Concrit for colorcoded

[colorcoded]

I want to receive feedback by:
My personal preference is comment on this post, but I'm happy with any option you prefer (email - color.coding@yahoo.com, PM, comment on AO3, etc.).

Here are the works I want feedback on:
Any of my works: https://archiveofourown.org/users/colorcoded/works/

My works' fandoms and content notes are:
Just a heads up that this account is my porn sock and so most of the works here are explicit and non-con. However, there's enough non-explicit work that you could stick entirely to that if you wanted. My main fandoms are various Disney, Soul Calibur, and some JRPGs and animanga.

Feedback questions:
Some suggestions of things to focus on:

• Detail/descriptions - Does the detail/description feel too sparse, or the pacing too quick?
• Does the fic feel complete, or does the ending feel sudden or anti-climactic? Or does the fic feel like it does not express a complete "thought"? How would you change the fic to make it feel more coherent?
• Titles and summaries - are they working? Could they be improved? Did you want to click on them or were they meh? Should they focus on something else?
• For porn, is it sexy? How's the build-up? Anything throwing you out of the fic?
• General writing - Point out any issues with awkward or confusing phrasings, repetitive words or paragraphs, poor word choice, etc. Any confusions where what's going on with the character or the logic of the story is unclear?
• Any suggestions for remixing or going a different direction with the fic? Missed opportunities to do something more with the fic, etc.?
• Anything you liked, what is working in the fic, any reactions you had (positive, negative, or neutral).

The style of feedback I prefer to receive is: Blunt and brutally honest is fine, but I need some encouragement as well. For example, getting a list of 20 issues with the fic and no positivity would be discouraging for me. If there's a lot of issues with the fic, feel free to pick the most major ones to focus on - that's still useful to me. I think my fics are pretty clean SPAG-wise, but please feel free to flag issues.

Comments to this post will be:
Unscreened

Comments

[farla]

Human, Real

So the thing that stuck out to me reading this is it doesn't seem to do as much as it could with the fact he's spent half his life as a donkey. I like the general tone of how you handled it - horrifying things happen throughout the Pinocchio movie and people seem to handle it without being totally debilitated from the trauma, and if the Blue Fairy can avoid major issues with someone turning from painted wood to living mammal then turning back to your birth species should go even more smoothly, but I feel it's still lacking in a lot of detail about how this works.

"Return home," the Blue Fairy had told them then. "You must return to your family and tell them where you've been all these years."

Like, a lot can go wrong here, and if these aren't the only kids the Blue Fairy's un-donkeyed over the years, she probably knows there's pretty good odds of someone running into trouble with this. Not just ones like Lampwick who just have no family to go home to, but ones whose families are still alive but aren't where they were ten years ago. If the idea is they've learned their lesson and their punishment is over, helping them actually get home seems like it should be included. Escorting the group would be the most responsible thing, but she is a fairy and I'm not sure if how briefly she interacts with Pinocchio is because he's supposed to be left to prove his virtue or because fairies are just bad at followthrough, so it's just as understandable if she's not going to stick around, but in that case telling them what's happened with their families and where they should go at the start seems within her wheelhouse.

the three newly-transformed men stood in silence before stumbling out of the stables, pounding off toward the town as fast as their feet would take them.

The other thing is that it's really weird to me that there's other donkey kids but they don't interact and he seems just barely aware of them. Having the group escorted and seeing the other two go home strikes me as a less abrupt way for them to leave the story, and would give a chance to show a little about how he feels toward them. Otherwise, I think it'd be better for him to just be the only transformed donkey at the stable.

And speaking of the stable, I'm not sure what the purpose of moving him out of the mines was. The contrast of going from the dark, enclosed spaces of the mine as a donkey to the open world as a human seems like it'd work well to emphasize how big a change this is. (And there being a lot of donkeys-turned-humans just doing a mad dash out of there without thinking would make more sense to me as a reaction given how confining it was.) Or I could see if that was too dark and you felt it was better to have him starting at a better place, or maybe use it to leave him a little unsure about living as a human when he's now without food and shelter, but then you say both were about as bad?

So that was how Lampwick found himself walking around town with a bossy cricket tucked into his cap, a cricket who was constantly telling him to talk to that shopkeep there or inquire over at that building over there. By the time the sun was setting, Lampwick hadn't found the slightest bit of work, and all of the cricket's chirping made him feel like he was worth less now than when he had been a donkey.

