Webnovel Feedback Roasts For the Fearless

Pearl487 · May 22, 2025

Hi, I'm new to posting my stories on Scribble Hub, but I hope that you'll review mine nonetheless! No AI used to write at all, only as a sounding board, just saying that from the start. Waiting for the roast! This is my story.

Tempokai · May 25, 2025

Ahrihn said:
Roast me please! Go wild i want to CRY and fix this mess

The Shadow Guard and Her Princess

When the emperor thrusts the seven imperial heirs into a struggle for the throne, Shadow Guard Three becomes the Third Princess’s only knife. But having spent her whole life killing for the throne, the deadly imperial competition drives away any chance Three might have for a happy ending. With...

www.scribblehub.com

I read three chapters, and personally you lost me at chapter one. Honestly, I would’ve forgiven you if it had been a train wreck, but it is just a car crash in a highway in the middle of nowhere. What you did instead was commit a literary felony: you broke the storytelling contract. You made a promise, and then you tore it up, spat on it, and fed it to the koi fish in a palace pond like it was plot fodder.

You promised GL drama in an imperial court—palace intrigue, shadowy guards doing their thing besides murdering, lovestruck eyes behind silk curtains. What you delivered was a moody, overcooked imitation of a genre that Chinese writers have already done, and at least twice as well. Hell, three times on a bad day with a hangover and a broken keyboard. You’re not reinventing anything, you’re tracing a photocopy of a classic and adding extra eyeliner to make it “deep.”

I'll start with the synopsis, the first text a reader sees from your book, the bait that's supposed to draw readers in. Instead of pulling us in with craft or clarity, you threw out a bunch of thematic buzzwords like they owed you money. “Shadow guard.” “Deadly heirs.” “Murder and love.” Great, we’ve seen it. You’re writing like you’re trying to sound poetic but forgot to actually tell us what makes this story different. It reads like you’re selling the idea of a drama, not the story itself, some kind of a pitch deck in prose form, and the only reason you think we’ll click “read” is because of the old “haha girls try to murder each other and then kiss” angle. Sure, it’s cute in theory. For a synopsis, it’s acceptable. But, there's always a but, that synopsis is a handshake, where you are saying, “Stick with me, and I’ll make this worthwhile—even if I use a few clichés.”

Chapter 1 slaps me across the face and says, “Actually, no.”

You opened with the grimmest kind of gore-core angst, sprinkled with cringe metaphors like it was National Simile Day. Blood dripping from silken sheets. Bones twisted like squid arms. Death as décor. You wrapped tragedy in a bathrobe of purple prose so dense it nearly suffocated your narrative. Short, clipped sentences tried to sound cool and edgy but instead came off like ChatGPT on a creative writing bender. Even if you didn’t use a model, it reads like you did. Which means your voice is indistinguishable from a predictive text generator with a trauma fetish. This is where your ethos died.

Let’s pretend, for one merciful second, that this was your genuine voice. That you really meant to be this dramatic, this dark, this drenched in poetic gore. I could’ve forgiven it, because writers have quirks. Some like long monologues, others like describing moonlight for four paragraphs, destroying their credibility in a record time. But then came Chapter 2.

Chapter 2 yanked the rug so hard it gave me literary whiplash. Suddenly she is snacking on biscuits and flirting with imperial politics like the last chapter didn’t end with almost corpse being tucked into bed. You failed to murder someone because she was “too pretty”? Are you serious? Is this a palace court or a Tinder date? You switched tones like a bad improv scene, and that’s where you lost me completely. The drama evaporated. The illusion broke three pieces, and all I could see is amateurism. All that was left was a critic squinting at your prose, trying to figure out if this was meant to be parody. The immersion was gone. Poof. Chapter two isn’t a breather—it’s a tonal faceplant. I didn’t feel the emotional complexity of a killer spiraling into doubt of why she couldn't kill her. I felt the emptiness of a story too unsure of itself to commit. That’s where your pathos died.

And then you had the nerve to drag us back into ChapterOneLandia in Chapter Three. Blood returns. Drama returns. Pain and trauma and hair-grabbing violence come stomping back through the door like they forgot their keys. But by now, your tonal inconsistency has trained me not to care. That’s not subtext, and that’s sure as hell is not foreshadowing. That’s just bad setup. You made the synopsis tell us what would happen—and then failed to make that scene compelling when it finally did. The confrontation between the killer and the victim’s daughter should’ve rocked me with guilt of not finishing the job and facing concequences. It should’ve burned with revenge from the other party. But, it landed with the emotional weight of a vacuum. This is where your logos dies, bleeding out in the snow while the reader checks out other novels.

