Thank you for your feedback! Very appreciated. Characters are spot-on, lol. Might have to go a little harder with the intimacy between Cillian and Marsie. I keep feeling like I'm doing *too* much and I'm going to turn off the readers who will think this is a romance just because two characters are together.

Very helpful!

> reminiscent of the Lt. Worf trope

[pauses to google "Lt. Worf trope"]

Ah, yeah, I can see that. What I was hoping for here was to get across the kind of perceived class difference between those with "respectable" but weak arts, and those with the more useful, darker/scarier/less respectable arts. Like the way people will sometimes underestimate/demean the abilities of others they believe to be of a lower class, until they actually have to contend with those abilities. This might come across more if I have Abashian's art on the page. I want to focus more on Abashian's *feelings* of superiority than to imply he actually *should* be superior.

> Daredevil fights the Hand

[pauses to google "Daredevil fights Hand" lol]

> kept thinking of Marsie as a Marcy and a woman

I'm constantly wondering if this is worth changing. He's a person who was born with a fancy name and came to hate it. My first ideas for his nickname were Mars, and then Marzie, but I didn't like either of

Part 2 of 2…woo hoo

**Fight Club** The weakest part of this story for me was trying to understand the physicality and setting. I don’t need too much description for my brain to start to formulate things, but I do need some sense of how things relate within a space to each other. I don’t know how to really do this too well. 

In the fight, I really felt like the world melted away and it was in a blank space. There were no borders and no stuff. Code Silver training says grab the fire extinguisher to bash someone’s brain in and not to grab the hemostats or a 60. There are these four guys in a room with a desk and a bunch of chairs, but something happens where instead of the claustrophobic nature of this space with partially high characters…it just voids out. Integrate the space into the fight. It goes on long enough and has enough damage done to the characters that it needs to feel more grounded in that reality for me. Something felt majorly amiss to me while reading it. I might be in th

Part 1 of 1. On a mobile. Beyond here be errors!

Thank you for posting. I don’t know how much of a help I am going to be here and don’t know if this will really warrant enough for a full critique. I do read a lot, but I also tend to be very opinionated and in a way that doesn’t necessarily mesh with others. I think even with the “holding breath” short story I was a dissenting opinion from others about the use of second person (IIRC I liked it and others were saying lose it). In other words, please just take this for what it is, a bunch of random notes from an internet stranger and one valid set of data points. What’s the p value on a thing like that?

**Overall** Two segments are presented here that mostly set the characters Cillian and Marsie (as well as Yoon). I got a lot of worldbuilding, powers, politics (drug trafficking gang stuff at least) all pretty well worked into the story that I wasn’t feeling them burden the pace of the piece itself. The prose itself was easy to follow an

Thank you for your feedback! Will make clarity edits.

Before I start, just keep in mind ,my style of writing is really minimalistic.  So obviously my critiques are coming from that place.  I am all about saying what I want to say in as few words as possible.  I am also not a professional.  I’m just some rando on the internet.  So feel free to take whatever I say with a grain of salt.  I say this at the beginning of every critique I do on here, but I almost feel like it’s unnecessary here because you are familiar with my style.  Either way though…  
  
Commenting as I read:  
  
Cillian…  spelled differently but it’s hard for me not to think of Killian’s Irish Red.    
  
I like the description of man eating chairs, but I also wonder why these chairs are so huge.  Or are the people (assuming we are talking about people…  I know this is fantasy so we could be talking about dragons for all I know.) are so small.  The hands melding with armrests is a little confusing though.  I am assuming that isn’t meant literally.    
  
Ok… so may

Thank you for your feedback! 

Names, yeah, lol. Never realized how many S-sounds I have. At least Cillian is just the original Irish spelling of Killian (or that's what Google says), might be worth changing to the K for clarity. Shain, Irish spelling again, because brothers. Abashian is my fantasy shortening of the Iranian Abbaschian, might use the original spelling for differentiation. Marsellous I thought I made up! I should have googled it. Sam barely exists; an easy name change there lol. 

I'm also feeling the abruptness of his recovery on re-reads, you're very right. Think it would benefit to have him suffer the consequences throughout the fight; offers more opportunity for staging like Grauze said. 

I didn't change the text but I did notice that the scenes were different font sizes somehow and fixed that, so everything shifted a little. 

Jong Yoon scene intro - I keep making this mistake and I don't know why lol. 

Thank you again! I really appreciate it.

Okay, so this is more notes than a crit - I read through and jotted some stuff down yesterday, but the document text seems to have changed a bit from what I initially read, so I'm not sure of my relevance now. My notes are from the version I read.

All the prose is super clean and grammatically good, so this is higher level comments only.

I liked the beginning? At least the original one I read; I think it's changed somehow but I can't quite remember. It seemed much more obviously hallucinogenic when I read it yesterday and now it actually seems a bit flatter and less striking. It was super clear to me that it was a hallucinogen, btw, no suspension of disbelief necessary. This prose isn't at Gore Vidal levels of weirdness.

