Concrit for radialarch

[radialarch]

I want to receive feedback by:
- email radialarch at gmx dot com
- comment on this post (not screened)

Here are the works I want feedback on:
Complete works over 2k posted to radialarch in or after 2015; please consider any co-authored works safe.

My works' fandoms and content notes are:
Mainly Captain America movies, Yuri!!! on Ice, podcast RPF, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, scattering of others.

You're most likely to see canon-typical violence, depiction of mental illness, or dubious consent as warnings. See tags/notes on individual works, and I'm also happy to provide more detailed content notes as necessary.

I have these questions for readers:
Looking generally for any strong reactions to specific lines as well as broader impressions on execution. Would welcome anything, but for specifics:
- Are emotional arcs clear?
- Is the ending satisfying?
- Are actions/dialogue in-character?
- Was there anything you wanted to see less or more of?
- Plus any stylistic or thematic notes.

I would prefer gentle (5) or direct (1) feedback, or something in between:
Maybe a solid 3? Tell me what doesn't work, what does, no need to hold my whole hand but maybe a pinkie.

Comments

[scansionictus]

I was really excited to see you'd written a V:LD fic, and I decided to read i have dug this grave for two. I went back and rewatched s1e11 so it was fresh in my mind. This is sort of a stream-of-consciousness play-by-play of my reactions to the fic as I read it, and at the end I addressed your specific questions. I hope this is the sort of feedback you had in mind!

Firstly I really love your opening here with how you referenced Keith's mother. It's such a simple but powerful memory, and as I reader I was immediately emotionally invested in the story.

I like the way Keith characterises the other Paladins here:

The others — he’s been trying not to think about them, but now the worries crowd in thick and fast. Lance is an idiot, and Hunk doesn’t believe in himself enough. Pidge is too easy to distract. None of them are as careful as they should be; they trust too soon.

I think Keith is very sharp and assessing, and he sees more than he lets on, so it's great to read his take on the Paladins like this, especially with his impression that they trust too soon. This paragraph says a lot about each of them, but it says just as much about Keith; he's easily the most wary of the bunch, and I like how that comes through here.

You built the tension really well in the scene where they're entering the planet's atmosphere, I could see the flight manouvers play out really clearly. I loved this line: For a moment, Keith can only see the bright glow of ionized gas. And then, below him: the black lion falling, graceless. and also how you throwback to the opening paragraphs with There’s darkness creeping up at the corner of his vision, a rush in his ears. For a moment, Keith thinks, distantly, of the sea.

When Keith approaches Shiro's body after the landing:

“C’mon,” he pleads. Shiro’s gotten bulkier in the shoulders, and it takes some effort to turn him over. “Not like this, not after everything.”

To me, this dialogue was textbook Keith. I could hear him so perfectly in my head. I liked your little piece of worldbuilding about Altean medkits, and (this is a tiny detail but) I appreciate that the injection was intramuscular rather than intravenous, because I would have trouble believing Keith could perform the latter.

“Wake up,” he says, voice cracking. “Shiro, please. I need you.”

It’s the second time in his life he’s said that out loud. Shiro doesn’t answer this time, either.

This line landed exactly the way you'd hoped it to, I love how you keep showing us glimpses into the fact that Keith carries so much pain and abandonment with him. I could very easily picture him clutching Shiro's unconscious body in the lake and begging him to wake up, that image was very powerful (and heartbreaking).

Keith is, momentarily, struck dumb by the sweep of Shiro’s eyelashes. A million miles from home, under an alien sky, and Shiro alive is still the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

This is such beautiful writing, not much more to add in the context of intellectual concrit but I wanted to say on a more visceral level that this made my Sheith-shipping heart so happy!

“Shiro,” Keith says, appalled he never thought to ask. "Can you — feel things with the arm?”

Shiro’s nostrils flare white; for a moment, he says nothing. Then, with a determined tilt of his jaw: “Just do it.”

This is such great Shiro charactersation, it's absolutely like him to evade the question, grit his teeth, and bear the pain. Shiro pulling rank on Keith like this is perfect too, especially with his simple "I'm not asking." As for the actual "procedure" itself, I appreciate your choice to skip over it and just reference it with:

The knife’s sheath is leather. Still smooth. Thick. He’s taken good care of it.

He unhooks it from his belt and offers it to Shiro. Shiro doesn’t look at him when he takes it.

The teeth marks don’t come out of the leather for a long, long time.

I think by detailing every aspect of it, it would have tripped up the pacing, and by skipping to the aftermath you leave it up the the reader to imagine the worst.

I also really liked your worldbuilding about the Red Lion and the repairs it needed, this is something that's often overlooked in the show so it's nice to get a mention here. It serves as a neat little reminder that the Paladins are actually spacecraft engineers, essentially. I also liked that you touched on the psychic connection Keith has with Red.

