scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/1v3ej9.md

## I'd like a critique of my two stories.

* Author: u/None *
* URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/1v3ej9/id_like_a_critique_of_my_two_stories/
* Score: 5

* Created: 2014-01-13T07:38:39

### Post:

I'd like a critique regarding how rationalist and how good these two fanfics of mine are. I'm defining rational fiction in the manner this one user described:

User: alexanderwales
"When people say "rationalist" fiction, what they usually mean more is "smart" fiction. In the sidebar of /r/rational there's a checklist of features to look for, but generally it means that the plot and characters aren't propelled forward by a lack of communication or by idiocy, and usually that characters get by using their wits more than their brawn. No one is just evil for the hell of it, conflicts are driven primarily by differences in values and the villains (to the extent there even are villains) have a real and honest point to their actions.
Some of that is synonymous with good writing/plotting, but I think part of the point is that intellect and values are drawn to the forefront, as there are certainly many (good) works of fiction that adhere to those standards but keep much of it in the background."

Now, my fanfics are more emotionally driven than rationally driven. One of the main characters in these stories was my attempt at writing a sociopath. They're both M-rated on FF.net. So be warned of the contents.

I would really appreciate if people were to evaluate it and let me know of my positives and my faults. I want to write my own original fantasy book so the criticism will help. I tried to make all the characters as intelligent as possible. For the Naruto one, I added my understanding of politics during the course of my political science studies in college. The Naruto one isn't complete but the Persona 4 one is. 

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4124585/1/Mistaken-Truth

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5351940/1/Seta-Souji-the-Infamous-Bastard

So yeah, please let me know what you think for good or ill and I hope you find the time spent on reading them enjoyable. 