Names - Marsie, female name vibe, yes. It would be ok if he was very, very strongly established with a male name first and only real intimates called him Marsie and the reader knows all this already. Also, he's making fun of someone else's name? It reduces character

Hey, glad to hear anything helped! Worried I'd come off as too presumptive about your own life experiences in my blogpost about the sympathetic characters, but it felt like something worth bringing up and I'm glad you understood! I actually quite like both Cillian and Marsie, and the moment was just surprising; Bash I wrote off as dead, as he'd been antagonistic and played the prejudice card. I expected that death. But then I thought we would pan to Marsie restraining Sam for questioning about the missing crates or something, not plunging a dagger through his throat, LOL. 

It worked out, it just veered off the expected path—which is not a bad thing, but intent vs. outcome, etc. Again, you've made it clear you get it!

Regarding the broader plot—it *IS* hard to pick and choose these battles. Speaking rq of my last submission, that's exactly the problem I ran into with it. Don't worry about critting it, it was too much set up, not enough payout. That project's back in the workshop as I 

Thank you so much for the crit! Wasn't expecting any more at this point so this has been a wonderful surprise. 

Regarding sympathetic characters, since that's the newest/most unique feedback I've received thus far: it's been a hard line to walk! Trying to make them seem "hard", not wanting to make them completely unlikeable. Some of this may be colored by my own experience with humor in dark situations ("making jokes in the trauma bay after patient expires" type of stuff, like you mentioned) that might not translate well to a larger audience, especially when you take it from observation of death to active killing. Not something I've really thought about before, so thanks for pointing that out. It's an easy enough change and not something I'm hanging their characterization on. So, awesome, point taken. 

Regarding broader plot: the full chapter (last ~2000 words not submitted here) gets around to it eventually lol. (blah blah passionate rant about my plot used to be here blah blah blah

\>> **CONTINUED (2/2)**

**Section IV: The Plot**
_____________
I’ll try not to repeat the stuff I was droning on about already, but suffice to say, I’m a little disappointed in how disconnected this chapter feels from something bigger than itself. The killing of Sam & Abashian can serviceably be drama and plot, but I’m left with questions and they aren’t the good breadcrumby kind. They’re the “Wait, what? Why?” kind. 

There isn’t really any concrete mention of why Cillian needs fantasy acid. Not that there needs to be a 4-para exposition about it, but for all the references to the greater world and the things happening in it, I don’t recall (and can’t find) any real mention of what, exactly, the Fast Hand is buying these for. I mean, I can accept that people buy drugs just to do them, obviously, but in a fantasy story that is probably not a in-depth exploration of an addict’s life, I’m assuming that *isn’t* the focus here. I also get the impression Cillian didn’t organize the deal bu

**Introduction**
_____________

Hi there—I’m a few days late to this one, but it caught my eye and I finally have some time to do some crits. I skimmed the other crits too, and while I’m not sure I can offer any *mind-blowing new advice*, I can offer another data point to pair with some of the other suggestions.

Fantasy is still something of a home genre to me, so I also feel reasonably confident critting this.

**Section I: Quick Impressions**
_____________

TL;DR of whole crit - I liked it. You have some decent characters here, an explored but well executed trope (a drug deal gone wrong), some nice world-building, and a relative “punchiness” that more or less keeps things moving.

If I had to ding points, I’d say the world building might take up *too* much space, the fight scene got a little loose and had a questionable end, and I think the narration was a little distant at times. Examples of each problem will come up below, so for now, I’ll get into it.

**Section II: The Character

[Chapter 2](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Szh1nMyZEG7LM-puV7vBCCMFygrTtvp6rgXPbVzJyoA/edit?usp=sharing)

This is not a full chapter, explaining the weird stopping point, but it's enough that I should have some character dynamics established.

Feedback: clarity, characters; otherwise, any and all

Basic fantasy terms for ease of reading:

Art - magical powers unique to people; everyone has one

Mark - basically a tattoo, unique to each art; everyone has one

Blemished - those with marks on their heads/faces; term signifying that their art is one the general public finds distasteful/reprehensible

Crits:

[[3219] The Otherbody](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/w9kx4s/3219_the_otherbody_revised/ii7tcb5/)

[[2694] Unfriendliness](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/wdj1i1/2694_unfriendliness/iiljvg9/)

[[1516] Cell of a Broken Heart](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/wc0qfu/1516_cell_of_a_broken_heart/iice3tx/)

[[1279] Lydia at Night, Part 3](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/wjsayr/1279_lydia_at_night_part_3/ijmzg2a/)

[[1256] Lydia at Night, Part 2](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/wbkkku/1256_lydia_at_night_part_2/ii9t47k/)

[[666] The Mandible’s Tale](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/wk6qd4/666_the_mandibles_tale/ijnlnnd/)

[2298] Leech - Ch. 2