I liked how you painted the world, few strong strokes that give an idea about a couple of scenes. While it doesn't goes down in any details, it gives a sense of place.

It took me a while to understand what kind of problem was afflicting the main character, and even once that was clear it didn't seem to really match with what he told us at the beginning. Obviously it is quite possible that he is lying or deluding himself.

I'm not completely sure if the fact that the first world died is something that reinforces the sense of isolation the MC feels or if it a distraction (or possibly a hallucination). It is thematically appropriate with the state of his mind, Disaster, everything is different, he doesn't feel any connection to the world outside, and then he rediscovers it anew.

I'm basically undecided if I should take everything at a face value or if the environment is only a representation of his internal struggle.

I'll have to think some more about this story, which I suppose is a good thing.

but they took every blade in his new home after the first time he tried to use one.

Hoo, boy. You certainly have my attention with a line like that.

The thing is, Writer, the further the story progresses, the more baffled it leaves me. At first I thought it was a story about a man in a mental institution, then a story about a man in a futuristic mental institute, then a story about a man in purgatory, then a story about some form of post-apocalypse scenario where people were being resurrected but nobody knows how or why, and Matello is just housed there because they don’t know what to do with him. And why was his skin green? Is it because he’s dead, or because he’s not human, or both? And then he gets let out because he feels better about having died?

I can’t shake the feeling that all of this is just window dressing for (what I assume is) the core of the story: a man wrestling with depression, a disease that is never actually addressed by name.. Is there a reason this is danced around? It’s almost as though you had several ideas on how to spin the narrative in an interesting way, but wanted to include all of them instead of picking one and sticking with it.

Also, it seems odd that he is allowed to leave without much fanfare; it’s almost as though he was there voluntarily, or at least he could have left whenever he felt like it, but that clashes pretty hard with the beginning of the story.

It’s possible I’ve completely missed the point somewhere in the setting, which is admittedly interesting - you leave plenty of room for the imagination between the events that are referenced. While I didn’t find too much in the way of typos, this story left me scratching my head.

Final Thought: A Bit Too Much Going On

A strong start, with visceral descriptions. I spent the first section under the impression that the fellow had been abducted by aliens. Then I hit the mention of ‘Hatched,’ went WTF, and never really recovered.

I was struck by the irony of him explaining ninetieth percentile just after having weathered a barrage of unfamiliar terms.

After a while I gave up and just kept reading on in the hopes that it would start to make sense, but this was an uphill battle through multiple layers of alien culture. It did have some seeming consistency, and might have eventually resolved, but the unreliability of the narrator added enough uncertainty that I never really felt comfortable with settling on an interpretation.

I recall running afoul of a few mechanical glitches, but nothing untoward of the writeoffs. Although I praise the descriptions earlier, I also found them to have some frustrating gaps, where I would suddenly realize that one of my long running assumptions was bogus (wait, he’s green? Is he even human?)

Overall, after reading this I have the impression of having caught a glimpse of a strange world through a broken mirror.

I think I have to agree with everyone else that this story ended up feeling like it had too much going on. The depressed, borderline-suicidal (and actually suicidal) protagonist never really excited me as a person, nor did Rhos, and the whole thing just never quite felt like it came together for me.

It threw a great deal at the reader, but in the end I'm not sure if it really "worked". We have all this weird stuff flying around, but a lot of it ended up coming off as being strange for the sake of strangeness rather than anything else. What was the point of it all in the end?

I think that in the short story format, it would have worked better if the guy had been a human from Earth who had been revived, as we'd have more of a frame of reference for the strangeness.

---

Welp, that's it for my initial slate, thanks to DQs. Time to get cracking on the rest.

Hollow Man

Okay, four stories into my slate and I’m yet to be really wowed by any of them (though reading some reviews of stories that aren’t on my slate indicates that there are a few to be found). Let’s see how Hollow Man stacks up!

Okay, so, there’s some interesting stuff going on, here. But I’m confused by some of the narrative. Let’s look at this:

The mirror stayed, for now. He thought they'd take it away after he broke it and tried to use the shards instead, but he couldn't even get that far. His fist just bounced off, and his face kept staring out of the damn thing. Not that it mattered, since his beard would be long enough to look okay in a day or two. Not great, but okay.

There’s, like, some mental time-travel going on here. He thought they would take away the shards of the mirror after he broke it (past tense), but he couldn’t break it (also past tense). These two things can’t both be true. Also, his inch-long beard is just two-days away from looking fine? How fast does his facial hair grow?

Weirdness abounds and we’re only two paragraphs in. There are other persistent oddities throughout the text, and I can’t tell if they’re deliberate or not. I would normally call them errors.

So the centaur-thing just walked in, and I’m starting to realize that this story’s strategy is to employ in media res in a very alien world. I’m not sure I’d have gone that way, since the point of in media res is to introduce a story with action, but when there’s so much oddity and sheer… well, alienness going on, it really just leaves the readers overwhelmed. Every paragraph has something new, unexplained, and as-yet unexplainable.