### Comments:

> **u/Escapement** [+2]  *Ankh-Morpork City Watch* (14 hours later)
> 
> I reviewed your Naruto fanfic's first chapter, because I am not familiar with Persona 4 (only ever played P3:FES). 
> 
> The writing style stuff:
> 
>  "He pointed at her and informed her it was her turn." Something more active than this, with actual dialogue instead of this, would probably scan better. Unnecessarily passive voice 'x told y about z' sort of thing is usually less interesting to read than "Big Z description", said Y.
> 
> "people who are blindly prejudice" - I am not sure if your intent was to have Naruto come off as a buffoon unable to speak correctly, or if you actually made a grammar error through oversight. This is, of course, a problem whenever something is not in perfect English by a character who has yet to establish their personality and dialect. ed: Later writing suggests this was an error.
> 
> "No dreams? Usually kids hollered arrogantly about how they would become tons of stuff at this age." Not really sure what you're going for here - referencing canon Naruto as being a standard kid in Narutoland. The idea that Kakashi would have no idea about his proposed Genin team and would actually be surprised by anything they said here seems a little strange, given later revelations and backstory and plot in canon. Whatever. 
> 
> "Kakashi informed them of the survival test and warned them not to eat breakfast." - See above about passive voice. Things like this forfeit the chance to establish character - depending on how Kakashi delivers his warning, down to what words he uses and delivery details, you can establish personality and character. This sentence just moves the plot along instead of doing that.
> 
> "sensei" - One place you have Sensei capitalized, down after the line break it's in lower case. Choose one and stick to it - I prefer lower case.
> 
> "shouted Sakura, angry at having waited for their tardy sensei for three hours."
> Firstly, you just spent a multi-line paragraph explaining why they were angry directly before this. If you hadn't done that, this would be sort of acceptable - but here it's just very redundant. 
> 
> "Snarled naruto, this was" - Firstly, comma splice. Secondly - really, snarling at him?
> 
> "Their angry features mirroring Naruto's own." Sentence fragment, revise to "mirrored" instead.
> 
> "boring at him" Would be a lot better as "boring into him". 
> 
> "Kakashi then went on to explain the bell test and that they would begin immediately. Sasuke and Sakura immediately went into hiding. Kakashi took out his porn and seemed to begin reading." More of this passive voice stuff.
> 
> "Naruto convinced Sasuke and Sakura to help get the bells per the agreement that both of them would get one. Sasuke and Sakura were curious as to why Naruto would decide to just give-up so easily but chalked it up for their own reasons. Sasuke, frankly, didn't care. Sakura assumed it was because he lacked dreams like her and Sasuke." More of this passive voice stuff. Not sure why 'give-up' is hyphenated. 
> 
> "Sasuke soon joined them in attack Kakashi" Attack should be attacking.
> 
> "They honestly were a poultry amount and C-rank missions would garner them both a higher paycheck.". 'poultry' should be 'paltry'. 
> 
> "fed-up" More mystery hyphens.
> 
> At this point I decided to stop reading with any focus on spelling and grammar. This does not mean the relative frequency of such errors decreased. Get an editor/beta reader, or do careful editing yourself. It just got tedious typing them all out.  Rest assured, there's lots more random hyphenation, grammar errors, and questionable decisions in overall style in the writing style later on in the chapter.
> 
> Check out TVTropes on Said Bookisms, your dialogue writing seems to suffer from these occasionally. 
> 
> The plot: 
> 
> Thank you, first of all, for getting the Obligatory Wave Arc (always a long and boring piece of writing which everyone has seen far too much of) over (relatively) quickly. That arc was vital to canon Naruto's opening, but it's always a slog to get through if you try to pace it like canon Naruto did.
> 
> I have read a bunch of Naruto fanfics, this introductory scene wasn't even that interesting when it happened originally in canon, it remains sort of boring here.
> 
> Secondly, I have no idea where you are going with this. Naruto seems extraordinarly different from canon and far more knowledgeable, far more competent, and far more skillful/powerful. Super!Naruto for no reason, basically. I don't particularly know why exactly he's Super!Naruto, and I find I don't particularly care. And everything so far in the story was basically "Canon Naruto, but with Super!Naruto."
> 
> Why does Sakura have this total hatred of Naruto if he's basically completely different (as characterized here) than he was in canon? Presumably he's not been incessantly pursuing her romantically? Speaking of which, reading about a 12 year old child having a girlfriend or, in his own words, "lover" is fucking creepy. Remember that this is a character equivalent in age to a SIXTH GRADER. I know it's not unknown in fanfiction, but it is still super creepy to envision for someone as old as Harry Potter was in The Chamber of Secrets.
> 
> I have no real impetus to continue reading the story. I hit the end of the chapter, and as far as I can tell events were basically "Canon, but Super!Naruto removed tension by being far more powerful than before while everything else was the same". I don't really have any strong reason to read the Chuunin exam arc which will inevitably come next (haven't looked, just guessing) because I've already seen/read canon Naruto and having a very similar thing with Super!Naruto instead is basically not interesting to me - there are a thousand other fics that already do that and aren't full of spelling and grammar problems. 
> 
> Basically, there's nothing that stands out as good or as a virtue of the story. There's no really funny bits. There are no really dramatic intense moments. I was never particularly sad, or happy, or scared, or amused. It was written as if the author was not trying to evoke any sort of emotions from the reader, but was instead just trying to move on the plot as fast as possible so they could get to the next bit - and all the bits are basically "canon Naruto, but with less tension", so it leaves me wondering why you actually included the bulk of this chapter at all instead of starting your story where the actual part you wanted to write happens.
> 
> Matters of taste:
> 
> Matter of taste: Sweatdropping. As in "Sakura sweatdropped." I strong dislike this, 'facefaulting', and all the other similar "make my story read like a screenplay for an anime/manga" elements. This is entirely a matter of taste, but it's a fairly strong one for me. Think about if you want to constantly remind the reader that these are characters from a manga or anime series rather than actual people. 
> 
> Matter of taste: Gratuitous Japanese. I tend to feel that things should be fully translated and localized or not translated at all. In your fic, you randomly sometimes put suffixes on names but not at other times, using Sensei and Bento and a few other bits of gratuitous japanese, etc. I prefer not doing this. However, I feel if you ARE doing this sort of thing, it scans better if you use them more consistently in your characters' dialogue rather than including them only semi randomly. This is because NOT using a suffix has a strong and important connotation in japanese culture (either you're really intimately close or you're basically actively trying to be insulting) which is usually not something the author intends. Something to think on.
> 
> Matter of taste: I have elsewhere seen "deadlast" used as a portmanteau to be a translation of dobe. I don't like it here either - I would prefer at least a space between the words.
> 
> TL;DR: 
> The plot utterly failed in the first chapter to draw me in and make me continue reading. The premise appears to be very similar to canon but with a much more competent Naruto, which is something which has been done to death. Perhaps after this introduction it gets better, but I already gave up here and I won't be continuing to read this fic. 
> 
> My best wishes for your stories and your writing. I hope some of the stuff I wrote here was useful to you as a writer and that you will continue to improve yourself.