You promised drama, but you failed to deliver it in a structurally sound way. You didn't just fumble the emotional beats; you dropped the rhetorical structure into a meat grinder. Kenneth Burke would look at your dramatistic pentad and weep into his whiskey while rambling that "good rhetoric is a proper drama".

So, I'll break it down for you. The act? A royal bodyguard fails to finish her task because the target was hot. Real professional. That undermines everything that followed. The agent? Three, an assassin raised to be loyal to the emperor, fails on her first outing without consequence. Her role demands absolute efficiency, and she immediately breaks it because, I guess, vibes? The agency? We see none—she has no method, no reasoning, just plot armor and mood swings. The scene? A rigid, hierarchical imperial court where power is absolute—yet nobody punishes her or questions her decisions. The purpose? God only knows. Romance? Survival? Who’s steering the ship here?

Your agent acts against the demands of the act. Your scene does nothing to challenge or constrain your agent. Your purpose is external—forced onto the characters by the writer, not grown from within the story. It’s structural chaos disguised as tension. Because of this misalignment, your pacing is whack, your character logic is broken, and your tone jumps through flaming hoops like a circus clown on speed.

And look—I get it. I really do. You saw a gap. You saw there weren’t enough GL palace dramas that combined blood and longing in this website. You wanted to write something that felt like the stories you wished existed. That’s noble. That’s urgent, but you rushed it. You didn’t slow down. You didn’t lay a foundation worthy enough of following till the end. You didn’t earn the emotions you asked the reader to feel. Everything else—tone, drama, pacing, dialogue—suffered for it.

There are good ideas buried in this mess. The setup? Has potential. The setting? Serviceable. The premise? Could’ve hooked people if it weren’t buried under all that emotional shorthand and inconsistent prose. Right now, it’s all wasted.

You didn’t tell a story in those three chapters. You threw aesthetic grenades and hoped people wouldn’t notice the lack of real emotional structure. Do better. Not because you owe me, but because your concept deserves more than this. Strip it down. Give your characters proper motivation. Give your drama weight of consequences. Make it mean something more than a GL setup.

Also, because you rushed with publishing chapters, posting more than few chapters everyday, you decreased your visibility. Slow the hell down, because the place where are you rushing leads to nowhere good.

Tempokai · May 25, 2025

Yuin said:
Please roast mine https://www.scribblehub.com/series/1161828/return-to-you-who-is-lost-bl/

I read three chapters of your story, and honestly, I need an emotional refund. Not because it was the worst thing I’ve ever read—that dubious crown still belongs to a certain CEO-reincarnation smut spiral—but because this is the most Chinese webnovel-looking original BL on this English-language site, and you managed to twist every well-known trope into a performance so disjointed I could hear the bones cracking under the weight of your tonal whiplash.

You really went for it, didn’t you? Brooding pretty boys in silk robes? Check. A stoic MC with a tragic backstory longer than the U.S. tax code? Check. A glitching game system that talks like a morally constipated Gemini? Hell yeah. You crammed them all in like you were afraid someone else would beat you to the cliché buffet.

At first, I almost clapped. Almost. I was ready to throw a shiny gold star at you with all the joy of a teacher seeing an overachieving student plagiarize with confidence. Because you had the setup, and you started hot. The prologue opens like a melodramatic opera—the crown prince clinging to a half-sobbing MC, a tragic execution, forbidden love, system-induced doom—it’s like someone shook a danmei novel until all the angst fell out and smeared it across the page.

And then... you killed the momentum like a moose on a highway.

You jumped off a narrative cliff, and instead of parachuting into something equally intense or meaningful, you plummeted directly into a cozy delivery job arc like none of the melodrama ever happened. The system tried to kill him. His boyfriend watched him get executed. There were glitching notifications that screamed “plot twist imminent.” But no, you gave me a protagonist who wakes up reborn and says, “Time to become a minimum wage delivery man in a fantasy tavern while mentoring teen NPCs like I’m applying to be a substitute teacher at a magic high school.”

Why? Just... why?

