Arnold, a degenerate with little social skills outside of his deviance groups, finds his boundaries and life styles being tested as the girl of his dreams, Barbara Ravenfeather, appears before him as a fellow classmate. The only troubling part about this development though is that Barbara doesn't exist; she is his comfort character from the hit book series "Magic, Monsters, and the last Ravenfeather.
All people say that if the proper motivation or reward were to lay before them that they would act and take the chance, but not many are actually faced with that said opportunity arising. Sit back and enjoy as Arnold's favorite book series fades from existence and instead his comfort waifu manifests in the real world!
Howdy y'all, this is my entry for the little monthly challenge but maybe I will be updating it after that as well. We'll see. Trying out a bunch of things with this story so mind some mistakes, but more importantly: Enjoy.
Howdy y'all, this is my entry for the little monthly challenge but maybe I will be updating it after that as well. We'll see. Trying out a bunch of things with this story so mind some mistakes, but more importantly: Enjoy.
Hullo.
I'll begin by saying I enjoyed this little read here, duty-bound and all. I'm a fan of philosophically-inclined writings, particularly those that weave them as some form of introspection. Whilst I'm not entirely sold on whatever you were lying down, I did like it for the most part.
What I'd like to comment on is the rather broad, melodramatic and extensive allure of your prose. I understand that certain topics lend themselves to a different writing style, but my mind begins to wander after a while because I don't feel anything *more* is added. The reflections are there, but they feel like rehashes, rewords, rephrases, there isn't really anything new that enhances or contributes to Arnold's perspective here. Even the first chapter suffers from the same lack of focus. When I read something like that, my first belief is that there isn't a clear goal to strive towards in the writing, so a lot of the stuff ends up being filler. Which, sure, can have its perks and rewards; it does here for the most part, but after a while it's becoming droning.
Notwithstanding that, I think that without a proper thematic basis this type of story ends up feeling unwarrantedly hollow. I'm not entirely sure *what* caused Arnold to be so...othered and alienated. It feels like a character trait that exists solely at the plot's convenience which, to me, isn't doing it any favours. I might've missed something, granted, I'm reading this in an odd fashion, but I'm fairly certain there isn't a Pygmalionesque story behind this. While I appreciate that Arnold has views fiction ('fantasy') as some form of universe that compensates his loneliness and isolation, it feels like an Ouroborous. He's lonely because he's hyperfixated and hyperfixated because he's lonely. Without a starting point, this cycle feels kind of contrived, though I admit it creates a very interesting read; which is part of why I'm even tackling this.
Prose-wise, I think I've said enough, but I'd like to highlight the perspective swaps that are somewhat... jarring? To me, at least, I feel like the perceived stylistic value of the extradiegetic comments don't really tie in properly with the more personal aspect of Arnold's inner monologue. Just a thought, I suppose.
That's it.
Bubs, out.
No harm in taking breaks, always good to make sure the writing stay fun😊.
A shorter chapter but just needed to get something out. Going to work on the other parts but I feel like a "break" was needed right there.
Not going to post a chapter probably tonight or tomorrow so I will probably see you all who reading on Monday. Have a good weekend.
I am not used as much to webnovel writing and I guess light novel writing as well. Many of the light novels I have read after all tended to start as webnovels so I was interested to start getting some writing online done and such lel.
Thanks for the reply and the further insight. I'll keep it all in consideration!
I think this length of chapter is a bit more suitable, your writing style is highly interesting but also quite dense and heavy - So this shorter version felt more approachable for me anyway 👍👍
This is a shorter chapter but I feel like rambling a bit more. Hold on through the slow and the real story will begin to glow. While I am not going to change it for previous chapters currently, I am having it so that the mysterious voice just starts and ends with the ~ for their whole dialogues instead of at the end of each phrase. Enjoy and I'll try and get another chapter out sometime tomorrow.
I have updated this chapter and the one before to make things seem a bit cleaner
I definitely previewed the material because in typing the lines I made just went straight across, but now they go a bit down lol
it looks fine on pc so maybe it's no big deal - Just thought I'd mention it😊.
Just looking at that from my
Phone right now; it kind of does look weird. I have usually been writing it from my phone so I will probably just take a gander at all of this
Your writings very engaging, especially your descriptions - But I think centering all the text makes it wierd to read, in mobile anyway👍👍.
Thanks for the comment, I hope that I will write enough that is worthy of a review lol! Encouragement always helps and I am even more psyched!
Thank you for your interest, I am trying to update daily semi-daily. I hope that you find this story pleasurable. I am trying a bunch of random things with this :D
Greetings Bubbles, thanks for the review and the uncanny accuracy. Your claims and observations are not unnoticed and not exclusive to you. I myself began this bit of writing and all of that because I just felt like doing a bit more writing on the spot and randomly jumped back to Honeyfeed and saw the monthly challenge.
If we want to talk about the story being the hollow and the more than confusing perspectives swaps, they were noticed to be definite issues right after the fact. The story, I never expected it to be all that coherent, even if I wanted it to be that point, as well as it just pacing rather poorly. I found that I had an idea and just started writing stuff and well, some ideas flop you know? Not that the idea of the story isn't salvageable, I think that you'd agree that cleaning it up and giving a cleaner/clearer goal would do wonders.
I did enjoy writing parts of this story but issues did just arise from attempts of a series of ideas. My biggest one that I found myself in terms of tests was that of the perspective swapping; it sounded very cool at first and I could imagine it in my head, and then I found random issues with formatting that made it not work. Like I am writing on my computer but I originally forgot that people are going to have different screens, maybe devices, and that is going to change how the material is viewed. I used to have some lines that separated the perspectives. It kind of was a cheap way out but it felt better then. Those lines though did not translate well into different screen sizes and especially to phones. I actually checked it out originally because @momentie brought it up.
But yeah, moving on from that bit of jargon, I found quickly in later chapters that the other voice had a different effect than desired. An issue on my part with having some issues with perspectives.
But yeah, once again, thank you very much again for the read. All reviews are very helpful as I am sadly not the greatest judge of writing and feedback on what works and doesn't make the learning process that much easier. While I was finding that I may not want to continue this story at the moment, I would love to have you check out other works that you happen to stumble on over to, and I honestly desire to check out some of yours as well!
-Kai