/lit/ - Literature

http://privatepaste.com/ae8c043f9e#

Privatepasted, if you prefer, though it loses the italic-thoughts formatting.

I'll just bump this a little...

I'd really like to get some outside opinions on this.

Interesting concept, although your references are quite direct. Not necessarily a bad thing, and if you manage to fit some more depth beyond the simplicity of Sefirot and the Seven Sins, you've got a good plan.

What might be interesting is, if you plan on having these beings be 'defeated', symbolic retribution or symbolic defeat would work well. For example, choose a sin, and how it is overcome by these 'Engels". Maybe Ash chooses a wrathful solution to a problem, and his companions oppose him. As the embodiment of wrath, perhaps he is ignored/unsupported showing how wrath is only powerful if you give in.

>>1094891
If you're in to intertexuality, religion is a very common concept, easily mined to find what you need.

Dante Alighieri comes to mind, possibly put them in a Dark Wood (of error) at some point, maybe have scaling a mount be a significant plot point, a descent into the bowels of the earth to maybe function as redemption/punishment, a celestial guide (Vergil/Beatrice), or possibly the concept of significant dates and timescales. And that's just the Inferno. Paradiso and Purgatario are also useful, adding more depth and satisfaction to the avid (pretentious?) reader who enjoys seeing his experience pay off. I'm not as familiar with the latter two of the Comedy as I once was, but from Purgatario, the river Lethe (forgetfulness/absolution), the concept of time-based penance, and the climbing of a steep hill are all important. The beauty of the spheres and the heavenly legions in Paradiso are also good sources for symbolic names as well as inspiration for an uplifting plot point/ending.

Paradise Lost would work well too, but I hated that and didn't read it as closely as I should. Multiple view points, the significance and details of a (The?) (F/f)all, and the portrayal of villains as glorious, beautiful, and possessive of some virtue would make sense too. Especially if your villains are hard to hate, and if their leader is a traitor of some sort, but a sort of tragic hero possessed of immense hubris.

I'm off to class now, good luck, I hope I was able to help, and I hope that you have success in your writing.

>>1094891
Actually, the sins thing is just for my own reference in creating their personalities. That said, I do try to be a little alligorical in how they're finally defeated.

Raziel gets boiling oil poured on him, Kether is finally crushed beneath a ceiling.
Ash eventually defects to the hero's party, mostly because Tris wanted him to have a better life.
The Engels are just footsoldiers, since the Sefirot is an organization that's somewhere between destroying the world (to make it a better place the second time around) and being the Salvation Army.

I probably should have given a little background... Set up the clip, as they say in late night.

This is the first scene, and is meant to be similar to the first scene of Star Wars. In this case, it's not a droid being sent away, it's a girl. Tris launches Embla out pretty much at random, and as luck would have it the main character sees a falling star and goes into the woods to find it. It turns out that it's a young woman with no memories. He and his sickly elder sister (actually his mother) nurse her to health and take care of her, until Ash comes a month later. The main character's sister is killed, but holds off Ash, and the main character and the girl are exiled from the village.

From there, they travel, trying to find out who Ash is and why he wants the girl. Along the way they meet a colourful (and multicultural) cast of characters, and eventually save the world from Kether, who's quite Anti-Villainish.

Also the sister's boyfriend decides to leave the village as well, to go find the main character and look after him.

>>1094907
In this one the Seven Sins motif doesn't go much further than Gilligan's Island. That is, there are seven people at the head of this organization, and their personalities are based on the seven sins.

In my OTHER story using the Seven Sins motif, I do go heavily into the symbolism and pretentiousness. It's a horror novel about a woman with no memory wandering through the town she used to live in, now haunted with somewhat demonic entities.
There are seven monsters, each one having been a person that played a heavy part in the reason the town is evil, and each one is based on the Sins and the penance of them in Purgatory.
Lust is on fire and has no genitals, Pride is hunched over with a huge rock, Wrath is blinded by acrid smoke that follows him. No idea what to do with Greed other than using the punishment of Simony in Inferno, though...
And Envy is less the penance for Envy and more the punishment for suicides. The less important monsters based on Envy are the ones that are bound in drab cloth--here being fleshbags, though.

And the story starts with the character waking up in a darkened wood, in water that she wakes up from with no memory. How's that for pretentious symbolism why do I seem proud of that...
I sometimes wonder if I go overboard with allusions.

It's a good idea but you don't have a great handle on sentence structure just yet. Consider your opener:

>The stark, silent whiteness of the Empyrean's hallways is broken up by the sound of a young woman fleeing through the corridors and the sound of blaster fire snapping the clean air with the smell of burnt ozone.

Woah. That's about four different images which the reader has to come to terms with, right off the bat. Break it down for them. KISS: start with place, go to atmosphere, then character. So:

>The hallways in the Empyrean are stark, immaculately white, and silent. Or they would be, were the sound of footsteps not steadily hammering away, punctuated at intervals by the hiss(?) of blaster fire. The young alvain woman fleeing [...]

Try and do that for all your sentences unless you are deliberately trying to overload the reader with information (can be good for building tension.) It does not work as an opener, though.

You also need to work on your dialogue. Read it out loud: does anyone ever really say "We can't let her get away" in a combat situation? Not if you want to be believable. I would suggest cutting out all that dialogue, and anywhere where it doesn't add to the development of the plot.