If you wanted to write a slice-of-life story where a sad man with beautiful eyes delivers parcels and occasionally thinks about his ex while sipping blue fantasy cocktails, that’s fine. That’s actually kind of charming, if it wasn't done to death in CN market. But you needed to start with that tone. If the narrative begins as a tragic, high-stakes dramatic death spiral, you don’t just unplug the emotional life support and let your protagonist mope his way through paperwork and sword drills.

That’s not a transition, that’s a narrative lobotomy, the storytelling malpractice every reader with high standards fears of. You had one job: keep the tone consistent, or at least ease the reader into the tonal shift. Instead, the prologue’s high emotional voltage just... dies. Instantly. Like a soap opera star having an off-screen death because the budget ran out.

If the first timeline ends in despair, the logically written MC doesn’t sigh and go “Welp, guess I’ll be a courier now.” No, he gets angry. He rages. He questions. Even Macbeth had time to deliver a furious monologue before biting the dust. Your boy? He gets a job interview and a new ID.

There’s no pathos. There’s no fire worthy of following after that plunge. Your MC is a walking beige wall of stoicism. His feelings are so tamped down, I started to wonder if he was a reincarnated IKEA bookshelf. It’s like you were afraid to let him actually feel anything for more than two seconds because it might interfere with the mood lighting those danmei love to lampshade. And that, dear author, is where your pathos nosedives off the tonal cliff you built and shatters into narrative dust.

That leads to the logos, or the logic behind your choices—because clearly, no one else did. Your story isn’t guided by character behavior or organic decisions; it’s guided by tropes. Every action, every decision, is chained to the genre expectation like a bad contract in a manhua transmigration arc.

Yohan doesn’t act like a person. He acts like a BL mannequin wrapped in melancholy. Everything he does is dictated not by the natural consequence of what’s happened, but by what the BL trope structure expects: "Oh no, I died dramatically, but now I’m in a tutorial hut, time to act sad and vague until the love interest reappears."

This is where your logos tries to catch your pathos mid-fall, but both tumble into the grave hand-in-hand like star-crossed idiots who skipped storytelling class. Let me say it plainly: you wrote BL as a bait, not as a narrative commitment.

It’s there in the tags. It’s there in the prince. It’s there in every whispered memory and longing glance. But it’s not in the story. It’s not in the structure. It's not integral. It's seasoning sprinkled on top of a dish that thinks it’s filet mignon but is actually fantasy mashed potatoes.

If you had the self-awareness to not tag this as BL in the title and just let the story progress as a slice-of-life reincarnation tale with emotional undertones, I’d have shrugged and said “okay, not for me, but cool.” Instead, you gave it the tag, leaned into it with dramatic monologues and tearful declarations in the prologue, then abandoned it for delivery routes and tavern politics.

You broke the language game of the genre. BL, like any genre, has its reader contract. If you start with tragic romance, readers expect emotional investment, not paperwork, IDs, and combat sparring with mid-tier NPCs. You broke the context. You lied, unintentionally maybe, but you still broke immersion. And storytelling, if nothing else, is immersion warfare.

This isn’t a poorly written story in the technical sense. Your ethos lives, looking at those two idiots—pathos and logos—being a pancake in the grave. The grammar’s fine. The descriptions, while purple, are serviceable. But your priorities are wrong, your emotional beats are misplaced, and your pacing is glacial where it should be volcanic. You’ve created something that makes sense only if you’ve read enough danmei to think “system oppression + soft boys + BL tag” is a substitute for narrative cohesion.

But I read webnovels with my brain turned on, and this one asked me to turn it off, smile, and accept that a delivery job in a guild is the appropriate follow-up to a public execution and cosmic betrayal.

I’m not mad. I’m just… disappointed. And a little embarrassed on your behalf. I read similar looking stories from CN in NU and those were fine until ML arrived, and typical BL drivel happened, and I know how this setup can be good. All I can say is either own your slice-of-life vibes and stop pretending it’s about epic gay tragedy, or actually write epic gay tragedy. This half-and-half dish is the literary equivalent of ordering a soufflé and getting a microwave mug cake.

You know what to do. Take this roast as a lesson on how this setup could've been improved. Do better, because behind that implied author I see a good enough storyteller who can do better without following clichés.

