/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>45925550

**What is your direction with this story now, honestly?**



The closest thing I can think of is now you want "Anon shifts his focus to trying to get rid of his personal demons/trauma/residue from his whole upbringing and how the helpers effect that"... but my mind can't grab onto the path for how that shakes out. Nothing ties together to anything. The arm stuff with Kasen was an interesting idea... but it just kept on going and going with barely an end in sight. It was running its own train, and that train did not have much of Anon on it, much as the story was acting like it does.

Same thing with the """Hearn""" jump-ins. They connect nowhere. She feels more like an occasional commentator to the spectacle popping in just to maximally inconvenience and for Anon to go into the "oh lord I really do have so many Youkai interrupting me from relaxing and trying to live my life" dance. I myself don't really like having to see Anon call Yukari "Hearn" in the first place. It flies in the face of how the whole rest of the characters act, they don't hide behind much of any mystique whatsoever. Anon gets to peer inside everyone's personality and mind because he's just that sociable.

Which is good, I'm not complaining about that, that's the bread and butter of the story after all, but I *am* complaining about how he has to call her Hearn and just pretend that this is something that goes on. It'd be one thing if it was a sort of inside joke, where he would call her ""Hearn"" only because he had to play along with the Gappy's whims whenever they are around, even in passing thought it would be okay to type ""Hearn"" within quotes show how Anon dislikes the whole idea of Yukari being the way she is, but for it to just be "She's Hearn. I have no idea why she is called Hearn, and I suspect that's not right, but oh well I'll just roll with it." and nothing building on it.... it becomes an annoying bump for my eyes, at least. (And maybe for you too, considering you slipped up and called Gappy straight in the 15th thread)

And that's not helped by your habit of overly repeating information whenever Anon thinks about something that happened more than two threads in the past. To be blunt about it, you need to learn how to consistently reference something that happened in more shrouded terms. Half the time when you reach back it's always directly as stated, blunt sharp summary, full names as if you're reading off a robotic cue card.
It makes me feel like you don't trust the reader to remember half the things that go on. I know your writing style does contribute to that feeling, but every time that happens it draws right out of the story. Or at least, the parts left of the story.

Those things that were easier to not notice when I had a story arc to invest in start becoming more and more obvious. It's like a field of grass with some stray blades not being cut down properly. When you're focusing on the beautiful flowers around them all, you don't notice the unevenness of the grass, but when there is no flowers, and you are immersed in a bunch of grass trying to look for more flowers, that unevenness starts to stick out, and starts to annoy.

And that is the crux of the issue: All these well-made, layered characters, all the nice scenery and side-stories about all these nice things you are making just become lots and lots of grass when there is nothing else to mull over. I ask again: Where the hell are we going?
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That's about all. Please please please don't think that I absolutely hate what you've made, trust me, if I hated what you made, I wouldn't have even got past the first two imgs. During the end of that Eientei stuff I was just reading for a solid hour, with nothing else entering my mind because it was spinning around with visualizing what was put onto the screen. You can write, and write well. But that rapture-level focus just slowly faded away the more and more words and characters went into the mind with little plot to connect them to.

I hope you keep on writing this, to wherever the hell you're going. Even this, flaws it may have is still a whole world better than the KKHTA-wannabe Special Ed kids over at the HSE. That toxic waste dump is a whole other can of worms that I don't wanna go near. (One that stopped being "good-bad" a while back)

After reading, now I really, really wish that I could try those damn heavenly peaches for real... mmmm.....