Concrit for lirin

[lirin_lirilla]

I want to receive feedback by: Email (lirin.lirilla@gmail.com) or comment on this post

Here are the works I want feedback on: Anything on my AO3 written 2017 or later, except for (single/double/triple/sequences of) drabbles. AO3 link with earlier works & drabbles filtered out

My works' fandoms and content notes are: Vastly assorted, mostly book fandoms, mostly gen, mostly G-rated, quite a few crossovers. The fandoms I've written in the most are: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis, The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, White Collar, Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I have these questions for readers: I'm very interested to hear whatever thoughts you have on the story you choose, but in case you need more to work from, here's some general questions that you can take or leave as you wish.

What did you think of my title, summary, and/or tags? Is the ending strong enough, & what could I have done to make it stronger? Does the story feel the right length, or do you think it needed to be longer or shorter (and if so, in what way—cutting/adding scenes, or different pacing)? Did I start the story at a good point, or should I have started it later (was there too much setup? should I have started in medias res and flashed back?) or should I have started it earlier (in which case what did you feel was missing?)? How's my pacing? How's my balance of dialogue vs. description? For extended dialogue passages, is the choreography of the characters' actions okay or do they need to be doing more or less? For fics in tight third (which is most of them), were there any points where you were unclear on whose POV it was? Do you think I chose the right POV to write the fic from, or you do think a different character's would have been better? If there are any OCs in the fic, what did you think of what I did with them?

I would prefer gentle (5) or direct (1) feedback, or something in between: (3) something in the middle; I'd like to hear what you liked and not just what you didn't, and I'd prefer if you weren't too blunt about it, but I'm okay with you throwing a whole bunch of "here's what you need to do better" at me.

Comments are unscreened.

Comments

[nonexistentwench]

Hi! I have decided to review Vengeance is mine, being a huge Christie fan, and I absolutely wasn't disappointed by what you did with the premise. When I read "One got in chancery" trying to choose what to review, I loved the style and dialogue but struggled to get into it due to the lack of set up, I felt it needed to be longer and go more into motivation and backstory, and I feel like this fic fixes these issues perfectly.
The work you did with the biblical quotes is impressive, very well researched and fitting, the style is extremely readable while also conveying the ah, peculiar personality of our Miss Brent. All the religious references flow naturally into the character even when she's not consciously using them - such as Beatrice and Edward sitting at her left and right!
The motivation is very well established and believable, absolutely without any risk of that shock value that people might incur in when they turn the stuffy old church lady into a serial killer. I also love how she clearly has a character arc through the fic, re-evaluating her role both in the island plan and in Beatrice's death and her relationship with God and vengeance. I especially love the juxtaposition of the paragraph about someone being one step ahead of her and the one about Louisa's death, showing her loss of confidence in her plan paralleled with her more limited loss of faith in the justice of God.

There are some choices I felt would have been more impactful: for example it might have been interesting for her to be as involved in Beatrice's death as in the original book but somewhat in denial, maybe thinking her parents are More responsible because, hello, that's their fucking child, with all the tragedy of her realizing she was guilty too all along. Even like this she seems a bit too forgiving of her "wantonness " given how still judgemental she is of Vera.

I was also very torn on what you did with Vera and Philip - on one hand I was a little disappointed at the lack of religious meditation for them, given they're guilty of the two most heinous crimes, and Emily inviting innocents to die in the first place is a little jarring with the rest of her morality, but on the other hand I see the need to show how Wargrave is willing to kill innocents, especially since I love how this plan slowly becomes more and more about personal revenge against him - a sort of fall from perfection. I wish it had been possible to sacrifice someone else on the island for this, but I understand you set up the fic needing to follow the events of the book quite strictly.
Overall these are more personal opinions than proper criticism and wouldn't really have occurred to me if I was just reading for pleasure without overthinking, I'm impressed by how well you made the plot work with so many changes in a story where everything has to run precise like clockwork for things to be the same.

