August 2022 Madness

[morbane]

Madness will happen on this post and in its comments. Thanks for playing!

Getting concrit
Ask for concrit by replying to this post (until the end of August 15 in your time zone). Anyone's welcome, whether or not you just took part in the July 2022 round. If you did sign up, you're welcome to ask for concrit on the same or different pieces, or ask for responses to more specific or different questions or the same ones. Concrit is not guaranteed.

Please include:

• Which works you want feedback on, and if any of your works are "safe" or should be skipped over
• A link to your work(s)
• How you want to receive feedback - ie, by reply to your own comment, by posting a review where the work is published (AO3, ff.net, LJ...), or by another means. (Note: comments are not screened on this post, so if you post a contact detail, anyone can see it.)
• Any specific questions you want concrit-givers to focus on, and what level of bluntness you prefer, if relevant
• What fandoms and content, roughly, your works contain - especially if asking for feedback on just a few pieces.

You can comment asking for concrit until the end of August 15 in your time zone.

It's okay to be more specific about the kind of concrit you want in Madness than in a normal round. You might not get anything, but feel free to ask.

Please feel free to leave constructive criticism for those who have requested it in comments!

General feedback

If you have thoughts on this community's events or the June-July 2022 round, please leave your thoughts on the July 2022 swap info post.

If you are willing to provide feedback on the feedback you got or get - "Yes, this was what I was looking for / I was surprised you focused on this aspect / Actually, that wasn't quite what I was asking / etc" - please consider saying so. This exchange is a learning experience for people who would like to give concrit. Please be constructive in these replies as well.

If you don't want any more concrit, reply to your own comment to say so; if you made your own post, you can also screen or close comments.

Comments

[thenewbuzwuzz]

On the off chance someone's up for it, I'd be interested in feedback on this 20,000-word Buffyverse WIP OR only its first chapter (which is around 2000 words). Replying to this comment or commenting directly on the work would be equally fine. I have specific questions, though you don't have to answer them all:

• I've been posting this gradually for a couple of years, and my main character's goals change during the story. How consistent does the story seem in terms of mood/genre/focus? Does it feel like it's still the same story? Do any developments seem to come out of nowhere or seem like sidetracking, based on how the story started?


• Chapter 3 is in an original character's POV, and one reader told me they miss the POV of the main characters. Anyone else get that? Might it be better if switched the POV back to the main characters for part of the chapter?


• How is Buffybot's characterization in Chapter 5? Does it make sense? Is it convincing and consistent enough?


• Generally, is anything confusing or hard to follow?

Alternatively, if someone reads just the first chapter, I'd want to know what expectations the chapter sets: what questions it opens, where you'd imagine the story might go, what kind of mood or genre you'd expect in the rest of the story, what (broadly) it might take to satisfyingly resolve what the first chapter sets up, or something along those lines.

My preferred bluntness level is: pretty gentle, please. Criticism is fine, of course, but I'd appreciate if you also mentioned something that works well.

Content notes: this is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer work with some references to Angel the series. It's most directly based on the BtVS episode "Intervention" and the AtS episode "Disharmony", so a familiarity with those might help. The main characters are the Buffybot and Harmony Kendall. The story is rated T. I would describe it as a friendship/comedy/adventure/coming of age kind of story, so in a word, gen. However, there is canon Spuffy in the background and extensive discussion of Spike from the POV of Buffybot and Harmony. There's also an underlying assumption that soulless creatures are people who are capable of change and affection (while their default MO is to make bad life choices from a human perspective), and I'm not looking for a second opinion on that. :) There are temporary content warnings on some chapters, including animal death and Warren Mears being creepy.

[farla]

I'd want to know what expectations the chapter sets: what questions it opens, where you'd imagine the story might go, what kind of mood or genre you'd expect in the rest of the story, what (broadly) it might take to satisfyingly resolve what the first chapter sets up, or something along those lines.

I would say that the first chapter feels not exactly self-contained to me, but like it's something more focused on buddy comedy interactions than that it's necessarily going to resolve plot points or even have an end it's moving toward.

I'm not sure that's something that could be fixed in the story text itself, because it feels like it's doing a good job of being what it is and I don't think trying to push down the banter or misunderstandings to make the plot seem firmer would help. I think here your best bet is to communicate it somewhere around your story (summary/tags/title/author's note) Like Working summary: A Spike stan and a Spike hater discuss their Spuffy-related woes while painting each other's nails or doing whatever skirt girls do together; eventually, unicorns. not only doesn't convey that this is going anywhere in particular, but I don't think really does justice to even the first chapter.

Relatedly, Warnings: Buffybot, Harmony; not particularly Spike-friendly makes me assume this would probably be Spike-bashing and also that it might be more about Spike than either of the nominal main characters, not Spike-at-his-canonical-level-of-badness-and-not-particularly-foregrounded where even when you've got Buffybot thinking about Spike, it's really less about Spike but about how Buffybot feels about him and what this all means for her. As far as expectations go, the warnings just makes me consider the possibility this is still winding up for it and the next chapter will suddenly dip into OOC levels of Spike-bashing, which turns out not to be the case. But I don't really know the fandom situation and if it's an anything not overtly positive about a character has to be warned for situation.

I've been posting this gradually for a couple of years, and my main character's goals change during the story. How consistent does the story seem in terms of mood/genre/focus? Does it feel like it's still the same story? Do any developments seem to come out of nowhere or seem like sidetracking, based on how the story started?

