Nov 18, 2022
Great job writing this! I found the perspective of a normal friend who's just trying to help out with the school life of his exorcist/witch/shinigami friends to be really compelling. There's dozens of stories about beating up monsters; very few (at least that I know of) about a friend keeping the normal lives of his shonen protagonist friends in shape. This makes the story pretty unique and I enjoy the perspective shown here.
The friend group really grew on me as the story went on. They all fit together nicely and the slice of life scenes with all four of them are pretty fun. If you come back to this world, there's a lot to continue off of, because all three magical sides can be explored a lot further. I think it would've been nice to learn more about the factions, but meta-wise I know you had a time and word limit and keeping the knowledge limited really helps strengthen Shun's perspective.
Helping that is writing in the present tense. Me personally, it threw me off a little bit at first since I'm just not used to seeing it. But technically wise, it seems all correct to me and using it emphasizes how detached and dazed Shun seems to be at the start of the story. The one critique I have is that I wish we could've seen more of the convos rather than just being told about them; a couple of times it would be 'Saori says this, and Shun felt this way'. It would've been nice to see the actual conversations, especially when plot points were involved. But there were meta reasons and keeping it short and to the point does help keep the story moving along.
Thanks for reading through my rambling. This was a great story and I could really see it as a manga. Good luck with the contest!