Yuin · May 25, 2025

Tempokai said:
I’m not mad. I’m just… disappointed. And a little embarrassed on your behalf. I read similar looking stories from CN in NU and those were fine until ML arrived, and typical BL drivel happened, and I know how this setup can be good. All I can say is either own your slice-of-life vibes and stop pretending it’s about epic gay tragedy, or actually write epic gay tragedy. This half-and-half dish is the literary equivalent of ordering a soufflé and getting a microwave mug cake.

Gotta say, this is the funniest shit I ever read. Alright you caught me. I wrote it without a storyboard and purely out of impulse (I just wanted to write smut) But I understand your frustration, heck, I even lost interest in my own story for one whole year?

Tempokai said:
And then... you killed the momentum like a moose on a highway.

Even my beta reader said chapter 1 and 2 are boring as hell.

Tempokai said:
No, he gets angry. He rages. He questions. Even Macbeth had time to deliver a furious monologue before biting the dust. Your boy? He gets a job interview and a new ID.

I did write that. But someone told me it just very sudden and like it doesn’t fit the context? So I removed it entirely from chapter 1. My bad, I could’ve kept some emotions there. Originally he did like punch the bed out of anger.

Tempokai said:
But your priorities are wrong, your emotional beats are misplaced, and your pacing is glacial where it should be volcanic.

I thot I overdid it in the prologue. I have no idea if readers are willing to read smth so graphic…

Tempokai said:
you wrote BL as a bait, not as a narrative commitment.

Well, I never intended this to be a BL bait. I was scared that people will feel betrayed finding out this shit is BL and they won’t continue to read it anymore. I really enjoy reading BL and all but I don’t know how to develop it.

In conclusion,
Either I fw BL or I don’t fw it. Okay got it.

Since I’m so deep into this, I will rework it from the start. I’m struggling to produce any ideas so I overly rely on cliche existing stories to produce smth I wanna enjoy but failed to satisfy.

Thanks for torturing your soul and giving genuine feedback.
(And I apologise for dragging you into reading this dreadful work.)

LuoirM · May 25, 2025

Tempokai said:
that dubious crown still belongs to a certain CEO-reincarnation smut spiral

show

SarahsBuzzard · Jun 2, 2025

https://www.scribblehub.com/series/1547361/fire-and-fools/

Go nuts ? I got about half the story up right now.

edit: The cover right now is generated by ChatGPT. I’ve got an artist from Fiverr working on turning it into a proper human-made drawing before the story’s finished. I've seen other people approach the cover creation policy with a similar philosophy but I realize it's still a real turn off for some people. Just wanted to give the heads up.

DokForL · Jun 2, 2025

Great. This is exactly what I'm looking for. I need someone who can push me to the edge of suicide instead of patting my back while knowing I probably suck.

Here's my story. I've wrote the first chapter and published it recently. More is to come, eventually.

Rise of the Ascended Warrior

Aurimaz · Jun 2, 2025

Still roasting?.. Wow, you have lots of free time... I'm kinda jealous.

ElStorm25 · Jun 3, 2025

https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1630055-angelic-protection-unit-the-awakening/chapter/1639821/
I'll just leave this here and wait for my demise, lol.

Tempokai · Jun 6, 2025

Erysion said:
I volunteer mine as a sacrifice. Roasting butlers get old sometimes.

King of Blue Flames

Rinaldo, of the Luminous Knights, is known far and wide as a brilliant swordsman who can cause injury or death with a glance. Despite being feared as “Evil-Eye Rinaldo”, he is actually a normal person with no special skills or power. To avoid an arranged marriage with his arrogant and...

www.scribblehub.com

And so you wanted a roast. Or did you? You volunteered your story for the literary Thunderdome, shouted “take me!” like some brave martyr in a B-grade dystopia for dummies, and then as if sensing the smoke of a roast, ran off and pulled the fire alarm, blocking the very person you handed the matches to.

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” you squeaked out at the end of every chapter like a kindergarten teacher with a persecution complex. Oh, that’s rich. That’s gold-plated hypocrisy marinated in cowardice and served lukewarm on a napkin of delusion, but sure, I'll say only nice things.

Your synopsis? Incredible. A breathtaking tribute to every single cookie-cutter light novel trope stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster in a back alley of Syosetu. Mob-character-turned-MC? Arranged marriage dodge? Feared swordsman who’s actually a potato? My God, we’ve truly entered bold new territory—by repaving the exact same road a thousand authors have trampled before you even in 2022, when that webnovel was released. If originality were a crime, your synopsis would be the safest person in the room. Not even on the suspect list.