There is a little inconsistency in the style, but I think it serves the fic well in most cases (and it's probably intentional) like the way she drops the -eth endings and starts using them again according to the tone of the paragraphs, since she doesn't use such language because it's her own or for its functionality but just because it's associated with the Bible, it's a good character note. However in a way you set up her narrative voice so well it's a little jarring in some points that don't fit it - for example it doesn't feel in character of her to refer to her murders are "psychological", rather than, idk, subtle or exploiting the torments of the conscience or something like that.

Various minor stylistic notes:
- we tested a page of the diary in question this feels a bit off because it's the first time the diary is mentioned at all
- A vengeful judge spoke lying words that sent my half-brother to the hangman, and none knew except God. I don't think the repetition here is necessarily impactful because the only thing only God knows is that the words are lies, while everyone can know the events happened? So you only really need the sentence after this one.
- for such a one as diligently seeketh the truth this sentence is a bit uncomfortable to read - maybe such a one to diligently seek the truth? One who diligently seeketh the truth?
- Between the lack of pulse… :they were all taken in a semicolon or even just a comma would be better, since the first sentence seems kinda unfinished this way

I don't think I have anything else to say. This is just a wonderful fic and I'm amazed at how well you made a diary entry format work so well both narratively and on an emotional level. It was an extremely fun read and very in character, and the blatant reference but subtle foreshadowing of the ending in the title is just delicious. The ending is just breath-taking - the stoic resignation of the phrasing "where I shall spend eternity" gave me literal chills. Thank you for this! Going through your fics was an utter pleasure.

[farla]

Thirty-Two

I really like the pace and feel of this. It's sort of languid and strangely cozy, and the way it keeps that feeling as the curtain draws back matches with how Sofi has to always act calm and happy no matter what's actually going on. The small things Sofi notices get across how limited her surroundings are while still making it come across as a lived-in environment rather than barren sterility. And the degree to which she doesn't have opinions hints something's off without making it obvious right from the start.

"ΓΩΘΠ-89," it says from a speaker three meters ahead of me in the corridor. And then from the speaker five meters beyond that, as I continue walking

I particularly like this detail. It's something I hadn't thought about but when you bring it up it makes so much sense that it would work this way, and just odd enough that I'd expect a narrator to notice it enough to mention.

But it considers it acceptable to speak of some of its lower-level activities to me—I'm on its side, after all, and even if I weren't, who could I tell?

I think this and similar bits are a little bit cheating - she's talking in terms of what RG-32 is thinking, and she is playing a part, but it still comes off as a fact, particularly when it's first person narration, and I think technical truths could work to cover a lot of it, like that they're both working for the government. Or possibly add more to the sense of how deep into the act she is by having her go more into detail about how very much she is on RG-32 and the government's side, so it's not a few minor lies but very blatant.

The humans there are suspected to be fomenting an insurrection against machine rule.

So, I spent the fic expecting get at least a bit more on what, exactly, that is, and feeling increasingly confused because the machines don't seem as forceful as I'd expect, or as callous. I know the primary point is how do you pass messages around without alerting the machines, but rooting for that to work is easier when I know why it's important they succeed, and you do have details peppered in nicely about life under machine rule, it just doesn't really clarify what the problems are.

RG-32 says that since the planet passes inspection they don't need to exterminate the humans, and exterminating humans being on the table is definitely something to give me pause about machine overlords, but it doesn't give any glimpse about what the initial anti-machine-rule grievances are. The fact the planet passes even though RG-32 finds conspiracies because those ones aren't really going anywhere with it means the issue can't be that the machines are just constantly slaughtering people at any excuse, so they must be being incited into rebellion due to how badly the robots are actually running things, but what is that? Sofi believes in this enough that she's given up her life to work as a lone human technician expecting it to end with her being found out and killed just for the chance that other future people might one day succeed, but she doesn't say anything more than "freedom" for what that future will be. She's obviously not free, but that's the same problem as the planet being in danger because they're working on rebelling, it's only happening because she already decided they needed to be opposed at any cost due to something else.

