Jan 20, 2025
Sorry it took so long to get to finishing this. I started reading what, two months ago? Part of the reason is that I slowed down or stopped reading entries that made me feel inferior in one way or another, and in terms of descriptiveness, it made me feel very inferior.
I know there was some discussion on Discord about just getting on with it, and during the tour, I could kind of see that argument. There were a lot of chapters that opened on descriptions of a city that ultimately wouldn’t be important at all to the plot. And they weren’t important because the real meat of the story took place in a stadium or backstage. We never got descriptions of the stadiums, because everyone knows what a stadium is. The bird alien scene was maybe the only one that took place in the described setting.
Regardless, I think the vivid descriptions were one of your strengths, and I wouldn’t overcorrect on feedback that they can get overwrought.
Another thing that came up on Discord was when I mentioned that I didn’t feel that the depiction of the idols in this book doesn’t mesh with the depiction of idols in anime/manga. A lot of the acts reminded me more of Beyonce or Taylor Swift, but that might just be because of my frame of reference. I don’t know anything about Kpop or even real Jpop idols. My exposure to idol culture comes entirely from anime, where they’re more straightforward, upbeat, cutesy, their overwork never harms them, and their productions are just singing and dancing around on an empty stage with some spotlights.
But I’m not really sure how useful this feedback is. This is a _novel_ contest, not a _manga_ contest, even if one of the prizes is a (potential?) manga adaptation. Maybe this differing depiction is that je ne sais quoi that Japanese publishers are looking for in a Western-authored LN.
And more importantly, it allowed you to make characters that felt a lot more real than any anime idol, complete with all the messy interactions that come with being human. I’d put that right up there with the descriptions as one of the biggest strengths of the novel.
I suspect you didn’t intend for this, but I found myself really hating Maya. Not at first. At first, she seemed just a bit starry-eyed and naïve. Lena was already overworking herself before Maya proposed the collab, so she wasn’t responsible for what happened to Lena, but her actions unknowingly pushed Lena even harder. When Lena first turns down the collab, Maya doesn’t take that as a sign that maybe there’s something in Lena’s life—like deteriorating health—that would make the collab a bad idea. A polite refusal like that is often a cover for something, but Maya doesn’t pick up on it. Or maybe she choses to ignore it.
And then when they’re on the stage with the others, she claims to be their friends, but she really doesn’t act like it. It’s always about her. When the others compliment her, she basks in it like it’s natural for her to be the center of everything. She never even notices all the times that Elise bites her tongue.
Yet, at the end, it’s Maya who Astra passes everything off to, and that’s kinda frustrating. From a Darwinist perspective, maybe it makes sense. Popularity is ineffable and a zero-sum game. Passing the torch to someone who is naturally more popular leads the greatest chances of success.
All that to say, my hating Maya isn’t a criticism. It’s evidence that you got me to care about the characters.
But if you’ll let me wander off and try to suss out what Lolo couldn’t identify as “missing”, it’s sometimes difficult to get to know these characters much at all. This is Lena’s story, but the perspective is locked so tightly on her that most of the characterization we get of the other characters is inferences from their interactions.
Combined with the format of the chapters each being somewhat disconnected vignettes, it gives us a very limited view of the characters. We don’t really get to know _who_ these characters are, we only get glimpses of how they act in a few situations. I think this technique it works well enough with Elise because we get a bit more time with her, but I think Maya remains a bit too obscured for how important she is (and maybe that contributes to my negative feelings toward her.)
Reading the other comments, I’m not the only person who remarked on the time skips. it’s an interesting way to do a “slice of life” format, but I think it makes the story difficult to follow at times. That forms a kind of harsh contrast with how descriptive the establishing shots and the concerts are. It’s like a lot of stuff gets described in detail, but it’s not as important to the story, whereas chunks of the story itself don’t get described.
I’m not sure if that’s what Lolo’s missing, because Lolo doesn’t really do plot, but from some of the comments, I suspect it’s the biggest challenge readers have with the book. I’m honestly not sure if it would hurt a manga adaptation though, since the chapters are short and relatively self-contained, which can be good for manga.
What Lolo’s really missing may be the robot fucc, or rather, the lack of romance in a story that bills itself on the cover, description, and tags as a romance. The romantic elements are very minor overall. It might almost work better to remove them entirely and spend the words on more connective tissue between the chapters.
There’s also the uncomfortable fact that Caden is technically in an owner-servant relationship with Lena. There’s a huge power imbalance here that’s only touched on briefly in the romantic aspect, but becomes super apparent when he has to go to to Margot for help because he’s physically unable to go against Lena.
The whole romance storyline seems to leave a bunch of loose ends, and the story leaves a few as well. Elise is back in the game, but she doesn’t seem to really have overcome all of her challenges. And the bird alien chapter sticks out as saying that Lena has found her stride at the end, but in the next chapter, she doesn’t seem changed at all.
Maybe that feeling of unresolved storylines is what Lolo feels is missing.
But overall, I think the strengths outweigh the weaknesses here. The prose is super well-crafted and the characters both feel real and caused me to feel things about them. Congrats on an entry well done, and best of luck with the judging.