After Keith has revealled Zarkon was the original Black Paladin:

Keith isn’t — he’s not good at this, at fixing people. Between the two of them, it’s always been the other way around, Shiro telling him what he needs to hear.

“Shiro,” he says anyway, the truest thing he knows. "If anyone’s worthy of flying a Voltron lion, it’s you.”

This is again perfect Keith characterisation; he's not the best at comforting people because he's spent so much time alone or else shutting people out. But it's very true to his character that the one thing of which he's certain, is that Shiro is worthy of being a Paladin. I also like Shiro's insecurities here; Shiro is so often putting on a brave face as the team leader, and I like that Keith is the one person he feels he can share these with.

They’ve been sleeping in their lions, or trying, at least. They leave the comms open, and most nights Keith can hear Shiro on the other end, the uneven breathing of someone who’s not quite asleep. He’s pretty sure Shiro knows he’s not getting much sleep, either.

I REALLY love the almost sort of intimacy of Keith lying awake at night and listening to Shiro breathe. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure he's just worried about Shiro, but it's pretty clear our boy's got it bad.

“I thought I was gonna have to spend a lot more time on my knees,” he says. "This is nice.”

Keith chokes. Shiro realizes what he’s said half a second after and goes very pink.

I had a similar reaction to Keith here! I love a flustered Shiro, and it's nice to see they're becoming a bit more relaxed around each other as they grow more accustomed to their predicament; this moment helped offer some relief in what's been a pretty tense piece so far.

The planet’s swinging into summer; the days get longer, hotter, and they’re shedding layers of clothing one by one. Shiro strips down to his vest, his feet bare; Keith gets into the habit of doing repairs with his shirt tossed aside, and pays the price by acquiring a vicious sunburn one afternoon while replacing the front heat panels.

I really like the image you're painting here! Particularly of a sunburnt Keith. I would have liked a bit more context on how much time has passed exactly; I was thinking it was maybe a week? But this paragraph makes me feel like it might be more time if the days are getting noticeably longer and hotter. Although I can accept that planets with smaller orbits will progress through their seasons faster. [Edit: I've read ahead and I see that it has been 1-2 weeks by this point? So the noticeable shift in seasons does seem like a bit much, but not so much that it would break my suspension of disbelief.]

It’s been a long time since they’ve been like this: content, without the weight of all the universe pressing down on their shoulders. Keith drops his head back down and says, “You know, if I had to get stranded on an alien planet, I'm glad it was with you.”

Shiro’s thumb is rubbing carefully beneath Keith’s shoulder blade. "Yeah,” he says after a moment. "Me too.”

I love this little moment. Platonic touching while one half of the pairing is pining is one of my favourite things, and I love that the universe has afforded them this moment of peace amidst the chaos.

Outside, there’s grass sprouting up, all around the lions.

“Where did this come from?” Keith asks. "The scans never picked up any kind of life on this planet.”

I had to backread at this point, because in the absence of any other explanation, I was picturing a fairly earth-like planet. I missed any description that the planet was barren or sparse. So I was a bit surprised by this. Regardless, I thought Shiro and Keith's revelation about the quintessence was incredibly clever and a great plot device.

“You have to leave,” Shiro says. "I know the red lion’s almost ready. Go find the others. Tell them what we know.”

“And leave you here for the Galrans?” Keith says. "No way. Red can take both of us.”

“But not the black lion,” Shiro says. "You told me it took hours to get here, and that’s without a fleet of Galra fighters on your tail. You’d have no maneuverability and no support, it’s a death wish. And I'm not leaving a dangerous weapon here for the Galra to find.”

I love Shiro being self-sacrificing here, it's very him. Keith's confession and his steadfast resolution not to leave Shiro behind was likewise great.

Regarding the removal of Shiro's arm, I loved these two bits especially:

The Galra had done this to him. They’d taken him and marked him like — like some kind of property, like they owned him; and all this time, he’d had to carry that with him, an inescapable reminder.

“I'll walk you through it,” Shiro says, trying to grin, and Keith thinks about Shiro’s white face, all those nights Shiro pretended he could sleep and Keith did too, and says, “Okay.”

And:

When he’s finished, Keith’s palms are slippery with blood. Shiro stays conscious the entire time, and Keith doesn’t know which would’ve been worse.

I love that you've shown insight into the burden Shiro carries, how they took a part of him and then turned him into a weapon, his arm serving as a constant reminder of his time in captivity. And again, I love that you skip over the actual amputation; I think trying to describe it in detail would cheapened it, and instead you've left us with exactly two sentences that are absolutely gut-wrenching. The imagine of Keith's hands covered in Shiro's blood is so powerful.

He draws Keith’s finger through the air, and under his touch, the sky comes alive; not the stars tumbled in chaos after all, but a map.

