9/23/2024-ginger_reckoning-hivemind buddycop book-sub 4-l, v, g- 4996 words

[ginger_reckoning]

Hey all! Tags this time for suicide--concerns a man contemplating ending his life for most of a chapter, then deciding to go through with it. Also later, some heavy gore but in a "horde of zombies" kind of way. Other than that, standard tags for language and violence. 

 

My main concerns this chapter are with the characters of S and A. Do they work? Are they interesting? Is there enough build up before this point to be interested in them? A in particular, I'm picking up that she's feeling a little flat. (Though this chapter is mostly action with her lol) 

 

Anyway, thank you all again!

 

[Ace of Hearts]

Overall: On the characters of S and A, what I like about them and my hangups about them are kind of the opposite of each other. S has a fun personality but I’m not always invested in its role in the story because we haven’t seen any real vulnerability from it so its victory feels inevitable with no real stakes. In contrast, I like A’s role in the story and her background as someone who channels pain through dance into magic, but her actual characterization feels too nonspecific for me. Here it seems like she wants to stop S because it’s going to destroy a big city and she is vulnerable to the image of her old guardian being used against her, neither of which give me a good feel for who she is as a distinct person.

I think that covers most of my big comments, actually. The fight felt a bit long without a lot of progress being made, but I think that ties back to the characterization comments more than the fight itself.  

As I go:

Pg 1. More fun commentary, though at this point I don’t totally trust the story to connect the social commentary to the main ideas or plot of the story.

Pg 3. One the one hand I do think it’s funny that B ascribes the city falling to basically karma when S is unrelated to all of that but at the same time it also makes it hard to feel like this scene matters to the story.

Pg 4-5. I like the idea of getting more of S’s characterization through B but because it feels like the plot is stalling for this I’m having a hard time staying engaged despite a lot of fun lines.

Pg 7. This does help to give the convo a bit more relevance, though it doesn’t have a big impact without knowing why S is incorporating people or what it plans to do with that.

Pg 8-10. The scene flows nicely though I think what’s holding me back is the lack of personal stakes for A. Which feels weird to say when she’s trying to stop the thing that killed her whole troupe but I’m not feeling a precise motivation from her beyond saving the city.

Pg 11. One of my rules of thumb is that if I have to rely on exclamation points, the dialogue isn’t strong enough on its own. Here, it feels like a symptom of A’s characterization being nonspecific.  

Pg 12. I do like the way magic can cut off her pain but that comes with big risks. Also could be very dangerous for her to get wounded and not even realize it.

Pg 13-14. I think the main holdup for me here is that I don’t really believe A’s actually making progress by fighting the different copies of S so counterintuitively it feels like the pace really slows here.

Pg 15. These lines from S are good, but they highlight my hangup that if there’s no progress being made here this scene doesn’t feel like it helps advance the story.