SOTF Archive/SOTF Classic

Frog child!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lemme see those Furb onions

diego larrosa Bls

Hi please look at Rhonda Lawson except not really that'll make her nervous but also please look at her!

Queue is now full! will update it when i'm not in a prison of my own sins

Catherine'Z 'ier for critique

I'm dumb and didn't realize there was a second page. I'll wait until next go around.

Ariana has a consistent compelling dynamic between conflicted thought and decisive action. Her inner monologue is often uncertain to the point of being messy, but when it's time for her to externalize her feelings coalesce into clear intent. Ariana doesn't freeze like you would expect, but her thoughts and actions don't contradict either. We get moments where she shoves the chaos to the side to go with whatever feels most pressing in the moment. Between my dad and clients I've watched a lot of cop drama over the year, and it feels fitting that she evokes the same snap decision energy their protagonists do given her aspirations.

What's really fun about this is all the places it can go from here. Ariana is trying to be a positive, protective influence on her classmates but we've had a few moments already where she's been tempted to act rashly. How long can she go before her control slips and she hurts someone she either misread or did not intend to attack? What about the opposite direction where her confidence wavers and she fails to act before someone else pays the price? Ariana is a good person so I don't think I'm offbase when I say we want to root for her, and that makes the possibility that things could go wrong all the more tense. It's appropriate that one of her earliest posts includes a line on unpredictability getting people killed.

Brief shout out to getting that loud voice advantage to pay dividends immediately.


Another one where nitpicky would be helpful because both of the takes I have here are extremely taste dependent. The first is that while I enjoy the tone of Ari's inner monologue, it tends to run really really long. The biggest example of this is her multishot where she keeps returning to the same themes in different ways. There's so much packed into these posts that could have been spaced out over time; I'm trying not to break it down in detail because that's outside the scope of this format, but I really wish things like her dwelling on how her classmates are gonna fare, her feelings about suicide, about her family, about ross, about announcement reacts, all had more room to breathe. It's a big info dump to try and take all of this in at once and I feel each element would be stronger if it had time to marinate before we get into the next. This happens a lot in Ariana's posts; you clearly have a lot of good content to write for her but it's crowded right now. I'd love to see her slow down and focus on a few elements for at least a scene at a time.

The second thing that stands out is her relationship with Ross. Nothing takes me out of a story faster than charactercest because it feels very safe, you have total control over this story barring Ariana getting rolled and that makes it difficult for me to get invested. I feel like no one is externally complicating their interactions despite the fact that they both have a bunch of lived relationships. The Dante pull is good, and maybe more elements like that where we see them reacting to each other's social circles would help. This is very much a personal bugbear that I'm sure you expected when you threw her at me so take it as you want!

I feel compelled to write little one sentence blurbs that basically come down to i like your kid more content please 99% of the time and this one is me commenting that I'm probably stopping that because it feels super fake go read ariana okay goodbye thank you

There is something to be said for writing that is deliberately difficult to follow. Michael falls in there without question to me. He has one typicalish thread and then immediately flies off the rails in a combination of overmedication, mental illness, and trauma that honestly works pretty well for me as a reader while being minimally obtrusive to his threadmates. What I mean by that is for the most part Michael's dialogue and actions are grounded even when his thought process is not. They certainly look wilder with the context of his inner monologue, but when you strip that away most of what he externalizes isn't that out of the ordinary.

Most.

We'll get back to that.

On top of that I think the incoherency of his thoughts is understandable as a reader with the right lens. He hyperfixates. He hates himself and finds projection of his insecurity in others. He tries to apply rational rails to his out of control train of thought and boy does that not help. The underlying truth of Michael is that he's a person who feels very empty latching on to the images of other people he creates to give him meaning, because it's easier to define himself by someone else than try to fill in the gaps in his own being he feels nothing can fill.

Fuck.

What a mood my guy


Okay frog this is where I must bully you. What's Michael's story? What is the arc you're telling with him? Under all the subtext and anarchy, where's the point? I'm not saying there isn't one, but when you write a character who is intelligibly unintelligible, who at heart feels like nothing and defines himself by fiction that must be dispelled, what are we left with at the end of the story? Michael is unraveling further every thread and there are times that it feels like when the final string is pulled there won't be anything left. Maybe that's the point! But gods is it a miserable point to arrive at and you're gonna have to sell the hell out of it to make me feel like I didn't waste my time. It's okay if his story is a tragedy, but what carries tragedy is the hope that things could be different, and with the way you've presented things I don't see a better path for him. There are so many interesting groups he's been in, but right now the only character he feels solidly rooted to is one that is both dead and also not even really that character. Everything else is just whim.

Let's address the most up top as well; Michael is losing his grounded action hard. The last few posts have him going full scenery chew with manic not-suicide attempts and blood painting and pretending to be a corpse and it's just...it's a lot my dude. I feel like he's gone from cartoon brain interacting with reality to full cartoon transplanted into reality, and how does reality deal with that? If he stays on this course it gets increasingly more difficult to engage with him, and Michael is strongly in need of people to keep his story grounded. Maybe that means branching into more idealized images other than Beryl since I think you've milked that one about as much as it gets, maybe that means finding a way genuinely interface long term, I dunno, that's your move! I'd be careful with the Big Crazy Antics, though. For me they miss what makes Michael so compelling.