Afterwards, that first chapter? What a marvel. The way it sidesteps proper context like it's allergic to a proper foundational setup? Revolutionary. Why ground your reader in the world when you can just float above it, flinging names, titles, emotional trauma, and exposition at their faces like you’re auditioning for Fantasy PowerPoint: The Series? Reading it was like sitting through the cold open of an anime that started airing halfway through the season in 2007. I’m sure there was something compelling under all the disjointed sarcasm, character bios, and third-person monologues, but I was too busy trying to figure out where the hell we were and why I should care.

Tone is a sublime chaos that I completely like and tolerate, like my 8 year old niece. It's like you threw “grimdark political fantasy,” “romantic comedy,” “isekai self-awareness,” and “anime meme dump” into a blender, hit purée, and forgot to put the lid on. The Metal Gear “nanomachines, son” reference—masterful. Completely not cringe at all. Totally organic, and absolutely didn’t snap your story’s neck like a tonal whiplash trapeze act. No sir. It’s not like throwing in pop culture nonsense mid-interrogation completely torpedoed any hope of tension or credibility. No, you elevated it. You lifted your scene from tense drama to Twitch chat in .02 seconds.

Your perfectly normal cast needs a mention too, a great example of deeply shallow depth and nuance worthy of showing off. Rinaldo? What a gem. A terrifying, invulnerable knight whose emotional range stretches from "mildly annoyed" to "mildly confused." I felt like I was watching a Skyrim NPC who accidentally became self-aware and decided to run for emperor. Face-blind, emotionless, and more passive than a garden gnome—but sure, let’s give him two sudden marriage proposals and slap the word “relatable” on him like a clearance sticker at the protagonist store. The man can’t die, can’t feel, and can’t express human thought without monologuing like a textbook—but thank God you gave us three chapters of his paperwork struggles. Really vital stuff.

Olivia? The world’s most competent wallpaper. You had something with her—calm, efficient, and the only one who didn’t sound like a caffeine-gargling light novel cliché. But she’s just a vehicle, isn’t she? A plot Uber. She shows up, nods, and gets assigned like a sidekick in a tactical dating sim. Every chance to give her interiority or development is smothered under a pile of exposition and dialogue that might as well have been written by a Discord bot roleplaying as a secretary.

Astoria? She’s fire. And by fire, I mean a burst of personality jammed into a single trope—“violent hothead with hidden softness”—and then left to simmer in irrelevance. She exists to deliver mood swings and drag people down dungeon corridors like an underpaid fantasy janitor. Violent, cute, quirky… disposable. Like a human grenade with the pin duct-taped in.

And can I talk about how the supposed “stakes” of this plot are handled with all the gravitas of a grocery list? Disappearing people in a plague-stricken town? “Cool, I guess I’ll visit my mom.” Assassination conspiracy? “Eh, let’s take the long way back.” An assassin stabs the protagonist seven times and then throws a tantrum about dagger metallurgy? That’s not tension. That’s parody, and not even good parody. That’s a great satire in cosplay pretending to be a novel.

But none of this would be worth roasting—none of it would be notable—if not for the tragicomic drama outside the page. You handed me this story like a sacrificial lamb, invited the flames, and when the smoke got in your eyes, you shut the doors and put up a “no critics allowed” sign. Blocking me from commenting on your story after you invited the roast? That’s next-level cowardice. That’s playing strip poker, then running off when someone calls your bluff. It’s like lighting your own fuse, then complaining the firecrackers are too loud.

If you truly didn’t want people to say “not nice things,” maybe don’t offer your story as a roast. Maybe don’t perform the ceremonial “I volunteer as tribute!” act and then flinch when someone actually aims the arrow. Because now it’s not just a poorly structured, tonally incoherent mess of a story. Now it’s a mess wrapped in hypocrisy, sprinkled with performative confidence, and topped with a big, salty flake of “I only accept compliments.”

You made yourself a hypocrite. A self-declared sacrifice who couldn’t stomach the fire. And for that, I can’t even be mad, just so disappointed that it took two weeks to write this roast.

No, scratch that. I’m impressed. It takes real talent to write a story that makes its readers confused, makes its characters robotic, makes its tone disintegrate, and then makes its author vanish the moment someone points it out. Bravo. You've managed to write the literary equivalent of a stage play where the actors forget their lines, the director runs offstage, and the audience is left clapping out of pity.

