Hello! Thank you for choosing the workshop and for giving me a chance to comment on your story!
I often find collaborative stories difficult to read, because the writing can differ so much from one writer to another if they're not actively making an effort behind the scenes. I did feel that you worked well together on this front, sharing a clear idea of your interactions and the world they occupied, and projecting this common vision without clouding it through the lenses of your respective voices. I'm also convinced that you collaborated closely to intertwine the emotions that drew your characters together, which shows in the emotional apexes of your writing.
Unfortunately, whether by intent or by accident, I found that A Bakers Tale suffers from a number of fatal flaws. These made it very difficult for me to offer a coherent critique. The tightly-spaced posting times and lack of editing or proofreading suggest that this was a 'speed' thread, although certainly the main plot was elaborate and coherently written for such a story. Thus I must warn that a lot of what follows may come across as quite harsh and critical. I offer my apologies in advance, and the consolation that given patience and foreplanning, I feel that much of what I criticise below may be easily avoided.
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Story: I would describe A Bakers Knight as a romantic fairy tale with a side dish of intimacy - albeit a debate as to whether it included enough of the latter to warrant the mature content warning in the title post. You make use of a number of established tropes in setting up and driving the plot, which allows the reader to establish fairly quickly what's going on. You then do a good job of developing the relationship between the two characters, before throwing it into chaos; I appreciated that you then went on to frame an epilogue, as cliched ("happily ever after") as it might be. You control the pace of your story well: the only jarring transition was in the first half of post 14, where Amari felt the need to go back in time to retell her side of the story instead of maintaining tension and keeping momentum.
Why then do I feel so cheated, so frustrated? I think there are three main reasons why the story doesn't work for me.
First, you don't take the time to introduce certain plot-critical elements early on. For example, despite the care with which you set up the opening scene, we're not shown enough of how and particularly why Amari is ostracised as a witch. Not to mention that in the end her healing hands come out of nowhere, proving that she's been lying all along ('If I were such a thing...'). Or you spend time developing plot points (Jonathan and David, the cloaked figure, the Duke) which are eventually forgotten and abandoned.
Second, you break my suspension of disbelief often, beginning with the logistical impracticalities of the way that Amari runs her shop and culminating (but not ending) in the sequence in which she and Joshua escape her execution. What few obstacles that are set before the protagonists are overcome with unrealistic ease, leaving far too little to stand between them and their fated happy ending.
Which leads to my third reason for feeling frustrated, which is that all pieces happen to fall exactly into place for Amari's rescue. Joshua turns up exactly on time and behaves exactly as needed; the NPCs do only what they're supposed to do and no more; the crowd behaves exactly as necessary that Amari and Joshua are somehow able to flee a guarded execution courtyard; all hints of foreshadowing disappear into the void as Ophelia is turned into a statuesque caricature.
In short, I feel cheated and frustrated because with a little more effort, a little more planning, even one more readthrough, you could have created a coherent and engaging fairytale that co-opted certain tropes and subverted others. Instead, I was left scratching my head at the execution of what should have been a fascinating read of an interesting plotline.
Background: You did make some effort to involve the setting in your story, particularly in the early part of the thread. By post 12, however, you mostly ignore the setting which is a major shame. Furthermore your descriptions suffer from two main problems: an inclination to tell rather than to show, and as a related tangent, a tendency to clump these descriptions together in one focal paragraph and then ignore them for the rest of the post. A more natural style might interweave choice adjectives and phrases with the action as it unfolds, or reveal details about the characters as they converse. Hence what description you did utilise had little overall effect, and plot-centric details such as Amari's golden hands slipped through the net.
Your strongest sense of the world at large came from Joshua's anecdote in post 5 and the time-skip in post 13, the latter in particular hinting at economic interdependence between Corone and Dheathain. However you also left many important details criminally underdeveloped, chief among them the public perception of witchery (in Corone? really?), and the implications of the social stratas that you insinuated were some of the cause behind Amari's persecution. Without a clear and unambiguous exploration of these themes, both central to the plot, you left her story taking place in a nebulous fog in which we were clearly meant to sympathise with Amari because we were never told the other side of the story.
