7 reviews

[farla]

Prohibitionstuck (Feferi (The kids, the trolls))

Orphaner Dualscar had been Feferi's first husband. They met when Feferi was still a working class girl and Orphaner was one of America's youngest millionaires. 

Wait what. That doesn't make any sense, why would she be working class? Feferi's aristocracy - if you want her not to be rich, then her family could easily be impoverished aristocracy, with Orphaner someone below her in class and give them a relationship resembling the one she had with Eridan in canon. But there's no way it makes sense for her to be marrying upward.

her Speakeasy

...doesn't need to be capitalized.

alreayd 

Spellcheck.

They weren't the only same sex couple under her employment. John and Dave lived together, though they were both quieter about there relationship. And neither of them wore dresses, the way Kanaya wore suits. Feferi was also positive that Gamzee and Tavros were together

Unless she has a reputation for allowing this kind of thing so same sex couples are more likely to choose to work for her, that seems like a pretty big stretch. Even more so when you say that she isn't even paying attention, they're just that indiscreet. If you want same-sex couples everywhere, don't try to make a historically accurate AU, just use the setting, say there's no homophobia, and cut things like real world references like WWI.

the way Kanaya wore suits

I see this sort of thing pop up a lot, but - Kanaya wears dresses. Kanaya really likes dresses. She has a wide variety of extremely fancy, girly dresses. When she chainsaws people apart, she is not doing it in pants.

 Miss Peixes patron's waiting

It'd be Mrs. Peixes' patrons waiting.

You have a lot of errors in this, and should probably find a beta reader.

Also, this wasn't much of a story so much as a rushed introduction to every single character. There wasn't much rhyme or reason to who had what job, you didn't have space to establish anything much about them beyond just flatly telling who's together with who, which is the least important thing.

Crack (Slick (Snowman))

One of the things I notice is there's often a lot of concern in fic with Slick getting even somehow with Snowman, while less so the other way around. This is one of those things were you can't point to a specific fic and say anything meaningful, it's simply that there isn't the expected variation here.

Spades (Slick (Snowman))

Although, there was that one time she stabbed him in the eye.
And that was something, he guessed.

The best hateship.

Promstuck

An amusing story that's either an extended in-joke regarding fanon characterization, or outright OOC. Slick and Snowman do not appear in a meaningful capacity and it's got enough comments.

Deuce of Clubs
Chapter 1: The First Day, The First Night (Karkat (John, the rest of the cast))

The beautiful, blind troll was a brilliant prosecutor who had psychologically tormented many a criminal into confessing their crimes, while the pale, gangly human was a genius detective well renowned for his near-mystical ability to deduce the truth out of thin air.

Huh. That fits Terezi, but I'd sort of think that John would probably not really come off as mystical, even if he was solving crimes. This seems to be just straight Sherlock.

“You don't need to say anything, your intentions are obvious! I can take care of myself. Didn't I prove that well enough last time?”

Yeah he just...really doesn't seem at all like John.

...and now he's doing the Sherlock deduction thing straight. John as super detective is fine. Sherlock as super detective, but named John, seems like you might as well just make it a crossover and have the actual Sherlock running around.

The more tightly a person clings to a secret, the greater the relish he feels upon tearing it from their fingers and flinging it into the light of day.

...he's spent most of the comic determinedly oblivious to everything.

He was a troll who never shied away from the truth, even at the expense of others' feelings. An open book. A man with no secrets.

Well, that's a pretty good rationale for Karkat's inclusion, and an understandable way for his character to develop once he's stopped hiding his blood color. I'd suspect he'd still have plenty of things he'd not admitting to, though, even if he doesn't realize it.

See, we've discovered more mutual acquaintances already.

This is going to end with everyone knowing everyone, isn't it? That's really contrived. It's one thing to have characters know each other, it's another to have two randomly assigned people turn out to have their whole social circle in common.

“She's not just an acquaintance for me, asshole. She's my moirail,” he corrected with an edge to his voice.

You weren't kidding about stretching quadrants. What's the point, though? It feels like the idea they're close friends is somehow not good enough and the relationship has to be in a quadrant to matter. Plus, if she is his moirail, and she's been friends with the victim for a year as part of a delicate and potentially drama-prone feeding relationship, why didn't Karkat know about it?

If rainbow drinkers have mental powers, then why didn't that option come up before, while discussing how normal psychic powers aren't enough to explain it?

Oh, yes. I pick Sleuth's pockets whenever he's being especially annoying. I'll give it back next time. I love the look on his face when he realizes he missed me doing it again.

...Yeah I really think this would have made more sense to just be a straight crossover.

