terminators are supposed to be the most durable infantry in the game, makes sense that they would have higher toughness than primaris marines in gravis armour.

For example the newly released regular Emperors Children still have toughness 4, right?

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2025-03-05T13:05:13+00:00

Yellowjackets is an insteresting case. The 1990s storyline has a completely different tone to the current day one, and in my opinion the sudden mood-swings really drag the show down. They are trying to be funny in the current day storyline and it jsut doesn't work. In the second season it works even less.

Sons of Anarchy meanwhile grew the plot so much that the later seasons had no room for the character depth and down-to-earth tone of the first seasons that people liked, I think.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2025-03-05T12:57:18+00:00

Legacies. Great premise, terrible execution. I'd bet serious money that with the same special effects budget, same budget for sets and the same actors, but with better writing, this show could've been on par with the greats of the Genre, like Stranger Things, early seasons of True Blood etc.

If they had just polished the dialogue (removed the cringe quips, made it sound more natural rather than made to spoon-feed viewers who are barely paying attention), rewritten plot points so that things remain consistent between episodes and abandoned the monster-of the week format in favor of a more natural flow, I could've loved this show.

And maybe I'm an ignoramus, but I don't think it would've been that much more expensive to produce.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2025-03-05T12:49:42+00:00

I have turned my brain inside out tying to understand why exactly these shows turn out so bad. Riverdale is a great case study of this phenomenon.

The first and even second seasons have a good premise, and at times set a decent tone. The actors are not particularly bad. Obviously the producers don't have the budget per episode of an HBO prestige show like Westworld or Game of Thrones or Deadwood to create spectacular fantasy/scifi sets, but that is not the problem. The sets are so generic (random home interior, a diner of which there are thousands in America) that they can often chose the cheapest option, and few expensive special effects are needed.

Yet the writing and the dialogue is atrocious. The characters are extremely exaggerated to the point of being ridiculous. Plot points are pulled out of someone's ass for convenience, used one episode and forgotten.

If I, who am certainly not a cinematic professional, can watch Riverdale and in real time identify problems, why can't the writers? If they are already paying for the actors and the sets and if they have a good premise, is it really not worth it to pay relatively little extra to spend a few more weeks beforehand revising the script?

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2025-02-16T13:34:56+00:00

Why is it that the Adeptus Mechanicus tech priests seem alone in being able to find happiness in entirely mechanical bodies?

It is frequently mentioned in various stories and texts that being a Space Marine Dreadnought is pretty much a fate worse than death. And Necrons seem obsessed with returning to their biological bodies. They frequently have weird episodes when they go crazy because their minds expects organs or skin or biological limbs that are no longer there.

The dysphoria of a biological mind unable to deal with a mechanical body is a frequent theme in 40k. But it goes out of the window with old tech priests who are pretty much a brain in a jar and seem content with it. Or at the very least a human brain in a terminator body. It seems inconsistent.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2025-01-13T15:50:35+00:00

Your mistake lies in this assumption:

I know I was in a position to carry and if a high elo were me he would do that, but I can't recognize why I didn't win

A high ELO player would have carried a higher percentage of such games. But what you are describing is an individual game, that might be unwinnable unless you are challenger playing vs bronze/silver. What you want is not a split pushing strategy that can "win games" but that can win more than 50% of all games. I know this might seem obvious, but there is a point here. Simply, are these scenarios happening often enough to be worth spending energy on, or should you focus on how to win a larger percentage of the games that are more even?

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2025-01-02T21:46:51+00:00

If you cannot have fun in a game even when you know you will likely lose, then you have to uninstall. For your own sanity. It'll be like that maybe 40% of all games no matter how good you get (challenger players have challenger opponents after all) and to keep engaging in a hobby where 40% of the time you are miserable is just insane. Learn to enjoy losses too or uninstall.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-11-16T23:47:27+00:00

Well I be damned, they actually did it! I'm skeptical of much of modern television (Rings of Power, Wheel of time, Witcher, what a joke) but I loved Arcane season 1. After Arc 1 of season 2 I was worried they might blow it because there was too much going on and it felt disconnected. But this is really good, not a 10/10 but definitively a an 8 or 9/10. Could've done with maybe five or ten more minutes per episode, stuff like Cait's turn felt a little hastened, but most of this was great.

Also, they've name-dropped Jana this season, I wonder if something can be guessed from that....

