How To Hire A Villain

[Breaker]

Thread Title: How to Hire a Villain
Judgment Type: Condensed Rubric
Participants: Stare, Nosdyn

This was an interesting thread detailing the meeting of two like-minded mercenaries, the development of a relationship between them and their patron, and the destruction of a rival lord's property. I really enjoyed the steadfast references to other characters such as Zieg and Jake by Nosdyn, and some of the pretty pieces of imagery from Stare. Overall I feel like you both have a lot you can work on improving, however, so let's move on to the scores and commentary by category.

Plot: 13/30

This story got off to a very slow start. What could have been a dynamic inciting incident (the blue-haired woman giving Stare control of Nosdyn) instead got stretched out to be painfully and awkwardly long. After that it felt like the story mostly consisted of talking and thinking heads until it finally picked up when the climax arrived. What you want is an inciting incident/narrative hook that really grabs the reader's attention and leaves them wanting more, followed by rising action that builds the tension until the climax. This felt more like a questionably convenient opening, followed by a lot of conversation. While the prose and conversation did provide some exposition, there was really nothing to keep a reader invested in the storytelling and anticipating what will happen next. If the most interesting thing in the beginning and middle of your story is a character's history, you definitely need to make some adjustments.

To be more specific, I would definitely recommend a stronger element of planning for your next thread. This one felt like you agreed on a general premise and then just kind of went for it. Neither of you seemed completely comfortable bunnying the other's character, which made those instances where you did bunny fairly awkward. Ideally the introduction of the fire could have segued a lot more naturally into the meeting of the main characters, which I already mentioned felt really convenient, despite the lantern Stare tried to hang on it in post 7. Overall I felt like the middle of the story was mostly filled with exposition and memories rather than actual rising action. This is where the planning comes in; if you'd pre-planned specific things that your characters would do to advance the plot, you wouldn't have ended up with post after post of motionless conversation and memory.

Whereas the beginning and middle (and the climax, really) felt longer than necessary, the ending felt short, almost rushed, and almost as convenient as the initial meeting. It didn't make much sense to me that two hardened killers and experienced mercenaries such as Stare and Nosdyn would become so friendly after spending what totaled maybe twenty four hours together. Yes fighting and killing together forges trust, but the way they both just decided to trust each other completely without an ounce of doubt rang really false for both of them. If you'd had a few more posts after the climax of them debriefing from the mission and getting to know each other, you could have made the friendship seem a lot more legitimate.

Character: 12/30

As I hinted at above, action was really the weakest element of this thread. A lot of the time the dialogue and internal monologue took place in a void where nothing was really happening. When they were expressed, actions were often awkwardly written and difficult to follow/understand. Here are a couple of examples of this:

Her claws that were not around those of the book

This is such an awkward way of saying she used her other hand, that I had to read it several times to understand what was happening.

So she went to the front

I had no idea what was happening until I got to the sentence after this one. Taken on its own, this phrase would seem to indicate that Stare went to the front of the bar, not flipped to the front of the book as intended.

This is just a couple of really a lot of examples I cited in my notes of awkward or unclear action. I noticed that Nosdyn had a tendency to write really generic, non-specific actions, whereas Stare was more specific but had a tendency to get overly wordy and focus on unimportant things.

Communication was probably this thread's most redeeming category on the rubric. The dialogue was decent and in character despite Nosdyn's tendency to say some fairly cliche things, such as telling two different people "your fate is sealed" during the climax. You also both utilized internal monologue well to provide backstory and flesh out your characters. The personas of the main characters felt fairly weak and inconsistent. To relate back to something I said earlier, it seemed like you just decided that your characters would become friends in this thread and didn't bother so much with planning out the how. The result was that the relationship kind of got shoehorned in, and both protagonists seemed to come across their feelings of trust and friendship far too easily.

Prose: 13/30

The commentary I have for the two of you in this section is fairly different, so I'm splitting it up.

Nosdyn: You have some serious mechanical issues to address. Luckily, it isn't anything complex. The biggest error which I noticed the most often was your overuse of capitalization. Words such as human, hume, demon, fate, master, the, and many others, do not require capitalization. It often felt like you had a needless capital in every other sentence. I would also recommend that you stop putting all of your dialogue in bold. At first this makes it seem like everything is being shouted, and then as I got used to it it just became annoying. The truth is, by putting all of your dialogue in bold you are really giving your writing a handicap, because you take away all the effectiveness of bold font. If you only used it sparingly, it would actually serve the purpose of pointing out certain words, and have an impact on the reader. I also encourage you to use more specifics in your writing. A lot of the time you tend to be extremely generic, saying things like "Nosdyn swung toward the human" or just repeating over and over that he has a brilliant strategic mind without providing any examples of brilliant strategy. Being more specific about these kinds of things would really help your writing be more grounded in character, and help it to become more cohesive overall.

Stare: I noticed a very large number of small errors in your posts. Typos, missing words, homonym confusion, and phrase repetition all really serve to slow down and even stop a reader, so I would strongly recommend that you start giving your work an extra editing pass, preferably reading out loud to yourself. Overall I think the most glaring weakness in your writing is your wordiness, which is a shame because it tends to get in the way of everything else. You really overuse words like beautiful, gorgeous, and handsome in your writing. These words are often meaningless to the reader because it tells them nothing except that your character is attracted to the person/thing she's describing. Being more specific such as saying "a handsome jawline" or "beautiful slender legs" really throws the reader a bone for two reasons; it gives them something to envision, and it lets them know WHAT your character finds attractive. Here's another example of one of these words being overused:

pies and pastries with curls of steam that wafted the gorgeous and tasteful scents towards them

The word "gorgeous" adds nothing to this sentence, in fact it takes away from it because all the other words are much more meaningful. You have some beautiful instances of imagery in your writing, but these were very frequently obscured by the thickness of the writing around them.

Wildcard: 6/10

I commend you both for putting in the effort of finishing such a long thread. However, I think there is lots of room for improvement, and the path to it lies through better planning and proofreading.

Final Score: 44/100

Stare receives: 2294 EXP and 89 GP! (Stare's GP used to pay for Nosdyn's spoil as requested)

Nosdyn receives: 1550 EXP and 194 GP, and the following spoil: Violet Marble: A marble that acts as a communication device between Stare and Nosdyn. If Nosdyn holds it then he can talk to her mentally. It will heat up if she/Vitruvion wants to talk to him to a mellow temperature. Stare can reach out and try to touch the marble, but it will only work if held.

Philomel pays 4 AP for the judgment as requested.

Congratulations!