About halfway through I realized that Terezi is actually the character that maps to Sherlock and that this is just the usual take-existing-OTP-slap-into-different-setting thing.

Creatures of Habit (PM (WV, AR))

Impressively cute.

City Noir (NB, PS (AD))

a Dersite, you had heard them referred to as once. You had no idea what that meant, or if it was even a real word

That seems over the top oblivious. People have terms for different groups all the time, and no one boggles and wonders if it's a real word or wonders what it means. If he's been working in a place where there's enough Dersites to make up half the police force, he should be at least passingly familiar.

Also, any time a new person is speaking, you need a new paragraph. At points it's hard to even tell which one of them is saying the line the way you've written it.

Anyway. This is intriguing, but going a bit slow. A detective plot alone is kind of thin - everyone knows nothing important is revealed until late in the game, and much of it is spent watching characters figure out things readers saw happening. It's good to have more going on.

Glitch: Organic (Black Queen, OC, Jack Noir (DD))

their epic moirallegiance/bromance

Urg, could you not act like the two are the same thing? Moirails are very different from friends. And "bromance" is just such an obnoxious term.

“Yes. Yes it is.” She breathed. “This is horrific.”
He paled, blinked. “Your majesty?”
Her hand balled into a fist, pounded the side of the tube. “He will never have a childhood

...but he just said "His experience is that of a normal child" The fact they're having similar experiences really isn't that big of a deal - most societies try to give kids similar lives and it's looked upon positively so long as it's a basically happy childhood. The major problem here is that the people they're raised by don't exist and won't be around after they're woken up, and it seems much of that can be covered by just making the fact they were raised in a simulation normal and having people around to take care of them afterward. There would also be the ethical issue of if they're being raised in a world designed for propaganda, but that doesn't seem to have entered anyone's head, and also the regular Dersites don't seem to need any extra motivation. This just seems like the usual playing-god complaint where anything new and different must be horrific by nature. I can see how this could be pretty messed up, but the actual arguments here just don't sell it.

After they’re released, we do additional programming; their purpose is hard-wired into them.

Why? If the kids are being raised in what amounts to Computerized Derse, and kids raised on Regular Derse don't need extra programming, why would they need to do this? Why would it even occur to them, and how would they figure out how to do it when it's a completely different sort of technology? And if you can just hardwire stuff in, why the massive simulation to do it naturally?

 “And perhaps a … richer environment for them to experience during the growing process, yes?” The smile that twisted onto her lips was thin, toothy, and horrifying. “How dull the world would be if we were all the same, hm?”

...not sure why she's evil suddenly? I mean, the story was just saying it was horrible they were so similar.

The angle was perfect; it’s hard for it not to be, when you’d been doing it for years. The prongs missed the kid’s eyes altogether and cracked through the thin layer of bone at the back of the orbits and squashed straight into the frontal lobe. The Archagent struggled a little, but LR pushed his hand into Jack’s windpipe and waited for oxygen deprivation to do its work. The programming pack picked up the brain activity and dinged on.

What the fuck. So they grow people up with wires attached to their brains, then they let them out, wake them up, and only then smash holes in their skull to try to program them? And while they're being strangled, because god knows that doesn't have any adverse affects on the brain. What percentage do they accidentally blind, or cause brain damage, or lose to infection? This is idiotic.

“Some of them live less than a day,” The Archagent snarled, teeth snapping less than an inch from LR’s nose. “They don’t have a choice to die but they do anyway. You lie to them and then you kill them.”

Not sure where Jack has gotten his uncharacteristic ethical streak. Canonically he's pretty willing to fuck over every last one of them. Jack's issue with Derse is pretty clearly that he's not running it, nothing more.

Why do they lie to them? Raising kids in a simulated world isn't inherently going to make them rebel if they know that, they could easily have programmed lives that included all these facts. Considering Derse seems to be in a total war state, I don't think the non-clones have a choice either, that's war for you. And is it really that much better to give kids the exact same lives but in the real world, then get them killed twelve hours after being drafted? You can indoctrinate people just fine outside a computer program.

And anyway, by this point, most of the people running things are clones, so it's not something one group is inflicting on the other.

And now Jack's on a tear about how the queen is an evil bitch and he's going to murder her. Since it's said that the only thing that went wrong with the programming is that he's able to think around it, there's the weird sense it's getting portrayed as a rational and non-psychotic response.

This just doesn't seem thought out very well. If the kids are supposed to be programmed/this is supposed to be terrible and dehumanizing, why give them a childhood on Simulated Derse instead of just rolling the bare minimal thing they need to know into the program they're supposed to get? And why wouldn't the programming be done before waking them up? It's not like you need it to be like that for Jack to interfere, since Jack does so after he's programmed. Jack gets pulled out before the technician goes on to the Dignitary, then wakes up in time to mess things up. And considering Jack's a psychopath, it would probably make more sense to say that something went wrong with the program besides that Jack can ignore it, just as Jack's interference meant something went wrong with the Dignitary's.

