Feb 01, 2025
Aight, we're at the end. I'll probably copy paste (parts of) this into my review for later, but here goes.
I like your style very much. It's spunky and energetic in a way that doesn't feel tiresome or the perpetually upbeat kind that drains you after a while. You weave together words with a very noticeable ease, and whilst I can't know for sure how easy it is for you, it does feel quite effortless. Spontaneously so; your words don't feel all that carefully selected and over-polished and I think that gives this benefits the story a lot. It makes the teenage angst and romantic triangle feel all the more believable and raw.
As for the characters, I love all of them. I love Petra's indecisiveness and freshness, I love Tori's sass and Zach's third-wheeling wheedling. I love Sol with all his forwardness and sincerity and I love Nico with all his edginess and vulnerability. If I had to choose who I'd prefer Petra end up with, I couldn't do it because, much like Petra, I love them both. Sol is so doe-eyed with how he loves Petra. He's the kind of himbo that is clueless and really doesn't know it, but not because he's too dumb, but because he's too kind and intelligent to care about that kind of stuff. And Nico is, well, he's just a traumatised little dude. It really surprised me to find out he had a crush on Petra, but all the same, it didn't feel out of place. If anything it was a good recontextualisation for all his negging.
Now, onto the negatives... sadly. I really feel like this story was a bit scattershot for the most part. The Solar Festival ending feels somewhat inconclusive, whether we interpret this as a volume or an arc or act; really, it'd only work as a TV season, but then we'd need a lot more meat on the story's bones. Which, sadly, isn't really there. A lot of the stuff we get is very precisely focused on the romantic plot, but it really feels like it's all too much too quick. The pacing feels like a direct consequence of the time constraint, if reading the comments tells me anything. It really felt like a lot of the connective tissue you summarised in scene transitions could've and should've been its own scene. All the same, we kind of had 4 chapters dedicated to developing Nico alone, which, whilst cool, felt like they were shoved in there at the eleventh hour only to make Nico's arc make sense.
I would say the same goes for some of the Harmonic Future elements. The world itself feels like it's there, there are a lot of futuristic gizmos which make it *amazing*. But then again, the handling of the plot itself feels a little threadbare in the sense that the harmonic future itself doesn't seem to be that much of a cause for any of the character's challenges. It is a harmonic future used as a backdrop, which feels somewhat... outside the spirit of the prompt. Really, it's only Nico's philosophical rambling at the end that salvages it.
All the same, I had fun with this story. All the best if you choose to enter in our next contest, and I hope to see you in the finals.
Bubbles~
