User blog:Thebiggesttdifan/The Critic Raves-Summer Schedule Judging, Week 1

Total Drama Honolulu
I read this story devoid of any context, and one good thing I must say is that I wasn’t really confused by anything related to past aspects of the story. I caught onto characters very well, which is definitely a good sign—usually, a story’s biggest problem is in its characters and their personality. Your characters definitely averted that—they had diverse personalities and actions, and, after I scrolled up and read their labels and character pages, some creative archetypes, too. I don’t think anyone on here has really tried a serious fundamentalist character yet. Your characters also remained subtle in their personalities—you didn’t base their entire personality on their two-word archetype. Good job on characterization overall. The grammar also was very nice, and there was never a spelling or grammar error that really jumped out at me and ruined me from the flow. Thank you, so so so so much, for keeping it in past tense. So many people change tenses far too often. It was a relief to find yours absent from those. The presentation of the whole story could go a little better, I must say. Description—even just describing where a character was when they were talking—seemed to drown out the dialogue when it was paired. You don’t always have to indicate a character is talking as long as you mention their name and what they’re doing. Lines like “Franky scratched his head and asked, ‘Well, how do you get by, being a pasty weirdo and all that chiz?’” could better be worded as “Franky scratched his head. ‘Well, how do you get by, being a pasty weirdo and all that chiz?’” There’s a distracting variety of words used to say how a character is talking instead of “said”. Usually, “said” will work in almost any occasion, and the dialogue should show how the character feels. Anything else for most of the time is distracting. My only big problem with this chapter is the end. After suffering through a very, very real-looking zombie apocalypse (a genre I’m personally not a fan of, but that doesn’t matter), it’s suddenly revealed that the whole thing was fake, and, naturally, part of a challenge. The problem: We have huge, lasting injuries described to us. Someone’s hand is bitten off—and presuming he’s not in on the challenge, we can only take that for real. Also, no one is traumatized by this situation—a little dismayed, but no one seems shocked or offended at how inappropriate the challenge is, or how it’s really cruel. To pare this down, the idea for a fantasy-type story has been done before, and it’s been done better—and while your take on it was all right, there’s a lot of plot holes left. Overall, the story seems to do well—just the challenge part of this chapter made absolutely no sense. 15/20