Shiro’s always shown him where to go.

This is again, really beautiful writing. I love that their intimacy in this scene gives way to an almost-confession. And I love that Shiro knows, and he feels the same, and as much as I would love for them to have a big romantic smooch at this point, it seems so true to their characters that they would decide not to act here. And then you gave me this:

He’s still holding Keith’s hand when they finally fall asleep.

Which is, frankly, as good as a big romantic smooch in my book.

I do have some notes for the final scene where the Galra attacked. This felt a little bit rushed to me. Don't get me wrong, it's very in-keeping the the show to have the heroes show up at the very last minute and save the day, so the other Paladins showing up just in the nick of time was still plausible. But I think this scene would have worked better if it were expanded upon. I think I was missing some description of the action, even just a couple of paragraphs would have made a big difference here.

As for the kiss, I can appreciate the thank-god-you're-alive kiss in the heat of the moment, but because the fic has been building to this whole moment, I would have liked this to be fleshed out a little more. But other than that, I thought the resolution was very satisfying and fit in so neatly with canon, and this story is really the perfect bookend to season one. I'm so glad I read it!

Here are a few other things I noted while reading:

A few of your canon-specific proper nouns weren't capitalised. I normally see see Black Lion, Red Lion (or even just "Lion"), Paladin, etc. capitalised. You do capitalise Black Paladin so this felt a little bit inconsistent. You also didn't capitalise Garrison, either.

This wasn't a consistent issue and I know this is just a stylistic quirk so ymmv, but I did notice a lot of semi-colons/colons in the beginning sections. The section where they breakthrough the planet's atmosphere in particular had a lot. It's the sort of thing that once you become aware of it, you start looking for them, so I found them a little bit distracting. But they seemed to ease up as the story progressed so it wasn't really a problem.

This isn't so much a negative, but more of a neutral: I didn't understand the decision behind breaking this story into parts. It didn't bother me, but I didn't see how it served the narrative. In fact the narrative itself was so cohesive that the breaks seemed kind of arbitary. Normally I would reserve this structuring for significant timeskips or POV switches, but again it didn't really detract.

Not a negative but just an avenue of exploration: I was sort of expecting the fic to touch on Keith's memory of his mother at the beach again. I thought that it could have been nice to reference this towards the end when Keith and Shiro are getting ready to meet (what they think is) their deaths, maybe Keith's hit with that feeling of the ground falling away beneath his feet, or some other callback. You touched on the ocean imagery previously and I really enjoyed the scene with Keith cradling Shiro in the water, so it could have been nice to reference this again, but it's definitely a very minor thing in the end.

My plan was to address your specific questions at this point, but reviewing the list I think I've touched on almost everything! Emotional arcs were clear and well-developed, the ending was satisfying, all the dialogue was in-character and I've highlighted points where I think you did a particularly good job of that. There's only one thing I wanted to address, and it was Was there anything you wanted to see less or more of?

Nothing I wanted to see less of. As for things I wanted to see more of, I would have liked a bit more of a description about the planet; what colour is the sky? What colour is the sun? Does the air taste different? Little things like that are what I love about space canons.

The other thing I would have liked, is that as a diehard pining fan, I feel like this could have been turned up a notch. I loved the little bits you've included such as lines that I've highlighted above, but I would have loved a few more details about the intimacy of them sleeping together in the tent, Keith needing to help Shiro with things and that making their relationship a lot more tactile than normal—little things like that. With that said, I notice that this fic carries the weapons-grade repression of everyone's feelings tag (which is a great tag), so I totally accept the decision not to have Keith's internal monologue dominated by how much he loves Shiro as a completely valid characterisation choice. The repression is something that I can readily accept in both directions, so it wasn't an actual issue so much as me being greedy for more pining.

I hope you found this useful! Please don't hesitate to ask me any questions. I really enjoyed this fic and I've enjoyed giving you feedback!

[radialarch]

Hi, oh wow, thank you so much for all this! My weaknesses are always in scene-setting landing an ending, so your notes, particularly on the alien planet and the last Galra fight/climactic kiss, were really helpful!

Looking back on the fic (haha, it's been a while), I think my original plan was to have a motif for each separate section, which eventually got scrapped, so threading the water motif more throughout the entire fic instead might've given the piece more coherency and set up a more satisfying ending! Something I can keep in mind for longer pieces when I'm writing in the future.

Anyway, I'm so glad you enjoyed, and thanks again for taking the time to leave such detailed feedback!

[scansionictus]

I'm glad you found it useful! As soon as I posted it I was like "oh shit this got long" so I hope it wasn't overwhelming. FWIW I think the piece was already really coherent/cohesive even without the water motif so it certainly wasn't lacking there, but that could have been a nice touch.

It was a pleasure, thank you!

