PlatinumSkink — Roleplayer Guild

... Gasp

... I made sure not to read if I passed or not before I had read through the review, but after the review, I was still unsure if I had passed or not. Gosh. ... I'm scared. Anyway. I'm going to respond, here.

The thing I want to make clear immediately is that overall, this story both shows that you are continuing to improve, steadily if slowly. The entirety of your entry, both parts of it, were lightly sprinkled with typos, awkward grammar, and inappropriate usage of verbs. However, this is perhaps the first time I have read through one of your stories without actually becoming overtly bothered by their frequency. If I had to pick one, I would say your usage of appropriate verbs still needs the most work, 'blasting beams of power' by way of example. Keep at it.

As far as your actual arrangement goes, there is a certain lack of descriptive/visual imagery. I barely have any idea what any of the characters look like or how old they are. You do a decent job of capturing the states of mind as well as their tone of voice and expression, but otherwise I may as well have been reading about stick figures. This also extends to scenery, incidentally. Aside from the brief description of Earth and the rings of Saturn, there is very little depth in your manner of presentation. A good example of this would be the armor our Plutonian heroes wear, which is never described as anything except, vaguely and unhelpfully, as 'armor' with a random color permutation. I have no idea if these are skin-tight suits, streamlined power armor, bulky environment suits, etcetera. Just a little bit of elaboration right at the beginning of the story would have massively improved the visual aspects of the whole thing. A similar problem is observable in the helmets everyone wears that grants them complete, total awareness of the entire battlefield - without telling us how. You do not need to provide a technical explanation, but providing one at all, however flimsy, would have been nice. Is it a telepathic effect? is it wired directly into their cortex? What is going on? No idea. In the future, you might want to elaborate more on such details. Not necessarily anything elaborate or fancy; a single sentence can sometimes have tremendous, far-reaching influence on the entire story (Be thankful you did not inadvisably provoke detailed inspection of the scientific aspects of your story like @mdk did).

I liked the arrangement of dialogue in the story, at least for the most part (refer to the first paragraph). The flow of conversations is remarkably smoother than in the past, and well put together. It still is not perfect, but represents a marked improvement over previous submissions.

I also liked your characterization of Eviri. You did a good job of conveying her conflicted state of mind; her wanting to protect Pluto while struggling over whether or not she was really doing the right thing. Her actions during the mutiny and later, during the fight over Earth, are a neatly structured staircase of character growth and progression. Although I did not actually like the character herself, I did appreciate the depth she acquired over the course of the story-arc. Well-handled.

Perhaps the single biggest problem I have with this story is that, given the effort and length, the actual plot and its logical rigor are both rather weak. Juvenile, in fact - the whole time I felt like I was reading a children's adventure novel. Given your statement that the story is basically of the magical girl genre, perhaps that sort of arrangement is inevitable, or else I simply do not enjoy the sort of over-embellished logic inherent in such stories. From my perspective the whole of the story is beneath your skill, or at least it should be. I was never engaged and, to be honest, I felt like my time was being wasted while reading through it. The story clears the basic standard of quality expected of good storytelling, but in part only because I decided to lay aside any misgivings I had concerning the sophistication of the plot since there was a significant chance my opinion would then be swayed by a preexisting bias against the genre. This is a bad way to have cleared the challenge. Under normal conditions a story should be of sufficient quality to win past the misgivings of a judge who is not making an effort to be objective. I am seriously considering revising the rules of judgment and have each submission reviewed multiple times in order to circumvent this problem in the future, so let it be known: Going forward I will expect better from you.

Also, I get that Aimer was a bit dumb, but descentry is a made-up word. I made it up. It is not actually a valid word. I was trying to sound cool. Please do not take my usage of a nonvalid word as an excuse to use it unless you also happen to want to make up words to sound cool.
@Terminal

... I'm currently afraid that, should I look directly at any of these typos, awkward grammar or inappropriately used verbs, I won't see it. I MIGHT see it if it's pointed out to me, but it could impossibly be pointed out to me by someone if I just typed it down on a blank paper and then just read through it myself. ... Oh, well. I'm happy you weren't overly bothered with it, and that it seems like I'm improving. I DID take a bit more care with each sentence I wrote this time... A bit. And only mostly on that point. Haha.

