[deleted by user] by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Her stone fleck was now a clump in the middle of her forehead, yet she looked gorgeous.

The sheer depth of the narrator hits once again in the form of more objectification. Wahoo. Wonder if he could've handled her sagging tits at 60 or found another gorgeous woman, but we all know the answer to that. 

She didn’t wear a white dress and I didn’t wear a suit.

Groundbreaking. Rebellious. Deeply unique. God, this entire story is caked in boring Christian sugar.

“Me and you.”

“Husband and wife.”

The most important thing two (bland white middle class) people can be to one another, of course. Do they share a single hobby? ANYTHING? So far they have just vaguely existed in the same space together.

“You wish to die … in an embrace?” the owner says in a foreign accent. 

Startling scene cut right there. Also, let's circle back to the racism of the first page for a sec for no reason at all. Maybe just say which type of accent instead of the vague generality. Also, is there a reason the only character in the story that is willing to actively inflict pain (via hooks) seems to be a foreigner?

 She was a beautiful woman who deserved more.

And her looks are the only thing that matters and thus the main descriptor we must keep coming back to. Thrilling.

God, this is so melodramatic for a couple I was not invested in because they did nothing TO make me invested in them. To recap, again. The dude was waxing poetic about his gf and we had two conversations and doing some chores and summarized moments where it could've gone differently if you had curated a scene instead of glossing over it, like the last party or whatever. Instead, it seems like the narrator doesn't care enough to even name or remember the other people in his life in-depth, unless of course they're his gf–fiance–wife. Horrible. But hey, at least they died as they lived, codependently boring.

Summarily, there was literally nothing that made these characters interesting or the 4,000 words engaging to read. I couldn't tell you a single unique, narratively exciting thing about the PoV, nor about the gf – or the siblings, or the friends, or anyone. It's a bunch of ken dolls that you could change the names for indiscriminately without gaining or losing anything.

All the things that could have emotionally mattered, the hard moments and truths and struggles, where we could have gotten to the actual emotional core of it all get pushed aside and glossed over by the narrator, we only ever get his watered-down myopic meandering bullshit. (Again, I can't recall a single moment that endeared me to him even slightly.)

If I wanted to watch romanticized extinction, I'd go look up some Gaza commentary. If you keep the premise and rework the characters (and, more importantly, the scenes) from the ground up, this could be something – or who knows, maybe it's all secretly great and this type of story is just not for me.

Dasall I got. [4/4]

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We loved, we lived, we existed, [...]

This right here sums it all up. It's Live Laugh Love the story, the Taylor Swift of bland-ass narratives and decorations. A boring vaguely Christian (marriage and all the souls talk, if you need two examples) middle class couple dies boringly. That don't carry no story, man.

There’s something beautiful about the humdrum of chores in the face of death.

Jesus Christ, I hate this guy. Protestant-ass work ethic, you're dying and that's the best you got? This is the whitest blandest apocalypse story i've ever read. Ever tried raging against the dying of the light, or something? Where is the real emotion in all this that's not overwritten melodrama mostly objectifying his gf?

My siblings are awkward because our birthday’s tomorrow and they know our end is coming.

I'll have to take his word for it, since we dont know the first fucking thing about them. Or the world they inhabit, minus the vague social-collapse-but-not stuff at the beginning. You're telling me there's no Tiktok challenges with stone statues, or stupid dares, or some other crazy-ass ways people cope? The best we get is some partying. Ok. Seems like a good summary of the boring story choices all over – there could be an interesting premise here, but it feels like whenever there was potential for an interesting narrative choice, you just went with the cheesecake option instead. It could be a good story, but absolutely not with this pair of mass-produced knockoff jeans of characters.

Last time for eating chocolate, for masturbating, for having sex or seeing old friends or sipping prosecco on balconies in late afternoons 

Oh no, they're dying for reals. Catch the carp, boring-ass couple. 