Sure, maybe that's my bias as a deeply hurt roaster is saying this things that I didn't even reference rhetoricians or philosophers in this roast. Maybe you know that you know that it's good or bad, and you just did it in a whim. I can't do anything but to scream at someone who wasn't online in this forum for 3 weeks. Whatever.

But don’t worry, from here on out, I’ll say only nice things. Like this one:

Your story is a perfect example of what not to do when faced with a roast, and for that, I thank you.

Anonjohn20 · Jun 6, 2025

Tempokai said:
You handed me this story like a sacrificial lamb, invited the flames, and when the smoke got in your eyes, you shut the doors and put up a “no critics allowed” sign. Blocking me from commenting on your story after you invited the roast?

Have you roasted any stories from this person before? Maybe they forgot to unblock you. LOL

TakeoMasaki · Jun 8, 2025

Are you still doing this? I posted quite a lot here but still no feedback. I would appreciate you checking out my story, a Japanese themed progression fantasy:

The Last Warrior

Your past can break you—or awaken the warrior within. Fifteen-year-old Hiro has spent his life scraping by in the shadows of a crumbling realm ruled by rival clans and secretive warlords. But when he steals a forbidden scroll, everything changes. Hunted by the deadly Kageyama clan and thrust...

www.scribblehub.com

Notrix · Jun 8, 2025

Will leave mine here.

False Heaven Resonance

Ray Halfred, a homeless dungeon explorer, is just trying to survive after losing his entire family in the catastrophic event that brought dungeons and rampaging monsters into the world—destroying cities and claiming countless lives. By some miracle, he gained a mysterious Gacha skill within a...

www.scribblehub.com

I will wait patiently for my time to come.
Thank you in advance.

Erysion · Jun 10, 2025

Tempokai said:
Blocking me from commenting on your story after you invited the roast?

High_Emperor_Anonjohn20 said:
Have you roasted any stories from this person before? Maybe they forgot to unblock you. LOL

I forgot! I should have unblocked you first before I invited. Sorry. I have goldfish memory! I can't remember if I blocked someone. @minacia can confirm this.

Tempokai said:
Your story is a perfect example of what not to do when faced with a roast, and for that, I thank you.

Look at the bright side. You are finally roasting the author, not the butler.

Leti · Jun 10, 2025

Erysion said:
I forgot! I should have unblocked you first before I invited. Sorry. I have goldfish memory! I can't remember if I blocked someone. @minacia can confirm this.

Look at the bright side. You are finally roasting the author, not the butler.

You just woke up one day and decided to block every active SHF users from commenting on your stories. And now you just remembered it? That's very you.

Macha · Jun 10, 2025

Erysion said:
I have goldfish memory! I can't remember if I blocked someone.

Unblock me you beet and onion slop eating hungarian elevated to sapience by the USSR.

ThriceRecklessSS · Jun 10, 2025

Hello fearless reviewers,

I'd like to submit my novel for your consideration. It follows a transmigrated lawyer navigating a world of magic and mysterious paths.
Master of All Paths: A Transmigrator’s Ascent
Lay it on me! Thanks for taking a look.

Brekker244 · Jun 11, 2025

COME at my hot mess of wish fulfilment, Excluding the Illegal stuff, that's just creative liberty now.
LINK to Book 1
LINK to the Book 2 (New One)

rvie · Jun 13, 2025

Tempokai said:
Are you one of those brave souls who believe your manuscript is teetering on perfection but still wake up at 3 a.m. knowing deep down it’s a disaster? Good. You’re my favorite kind of writer. I’m here to roast your work—scorch it until the ashes look usable. Think of me as the Gordon Ramsay of prose, minus the condescension and fake praise. If your story’s dialogue sounds like two malfunctioning robots reciting a phrasebook, or your pacing moves like a snail overdosed on melatonin, I’ll say so. And you’ll thank me. (Eventually.)

I won’t pat your ego or whisper empty affirmations about how your “raw passion” is shining through. I’ll wield my critiques like a rusty spork and perform open-heart surgery on your prose—messy, necessary, and unforgettable. Don’t worry; you’ll survive. Growth always hurts. But so does realizing your novel reads like someone fell asleep on a keyboard.

If you think your manuscript is ready for tough love, I’ll give it to you straight—no sugar, no spoon. You’ll cry, sure, but you’ll also crawl out of the wreckage stronger. Because what doesn’t kill your manuscript will absolutely make it publishable.