I'm aware I skipped out on a lot of descriptions. That's partially because I'm not comfortable writing descriptions. When I read descriptions, I often find that my mind forgets them within seconds and I therefore don't really have a use of them, they just hold the reader up before getting to the action which would be remembered. Though, suppose that's the wrong way to go. And, haha, I intentionally avoided thinking about how the stuff they used actually worked, because Plutonian technology's supposed to be so super-advanced it's basically like magic. That was the wrong way to go there, too, huh. Alright. On those parts, I'll attempt to do better and not avoid it in the future.

I'm happy you liked the characterization of Eviri. That little thing is like, um, the most important part of the entire story. It's the part I created and molded first of all and created the rest of the tale to fit it, and you liked that. Everything else was secondary. I'm... I'm most happy about that. If you had disliked that and liked everything else, I would have felt worse than I do right now. Haha. ... And yes, as a person she's not very interesting. That was intentional. Haha.

And that (second to) last paragraph... it scares me. Partly because I don't know what part of the story you don't like. Is there any of my stories that haven't been juvenile? I'm not sure what you're referring to "over-embellished logic". I'm not sure what here is supposed to be beneath my skill. Minus killing all the characters and their home this is pretty much the kind of story I want to write (only referring to the story, not my writing of the story). But, even more than so, I don't know how I would have otherwise have written a tale which accomplished the terms of the labour that still would have made a good story. I'm sorry for having made you feel like you were wasting your time, I have no idea how to change that. I'm scared that, when I sit down to write again, I have no idea how to write something that doesn't make you feel the same way as this one. I basically want to write things that feel like Disney classics or Miyazaki's movies, the ones that would appeal to pretty much any ages, with bright endings that'll make the reader feel that the heroes accomplished something, without necessarily needing to go super-dark and such (though, of course, with my own style). Does that give some form of clarification? I want to write fantastic worlds that makes impressions and write about meaningful characters doing their best in such worlds... ... ... Is that in itself juvenile? ... Then maybe juvenile is the way I want to go. Haha...

Maybe it's Umeron being such a stupidly dark villain that was juvenile? Well, I needed a guy that wouldn't hesitate to destroy Pluto. ... Can't imagine any other sort of guy that'd do that. Well, any other sort that isn't considerably boring. I even had the explanation that he put a chip in his own mind to kill off such emotions to find ways to defeat Plutonian technology, yet it killed more of his humanity than he intended and he became that. 

Maybe it's Eviri being put in charge here that felt juvenile? I didn't want her to be someone who was originally in charge, I didn't want her to have experience feeling pressured by such responsibilities. I feel it wouldn't have given as much of an impression if she just handled it with such professionalism. 

Or maybe it was Sewbrig? He was more of a joke than anything else, I'll admit that he was most likely the most juvenile part of everything, sure, but I want to have a jokish element to my stories somewhere, he was mostly created for the moment when Eviri hit him. Eh... Was it a mistake to include him? But, I really wanted a character like that, who yelled at them from behind. Could I have done him better somehow, would that have made the entire story less juvenile?

Was it the actions of the other nations being conquered? Would they have joined their armies up or- no, I don't have a bloody idea what they should have done. I'm no military expert. I did my best to give Eviri a believable journey of conquest through the Solar System which she had been forced on by the threat of the annihilation of her people. Is that juvenile? I dunno. 

Was it the fact Eviri's companions were such obvious attempts of just getting a colourful cast that made things just feel like their forces were led by children, or something? I really didn't want to make the characters just military officers. Those kinds of stories just following military officers are usually the kind I enjoy the least. I want myself brave young souls daring to take on the world. Is that desire juvenile?

... Or is it just everything altogether? Then I don't know what I could have done instead right now, since the above is basically a gathering of the logic which I applied to make it a story I myself would enjoy reading. I don't know how I'd otherwise do it. ... Sigh. I sure don't feel like I passed any labour, right now. Oh, well.

... And acknowledged. I won't use your made-up word in the future. I only used it because "Terminal used it, then it has to be a real word". I'll make sure to do proper research before using such words in the future. XD
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