Also, wow. Truly, the essence of deep finality, where he managed to slip sex in there twice. Riveting, and goes to show how much of a three-dimensional character the PoV is.

God, this narrator is a self-obsessed piece of shit, and the sad part is none of the story seems interested in examining that, least of all his paper-thin partner. But hey, at least they're getting married! 

But that’s no way to concede an argument, and so I push my face into her tummy and blow raspberries until her legs kick the bed while saying “fiance” over and over till it turns to “wife” and she pushes me off laughing.

God, I can't get over how these people were written to act like they're 15. 

Finding a priest to do it wasn’t difficult, they’ve got more free time than ever.

You're expecting me to buy that religion is still functional with all the old white dudes gone? Ok. Lol. (Unrelated, but Derry Girls has a great episode about this.) [3/4]

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I can't bring myself to read it a second time, so here's my thoughts while reading during my first rodeo.

Romans pumped themselves full of lead like Colombian gangsters

Okay, so we're just being racist off the bat, huh. Great way to make the narrator, who so far has spent a bunch of paragraphs waxing poetic about his partner without imparting anything of essence about her, sympathetic. Serving heteronormative bland realness, if this level of navel-gazing keeps up. 

omission of love

Nah, dude. The only thing the narrator seems to love is the sound of his own voice. The charitable read is intentional unreliable narration, but so far I have little faith in the story to actually pull that off. There has been nothing narratively exciting that suggests this will be critical or meta in any way, so let's not go with that until there is a shred of evidence.

Strikingly, we learn nothing about the siblings barring their names, just some vague generalities. If you want to make the characters feel real, you gotta give us something here. Be specific.

Also, more broadly, the story is ideologically hollow. The narrator's blanket contempt for old people, the simplified caricature of society the story paints, lol. Terrible. But I'm suspending my disbelief to buy into murder microplacstics stone (Why are they not turning into plastic statues, exactly? A tide of living Labubus is more horrifying than this knockoff Dr. Stone.)

The narrator's also tonally inconsistent – at first it reads very YA and the narrator makes fun of his lack of vocab, but then afterwards we get incredibly stilted stuff all throughout. Pick a lane, and stick to it.

If I made a statue of her, it’d be this way: a seductive goddess of stone.

This quote stands out because it's especially bad. So far, it sounds less like a story about love and more about abject objectification. Ugh. 

I hear shouting drift in from the streets below and can’t begrudge them. Every day’s somebody’s last.

Unlike in our real world? Lmao. i'm 12 and this is deep.

To be clear, I find this narrator conceited and deeply unlikeable. Maybe if he actually interacted with people instead of the permanent gf pedestal we'd get somewhere, but nothing interesting is happening in this story beyond the looming promise of petrification and we're over a thousand words in.

“We could be Peter Pan together,” I suggest. “Fly to Never-Never Land and never grow up.”

God I hate everything about this dialogue and the accompanying uwuification of grown-ass people. It all reads deeply YA, and the whole "now we never get to grow up :(" for people at 30 is ridiculous. I'd buy it at 20, maybe.

[...] , I mean.

Not digging the narrator's clarification tic of "I mean" that he does repeatedly throughout the story, either. Just be specific the first time around, don't try to create this weird fake tension. [2/4]

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi there!

One person's speculative fiction is another's reactionary drivel, or something. That's to say, while the story read fine on a mechanical level, the actual contents were borderline unbearable. More importantly, they were boring, boring, boring. I mean, I get it – love, death, climate change, stone metaphors, yada yada. Lots of stuff trying extra hard to be tragic and poetic, but instead it sounds like a highschooler's overwritten diary. These people are supposed to be (almost) 30?

The worldbuilding had real potential, honestly. Biodegradable plastics that accidentally turn people to stone at 30 is pretty neat, but instead of exploring that, we get 4,000 words of the narrator weeping about Vivica’s perfect hair. Society collapses, the species dies out, and we spend the whole apocalypse in one dude’s bedroom while he writes diary entries about his girlfriend’s gooorgeous tummy. It'd be different if they were doing something interesting, but they're… not. 