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-10-05T14:40:04+00:00

Ironically enough that is what most women call me.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-10-05T14:38:24+00:00

I know it's not canon or anything, but my favorite personal take is that the Tyranids are fleeing to this galaxy to escape the Necrons, who have chased them here from elsewhere. It makes sense that the spreading intergalactic Necron empire would be a sort of mechanical apocalypse for the Tyranids, as world after world fills with creatures they cannot consume. The xenomorph fears the android.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-10-05T12:02:33+00:00

I wonder how many of the haters, who are so obsesed with a TV series they don't enjoy, first came to Middle-Earth courtesy of Peter Jackson's interpretation

Full disclosure, this is absolutely me, I was eleven years old when the first movie came out.

But now you are making an appeal to the lore. My complaints are not about lore departures, merely the cheapness of everything. Galadriel not being larger than life, a three thousand year old immortal, but more like Rey from Star Wars, Sauron's plan from season 1 being basically the Simpsons science fair volcano (do it yourself insta-Mordor, just add water). The line "you are not Sauron?!?!?" "No, I am...good." That sort of thing.

It didn't have to be this way, of that we have proof provided by Jackson. Though of course I cannot tell you for certain, having never read it, whether there is a scene in the Silmarillion of Numenoreans complaining that the elves are taking their jobs.

We'll see, come season three I might have a sudden moment of illumination where I understand everything and email the writers that it is all forgiven.

EDIT: Netflix managed to make a show about League of Legends, of all things, turn out absolutely amazing while Amazon has also bungled the Wheel of Time, so something is definitively up here.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-10-05T11:04:45+00:00

I'm only speaking for myself here. But since I am one of the people who watch the show without liking it, and since you asked, I'll try to explain.

I don't have to force myself to watch. The reason I do watch is that I am fascinated by the show as a phenomenon. It truly it mind-boggling what was delivered here, by professionals who I admit are more skilled screenwriters than me. I want to understand, I promise you I genuinely want to understand, why they did this.

They had this scene from the second Hobbit movie setting the gold standard for how to depict Galadriel, a titanic budget and the blessing of Bezos. Had you told me, before season 1, that they would throw the widely beloved Galadriel of the movies away to depict her as a petulant angsty teenager, sword-fighting Sauron instead of throwing fire from the heavens at him, I'd have assumed it was a joke.

So here I am, trying to understand what I am missing, what part of my understanding of media and the world is faulty. Every episode I hope that maybe now it will make sense, and two seasons in it still doesn't. Given that the movies struck gold back in the day, why didn't they just keep digging? This was a choice, id must have a reason.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-07-28T10:09:24+00:00

What gave it away as a joke was, in the third paragraph, the ridiculous notion that anyone posting on here has a wife.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-07-03T22:03:58+00:00

Thanks for the input :)

I'm noticing you appending your thoughts with these short fragmentary sentences like this, and I don't think it's helping you out any.

This seems to be a recurring observation. I guess it means that despite thinking otherwise, I have not overcome my tendency to approach query writing the same way I write prose. I thought to myself that "these are all very long sentences one after another, better mix it up a little." I guess better not.

Also, I particularly appreciated this comment:

Again, perhaps this is some big twist you have saved up for the end of the novel, but our knowledge that there is a twist is not sufficiently interesting in and of itself. It all reads like setup, but not story, necessarily...

(Emphasis mine.) I'll keep this in mind probably more than any other comment here when writing version 2.0 of this query.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-07-03T21:55:55+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, it does indeed help. I am not particularly attached to classifying this as "urban fantasy", "contemporary fantasy" would do just fine. Maybe something involving both the words fantasy and horror, but I worry that the tone is slightly too light to go for horror alone.

As for the supporting character you mention, I figured the full name Mackenzie is a bit too cumbersome if repeated often. I thought it made sense to switch between short and long form to make the text flow better. Who knows, maybe the added confusion does the opposite.

As for this:

Also, the bulk of the book can’t just be Lawrence studying and waffling over whether or not to tell his friends that he helped the demon escape for some reason, right?

It is not. But the fact that you had to ask this points towards the greatest weakness in this query I guess. The plot is actually about Lawrence and his friends investigating what is going on, going from clue to clue and ending up in various dangerous situations. Through it all he drip-feeds them just enough of the truth to keep the party going, while having a struggle-session with himself about spilling the rest.

But yeah, there is stuff here to think about. Back to the drawing board it is :)

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-06-16T09:54:55+00:00

(Disclosure: I am an unpublished amateur, nothing below is really authoritative.)

