Concrit for kira_katrine

[adriennefae]

I want to receive feedback by: comment on my post in this community, or message me on Discord at kira-katrine#0981.

Here are the works I want feedback on: On a Different Frequency, an endlessly upward world, things look different from here, making up for lost time, The Red Angels, the greatest mysteries come in threes, working on halloween, new normal, the ones who stayed, all for the best, she was human.

My works' fandoms and content notes are: Mostly either Star Trek: Discovery or original works. One is tagged 'The Hymn of Acxiom - Vienna Teng (Song)'--that is in practice an original work inspired by that song. All the Discovery fics listed are gen; the original works are either gen or non-sexually-explicit F/F. the ones who stayed is tagged for Major Character Death. The ones that are tagged Choose Not to Warn usually include canonical character death/talk about it.

I have these questions for readers: What is your overall impression? For the Discovery fics, if you know the fandom, do the characters seem IC? If you don't know the fandom or you're critiquing an original work, do you get a good sense of who the characters are and do they seem internally consistent? If you're reading one of the F/F stories, is the characters' relationship believable to you, do you like it, and do the characters' feelings about each other come across well? For any of the stories, are the characters' emotions conveyed well in general? Does the dialogue flow well? Do any parts not make sense? Is the prose in general written well, and is there a good balance of description vs. dialogue vs. narration vs. POV characters' thoughts? Does it start and end in places/ways that work for you? Is there anything else that you particularly liked or disliked? Feedback on summary/title/tags is also welcome.

I would prefer gentle (5) or direct (1) feedback, or something in between: 3-ish.

Comments

[skara]

I chose the ones who stayed because I liked the atmosphere of the fic, and because I'm a total sucker for this sort of doomed, angst-ridden pairing, especially when one of the parties is an AI.

Summary, title & tags, plus overall impression:

I feel like the sparse tags really work; there's a lot implied by just the two additional tags and the archive warning. I went in prepared for angst, for lingering attachment between two people separated in an extremely final fashion, and that's exactly what I got :D

Re the summary, I feel like you could have nixed "Quite literally, in fact." and trimmed the last sentence a bit, like so:

Carol was Phoenix's person. Phoenix was Carol's home.

Now, she always would be.

The title works for me, but I will say that it feels a bit more focused on, idk, the whole crew? Than just the central pairing? "the ones" to me feels like it's meant to refer to more than just two people.

Spotlight on the start:

Carol knew something was very wrong with Phoenix.

I really love this line. It's a perfect jumping-off point for the rest of the fic.

The spaceship’s AI had never been offline for this long before. Whenever something had gone wrong in the past, Kelley had been able to fix Phoenix right up. This time, though, nothing the engineer did seemed to make any difference. Phoenix's usual humming noises were entirely absent; the consoles were oddly freezing cold; when Carol spoke to her, there was no reply.

This paragraph establishes the situation the characters are in very nicely, building it up step by step. You get across the fact that Carol and crew have died and are lingering on as ghosts without ever having to state it specifically.

Spotlight on the main relationship:

Much as I like the central ship, I feel as if Phoenix getting attached to Carol came across more and felt more supported than Carol's attachment to Phoenix. Carol's attachment to Phoenix needed more airtime than it got.

Take these lines, for example:

A computer that took commands and gave the crew what they asked for and didn’t talk back and didn’t voice opinions and didn’t give advice and didn’t have long conversations with Carol as Carol lay in bed at night, unable to get to sleep.

Many of those were things other members of her crew could also do, of course. One, in particular, was very much not.

The last line in particular led me to expect more from the depiction of their relationship; that the most intimate they got (from Carol's POV) was just long, late-night conversations felt kind of disappointing. I wanted more angst, more torment! If they never got freaky together, I wanted them to feel bad they didn't take the chance to cross the line, or miss the other ways they could have been intimate (hugs, touch, etc); if they did fuck, I wanted them to remember what happened and crave more and feel bad in various ways (e.g. 'how dare I think so much about the sex when there's so much more at stake').

To be fair, you really got Phoenix's side of the relationship across well. I loved the whole sequence beginning with this line:

She remembered realizing she didn’t watch anyone else on the ship quite this way.

I loved how Phoenix slowly, carefully analyzed her feelings and came to the obvious conclusion. I especially liked the thought of her writing love poems via neural net text-generation :D

Other thoughts:

As I reread the fic, I couldn't help but wonder whether it would have been more effective overall if it was just from Phoenix's POV. I felt like you had more to say about the general situation and about Phoenix and Carol's connection from Phoenix's POV.

Another thing I noticed on rereading was that it wasn't explained whether Phoenix could see and sense her dead crew. I liked the idea of her also being unable to see them, but I feel like that needed to be a little more obvious.

Hopefully this has been useful to you. If you have any questions or want clarification on any of the points I've made, feel free to sling me a comment, an email or a PM.

[adriennefae]

Thank you so much for the critique! I think you have good points about me not having given equal attention to Carol's side of the relationship compared to Phoenix's, and not having fully gotten Carol's feelings across. I'll keep that in mind in the future.