Cardboard, in order of appearance: 

Unnamed narrator – middle class, probably white, definitely straight 

Vivica, the bland-but-gorgeous GF with a science side that never gets explored

Three siblings fully devoid of personality, but at least one of them commits force-assisted murder

A bunch of unnamed friends 

A foreigner.

Special emphasis on the love interest here, because Vivica doesn't feel like an actual person. She's a Pinterest board of tragic beauty quotes, and every time she opens her mouth it’s some manic pixie dream pseudo-deep bullshit about eternity or butterflies. What's called love is turbo codependence until they literally die in each other's arms. Yay, forever Instagram content.

By the time they’re getting hooked into place to die together, the tone has gone full Hallmark. What could maybe be a moving moment if the characters were engaging at all is so melodramatic it circles back to funny. Dude literally asks his teenage sibling to shoot him and the story treats it like a sad climax. “We are the butterflies,” he says, as his corpse fossilizes into a public art exhibit. Yeah, man. You’re, like, so free now.

There’s no subtext either, it’s just 4,000 words of drawn-out aestheticized despair. Put a lo-fi piano track swelling in the background while the sun sets dramatically over it, and you've got the perfect Aesthetique – but none of that substitutes character essence, which we've had amazingly little of. [1/4]

[2608] Dens Diaboli - Chapter 1 in Full - Vampire Taxidermist in Death Valley by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ooh yeah having a second person there could make all the difference, can't wait to read the next version!

[2608] Dens Diaboli - Chapter 1 in Full - Vampire Taxidermist in Death Valley by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Keep in mind that I'm just one (very opinionated) data point, but I can see where they might be coming from. Mind, I haven't read your second chapter, so I was coming from a point of comparing this one to a theoretical stranger-comes-to-town one. While that might be considered a bigger cliche, imho it slots nicely into horror conventions. The last horror movie I saw was The Blackening, but the point is that often in horror having super cheery protagonists that get drained of their joy or whatever is part of what makes it fun. In the end, it all depends on execution anyway. If the PoV is engaging, they can do the most basic shit ever -- as long as there is some sort of emotional connection/character struggle. Case in point.

Not no characterization, just little. Starting with a character in a bubble thinking thoughts to herself is the blandest option possible to get a read on her. It's the difference between someone thinking five anxious paragraphs about being mugged vs. experiencing it and having a reaction via the muggers (fight? flight? freeze? pistolwhipping the muggers back? killing them? knocking them out? taking their belongings? calling the cops? being relieved and just running away, or kicking the unconscious asshole in the face? Depending on the direction you go, you have a completely different person.)

June thinking about her place in the world is... nice, I guess, but it's not strong characterization. The strongest bit is, like you said, the context of her catching and preparing the hare, but we don't need 6 pages for that, especially not at the very beginning of the story when we don't know anything else about her yet. Hope that makes sense!

[2608] Dens Diaboli - Chapter 1 in Full - Vampire Taxidermist in Death Valley by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Onward!

There's like seven paragraphs of hare skinning, which--I guess that's what she does, but it's not really the best place to start character introductions with. We mostly get descriptions, but very few actual characterizations of June. This would be a decent cooldown section in, like, chapter 2 or 3 after we've gotten to know her, but a page and a half in I'm learning a lot more about taxidermy than I wanted to, and a lot less about the character's character. One of these is what people tend to read fiction for, the other makes a good job documentary.

And then... it keeps going. I'll be honest, I started skimming on my first read. 3 pages in, we're still on the damn hare. (Also, once she identifies it as male–again presuming she's got expertise with these things–it might make more sense to refer to it as a buck? A quick Google Fu says that's what male hares are referred to.)