[adriennefae]

So I’m not really in any of the fandoms you’ve written for, so I wasn’t able to comment much on whether the characters were in-character or not, but I tried to address the other things you asked for. MCU is the fandom of yours I’ve osmosed the most about, so I went for that. In particular, your fic the promise in my bones interested me.

-the beginning really draws me in! The fact that Steve could only last three days before going to see Bucky in the lab, the way you have him looking at Bucky, the fact that he keeps going back, all of that clearly tells me how Steve feels about him
-the exchange about being between the living and the dead is intriguing--draws a nice parallel between the two characters
-”He stops in front of a stand of apples, picks one up in his hand. He can smell it, sweet and clean — feel the phantom ache in his teeth. He can’t remember the last thing he’s eaten.” I really like this line--it really conveys how long it’s been
-The dialogue in this is really good in general, especially in Steve's POV section--quippy and fun at times but also gets to deeper things about the characters and the story arc
-And then it shifts into Bucky’s POV--my first time reading through the fic, I wasn’t sure if the choice to tell the events leading up to their meeting first from Steve’s POV and then go back and tell them from Bucky’s worked for me--maybe because I wasn’t expecting it to go back and was a little confused at first about when the beginning part of Bucky’s POV was happening in relation to Steve’s POV section--but on second reading I think it does
-Bucky waking up is well done--it conveys the strangeness of this way that he wakes up and also makes it clear that something is different than usual
-I love how this hints at their history, references to things that happened between them dropped in among everything else--Steve mentioning camping in the Alps, Bucky remembering them talking in the bar--it's balanced nicely with the ongoing action of the story
-The part about getting used to his arm is very well written, and does a good job of setting up what's going to happen in the last scene
-The scene of Bucky trying to rescue Steve is very good--how both Bucky and the reader slowly start to realize that all the precautions he took weren’t working out quite the way they were supposed to--and then the change where Bucky starts thinking of Steve as Captain America, his enemy, how you did that really works for me--but he’s still thinking of his history with Steve, the way he had been before with the references to their past, it’s done really well and it’s clear how the rest of the story has led up to it
-the ending is definitely satisfying! I love how Bucky is able to sort of convince himself not to see “Captain America” anymore, that it’s really his friend Steve in front of him and that that’s the more important part of who Steve is. And you can really tell how proud Steve is of him too, with that last line.
-This might be influenced by the fact that I don't know the canon well and someone who does might read it differently--but the way the fic ended kind of made it seem like Bucky's emotional arc was the main important one in the story, despite his and Steve's POVs getting roughly equal time. I'm not sure I got Steve's arc as much beyond him being sad about Bucky. That's not to say that the story should be equally focused on both of them just because it's structured that way with the POVs, it still worked really well for me for the most part, but it's just something I was considering.

in the clear

[sadisticsparkle]

I picked this one because I love fic dealing with the aftermath of the mess that’s FE3H.

It was lovely and really good at complicating what’s in canon. Considering it’s both future fic and very short, you did an amazing job of implying character growth and changes in their dynamic. They’re different from the way they are at the end of FE3H but they’re recognizable and there’s a sense of history (on top of the one in canon). For example, the opening paragraphs with all the references to the previous times this has happened and how they’ve learned to handle it quickly bring the reader up to speed.

I have a hard time talking about ‘character arc’ in the sense that this is more like a snapshot of their new dynamic. It’s a night like a lot of other nights, not one where there’s a big step taken.

I would have wanted to see a bit more of how the war has affected Felix. There are several lines mentioning it (It took Felix a year to start grasping what it meant to be alive, other than waiting for death—he still forgets, sometimes, in the brief space between sleeping and waking. is a great one), but at the same time he’s very… well-adjusted so for me it worked more as a Dimitri fic than a Felix one. Rather than Felix remembering the ways the war has affected him, I would have liked more showing of that.

Because the way you wrote them was so lived-in and natural, would have liked is more hints of their current dynamic, of how they work when Dimitri is not Dimitring all over the place. That could have been an interesting contrast to their past dynamic that’s showcased through the fic.

It flows very well and the use of changing tenses is very subtle and unnoticeable in a good way: you’re not thinking oh here’s the flashback and the fic remains rooted in the sleepless night throughout. But at the same time, the contrast between younger Felix POV and present POV is very clear.

Had Dimitri made a sound? This is the limitation of memory. After the Western Rebellion, Felix would return to this moment, worry it smooth like a river stone, unable to discover the truth. Had Dimitri known then that he was sinking into a madness where only the dead could follow? Whose failure had it been, that he succeeded: Dimitri’s, in his silence, or Felix’s, for not hearing?
Neither possibility is better; but the uncertainty eats at him more.

Like this paragraph here could’ve turned into a muddled mess, but instead is crystal clear. So that’s something that I was really impressed by.