More Jack-is-the-real-hero stuff, basically.

Trying Everything (Slick (Droog, Aradia, Karkat, Boxcars, Clubs))

Hm. The portrayal of Droog is quite good, and Slick's solution fits in well with his character and canon - though the Aperture Science thing feels like it's shoehorned in. I don't see why the reason for her death is so unclear - was it actually the Felt? Someone else? An accident? You don't even say much about what happened. It would be nice to know if Droog was murdering people who had nothing to do with it or not.

This will apparently be the last review I give them, because "You are pretty much calling me out (from what I understand) on my headcanon, which you don't agree with?" and they want me to stop talking. Headcanon is apparently the plothole equivalent of "but its my riting style!!1!" and presumably "calling me out" has mutated into "you are unfairly persecuting me".

Feferi (The kids, the trolls)
Slick (Snowman)
Slick (Snowman)
Karkat (John, the rest of the cast)
PM (WV, AR)
NB, PS (AD)
Black Queen, OC, Jack Noir (DD)
Slick (Droog, Aradia, Karkat,, Boxcars, Clubs)

Four of eight today! Sure, Feferi's OOC, NB is only present as a prologue victim and the Black Queen's there for yet another BLUH BLUH HUGE BITCH thing, but...

Comments

[charizamdc.livejournal.com]

There's no good use of the phrase 'I'm/you're calling you/me out'.

...Maybe as a joke?

[farla.livejournal.com]

I think it's been ruined past even that point.

[conceptofzero.livejournal.com]

One of the things that really annoyed me about Crack (and Ember rightly pointed out that only I spend so much time thinking about character's sex lives) is the final end insult with Slick declaring that she fakes her orgasms with anyone who isn't him.

Which... no. I can't buy that Snowman, a woman who was once Queen and got everything she desired, would settle for faking. Either she'd teach them how to do it properly, or she would shame the shit out of them for thinking they could get away with a piss-poor performance. People fake orgasms because they're afraid of hurting their partners feelings and making them feel inadequate. And I can't see her being terribly concerned about the rest of the Felt's feelings in this AU, since she always seems to openly hate and condescend to them. If anything, wouldn't she be more likely to rub it in their faces when she could get off? Arrrggg.

[farla.livejournal.com]

It does seem to have the subtext that a woman enjoying herself is inherently shameful. (And that seems in line with the idea she's sleeping with a lot of people but none she likes, as that's less "woman doing what she wants" and more "women in male groups are automatically the group's whore".) More generously it could be that she is getting off but she's normally able to keep quiet, so it's Slick that makes her lose control, but that doesn't explain why she'd bother pretending anything. The whole sidetrack has issues.

[conceptofzero.livejournal.com]

Holy shit. You just finally concretely expressed the reason why I always end up disliking stories that have her sleeping with multiple members of the Felt/Crew: she never seems to actually enjoy sleeping with them. It's always presented as boring awful stuff that she does while waiting for the primary male love interest/antagonist to give her attention.

Fandom has some pretty messed up ideas when it comes to female characters actually enjoying sex (and male characters too, to be fair). As much as people talk about supporting liberated characters, the final end goal is always to enter into a monogamous, preferably-legally-sanctioned relationship, no matter what the character's views have been in the canon (or even in story) up until that point. So characters who aren't in a monogamous relationship or will never been in one almost always seem to have unhappy, unfulfilling sex lives where they move aimlessly from one partner to another, or between multiple partners, as if they're in some 1960's public service film about the Dangers Of Free Love.

[farla.livejournal.com]

I can understand why people want the end goal, since it's shipping, but at least the guys' relationships almost always avoid the whole degrading thing. (I have seen stuff where they're hooking up with jerks and strangers and it's just making them miserable, but it's far from the norm, and it's usually portrayed romantically, not a sign they're used goods.) Whereas women are supposed to pine quietly, or have one straightlaced relationship that didn't work out they ended at least a year or two back, or else. Snowman in that verse is doing nothing but fucking guys she hates who treat her like shit. And just in general her sexuality seems to be there to say she deserves the disrespect she inevitably gets from everyone. Sometimes there's the sense that Slick sleeping with her at all is basically the guy sleeping with the ugly harpy girlfriend and he'll come to his senses soon and dump her.

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

Woah Prohibitionstuck got deleted...

[farla.livejournal.com]

That's a shame. Well, I was the second critical review they got, so maybe that's it, or since it was written a while ago they had second thoughts?