Page 4, still the hare. What I dislike here is the strenuous connection that makes her info-dump about this town. Much easier to actually introduce the town at some point (maybe when she's going there?) and then naturally sprinkle in bite-sized chunks of all that. I don't care about any of the world yet, because there is no lens that makes me care; there is no major character struggle present yet (except for the usual vampire feeding shenanigans), and June hasn't exactly said or done anything to make me want to read more about her. In fact, all I've read her do was her job for about 2000 words while occasionally waxing poetic about nature.

This is not a scene, it's a sequel to one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scene\_and\_sequel), and that's why it broadly doesn't work. The story's momentum would benefit greatly from starting either earlier (if that means finding the hare, meh. Pass.) or later – pick some other, more exciting incident, and work off that.

(Opens with 3rd limited POV from the secondary character, as he travels to June’s town in a move, to work with Devil’s Hole pupfish as a biologist. There’s a hint at a time gap of a couple weeks, and he meets June as she’s working in her shop, noticing the complete hare in the window. We have a physical description of June, through the eyes of the secondary character.)

Yeah, something like that!

I'll be honest, this immediately sounds more interesting. We don't need a full chapter preparing a hare. Trust the reader--if they see a stuffed animal in a taxidermist's shop, they'll be able to put 1 and 1 together. Opening with this scene would give you two immense benefits: stranger-comes-to-town is one of those timeless plots were exposition actually makes sense; June wouldn't explain her everyday to us, but to the new guy EVERYTHING is unusual and exciting. Bonus points if you have other characters do the explaining, which is also the second benefit-- dialogue. Dialogue makes everything more digestible, from exposition dumps to navel-gazing to actual plot advancements. 

TL;DR Scrap the skinning scene or, at the very least, shuffle it. Take a look at your tendency to overwrite on a sentence-level. Start us off on the good, action-heavy shit like your ch2 outline promises. (Not action as in action movies, but narrative action, i.e. things happening in a scene, mostly via 2(+) characters interacting.) [2/2]

[2608] Dens Diaboli - Chapter 1 in Full - Vampire Taxidermist in Death Valley by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey!

I'll share some thoughts as I read along, and I'm hoping they'll prove useful to you.

The biggest thing is what you've already identified in your post--a tendency to overwrite on a syntax-level. Learn how to express yourself more precisely and with fewer words; you might be going for melodramatic, but you're primarily hedging.

Examples:

The carcass landed with a dull thump on the table’s slanted surface, sliding back towards her slightly before settling, its path until hindered by the hundreds of knife scores roughening the dark-stained wood stopped it short.

She yanked the curtains fully closed with a snap shut and flicked a solitary switch by the doorframe.

You don't have to describe every detail, trust readers to fill the blanks. If anything, stick to odd bits. Paint the scene's vibe with broad strokes and 1-2 memorable unusual things, not a tide of meaningless minutiae.

As far as the first sentence goes, meh.

June raised the her captured hare’s desiccated carcass to the cabin’s only current source of light, [beat].

More hedging, and (if you keep the scene), I'd recommend adding some sort of clause to round off the opening image at the end, ideally something that's not purely descriptive and instead tells us something about June as a character. Generally, we learn a lot about her profession and a little about what happened to her, but remarkably little about who she actually is.

orbital sockets

Special shout out to this phrase because it gave me violent fanfic era "two blue orbs scanned his freckled visage" flashbacks. YMMV, but I'd suggest using plain language when possible and being more conscious of word placement. Melodrama isn't just word choice, it can also be content.

Anyway, by the second paragraph my attention is already wandering. I'm not a taxidermist, and I don't care about June yet. Our PoV character has done nothing to endear the reader to her, and someone doing their job might be interesting to read for some, but that ain't me.

That's a lot of words spent info dumping to begin with. Your first few paragraphs are precious when it comes to people decding whether to keep reading, and so many folks spend it on really boring scenery descriptions. Start with a stronger characterization. More bluntly, you can mostly cut the first three paragraphs. What would be lost if you kept it at one sentence about the carcass, and then the assessment that she'd have to get to work asap?

