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[personal profile] skara posting in [community profile] concrit_x

I want to receive feedback by: comment on this post, on the fic itself, or send an email to: to at skara.casa (yes, the first half of my email is that short ;D)

Here are the works I want feedback on: Any of the works posted under [archiveofourown.org profile] skaralding are fair game. I am particularly interested in getting feedback on: Figurine, in Reality (HP, 5k), The Return of ANBU Weasel (Naruto, 5k), Unravelling Aymeric (FFXIV, 9k) and bloom (Naruto, 29k)

Work fandoms and content notes: The fandoms I write in are mainly Original Work, Naruto, FFXIV and Harry Potter. I tag my fics pretty thoroughly; incest, rape, underage, graphic violence and character death are my most frequently used warnings. If you want an extra heads up before diving into any of my fics, let me know.

I have these questions for readers:

Questions for specific works:

  • For Figurine, in Reality: I feel like this is one of my more balanced works, but I'm curious as to whether there's anything about it that could be improved.
  • For The Return of ANBU Weasel: I was going for a sparse, choppy style in this one, and while I think it worked overall, I also wonder if I left too much unsaid.
  • For Unravelling Aymeric: this was my first attempt at second person and I'm curious as to whether it worked or not. I'm also curious as to whether the main sex scene outstayed its welcome---I was going for long and lush but feel as if the pacing both dragged towards the end and also maybe didn't deliver on what the story tags set you up to expect.
  • For bloom: I feel like the ending for this was too abrupt, but I'm not sure what would be an improvement.

Questions for all my fics in general:

  • Did the beginning spark your interest?
  • Does the pacing work?
  • Is there anything I overuse that stands out strongly to you or feels jarring? Words, phrases, punctuation, formatting, all of that is fair game.
  • Does the ending work? Is it too abrupt, or just right?
  • Do you feel as if the story delivered on the expectations set up by the summary + tags? In other words, when you you were done with the story, what did you feel was missing?

I would prefer gentle (5) or direct (1) feedback, or something in between: 3 please :D

Comments are unscreened.

Date: 2020-08-16 11:20 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] impilii
Hello! I read Figurine, in Reality, and found it really charming and fluidly written. You have a really excellent eye for characterizing details, and your narration and dialogue are equally engaging and natural. I've included some thoughts on Blaise's voice, your dialogue generally and the characterization-impact/comprehensibility of your canon divergence. I hope they are helpful, and I'd be happy to clarify any of them if you have questions, or just to discuss!

To start off: your Blaise is great and I absolutely loved his narration. It was funny, felt generally true to his age, and overall put a big smile on my face. I especially enjoyed these moments:

  • Blaise was very careful to appear not to believe in fairytales. His Harriet Potter figurine, the flashy jewelled one his mother gave him on his ninth birthday, had moved locations as often as they had had guests at his home. — I love this as a character introduction. Adorable paranoid Blaise, very concerned with what his action figures might imply about him!
  • She was there now, nestled amongst his pathetic chocolate frog card collection, wrapped in an old green handkerchief, the silk one, so she would be comfortable. So that when he finally met her, he could hold that ridiculous image of her in his head and smile at her like his mother had taught him: coolly. — The combination of care, make-believe, and attempted grown-upness is really nice here. I like the emphasis on “the silk one, so she would be comfortable,” and the introduction to the way his mother has been training him for the social battlefield of school!
  • “Come on, if you’re coming,” he said, holding the door open for them, and when no one followed, he just turned up his nose at the whole carriage. “Fine, then,” he said. “I won’t bother to bring her back.” — This moment felt really true to Draco. The dialogue between all the pre-Slytherins also felt very natural, which I think can be really tricky to pull off for eleven year olds, so mega compliments there.
  • So it wasn’t Daphne’s fault, not really. And it was cruel of him to pointedly ignore her, instead of ‘fanning the flames’ the way Mum always talked about, but the thought of Draco being the one to dazzle Potter hurt so much — Blaise had quite an intense focus on romance, but I think you do a great job of justifying that characterization with these little hints of his mother’s lessons.
  • Clearly the whole hall felt the same way Blaise did, because no one so much as breathed as Potter—so, so much shorter in real life than he’d imagined—took her first few steps towards the Slytherin tables. — I really like the clash of expectations and reality, especially after Blaise’s drawn-out daydreams about her.
  • “This must be why you’re in Slytherin,” Draco said, just as Blaise was nerving himself to try and say the exact same thing. Lucky I didn’t, he told himself. It sounds really stupid. — I really enjoyed the Parselmouth interaction, and I loved Blaise's analysis of his and other's conversational gambits.
  • She expressed more interest in the treacle tart than in Draco’s increasingly annoyed questions and “Yeah?” Potter said, dismissively. “And who are you?” — These two moments felt very Harry, and made me grin.

