Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
(I actually thought that was a moving gif, but screw it, I like it!)
Recently I was looking through my various lists and I found this one. My first thought was "oh.... shiiiiit." I had completely forgotten that I had said I would review it some time back, so that's my bad. I put it at the top of my list and I'm jumping on this sucker and gonna knock it out. Better late than never right?
The story is a reasonably long one. Even has a side-wiki book attached to it.
TLDR; An original medievalist story exploring loss and revenge, exploring new lands, and exploring exploration.
I'd rate it 2 smashing out of 5. Its flaws outweigh its strengths.
Grammar and word usage: Messy - Normally I don't touch grammar first. I rarely care. So long as I can read it, so long as it doesn't directly act as roadblock, then I give it a passing grade. Commas or semi-colons or a few misspellings don't bother me. So... yeah. This story bothered me and made it very difficult to be emotionally invested in scenes as I felt I should have been. The reason being three things on a word level, sentence level, and paragraph level:
A) Verb Tenses were chaotic at best. No sentence ever seemed to stay on the same past/present/future/perfect tense from sentence to sentence, AND you often had multiple different tenses in the same sentence. This isn't a small isolated thing in one paragraph or even one chapter. It is all of them. This was jarring.
B) The paragraphs either tried to do far too much or far too little. This one is a bit harder to explain, but the overall structure of the story at the most basic level is in the word/sentence/paragraph structure. A sentence is a single thought. A paragraph explores that single thought further, expanding on it and poking at it and experimenting with it and seeing where it goes for a bit further. It is like music. In music, you get a few chords, and then you write an entire song exploring variations of those few chords. (Look up Axis of Awesome - Four Chords for a taste of this idea.) But no matter how you explore it, it is still an exploration of a single thought. This exploration can include brief events connected to it, or thoughts connected to an event, or a chain of events within a brief moment of time. These still work. But what the story does is either have no exploration, whatsoever, of dialogue or thought that is important or it piles on seventeen or more thoughts ontop of each other that have nothing to do with one another. It's like someone showering while watching tv while cooking while vacuuming their hair and suing North Korea for plagiarism of sending a dog to the moon instead of waffles because it insults your red fingernails that are suddenly sentient. (now do you remember the first thing that sentence touched on? Showering.) With everything disconnected and jumping and having no idea what it really wants to say at that moment, then it's very difficult to explore that 'thing' further and invest in it.
C) When you have. Very long sentences. After long sentence. After long sentence. It gets repetititive. There needs to. Be some kind. Of mix up. Otherwise it sounds. Very very odd. It gets difficult. Lengths of sentences. Is like music. It needs mixture. It needs melody. Or it sounds. Robotic as hell. Same thing with. Very short sentences. Like I did here.