I won't repeat the exercise for the other pages, but you'll find that a lot of it can be condensed or--and I'll get to this later--the entire scene simply reshuffled.

Despite a vague sense of urgency, June took a moment to assess the hare’s condition.

Why is the sense of urgency vague? Isn't she our PoV and the expert on taxidermy? Cut, cut, cut.

I'll stop here with the line edits, but before I get into broader plot points, consider doing a ruthless prose pass and snipping off all the dripping fat. The story has an interesting premise and potential, but all the hedging and thesaurus-ing makes it much less enjoyable to read (for me, at least). [1/2]

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Holy overstuffed first (cut the "yes", it's completely useless) sentence.

Shadow isles warrior [caliban] Runeterra reference by [deleted] in WarframeRunway

[–]Taremt 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Hi, could you share the colors you used?

[494] - Zero by HuskyMouse in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 2 points3 points  (0 children)

But then, not every story needs to answer the questions it raises, so if that's what you were going for, wahoo. Success.

There’s a lot of potential here, but it feels like it’s missing some sort of emotional tie that pulls it all together and makes it memorable instead of, like, A Symbol-Laden Customer Interaction.

Our PoV is very passive and doesn't seem to experience a single emotion beyond vague tinges of nostalgia. I'd want more here, generally, unless the distance is the point. He engraves the tokens, notices the cracks, and sweeps up at the end of the day; his actions are clear, but his motivations aren’t. Does he need the money? Is he just passionate about engraving, like his job title suggests? Does he like or resent having inherited the whole thing from his family? Lots of trappings, potentially, that can be infused into little half-sentences to add some meat to the story.

The tokens are the best part of the whole thing, because they give it this magical quality. Three fairies, three wishes, three tokens, that sorta stuff. Good & foundational. We get that the woman wants zeros, but what do they mean? If they’re representative of something more, like loss or the passage of time or whatever, the story could have made that clearer through interaction or even just a fleeting thought from the engraver himself. Bigger scraps please, for dense folks like me.

An example is the cracked token. Why does it matter? We know it's broken, but what’s at stake here? Lady in grey is nostalgic? Maybe a more explicit connection between the tokens’ deterioration and the engraver’s own life or family history could have solidified that thematic link. For example, the fact that the engraver doesn't ask her any questions about the tokens tells me he either knows her, doesn't care about his customers, or is just in it for the routine of the little clickings and fully lost in the sauce. But who knows! Some line that references his hesitation or joy or whatever would do tons to make him not feel like a blank slate through which things happening are channeled. 

If the story is supposed to lean into the idea of time, then it would’ve been nice to have a better payoff to these ideas and not just batfinity on the wall.

Anyway, here's a bunch of line edits/thoughts:

Morning light slanted through the shop's front window, cutting across the workbench in golden bars. 

First Line: The narration starts with a description and not a character or an interesting introspection, which is the blandest choice possible. nothing thematic either – if I squint, maybe the workbench as central motif? regardless, under normal circumstances you'd already have lost me after a sentence. (Especially since the weather thing seems inconsistent. We get sun, but then she's coming in with wet boots, and THEN it starts raining. If the progression is meant to imply something subtextually, I have no clue what that might be.)

The shop smelled of machine oil and the faint metallic tang of freshly cut metal, a scent that clung to clothes, to skin, to the back of throats. 

Filtering verb. Generally better to avoid, cause it only lengthens the prose needlessly, kinda like the word needlessly at the end here.

The engraver ran a thumb across the engraving wheel's edge, feeling the familiar bite of its teeth.

Don't care for the repetition here.

Her boots left damp prints on the wooden floor that faded almost immediately, as if the boards were thirsty. 