>> **u/None** [+1]  (14 hours later)
>> 
>> I appreciate your review but it honestly seems to me that you didn't bother reading the info where I specifically stated it was an alternate universe fanfic. It doesn't follow canon and will deviate the more you continue reading. You seem far, far, far too stuck on the idea of "it has to be like canon" instead of actually examining it for it's own merits... 
>> 
>> Also, canon Naruto had Sakura courting Sasuke occasionally. I mean, there was even a story arc between her and Ino about who would get Sasuke's affection during the in-between periods of the Chuunin exam storyline in the CANON story. 
>> 
>> Suffixes are used haphazardly in real life Japanese culture. They don't use sensei and other such terms all the time. 
>> 
>> Anyway, thanks for reading and letting me know. I agree with your point about it moving too fast. I basically was but it was important to explain certain events. I'm not sure you actually took the time to finish it at all judging from your lack of comments on the latter portion and obvious misunderstanding of the AU nature since I did go into AU territory upon Zabuza's arrival into the story. 
>> 
>> But thank you all the same; I don't want to sound snobbish. I really am grateful you took the time to read it.

>>> **u/Escapement** [+3]  *Ankh-Morpork City Watch* (15 hours later)
>>> 
>>> I think you should have considered the pacing issues of your story more closely. Your chapter 1 was ~13,000 words (not counting author note). It was basically a retelling of a story your target audience already knows with a super!Naruto. The fic could change a lot after that and improve and become something new that noone has ever seen before, but if you ask people to read 13,000 words of shlock before that happens a lot of people will abandon ship at some point before hitting "Next chapter". Or even the end when things start to deviate. 13,000 words is seriously about 4 chapters of Harry Potter (that number of words puts you at about the border between of Chapter 4 and 5 in The Sorcerer's Stone, for example, and represents over 1/6th the word count of the whole book). Start in the Wave arc or something instead and you could have cut the length before you get to something new and interesting down substantially.  First impressions are important. If the first page of something doesn't grab me, the odds I will make it to the end of the chapter are low. If the first chapter has nothing good in it, the odds that I will go to the next chapter instead of going to read something else is pretty slim.
>>> 
>>> As far as courtship goes, my writing was probably a fairly visceral reaction mostly to Naruto's use of "Nobody but his lover had ever intimately touched him like that." in your first chapter. If you had substituted girlfriend instead of lover it would be substantially less creepy. The idea of romantic stuff is not so bad, if perhaps better played for laughs than played straight, but the idea of 12-year-old characters actually having sex is really not something I am interested in reading. 
>>> 
>>> Edit: Suffixes not being used has a meaning, as does using san vs chan vs kun vs etc. If you use them rarely, you can't use not having a suffix appropriately. It just reads really strangely, to my eyes. A lot of light novels' amateur translations for example actually just preserve all suffixes from the native japanese and in those the dialogue has them pretty much always using -san/-chan/-kun suffixes when characters talk to each other, which is fine. Or you can go a more complete 'official' translator route and go from "Naruto-baka" to "Naruto, you idiot!". But mixing the two seems weird to read. 
>>> 
>>> I did finish the first chapter, but i stopped picking out elements to nitpick for grammar, word choice, random hyphens, etc. part way through. I didn't read any of the later chapters, so if they are amazingly different then... I don't know, perhaps you should have lead with them and let the prologue go hang? Or summarize hard and only write as much of the prologue as actually changes a lot from canon?

>>>> **u/None** [+1]  (15 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> Yeah, I can see your point. 
>>>> 
>>>> The purpose was actually to start with something familiar and slowly add the changes over time but I guess that didn't pan out too well, lol. 
>>>> 
>>>> The 13000 words were entirely unintentional but I figured that people on fanfiction.net love reading and the larger the better. That was my thought process back when I wrote the chapter. I wasn't proven wrong for the most part but I did make it too big. I apologize for that. 
>>>> 
>>>> As for courtship, I'll just let you know that it's part of the reason it's an M-rated fanfic. I tried to go for a more medieval type of approach as far as the culture. The canon story doesn't make sense as far as cultural norms go so I tried to make it more realistic. 
>>>> 
>>>> The shinobi are the equivalent of the military as such they grow faster as a reaction to being put into a dangerous life. In ancient cultures, people had marriages at age 13. That seems absurd to us now but back then it was the norm. That was part of the reason I did it. The canon Naruto series had Sakura and Ino trying to date Sasuke at every given moment in the early storyline so this wasn't even too far of a deviation.
>>>> 
>>>> Suffixes do have a meaning but I think you're overstating how often they're used. They'll be used as a greeting or when someone is very formal as a matter of decorum but on a personal level and especially in combat situations; I don't find the use in formality realistic. I feel this is doubly true if we're speaking of kids. 
>>>> 
>>>> I don't plan on having any sex scenes in any descriptive sort of way. I planned to write a timeskip like the canon series if I had made anything like that but I felt expressing how normal the idea of dating at such a young age was part of their culture. I honestly did base it off seeing the canon series too.

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