For the first chunk of the fic I was thinking the machines just abduct people to work on the ships, but the fact she planned this out and the conversations with RG-32 where it seems concerned about if she wants to keep working make it sound like this is voluntary employment. And the fact her father could live playing music and do so well he was traveling around planets doing so means it can't be that your choices are "voluntary" employment as AI ship worker or starving. Near the start, there's RG-32 expects instant obedience, and I always do what RG-32 expects of me. which sounds bad and certainly implies humans don't have much say in anything. On the other hand, it's hard to believe a human in charge would act differently toward her there (or, well, they might, but probably not in any positive way). RG-32 was told to go jump somewhere and Sofi has to be in the safe location before they can jump so delaying would cause a problem, and she's not doing anything else, so dragging her feet there would just be a pointless inconvenience to others. And RG-32 isn't impatient or annoyed when she does her job slowly because she's composing her message, so it doesn't seem particularly forceful about its instant obedience demands. There's also still has time to keep an eye on me—determining what meal is healthiest for my current biological needs, producing that meal from its stores of foodstuffs and chemical components which brings to mind just getting fed to keep her functional with no thought about what she wants and more of RG-32 just deciding things, but near the end when there's a description of the food, it's "Formulated red meat with spinach and tomatoes," it says. "You need more iron this week. I had intended to serve it with garlic butter, but perhaps you would prefer a different sauce." so it seems the meals are well beyond the utilitarian minimum needed to maintain a biological tool, and also that Sofi does get at least some say in it. Plus she's provided extensive entertainment of her choice, including what seem to be physical books getting carted around on a ship that has limited space. And the bit about how she decided to cut her hair after being on the ship a while because something really horrible happens if it's outside the pod during jumps just struck me as amazing that this wasn't a rule but a choice. She's repairing things between jumps and they need multiple jumps to get places. If she explodes or turns into an eldritch monstrosity or just gets too messed up to move after a jump, RG-32 is in trouble. Jobs have enforced much stricter dress codes for much, much less reason.

The end result is that what Sofi's going through and the sacrifices she's making was really undercut for me by the fact I questioned if her actual reasons for this are good and if succeeding would end well for anybody - does she expect humans to be kinder rulers of other humans than this, which is at best extremely optimistic given our history? Is there some sort of religious thing where the machines are bad because they're machines and humans are the only ones who should be in charge? Is she coming at this from a hardcore libertarian stance where any regulation is inherently bad regardless of what those regulations are? Does stuff like "formulated red meat" taste like unsalted cardboard and the machines have banned cupcakes?

I don't think you necessarily need to go into much detail on exactly how the machines rule their empire, but some point of comparison would've really helped. If, say, Sofi said technicians on ships were the best treated humans in the galaxy and given all sorts of perks to keep them loyal, that'd paint a much bleaker picture of how everyone else was living.

[enisy]

I read A Corridor Without Wrackspurts, which was so sweet and endearing I am at pains to provide concrit for it. I love your Luna voice: kind-hearted and imaginative and totally oblivious to her peers' ill intent. I didn't remember anything about the Grey Lady, but I might look up her wiki entry after this, because you painted such an intriguing portrait of her. I really like the lukewarm, half-interested tone she has throughout the story, with copious affection and passion just below the surface ("You don't know what I did" / "Perhaps I shall drop by, just to say hello." / "I do miss books").

Fave lines:
- She'd have to sniff the ingredients in their next class and see if there was something appropriate that she could spill on the book. Just a dab at the top of the spine should be enough.
- "Is it?" The Grey Lady looked around at the dark corridor. "Perhaps that's why I like it so much."
- Luna had hoped that Grace would be her first friend at Hogwarts, but she would just have to be her second friend instead.

The fic as a whole doesn't sport any breathtaking expressions or disarming turns of phrase, but it's told from eleven-year-old Luna's POV, so it doesn't need them. I think this style works very well for the story, except maybe you lean too heavily on dialogue toward the end - a few more descriptions would help to set the mood or atmosphere. Also, I am not 100% convinced about this, but I have the feeling the fic is too skewed toward Luna in general - perhaps you could emphasize the things Grey Lady is getting out of this just a tad more (books, supernatural advice, a third thing)?

I just spotted a couple of SPAG errors: I always thought that lessons and studying was such a slow way to learn (should be "were") and Hopefully, there would be no more wrackspurts than there were people ("wrackspurts" needs a capital W).

Beautiful story! Thanks for sharing!