"Very well." Frøy took a deep breath. "You've been dead for a long time, and so has the Dragonbond Empire. Something called the Descension killed the First Race and warped the face of the world. I wish we knew how long it ago that was, but it was long enough for some new species to take over. Some of them, like mine, think pretty much the same as you, or close enough. Others don't. They're dangerous, and they're in the majority.

"Even those of us who aren't Returners are realizing just how much has been lost. It's not safe to travel beyond the Eurian Rim, and—"

"The Returners?" Mattello asked. He was starting to find the conversation more engaging, confusing as it was.

Yeah, that’s what I was talking about. Bam! Take that, reader! A whole bunch of references you have no way to understand.

Okay, so it turns out all this was just a framing story. Mattello’s story, which he relays to Rhos, is the real story here. So, I wonder, why does the framing story exist?

We get to the end, and the second-to-last paragraph drops some bombshells on us: “It was an absurd idea, later tempered by Rhos's confession that the headmaster had ordered his food laced with experimental medicine.” Really? That’s a pretty big deal to just hide in the middle of a nine-line paragraph.

This story baffled me. I have no idea what happened, despite fully half the story consisting of the main character telling another character what happened in a previous life. That sounded sort of interesting, which leaves me wondering why the whole story wasn’t just Mattello’s tale? The endless dropping of names, places and events without even an attempt to explain them isn’t world-building, it’s just bamboozling.

Sorry, author. I had a lot of problems with this. I read through it twice, and I still can’t even explain what this story is about.

16 – Hollow Man

I don't feel like the first paragraph is carrying a whole lot of information content, and I'm worried that the biggest piece of content ("raise morale", implying Mattello is a military man) may be unintentional. It's not clear to me how much the weak first paragraph matters, though, because you're doing a pretty good job dropping information slowly across the first few. I usually like a faster hook, just to get me immersed in the story, but this is probably one of the better slow hooks I've read in a writeoff. It's like a persistent pull rather than a yank.

And then there's that fourth paragraph. Hoo-boy, does that change things up. Okay, now I'm finally a bit curious.

He asked him what it was, and after an awkward hesitation, his caretaker had left without telling him.

Want to flag this because it's particularly bad. You just introduced a character on a pronoun that matches your perspective character's gender. I literally cannot imagine a good reason for this.

The description of the visitor is... distinctly unhelpful to me. It starts out by comparing him to a class of animals that's sufficiently broad to not give much information on appearance, and then proceeds through metaphor to hint at morphological changes and limb additions. Based on the description given, this seems like it could be anything from a six-legged centaur with a bull head to a humanized pony with a weird skirt of legs, to a goat-spider with a human-looking thorax. (After spending far too much time looking at this paragraph, I'm thinking that this is supposed to be like a centaur but with the animal's original head—though I still have no clue whether the original animal was a horse, an ox, a water buffalo, or one of the weirder draft animals like a goat, an elephant, or a reindeer.)

There are a few cliches floating around in here, and a few pieces of what feel like odd written construction to me. I don't know how much to bother talking about these things, because it seems like some of it can be written off as an authorial voice that I don't particularly like at times. I guess my advice would be to sit down with this at some point and read it out loud to yourself, and see if there are any places where you feel like the language sounds a bit unnatural. Those places definitely exist for me, but if they genuinely don't bother you on a close read, author, then it's probably fair to just ignore my discomfort.

I will say, though, that there are definitely some spots where you keep your language loose and unconcretized. These are places where I think you'd uniformly improve the story by doing some further concretization. Let me give an example:

"Very well." Frøy took a deep breath. "You've been dead for a long time, and so has the Dragonbond Empire. Something called the Descension killed the First Race and warped the face of the world. I wish we knew how long it ago that was, but it was long enough for some new species to take over. Some of them, like mine, think pretty much the same as you, or close enough. Others don't. They're dangerous, and they're in the majority.

This looks awfully concrete, with a lot of proper nouns thrown in—but there's no detail on the proper nouns, and "some new species", "think pretty much the same as you", and "[t]hey" are very nebulous things for Frøy to be talking about. This passage winds up feeling like an infodump, except without much info. One of the big reasons for that is that it doesn't feel like it's carrying much information about who Frøy is. He probably doesn't think in terms of "some new species", he thinks in terms of his race and the major races his race interacts with for good or ill. He might well mention the Dragonbond Empire since that's contextually expected to be a shared point of information for him and Mattello here, but "there was this thing we call the Descension" is unhelpful from both his perspective and Mattello's, since the name is going to mean nothing to Mattello and it dodges giving any real details on what happened. You want to be working inside the framework of "What is Frøy thinking about, and how will he try to communicate it to this outsider who lacks much of his cultural context?" Even though it looks like you've got some solid concretization here with "Dragonbond Empire", "Descension", and "First Race", one of those terms isn't really carrying any in-character information. (The first is carrying some about Mattello and the third is carrying some about Frøy, though. Not as much as I'd like, but some.)

