Bulwark(jirocho) Shadow of a god vs Amit (bakabaka) ?????

I am posting this now so i can at least get my story out, and open to some CnC. So i havent gotten a reply from BakaBaka or heard head nor hair of him.The deadline was to be the 15th of november, As of todayi will be giving the deadline an extended week for him to reply. If he does not i will formally consider this a surrender on his part and go on with my next story. Hopfully you guys enjoy the read and it comes off better than the last fight i wrote. Tell me your thoughts and what you think i may be able to work on better next time.

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Hopefully Bakabaka will respond, though in my own personal experience such things tend not to happen.

That being said, I'll leave you with some advice but first a few nitpicks.

One, it's best to link your gdocs page instead of having your readers copy paste the URL. You can do this by putting the link between a [url]

[ url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cM97E5fByyv6lrFmjD_ViqKHfssHtM_unwnrNYLnLnc/edit?usp=sharing]Shadow of a God[/url ]



Shadow of a God

Two is a personal pet peeve but capitalise your I's when you or your character is speaking about themselves. I when referring to the ego is always capitalised. It's not such a hard thing to watch out for. It's become so instinctive for me that even when I tried to make a sentence where I deliberately uncapitalised all I's, I still ended up capitalising one.

Right, now lets move on to my remarks.

One thing I immediately noticed is the way you handle exposition. The first thing Jericho says when he wakes up is "these dreams haven't stopped since my bout with Percy", but think about it. Is that not a very odd thing to say to yourself when you just woke up? I can't speak for anyone else here, but I usually don't wake up in the morning saying "Time to turn off my alarm and eat breakfast". Instead of saying it I just, y'know, do those things. It is clear that you want to inform us that these dreams have been going on for a while now. So when you end up writing dialogue like this, perhaps sit down and ask yourself "What am I trying to tell the audience with this line? Is there a better way of conveying this information?"

In this case, you could've easily left behind the quotation marks and just left it in as a simple line of text. Instead of Jericho mouthing it to himself, it just reads: 'Another one of those dreams. They hadn't stopped since his bout with Percy'. Jericho saying things he could've just as easily thought to himself happens a lot in this story. Why don't you take a look at his other dialogue and try to see which ones don't really need to be said explicitly? The dialogue with the waitress, for example, doesn't need to be said. It could easily be substituted with a piece of text that reads 'Jericho ordered some hash n eggs and coffee'.

In that same tangent, there is a lot of, let us say, overt exposition here. Things put into a sentence just to convey some information, but often it tends to mess with the flow a bit.

He steps out of his small one bedroom apartment and heads to the nearest cafe.

It very much feels like "small one bedroom" is crammed into the sentence here to inform us, the reader, that his apartment only consists of a single bedroom. Again, try and ask yourself if there is a better way to convey this information. Could you show us, through Jericho's interaction with his surroundings, that his apartment only consists of a single bedroom? As things stand you're kind of dumping this information on the reader. Exposition isn't the most interesting thing to read.

Another thing I see you doing is repeating the same information in the same sentence, sometimes multiple times. To pull up two examples:

“Another one of those dreams, this is getting old, they haven't stopped since my bout with percy”

'another one of those dreams', 'this is getting old' and 'they haven't stopped since my bout with percy' all imply he's been having these kinds of dreams for a long time. In the correction I gave to you earlier I turned it into "another one of those dreams. They haven't stopped since his bout with Percy". Even though it's basically repeating the same information twice, these two sentences complement each other and flow naturally. However, repeating that information another time becomes excessive, and kills the flow of the sentence.

It is now 6:00 Am, and Bulwark decides to go out and get some breakfast since he's not getting back to bed anytime soon.

Again, you repeat the same bit of information (it's morning) on three seperate occasions ('It is now 6 Am'/'Bulwark decides to go out and get some breakfast' -> 'because he's not getting back to bed anytime soon' especially this last part is unnecessary). There's a few more of these sentences in there so I do suggest that next time you write a sentence like this, you stop to ask yourself if you're by chance repeating the same information twice.

Story wise, I'd say your battle drags on a bit too long. A lot of this is is buildup for the meeting with the blue woman. Again, however, you hit the same note just one too many times. After about two times I'd argue Jericho would stop going "must be my imagination" and would start growing curious. Except he shrugs his shoulders about five times before he sort of runs into the blue woman. It feels like this could've happened sooner.

That being said, Amit feels like he's been shoehorned into this battle. It reads like he's just in this story because this is a wRHG battle and not because he has anything to do with the actual story. Jericho conveniently reads about him in a newspaper a few minutes before he runs into the guy, then when they do fight the battle just sort of ends out of nowhere. I'm missing a sense of tension, a sense of stakes. It never really felt like Jericho was in the slightest bit threatened by Amit (made even worse by the jokes he cracks about him). The woman Bulwark saves sort of disappears for a while too while Amit and Bulwark are fighting, then she rematerialises when the conflict is resolved. Wasn't this an alleyway? Wouldn't she get in the way of the ongoing fight?

There's a few other things I'd remark on but I'll leave it at this. Hopefully it's useful to you.