Oct 11, 2023
I think there's quite a few people who have been repeating, almost verbatim, the lines from the short story about people being driven by Thanatos/Eros. I'm not a big fan. It's a mixture of being a waste of words and also since a lot of people are doing it, a lot of people's entries blend together as essentially a riff on the same thing.
A couple other things I'd note is the opening could be shortened a little. The first sentence parses really weirdly, but I think the second sentence could probably serve as a better opening. The philosophical waxing doesn't do it for me, I think there are too many generic observations that I think could be excised in favor of just getting right to the story.
I think the more uplifting spin is fine, I like it, but I think my issue is I'm struggling to see past the general misanthropy and edge that you've set up in the beginning. It feels like the only reason the narrator decides to withhold his own death is because a cute girl cries in front of him, and I think there needs to be more emotional sincerity or at least a stronger emotional connection between the narrator and this other character to make me forget that the narrator spent a long time at the beginning of the story talking about how the world is trash.