Jan 18, 2025
OK, here it comes. Real criticism. You asked for it.
I don't like the frame criticism as "bad" vs. "good," but rather "what worked well" vs. "what could be improved." By the very nature of the two topics, that means a lot less time gets spent on what you did well.
But obviously you created a setting and characters that resonated with a lot of readers, and you handled the theme well. I’m serious. As much as I joked about wanting robot catgirls debating the relative merits of act utilitarianism vs. rule utilitarianism, Stella’s musings on the horrors of sapient existence were well done and provided the obstacle for her character growth.
As to the stuff I felt worked less well, I’ll preface this by saying it might not matter. The things that matter to me might not matter to readers in general. In fact, there’s a strong case to be made that they don’t. Your story was more popular than mine, despite what I perceive as the following flaws. And it’s not just that you read more stories so more people read you back. You got more comments and engagement with your story. Stella’s struggle and the strong characterization resonated with people. It might be exactly what the judges are looking for.
I know you’ll try to cope by saying it’s all pity comments or whatever, but I don’t think it is. If it makes you feel better, you can dismiss all my critiques as salt on my part for the fact that you did better than me. I don’t care. But since you specifically asked for critique, I’m going to try to be as honest and objective as I can.
IIRC, you yourself called out the story as repetitive and predictable. I’m not going to disagree. In fact, when I thought I wasn’t going to be allowed to read the true ending, I made up my own ending, and just to demonstrate, here it is:
“Shigure.”
“Yes?”
“Do you want to marry me?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
And it was okay. Because nothing truly mattered.
Obviously, you went the opposite direction in terms of Stella coming to the conclusion that one should find their own meaning in life. But you have to admit, I got pretty close to your “It was fine.” ending line.
So yeah, I think although you did improve on removing a lot of unnecessary dialogue compared to your past writing, I think it made it easier to see the general pattern of interactions between your characters. Nothing really seemed surprising. Nothing really came out of nowhere.
Except the stuff that came out of nowhere. Like the sudden hallucinogenic mushrooms under the bed that Stella vaporizes with no thought at all. Why are they there? Why would someone hide drugs in a hotel room someone else is using unless they’re trying to frame them? It very much seemed to me that they were introduced as a sudden plot point to have an excuse to introduce more characters.
Which isn’t the worst thing in the world. Sometimes you gotta do that. But it seems like most of the plot is driven by these kinds of last minute twists with no real buildup in order to set the stage for some introduction to happen.
And when combined with a plot that kinda meanders around a lot, it reminds me of—and I promise this isn’t intended as an insult but as an illustrative example—a less edgy, less lolrandom Adult Swim show.
Because when you combine strong characterization with not much of a plot, the result is mass Flanderization. I first noticed this with Kou. I’d start a chapter and think, “I bet if Kou’s in this chapter, it’s just going to be him peeking out the window and then hiding when Stella looks at him.” Not all characters really had enough “screen time” to be Flanderized, but the major ones did. Isla was basically nothing except his posh ramblings.
Every time the dialog hit an awkward spot, Stella would vaporize a drone. Every time the dialog hit an awkward spot, Master Shake would throw something on the ground, causing it to explode. That’s kind of what I mean when I said it reminded me of Adult Swim.
So yeah, the lack of a driving narrative was difficult for me. So let’s think about how you could have added one.
I wouldn’t recommend it, but you could make the driving goal of the story Stella’s ambition to open a tea/peach pie/etc. shop. And in the dialogue, it almost seems like this is the driving narrative. Some of the events in the story even revolve around this, like the delivery of all the ingredients. But the story isn’t about the struggle of opening a small business. We don’t even get to really see it open, or how it changes Stella’s life. The only two real obstacles to overcome are the ingredients and the permission, and the permission quest is pointless from the get-go, since Stella herself is the only person who hasn’t signed.
If you were going to go this route, you really need a beginning, middle, and an end. Near the start of the story, Stella has to have a compelling reason to what to do this, and she doesn’t really. It’s just an idea. The middle has to be about planning, executing, setbacks, and final triumph, and the ending has to show the results of her labor.
You could make the story about the conflict with the mushroom mafia, but that comes too late into the story, and then we immediately skip ahead to it already being resolved. And it’s kinda anticlimactic, both the fact that we don’t see it play out and the resolution. (Now that I think about it, the neighborhood all getting together and deciding “why not” even though Stella is super dangerous is anticlimactic in the same way.)
So I think your strongest choice here is Stella’s quest for meaning, and perhaps you meant to go for this, but it got buried under the peach pie and mushroom subplots. Not every story has to be the hero’s journey or whatever, but I think you could start with Stella deciding near the beginning that she wants to find meaning, whereas in this book, she waffles on and complains internally and externally about how much existence sucks for like, most of the book. Then you’d have to have her take concrete steps to find meaning. Put obstacles in her path. Give her enemies and allies on her quest. And finally, show what she gains, fails to gain, or loses from the attempt. The ending, like I said, was nice, but Stella’s acceptance of making your own meaning seems to come out of left field, when so much of the character growth up to them was more about learning to accept that people come into and out of your life.
As far as other things to improve go, I think there were some parts that were too obscured to the reader by sticking to Stella’s perspective. To use an example from a chapter I read today, I didn’t realize Shigure had hit his head that badly until it’s explicitly stated at the end of the chapter. I still don’t understand what happened with his first arrest, either. Not everything has to be explained to the reader as long as the world itself is consistent, but I had a hard time figuring out what you were attempting to communicate to the reader in scenes like that.
And finally, there were passages where I felt it was difficult to tell who was talking. Again, an example from today, when Isla tells Shigure that he and Stella aren’t a thing, there were passages where I thought Stella was talking to Isla, because she started the lines with “Isla?”, but she was actually speaking with Shigure.
Both of these I think would have been fixed in a second or third draft, but that’s the brutal nature of the contest deadline.
So yeah, that’s all I got. I am super glad you finished on time. Congrats on that, and I do wish you luck with the judging. Maybe the parts you did well will carry you to the finals, but I felt the story could be a lot stronger with a driving narrative. (And with robot catgirls talking about categorical imperatives.) Especially in the middle of the book, the chapters got repetitive and the story didn’t move forward at all. And if you can provide character arcs for the other major characters, it helps to avoid Flanderization.
![Parallel in Two [Saga Cover]](https://honeyfeed-novel-images.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/novel_image/file/19959/cover_thumb_b4b8f013-ea32-4c39-83f9-8361adc49b89.jpeg)
