May 15, 2025
Well... aight.
I've been seeing you turbo read this entire site at record speed and had been wanting to check out your works for a while, so here I am.
At first, I thought it was merely the CHONKY paragraphs that kept losing me on mobile so I read on a computer instead, which is a good thing because some paragraphs were beasts this chapter and would've lost me for sure if I was still reading on a phone, but anyway. No, that wasn't it. I've read other stories with massive chonkers here, and while it is kind of annoying to read the same twice sometimes, I didn't necessarily divert my attention because of it.
In this story's case, I believe the problem is moreso due to the way things are told. Yes, told. Almost nothing has been shown so far. Not only that, but the narration itself is so matter of fact and devoid of flavor that the main character feels like an NPC in her own story. So far, 80% of events have been summarized into chonkers that feel like summaries of summaries themselves, almost like someone took several elements of different books and decided to tape rather than fuse them together. The whole story so far has this been there, done that kind of feel, which kind of disappoints me since the premise sounded so fun and cozy.
The narration being passive leads to the main character feeling passive as well. Every now and then she has a thought, the thinks, she thoughts as she thinkers, but does SHE, or does the "story"? I don't know, I feel like I've yet to meet a single character, and the dialogue doesn't help. It really feels like talking to every NPC in an old game where you can tell the devs hadn't slept for three days and just had them say the most generic things possible. If it's not unsubtle exposition, it's poorly-taped story elements. I can't get any personality from a single line of dialogue so far, let alone the narration, so how could I get any personality from the characters? Or any character at all? Or any story at all?
This feels like... I don't know, an amalgamation? An embryo? Like it has characters, a plot, dialogue, narration, but where is the actual conflict? Where is the hook? Why should I care? What separates this from the millions of other fantasy stories out there involving magic quests to save the land? I'm not so much telling you "this is bad" because I wouldn't say it is necessarily, but moreso, what was your intention when writing it? What do you as an author, as a person, have to say? Or is it merely practice? If so, when does writing stop being practice?
I'll probably trim most of the loloposting during rewrites, so thank you for pointing out specifics, and honestly, I would agree that the prose is better this time around, even if both were first drafts that imploded near the end due to skill issue 
surely he's not a narrative device is he... surely...