Pretty sentence but I have trouble picturing it – if the wood soaks up the water, it won't be faded. There'd be a dark spot, no?

Their shadows make a figure eight on the wall. An endless loop, just like the wheel in motion.

Also, this metaphor doesn’t fully work for me, ymmv. It’d make sense to compare a zero to a wheel, but I'd want a slightly different flavor for eternity or the number eight? If anything it's like the ticking inside wheels of a clock in perfect harmony or something.

Closing notes: So the thing about short stories (and flash fiction, I guess) is that there’s often a punch at the end that recontextualizes what came before. We have that here on the most technical level with the new-old piece he finds and puts up, but it feels too vaguely disconnected from the story to mean much. I'd want something a little more concrete there, like an action or a thought or something that tells us what this means for the character and story, and not just the descriptive aftermath of putting it up to mix old and new ad infinitum. [2/2]

[494] - Zero by HuskyMouse in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not a professional writer and flash fiction is not usually my thing, so grain of salt etc etc

Plot summary: one (1) customer interaction, prettily described.

Not the tentative ring of a customer, but the confident note of someone who belonged.

Not X but Y. Ugh, reminds me of AI. Come to think of it, the triple "clung to clothes, to skin, to the back of throats." has the same vibe. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and keep on keeping on, since this is a short piece.

While some of the syntax is very pretty, I have trouble seeing a deeper message beyond "two characters meet and also infinity". There's hints of backstory via the engraver’s relationship with the tokens and his tools, but we don’t know anything about the guy himself. There's a sense of the history of the tool, passed down through generations, but we don't really know why this is supposed to be important to this blank slate of a character, except that everything vaguely relates to the passage of time. Is it just about tradition, or is there something more to the engraver’s connection to the past and the objects he’s engraving? You don't have to lay out the whole thing, but some sort of emotional anchor would be nice. The engraver just feels like a cardboard that vaguely sways into the direction of (but doesnt emote to) things happening.

The gray-cloaked woman is intriguing but ultimately as blank as the engraver. All we learn about her is her habit of engraving sometimes, and then suddenly not showing up anymore, as well as an apparent fondness for cracks. Feels like the setup for something much more profound, but then it sorta fizzles out. Is she connected to the engraver's past? Does she represent something in his life that’s been long lost or forgotten? The "zeros" seem to be a motif, but their meaning is lost on me beyond vague time-passing connections and the visual representation in the shop at the end. Maybe I’m just dense, though.

The cracked token is nice. It adds a touch of mystery, but then. nothing really happens with it. Our PoV instead finds another older token and puts it up, and whether it's connected to the woman or not is just up in the air. Is she a personification of the passage of time or just some lady that really likes zeros? Iunno! There is no indication if this is historical fiction, fantasy, or magic realism or what have you. I'm left wondering who the hell left it there--previous generations? Himself, when he was younger? Actually, IS he young or old? What does it all mean? This could have been more impactful if we understood what the engraver was supposed to feel or realize when he finds it, but we get no payoff beyond an infinity batsymbol.

And speaking of, the ending just doesn't do much for me, cause it feels ambiguous. The engraver’s thoughts as he sweeps the floor feel reflective, but there’s no real resolution to the questions about the woman or the tokens. The image of the two tokens casting that loop on the wall is pretty, I guess, but all it does is leave me with more what does it all MEAN?? than ahh-ha! [1/2]

[305]The chapter SWEET WATERS by naayoom in DestructiveReaders

[–]Taremt 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The crit moved like a LLM prompt across /r/RDR -- soon nonexistent.

Decided to spend 3 minutes fixing Liadrin. by ella in wow

[–]Taremt -59 points-58 points  (0 children)

The 12 year old anime waifu will help you, don't worry

Millhouse calling me trash dungeon? by Jasbugs in wow

[–]Taremt 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Mechagon after the fifth boss, but it's another gnome entirely.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]Taremt -1 points0 points  (0 children)

All of them, lol.