Jun 15, 2023
Yo, this is pretty sick. I think the musical parallelism is pretty cool and I genuinely enjoy how your prose more or less shifts gears between a struggling performance and a roaring show. You definitely had a sense for what you were going for and it came through so kudos on that end.
I also like the little subtleties in the character interactions. They're anime, but not too anime, and there's this more or less awkward, yet endearing chemistry between the apparent leads of the band. It's cute how they sort of hit it off without any hassle and making music be the fundament of that was an excellent choice. Kudos, again.
If I had to make some negative comments, I'd have two. I feel like the prose, whilst intriguing, is a bit lacking in the connective tissue. Try as I might, I found it kind of hard to read them with a flow and in a composition so musically oriented, I found that particularly jarring. More granularly, I think you could workshop your descriptions a little bit so that they feel more expository and more revelatory, perhaps closer to the eponymous purple prose. I think that would round off the composition a bit better.
Secondly, I think your ending is a little lacking. Perhaps it feels a little abrupt as I didn't feel that strong of a build-up or maybe the aftermath of a climactic song wasn't as well fleshed out as it could've been. In particular, I think it might've been a little better to zoom into Issei (whom I assume to be our MC) and have him wax a little about the performance and how he felt about it. I think it'd be more expedient as well as more powerful to show Issei's awe first attuned to the crowd's cheers and then juxtaposed with their ensuing jeers. The way you wrote this ending off, it feels distant – as if I'm not looking at your character's reactions, rather at their reflection in the mirror. Such writing is fine in a vacuum, but I feel like it makes something with a subject matter so passionate appear impersonal and aloof, whereas more intrinsic and 'inner' (i.e. focused on one character's feelings) writing may lend more strength. Then again, that might be prescriptive of me to say.
Still, solid effort, genuinely liked this. I'll add this to my list. 