I really liked Harriet’s introduction, and initially thought this was the beginning of a very interesting perspective on how Petunia’s child-rearing might have been different with girl!Harry, and the ways her focus on respectability and a particular sort of ‘manners’ might unintentionally prepare Harry for encountering the inanities of “Pureblood culture.” (I got that impression particularly strongly from And she dug in to the tart, cutting neatly, with such steady, elegant slices that Blaise found himself imagining her secreted away in Ms. Kittredge’s back room, listening keenly to their etiquette lessons.) Then, as we spent more time with her, I started to feel like there was something off about Harry—a sense of fakeness/wrongness, somewhat age-inappropriate self-possession and dialogue, and inconsistent knowledge of the Wizarding world. As I read on, I saw that Blaise was picking up on that as well, so it was clearly intentional, but I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to add—it mostly made me feel ambivalent about her characterization, especially when the story wrapped up almost immediately after that.

I read in the comments that you meant to imply that she’s a time-traveler from a similar universe, and I’m not sure that came across effectively. It also feels like a bit of a bait-and-switch in terms of summary and tagging. Genderswapped Slytherin Harry dealing with pureblood culture I’m enormously interested in, but genderswapped, alternative timeline, ambiguous age, time-traveling Slytherin Harry who has possibly done this all before? That’s a lot of jumps, and a lot bigger difference than the “Canon Divergence” tag led me to expect.

On reading through some of your other works, I noticed that you write a fair bit of this sort of time-travel universe jumping. I think you may have the details of these alternate universes so thoroughly worked out in your head that it seems redundant to put them on the page, but I think that leaves gaps for your readers. You’re working off a slate that is pretty removed from the shared universe of canon or even fanon, and that can make it difficult to meet you there. I noticed this in Return of ANBU Weasel as well as the DarkLord!Ron drabbles that inspired it—I had a lot of questions which I initially chalked up to my mostly-osmosed familiarity with Naruto and not having read the DarkLord!Ron fic, but I had even more questions after I went back to see if the Ron story would illuminate things for me. I think in places where your story is significantly canon-divergent, and that divergence is important to the story, it would help to add more detail or explanation of those differences and the way they have impacted the characters.

Something I noticed about your dialogue in Figurine is how you highlight the most important dialogue moments and summarize a lot of the "getting to know you" stuff, or you pick one piece of characterizing dialogue to make a point, as with Mrs. Parkinson's comment at the very beginning. I think that's an element where your tendency to elide things and let the reader fill in the gaps works really well. It's great for the pacing, and helps us focus on the really meaningful interactions. You've also got a good sense of comedic timing.

To provide short answers to your specific questions:
1. Did the beginning spark your interest? — Yes, absolutely.
2. Does the pacing work? — Yes.
3. Is there anything I overuse that stands out strongly to you or feels jarring? Words, phrases, punctuation, formatting, all of that is fair game. — No, your prose feels really well-balanced, and the story is a very smooth and enjoyable read.
4. Does the ending work? Is it too abrupt, or just right? — The end does feel a little bit pat, but I can see how it might be difficult to find a stopping place and otherwise the story might balloon. Ultimately, I think it works the way it is.
5. Do you feel as if the story delivered on the expectations set up by the summary + tags? In other words, when you you were done with the story, what did you feel was missing? — As I said, I did feel like there were things missing/expectations I had that weren't necessarily met, mostly around the "canon divergence" tag.

Overall, I think this story is beautifully constructed. There's a great balance between Blaise's reflective narration and the dialogue and action. You do a fantastic job with the little character moments for supporting characters. I laughed at the humor. And ultimately, your prose is truly excellent: it carried me across the questions I had and provided a really engaging and enjoyable experience.

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