Concritathon

[indri]

Text pinched from peasant_ and deadsoul820.

This is my post for peasant_'s Concritathon. Anyone who wants to give me public concrit for Descent is very welcome to do so here. Anyone who would rather send the concrit privately, my address is archaeoindri@yahoo.com.

According to the rules of the concritathon:

Concrit is Constructive Criticism. This means that it must point out at least one, preferably more, flaws in the story as well as at least one, preferably more, good points in the story. It must also be written so as to inform the author of your opinion without hurting their feelings.

Ta.

Comments

[estepheia.livejournal.com]

Critique of Indri's 'Descent' - by Estepheia

Few stories fit as seamlessly into Mutant Enemy canon as this one. Many viewers have wondered how Spike’s sanity got shattered like that and how he got back from Africa and what First Evil’s role was in Spike’s return, and what First Evil’s plan was for him. You have answered these questions in a way that’s so utterly convincing that it feels like it ought to be canon. Actually, in my head this is EXACTLY what happened and how it happened, no doubt about it. You nailed it. Whenever I write souled!Spike your story reverberates in the back of my head along with official Mutant Enemy canon.


Plot

I like the way Spike is threatened from two sides, physically by the vampires of Uganda, and mentally by the First’s insidious machinations. Spike is caught between a rock and a hard place, slowly crushed between them, bruised and battered, yet he never gives up.

I like Spike’s determination, his pig-headed pride that forbids him to just hurl himself into the sun’s rays, his desperate hope that maybe, at the end of his journey, he will find forgiveness.

He’s on a hero’s journey, traveling through an unfamiliar country (being newly ensouled is also a kind of terra incognita), gritting his teeth, fighting the pain, unaware that he’s being pushed into the abyss of madness. The sense of journeying is conveyed neatly through the different settings and landscapes that he travels through and through the various vehicles he uses or encounters. The heart-wrenching thing is the fact that the journey is rigged. The reader is constantly aware that Spike is being manipulated, that First Evil is trying to find the right way to pull his strings.

The First leaves no button unpushed, no dead face unworn to find the weak point where Spike will crack. At the end Spike is right where First Evil wants him, a weapon primed and about to be deployed, ready to be fired when First Evil sees fit.


POV

One of the most effective aspects of your story is the twin perspective. There is the third person limited perspective: we follow Spike’s travels, see what he sees, hear what he hears, smell what he smells. We feel his pain. We see him act, and we observe what he thinks. Sometimes we get close enough to really hear what he’s thinking.

On the other hand we are never allowed to fully merge with the character, never fully immerse ourselves in his thoughts and feelings, because we, unlike him, possess foresight. We know what will happen, know that the woman in the lab coat is the First. We can never quite exclude our knowledge, it gives us a kind of double vision of events. We know, unlike Spike, that he’s not hallucinating, that he’s being manipulated.

This double vision is maintained through skillful information management. Our canon knowledge of things to come and things that have already happened is repeatedly woven into the story, like an almost invisible thread.


Voice

By ‘voice’ I mean the narrator’s voice. The narrator’s voice is predominantly factual, not quite journalese but on the whole lean and precise. (And a lot more factual than Spike’s voice) Sometimes, when the POV moved closer to Spike, I felt that a choppier and more colorful language might have created greater immediacy. I would have liked for Spike’s voice to be more prominent in some of the introspective sections.

On the other hand, the language evokes an almost dreamlike sense of transit, not so much of falling but of slow motion. (Like when you stare out of the car window and lose yourself in the whoosh whoosh of the passing landscape.)

Overall the voice is very effective. The reader is never told how to feel. He’s not prodded and over-stimulated with great showy effects, he finds his emotional responses within himself. The sentences with the nastiest punch are those that are stated matter-of-factly.

However, I wouldn’t mind seeing the narrator lose some of her impassiveness is during fight scenes. The events are depicted with precision, but the scenes lack in drama, especially when weak verbs take over. That may well be deliberate, and it’s not something that distracts greatly from the overall impact of the story.