Hello, Tempokai!
I've been seeing this thread a lot and it's hilarious and insightful.
Please roast my story.
5 Systems. 5 Royal Families. Greetings, Champion! 17 year-old, Collin Rex is a football player with a heart of gold. But his easygoing life is flipped upside-down when his older siblings fall into a mysterious coma and no one knows why. With no more tricks in their playbook Collin's parents...
www.scribblehub.com
I read three chapters of your so-called "story," and I already forgot what it was about. Not in the way that some tales slip through the mind like a pleasant spring breeze I had today—no, this was more like trying to grasp a handful of air in a room devoid of oxygen. It was so devoid of substance, so magnificently hollow, that my tired brain after work, in an act of self-preservation, chose to delete it the moment my eyes left the screen. If nothing else, congratulations: you've created the literary equivalent of a blank stare into the abyss.
Oh, but wait—I do remember something. I remember clicking your link, reading the words, and immediately forgetting what I had read, because it was that inconsequential. I have encountered shopping lists with more emotional depth, disclaimers with greater narrative cohesion, and graffiti in a public restroom that told a more compelling story than this. Do you want to know why? Because your text—yes,
text, because calling it a story would be giving it too much credit—is nothing but a pastiche upon a pastiche, stitched together like a Frankenstein’s monster assembled from the rotting scraps of every trope you've ever consumed, with none of the care required to bring it to life.
From the very beginning, your synopsis made me question if you understood the fundamental purpose of a synopsis: to hook a reader. Instead, what you gave me was a Gricean Maxim violation speedrun, dumping irrelevant information while withholding anything that might have actually made me care. Oh, he’s a Brazilian-Romani high schooler? Fascinating—except, you never tell me why that matters. Oh, he’s good at sports but shy? Groundbreaking. Truly, a protagonist for the ages. Suddenly, a wild
The Knight System appears! It is vague, limp, non-descriptive phrase plopped in as if I should instinctively gasp in awe. It’s a system! It’s knightly! It does things! So what? Am I supposed to weep in reverence? The synopsis doesn’t even have the decency to
pretend it’s excited about the story.
After condensing that information into my notes, I reached the prologue. And oh, what a
prologue it was. You threw me in medias res, except you executed it with all the grace of
The Hangover (2009), minus actual hook and the reason to care. The context was absent, the character motivations were missing, and the action had no weight because I knew nothing about these people, this world, or why I should care. It was a series of flashing images with no coherence, no buildup, and no purpose—like a bad anime opening sequence that plays before you realize you’ve walked into the wrong theater. Too bad I forgot what I wanted to read about, so I just pressed "next chapter" missing it few times despite not having a hangover. Just when I thought you might at least try to build some kind of story, you yank me decades into the past without so much as a transition. The prologue is completely useless. Delete it, and the story remains the same—which tells me you don’t know why it’s there either.
Afterwards, chapter one? DOA. You assume I care, but why should I? I have just witnessed your protagonist flailing around in a fantasy setting for no discernible reason, only to be slammed face-first into
High School Slice-of-Life Trope Hell, where I get the grand privilege of watching a guy whine about moving, wear anime T-shirts, and struggle with football practice. Is this the same person? Because the
prologue version of Collin fought skeletons and did shadow magic, while the
chapter one version of Collin barely fights off the urge to check his phone. Synopsis? What synopsis? That’s not character depth—it’s pathos used wrong. If I wanted to experience two completely separate genres awkwardly stapled together, I would watch an anime that got canceled halfway through its first season that got continued by another studio.
And then, THEN, oh, then I get to chapters two and three, where you act as if your protagonist is a real person that I should follow with rapt attention, except he isn’t. He is a husk of a character, a mannequin with vague "relatable" qualities tacked onto him like cheap stickers on a thrift store laptop. The fact that you gave him a bisexual identity, a long-distance boyfriend, and a tragic backstory about his comatose siblings
does not automatically make him interesting. Traits are not
personality. He has no distinct voice, no compelling agency, and no actual reason for me to want to spend more time with him. He exists merely as a vessel for the plot to happen to him.
What a plot it is. A vague, wobbly, directionless mess where nothing feels like it matters. I see a bland high school setting that might have been interesting if you had the capacity to establish an actual atmosphere, but no—you went with usual amateur
Tell, Don’t Show approach, where every setting detail reads like barely disguised EULA tropemania. Even your worldbuilding is comatose. This city, this school, this whole environment—it fails any attempt at critical thinking because there is no effort in making it feel
real. It’s a backdrop painted on cardboard, waiting to collapse under the weight of its own nothingness.
So, there’s Helena, your "Emo-Girl" (aka succubus (why?!)) mystery-box childhood friend, who exists solely to spoon-feed Collin exposition and look vaguely intriguing. Oh wow, she has different-colored eyes. Oh wow, she remembers everything about him while he remembers nothing. Oh wow, she had dead parents. Truly, the depth of her character is overwhelming. The problem isn’t just that she’s a trope—it’s that she’s a
trope without substance. Even if she has
potential in the future, it means nothing when you can't start off the reader engagement from the start. If she were in a visual novel, she’d be the character whose route was still under development.
By the time you reach the third chapter, you assume I am invested. You assume I will care about Collin and his awkward social interactions. You assume I will be intrigued by the breadcrumbs of mystery you’re dropping at your leisure. Assumptions don’t build engagement. A good story builds momentum, stakes, and urgency. This does none of those things. It just exists, floating in the void like an abandoned script for a CW show that was canceled after the pilot.
At this point, I don’t just not care about what happens next—I actively resent the fact that I spent time reading something so aggressively mediocre. Your storytelling lacks soul, your execution lacks direction, and your protagonist lacks any reason to be followed beyond "he's the main character, so I guess we have to." This isn’t a story. It’s a collection of words that don’t add up to anything.
You didn’t participate in worldmaking in a Nelson Goodman's way—I can poke a hole through it and watch it collapse like a cheap set on a low-budget play. You didn’t create characters—you assembled clichés and hoped they would become people. You didn’t write a compelling story—you strung together disconnected scenes and called it a day.
Go back to the basics. Read real books. Understand structure, pacing, character motivation, and how to actually make a reader care. What you’ve made is
not a story.
It’s
a text.
A text that I already forgot.