The switch from Frøy to Rhos really bothers me, because it's so fourth-wall-breaking. It's not the only place you're making some odd intrusive choices—another example is when Mattello almost seems to act as author-hope-for-audience-surrogate and thinks that the conversation is interesting now that proper nouns are getting name-dropped—but it's the one that bothers me most. It raises a major question to me of where the perspective is sitting. It can't be sitting with Mattello, because we're explicitly seeing Frøy's internal reaction to the change in name choice. But it also can't be siting with Frøy, because he's not going to change how he thinks of himself based on how a third party is naming him (not unless Frøy is considerably more alien and interesting than he appears, which you're not doing any groundwork to suggest). So is this an omniscient perspective? But then, as with Frøy, why is a character suddenly changing his name in response to another character's attitude. It's all very irregular.

Frøy's reactions once Mattello starts telling his story seem pretty bizarre. The "Oh no" paragraph in particular makes me expect that Frøy has just realized some critical piece of information about Mattello. I mean, it doesn't seem like he can really be shocked that Mattello was suicidal, because it would be stupid if he didn't know Mattello is currently suicidal—so the implication is that he's shocked about some heretofore unknown fact about the eggs that I'm desperate to hear about. Except I don't, and it doesn't seem like Frøy really figured anything out. His "fall on his ass" bit seems similarly over-dramatic. Mattello seems to have a right to some strong reactions as this scene moves forward, but Frøy not so much.

Done now. In the end, there's a lot I like here. The setting and backstory are both fun, and much of the prose is smooth and engaging (with the caveats above). I genuinely find both Frøy and Mattello interesting, and I wouldn't mind knowing more about them. There's a bit of resolution by the end, though I think there's never quite enough conflict here to make the payoff all that worthwhile—this is mostly a setting story. The perspective and prose issues that exist, though, bother me a fair amount, and I feel like you're papering over a lot of actual backstory with the Proper Noun Trick. And while I enjoy Frøy and Mattello, I feel like they could both use some more serious characterization. They're interesting frames to build off of, but as with the backstory I want more actual substance and fewer shadows and ghosts. The overall effect is oddly on-point with the title: I like this story, but what's here seems uncannily hollow.

HORSE: Decline to rate (primarily because the Proper Noun Trick sort of breaks the meaning of the Originality scale—originality is both the strong point and the weak point in much of this story).
TIER: Flawed but Fun

Man, this fic started so well. Your descriptions were great, I was hella interested in why he couldn't cut his beard. I loved the detail about him not being able to touch anything.

This fic was going well... but everything changed when the Fire Nation Dragonbond Empire attacked.

Once the intergalactic empire and races sci-fi stuff came in, you lost me completely. There are so many names, so many terms to remember... and half of them just get dropped in with no explanation nor context to define them. I'm hella lost.

He stepped back, looking like he'd been doused in ice water.

Great description. Stealing again. #SorryNotSorry #PlagarismIsForWinners

It didn't help that at the end, the most pressing question in my mind was whether Rhos and Froy were the same character.

Sorry, author. This fic didn't work for me at all.

I'd like to thank everyone who read this for giving it a shot and apologize for how rushed and unstructured it turned out to be. I've had this idea for a story for a while now and I've been dragging my feet on committing to a plan and putting a draft down in words. The feedback I got should make it easier to figure out where to take it from here.

>>Solitair
So when I said that I based this on Tarot, I mean that the story's themes are tied to The Fool, both in the modern sense of starting a journey (with Mattello waking up in a new world and having to get used to it) and with the original medieval depiction of madmen (with his depression and mental illness). I plan to eventually make a short story for every card in the Major Arcana and put them in a collection, though Mattello won't be the main character in all of them and might not make an appearance in some.

I have two goals in mind with this story. The first is to present a first impression of the new world through the eyes of someone who suddenly ends up there. Because of events I planned in the setting backstory, I wanted it to be somebody from the distant past. Besides, having someone from the real world transported to a fantasy land is overdone, and even though I know that it's still possible to retread old ground well, I already have other plans. I realize that introducing a strange new world through the eyes of someone who's already used to another strange new world is tricky. Final Fantasy 10 is the only story I've seen that pulled that off, kind of. The first step, I think, is differentiating the aesthetics and feel of those worlds and using Mattello's perspective to contrast the two (and also having the old world be closer to ours, for the sake of making it easier to understand.

The other is that I wanted to write a story about a man who killed himself. After one time I heard about a suicide, I wondered if, in circumstances where dead people still had feelings, those who killed themselves regretted their rash decision. Depression was the first circumstance for suicide that came to mind (though switching that out for something else isn't out of the question), so that's what I went with. I want him to try and cope with the implications of what he did, combined with the possible relapse of his depression after a dream life that made him perfectly happy, in a way that doesn't dismiss or minimize his condition but offers the promise of hope for a better future. It would parallel the basic point of the setting: much of the world is a hellish wasteland and life is much harder than it used to be, but things are getting better and people are starting to find ways to live beyond basic survival. Part of this universe is my response to people who are getting burned out of dark fantasy books like A Song of Ice and Fire. It's a dark and weird world, but it doesn't have to be miserable all the time.

>>Dubs_Rewatcher
Gee, thanks. I'm glad I wrote at least one decent sentence.