I feel all this could stand to be expanded on more too. Is he running into difficulty because his only job experience is ten years of pulling a cart, or is it more that no one's hiring? The first one seems more realistic and would suggest Lampwick is better off trying to focus on rehabilitation and gaining skills but the second is more fitting with the general attitude of the setting where it's about trying your best to do what you should be doing, and Lampwick's more adult mindset and willingness to listen to Jiminy even though just finding work is itself a lot of work is a good sign.

A few days passed before Lampwick found work. It was only a temporary construction job, erecting the new bank building, Jiminy had told Pinocchio, but it was good, honest work and Jiminy was pleased.

And continuing that, how does this actually go? You mention that he was unused to using his hands the first time he ate - so, is he pretty uncoordinated and only really able to do gross motor skills and heavy lifting, or is it like riding a bicycle and although he's not sure of himself, once he starts trying to put things in place he finds his coordination returning? The bit where he has difficulty with carving and jumps straight to "my hands are practically hooves. I dunno why I thought it'd be a good idea to try something that actually requires skill with 'em. really jumped out at me as an interesting thing to say, but I'm not quite sure what means for Lampwick - did his time with hooves mean he's worse with his hands now and he feels like he's not going to get that back, or is it that he felt like his hands were "practically" hooves even before this and had bad self-esteem over it, and he's sort of missing being a donkey where no one expected anything more than hooves from him?

I also feel it could use resolution on the job front since you bring up that Pinocchio is barely managing as it is and that Lampwick is really struggling to find more work, but then the fic ends resolving the nature of their relationship rather than the problem of Lampwick being able to stay on a monetary level. Having Pinocchio encourage Lampwick to keep trying at carving and showing him it's something you learn rather than something you have to be good at for the first try would be one option - perhaps set up that Pinocchio's business is going okay but as he's just one person he can't make things too fast, and maybe part of the workshop feeling different is that there's a lot less things in it total because he can't work fast enough to build up the same stock. Or else maybe cut out some of it and have the conversation where Lampwick resolves that he'd sooner leave and live on the street than eat Pinocchio out of house and home for before he gets the building job, with the implication that now he'll have steady work in construction.

It had been a livelier place when his father was there. Father had always been eager to talk about his latest project, or to show off a new contraption he'd made. The workshop had seemed smaller then, smaller and cozier and filled with light.

Also, this is pretty minor but while I understand what you're going for, it seems weird for someone who's now an adult to remember a space as smaller rather than larger - both physically, and in the sense that tons of his father's projects and contraptions would probably give a sense of the place being more expansive compared to later once they're all familiar or his own work.

[colorcoded]

Late reply, sorry, but thank you for these notes! And thank you for reading this one because this fic (and also Pinocchio in general) is quite dear to my heart and I love when people read it and offer their thoughts/reactions on it. Reading through your notes/questions was really interesting for me because for half of them I'm like "Oh yeah, I guess I didn't think about it" and for the other half I'm like "Oh yeah, there's a story behind that," and it's interesting to see what stayed in my head only. Here are some of my author's notes if you're curious:

Moving Lampwick out of the mines: This is mainly because I wanted to write something about Pleasure Island boys being sent to the salt mines as that was always a fascinating part of the movie for me. But then I read the book and discovered that Lampwick worked on a farm as a donkey so I was like "oh yeah, I've gotta work that in too." The strings are showing a bit here!

Lampwick's difficulty finding work: My thinking was that it was more that there's no one hiring/not many opportunities. Here, I was mainly drawing on my own experiences with job-hunting in a tight market.

Lampwick's motor skills: My headcanon is that Lampwick's motor skills returned fairly quickly after an initial adjustment period. He's more or less normal but maybe a bit clumsy because his dexterity stopped developing when he was a kid. His comment about his hands being hooves is more his self-deprecating dark sense of humor. But you're definitely right that I didn't expand on this at all! There's definitely room for filling in these details.

Lack of resolution on the job front: The story behind this is that the original Pinocchio book has some slightly creepy elements where working is inherently virtuous (and conversely, to not work is vice). I wanted work to have some role in Lampwick's return to society, but I wanted to steer clear of the direction of the book and avoid implying that Lampwick's worth/happy ending is dependent on whether he's working or not. Lampwick feels guilt about not pulling his weight, but that guilt is self-imposed; Pinocchio's support for him is unconditional. But I definitely could have actually integrated that realization into the story rather than leaving it awkwardly hanging!

The rest I didn't put enough thought into to have an answer. Thinking about all of these aspects is very interesting and definitely things I could expand on further in the fic. Thank you for this concrit!