Characters: I hate to say this, but your characters were perhaps the weakest part of your story.
From her first appearance, Amari is a very underdeveloped, and to me very uncompelling, protagonist. We are never given any sense of her motivations or her history, beyond being repeatedly hit over the head with just how unselfish and kind and pure she is. You try far too hard to present everything she thinks, everything she does, as the epitome of goodness and sweetness. She has no character flaws, no negative emotions, and also no depth, no sense of self or of purpose. She's a porcelain doll placed upon a pedestal of perfection, simply for the sake of driving the plot.
Neither does she develop through the story. Even Joshua's 'sacrifice' only causes her more to feel more guilt and unworthiness, and never does she choose to embrace the only thing she has left - their 'love - with all her heart. This inability to make a choice on her own behalf, of relying on Joshua to save her, to stand up for her, and to protect her, is Amari's greatest flaw as not only a protagonist, but as a character. Her lack of progress and lack of charm ended up frustrating me even more than my inability to suspend disbelief. It made me difficult to like her, despite the fact that she has done little wrong.
With Joshua we at least get a sense of his history and his chosen way of life. But his 'love' for Amari eventually becomes his defining characteristic, with his sense of justice (mostly revolving around 'protecting' her) a distant second. His treatment of Ophelia with complete disdain and lack of respect is a major unlikeable trait that for a short while I thought might play a crucial role in resolving the thread, but in the end went unacknowledged; his inability or unwillingness to speak to her about their 'betrothal' is the root cause of the eventual conflict, after all.
Every effort is then made from Amari's and Joshua's eyes to present Ophelia as the villain of the piece, and yet (her strong-arming thugs aside) she almost comes across as the only sane member of your cast. Her questions about Amari's shop - combined with Amari's un-foreshadowed use of her golden hands - almost gave me hope that you might pull a twist in concluding the thread, in that Amari *was* bewitching Joshua throughout the thread after all, and that the knights and public had been correct in their suspicions (if not their bullying and their thuggery)! In the end, however, you reduced her to nothing more than a caricature with that one smirk. We're never shown why Ophelia is obsessed with Joshua, only implying that she's possessive and jealous, and she never even got the luxury of a conclusion.
Your only other character of note was Duncan, who somehow morphed from a frail vagrant to capable of yanking Joshua and Amari away from Ophelia and the knights in the middle of a crowd. Jonathan and David disappeared from your story without a trace as did the cloaked figure and the Duke; Amari's father was a cardboard cutout and a vast underestimation of what it means to care for a sick family member; and all of your other NPCs were one-dimensional, disposable mannequins. While I understand that none of the above were as important as your main triumverate, a little more care in presenting their thoughts, their hopes and fears, would have gone a long way in giving your story some much needed depth.
Technique: I'm going to be harsh here, because I know both of you can do far better. It is also my belief that if you're submitting a story for other people to read, you should show them respect by proofing the most glaring errors from your work (the more attempts made at proofreading, the better). As stated above, there was no evidence of this process, and thus your story was littered with examples of poor grammar, misused punctuation and capitalisation, repetitive sentence elements and structure, and so forth. This contributed to how difficult I found it to read your tale, and amplified the effect of the adverse comments I've already made.
In terms of technique, there were some phrases which stood out as particularly well executed, in particular during the intimate scenes at the centre of the thread (both early conversation and Joshua's visit). But I saw few if any attempts at descriptive metaphor or personalisation, perhaps as a direct consequence of your tendency to tell rather than show, and as stated previously you didn't make good on much of what you might have tried to foreshadow. I have to admit that you could have done better here.
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A Bakers Knight was not a poor thread, by any means, else I could not have written as much as I have above! But it was definitely not well executed. Your central premise was solid and gave you the option to weave an interesting dance with your readers' expectations, but your characters never rose above frustrating and you chose the easy way out to conclude your fairytale. With a little more effort and care, you could have written a masterpiece.
I hope that my criticism doesn't put you off writing this kind of thread, and I hope that you continue your prolific efforts on site. But I also hope that next time you submit to the Writer's Workshop, I'm able to enjoy your stories as they're meant to be enjoyed.
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