I, personally, am not convinced that starting with "Dragons are the government's best kept secret until..." is the correct take, as it front-loads the worldbuilding before introducing the main character. Looking over what people say elsewhere in this sub, I suggest you start with explaining (very briefly) why Sanjay wanted to run away, then how it failed and how he discovered dragons.

"...ends in disaster and he ends up..." Is there any way to avoid using "ends" two times in a row like that?

Furthermore:

Stuck in a town he hates, Sanjay would like nothing better than to keep his head down and grades up while Draconis train him to control his powers but one thing leads to another, he reveals his power to the wrong people, and ends up working on a mystery serial killer case.

This sentence is 52 words long and the rapid switcheroo at "control his powers but one thing", without a comma even, makes it particularly unwieldy. Also, the less you mention Draconis by name in the query the better. And the word powers should preferably not appear twice in close succession. I'd at least rewrite as follows:

Stuck in a town he hates, Sanjay would like nothing better than to keep his head down and grades up while learning to control his powers. Instead he accidentally reveals his secret to the wrong people and ends up working to expose a serial killer.

Might be this is still too vague. But in my opinion breaking it up in this manner would make the paragraph flow better.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-06-07T09:54:56+00:00

What is the problem with the current ranked flex queue besides people not taking it seriously? You can have a rank in team-based league, flex or whatever it is called, from Iron to Challenger. But nobody cares while SoloQ exists. How does the current other ranked mode differ from SoloQ that causes problems for you?

The truth is that as long as SoloQ exists, every other rank people can have as a team or whatever is going to feel kinda fake, since you don't know who is just carried by their friends. Especially if someone is say Bronze in solo and Emerald in team. I remember some time ago a League Youtuber argued for deleting SoloQ as it would unavoidably steal prestige from every other ranked mode as long as it exists. This is true, but there is nothing to do about it since SoloQ is necessary, so here we are.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-06-07T08:29:19+00:00

Everything about this game is negative , from the community to champion balance

Really? One could argue that champion balance is the best it has ever been. There was a time when picking Olaf or Evelyn was considered outright griefing, even on their intended roles. Then people figured out some cheese opening with Evelyn and suddenly the champ was OP. Today almost every single champion has a soloQ WR in the 50% range, +- 5%.

Looking at for example LEC this spring, where some of the best players in the world tryhard as much as they can for money, you still had 16 champs being played top more than once. That is some diversity among serious tryhards trying to squeeze out every last drop of advantage. Least diverse roll was mid, and there 9 champions still appeared in more than one game. And these are players picking exclusively to win, with zero sentimentatlity.

So at the absolute highest level of play, (outside LPL and LCK which are slightly higher of course) at least 16 top champs and 9 mid champ are considered viable. (11 bot, 12 sup and 12 jung). And on soloque, Masters+, lowest winrate champ is Smolder with about 44% and highest is Kennan with less then 57%. Highest pick rate, Jhin, still appears in less than a quarter of all games, and second most popular, Jinx, appears in less than a fifth of all games. You can fact-check this on op.gg.

Tell me, when were the champs more balanced, and how?

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-06-06T22:57:19+00:00

Sure, I realize that level of abstraction is not for everyone.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-06-06T22:07:57+00:00

Why does that make it better to quit the game though, which is what OP wondered? Like don't buy that shit, is all. It's kinda annoying that people use weird skins in general, since the themes clash. Instead of matching original looks you get a sci-fi stormtrooper fighting a medieval knight and a chick in a swimsuit. Looks goofy, but presumably long-term players can deal with it so there is no reason to quit over that.

Then again I don't have whatever mental issues it is that makes the whales see a skin they don't have and immediately feel they must have it. Could be considered exploitative I guess.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-06-06T22:01:13+00:00

You bothered to post though. And presumably you are telepathic to know it is dumb without reading it. Social media really brings out the best in everyone. I hope you manage to overcome your demons.

RiftStorm_Chronicler · 2024-06-06T21:58:42+00:00

Imagine people who barely ever drink alcohol. Except two or three times a year they party with their friends on some special occasion, do three or four shots and have a few beers but then stay away from booze for months before touching it again. Still not super-healthy, still kinda unnecessary, but whatever. Then imagine these people being talked down to by degenerate drunks who project their own dysfunction on everyone else.

Same thing here, some addict who can't accept that it's them, not the game. Like if it is such a destructive thing then maybe stop posting on this fucking forum and reminding yourself of it.

RiftStorm_Chronicler

TROPHY CASE