Think you can handle it? Drop your link below. Let’s fix your words before they become tomorrow’s filler on this website.

can you tell me if i should change something or make it more better https://www.scribblehub.com/series/1654013/beckoned-from-the-brink-of-another-world/

Tempokai · Jun 15, 2025

These roasts will be short. I don't see the value of going deeper in each of these titles.

Fairemont said:
So, after receiving some feedback on my story from others, I have learned that my opening chapter is a tad weak. It inspired me to try something a little different. So, I wrote an opening segment for a different story Ive had cooking for a while. Its only ~1300 words, but I would love an opinion on whether or not it is a suitable opening scene that'd inspire others to read on.

I have it in this drive doc for the moment, but if you'd prefer I can publish it on SH.

Destiny Demands my Death

Destiny Demands my Death By H. R. M. Fairemont Chapter One — Shattered Mirror I find myself struggling with a question: how important is knowing the truth? Some truths come with disastrous consequences; they are capable of upending our lives or changing our entire worldview, so when faced with ...

docs.google.com

I read it weeks ago, and reread again. As a opener it's good, but it's shallow. Sure, elements are there, but there's a serious lack of a coherent context to make the oomph of a new game+ to be effective. This opening reads like it skipped two chapters of build-up to make that conclusion to be good. If using dramatistic pentad, I'd would've said that the Scene isn't developed well. The pentad it Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose, so you didn't google that right now reading this.

Act is breaking free from the fate, Scene is some plot (?) in a book, Agent is a metaconscious character who is sick of the plot. Agency is unclear but metaknowledge mixed with system and inability to escape the plot. Agent's in-universe Purpose is to break free from the control of whatever being controlling it, but the implied author’s purpose seems to be setting up a meta-reset to justify the New Game+ structure and to push the story forward. That’s fine, but it means the Act I'm seeing (the killing, the break) isn’t truly about the character, it’s about getting the reader to Chapter Two. That breaks its emotional weight.

Sure, you've wrote it well, but because there's undeveloped (not empty, as you did the job) context, what happened before that scene where the character namedrops the name of the story, it falls flat. There’s a balance most strong openings have, and I call it sequential "context, character, context". The opening here isn't balanced properly, it'd say 10% is context, 60% character, and 30% content. The characters fall flat because context is flat, because the world is underdeveloped. I don't need to know everything, but why those characters matter, and you didn't gave enough of it for me to care, even if it's unfinished. Sure, I don’t need full dossiers on the side characters, but I do need a reason to care when they mourn, scream, or call Yukou a demon. Without a developed context, their reactions are just noise and not the consequence you are showing.

What you have here is just a climax for the story that is roleplaying as a beginning. Write what happened before that climax happens, and you're golden.

Gallahart said:
I think I need it. Like a cold shower to wake up.

https://www.scribblehub.com/series/1560933/the-cuckening--redone/

The shower is late, but looking that you used The Butler to write your story, I'd say it's a must. Meta stories involving the character sitting on the internet could be fun, but yours isn't, chief. I read three chapters, and all I saw meandering, slow mess that doesn't try to persuade the reader to keep on reading. Sure, you have all your themes of loneliness, sad boy masturbating to escape the crushing loneliness of modern life, being cucked IRL by RL, whatever, but it lands flat when your credibility is none, courtesy of the Butler and the story being a niche (satire of NTR) inside of a niche (NTR stories) inside of the niche (everything fucking else in this website).

The plot is slow, despite of sentences being short. Sure, technically shorter sentences should increase the pacing, but when it reads like ButlerGPT on a bad day without censorship, with those misplaced metaphors and casual/formal unintentional mismatch of prose, combined with usual Butler patterns that are too long to describe in a short roast, it makes the experience inauthentic. It doesn't feel like a this story is written by a noob writer who dabbles and trains his English language. I would've done my usual Aristotelian rhetoric breakdown, but it's not worth it here. I don't see any conscious persuasion happening in these three chapters.

This webnovel is clearly an attempt of a bad faith in Sartre way, in trying to be someone you're not. If you wanted to be better in English, you'd wouldn't made the LLM do the 50% of your work in fixing grammar and whatnot. English and communication works in deliberate breaking of those communication rules, not accidental. With this what happens in the story is nothing, because it's not a story, but a text written by someone you're not, but trying to be. Do better.

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