I didn't really feel like they were changing. From her personal POV, she had specific goals and then subgoals to accomplish those goals and then finding out she actually had goals under those specific goals which she then can address more directly. But on a story level, Buffybot is trying to solve the problem of being unhappy with her present situation, she pursues it pretty doggedly and with good cheer throughout, and you also have her express it as about becoming "real" and have her buddy be someone who also has connections to authenticity and fakery, so it's not a surprise that's what the story goal is.

Chapter 3 is in an original character's POV, and one reader told me they miss the POV of the main characters. Anyone else get that? Might it be better if switched the POV back to the main characters for part of the chapter?

I didn't miss it, but I'm generally positive toward OCs. I don't think this is one of those things that really has a definite answer. I don't think it's necessarily even a CC vs OC divide at its core - I've seen people express similar opinions on side characters in standard novels where everyone's the author's OC, and I wouldn't be surprised if it comes up with canon characters in fic too. Some people like exploring a lot of characters, some people are here to get invested in one or two and want to stay focused on them, and a story fitting one or the other isn't better or worse for it.

That said, I do think it's possible a POV swap that chapter could add to the story, in that the cactus kitten demon doesn't understand a lot of what's happening and doesn't care very much either, so jumping into what this feels like is happening from Harmony or Buffybot's POV for an extra scene might add something.

Generally, is anything confusing or hard to follow?

So while I did like the cactus kitten demon, it does seem dark even for Buffyverse that feeling upset someone tortured you to death damns you to Hell so I was uncertain if there was something more going on there or some sort of lie, and probably spent more time than was intended trying to pick that apart without success. It seems like it should involve a little more active evil than dying with a lot of justified anger, like if the cactus was going to go to cactus heaven but a demon came in with the offer of kill X innocents for me and I'll give you the power to kill your owner or some similar thing that laid out that the issue is willingly deciding to harm others rather than getting sent to Hell and then agreeing to hurting others to be spared, and also having it tied more firmly to actual choice would've made it a little clearer what ultimately running off to be with the cactus cat instead of continuing to try to kill people meant, metaphysically.

How is Buffybot's characterization in Chapter 5? Does it make sense? Is it convincing and consistent enough?

I think it makes sense, especially when we don't know quite how much the white-hat robotics students changed, but I did find it somewhat dissatisfying how much of her old programming she was jettisoning without needing much of a push and that it was lining up relatively well with what a human would think made sense to throw out. It felt like she was kind of approaching "very weird person who had this junk slapped on top of her original personality and now she's freed of that" more than someone whose personality is built out of it. Like I said, it's plausible. The people messing with her code trying to free her knew she was programmed by Warren to be a girlfriend to someone else awful enough to ask Warren for that robo-girlfriend means they could've done things to give her a little extra encouragement to prune out those things (like "anything tagged What Your Man Wants isn't an important thing to care about and what matters is What You Want") because they're trying to counterbalance the existing bias that Warren probably put in. But I like the alien reasoning with a human face of Buffybot, so I'd have liked if her removal and edits of her code was along more alien robot reasoning where it didn't matter why she was made this way, it only mattered if it was causing her a problem now - ie, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that she'd feel constrained by the rules of what she can wear and then delete it and feel happy she can wear what she wants, as opposed to what she wants lining up with what Spike liked her wearing, but it might make sense for her to make a new category of fashion (art) and start figuring out what she thinks she likes about that kind, or delete it if there's a definite contradiction where Spike wanted her to like leather outfits so she'd appreciate his fashion sense, Warren put that in as a general like, and then Spike told her to wear other things and she had to so long as she had making him happy as her highest priority.

[thenewbuzwuzz]

Amazing, thank you so much! This is very helpful. :)

Good point about the Spike warning. My Dreamwidth friends know that Spike is my fave and sometimes I overstate warnings, but I should reword or remove that by the time I crosspost to AO3, at the latest.

I took the circumstances of the cactus kitten demon's employment straight out of some folklore (though I may have interpreted it in a way that made it weirder), but that folklore was old enough that I think it might have been based on the idea that you're doomed if you don't confess your sins right before death, or something along those lines. Giving her more of an active choice sounds like a good idea, thanks for letting me know how the whole thing came across to you! :)

Hmm, I definitely struggled with how much of the Bot's programming to change and in what way, and this does sound like a problem I'd like to avoid: "how much of her old programming she was jettisoning without needing much of a push and that it was lining up relatively well with what a human would think made sense to throw out". It makes sense that the weirdness of her reasoning is part of her charm. I'll take another look at all that, thank you very much for such a detailed and clear response. :))

[ember_keelty]

https://concrit-x.dreamwidth.org/19968.html

My sign-up post still says open-for-concrit, and I am! Just in case anyone would rather look for people here than scan through all the sign-ups. Fandoms are Undertale and Dragon Age. Everything I said in my post still applies. I would particularly like to hear thoughts on Play Hero.

Oh, and a new work has gone live since the main round. Amputation, for the indie VN We Know the Devil. I'll take feedback on that too!

[paulamcg]

I'll be happy to still receive concrit on any of my works posted on AO3, here: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaulaMcG/works. They are all in the Harry Potter fandom.

Here's my post for the July round: https://concrit-x.dreamwidth.org/24571.html.

[farla]

In addition to what I said on my present post, for the Lucifer fic, I'd particularly appreciate thoughts on characterization, as it sounds like I may need to rework that to better get across what's intended.