And that's it? Two chapters worth of 1206 words, and you ask for a feedback? Bold strategy, Cotton. Too bad it didn't play out.
First of all, “protagonist,” Yopy. He’s not just forgettable, he’s the kind of character who actively erases himself from your brain the moment you stop reading. If he were a flavor, he’d be tap water. If he were a color, he’d be beige. If he were a piece of furniture, he’d be that one rickety folding chair you only remember exists when guests come over.
Yopy’s entire personality boils down to
“Eh.” He’s late to class, but does he care? Nope. He’s bad at making friends, but does it bother him? Of course not. He’s ranked 862nd out of 1,000, and instead of giving us even a single glimmer of ambition, frustration, or self-reflection, he just shrugs and takes a nap. Yopy isn’t a protagonist - he’s a walking anti-storyline. You could replace him with a decorative houseplant, and I promise you, the plot wouldn’t change one bit.
Two chapters in, and what has
actually happened? Let’s recap:
- Yopy wakes up late.
- Yopy shows up late.
- Yopy falls asleep.
- Yopy refuses to form a team.
- Yopy checks his phone.
That’s it. That’s the entire plot so far. I’ve seen more compelling narratives in instruction manuals. This story isn’t slow-paced. It’s in a
coma. At this rate, I assume with such pacing, you'll reach the first meaningful conflict around Chapter 50, assuming Yopy hasn’t fallen into a permanent vegetative state by then. And ending with a cliffhanger? The fuck are you doing? I would've missed this point if the chapter wasn't
600 words long. It feels lazy, like MC. Whole execution and the synopsis screams "lazy." The cliffhanger would’ve worked if the story gave us a reason to care. Maybe tease that one of his teammates is a rival, a top-ranked prodigy, or someone with a mysterious past. But no. Instead, we get Yopy’s trademark detached indifference and a screen that literally says, “Check back later for something remotely interesting! Or don’t! Whatever!”
The writing is serviceable, which in this case is just a polite way of saying “it exists.” It’s not bad enough to be laughable, but it’s not good enough to be memorable. Every sentence is so aggressively average that it reads like it was generated by an AI on autopilot (and not even a good one). Descriptions? Bland. Dialogue? Flat. Pacing? Glacial. There’s no personality, no flair, and absolutely no attempt to stand out in a sea of generic webnovels.
Even the worldbuilding is phoned in.
“Starbound Academy trains the brightest minds and most promising fighters to protect the galaxy.” Cool, great, but from what? Aliens? Evil space wizards? Interdimensional sentient spreadsheets? The story doesn’t care enough to tell us, and frankly, I don’t care enough to ask.
This isn’t just a slow start, it’s a
non-start. It’s as if the author opened a Word document, stared at it for five minutes, and thought, “Eh, good enough,” before slapping the chapter online. There’s no spark here, no effort to push beyond the absolute minimum. The characters are one-dimensional, the plot is nonexistent, and the pacing is so slow it’s practically moving backward.
The real tragedy? This story had potential. A low-ranked protagonist at a prestigious academy is a solid setup for an underdog tale, but the you do absolutely nothing with it. Instead of giving us a scrappy, determined hero fighting to prove himself, we get Yopy, a human snooze button whose entire life philosophy can be summed up as
“Eh, whatever.”
Even my outside tomcat (if he could write) take 1200 words, and make a good story out of it. This webnovel isn't even a webnovel, it's a scaffolding with no "under construction" label near it. It’s the storytelling equivalent of a shrug. You might be okay with drifting through life in a haze of apathy, but readers aren’t. If the you wants this story to succeed, they need to wake up, grab some coffee, and start putting in actual effort, because right now, “Star Trial” is the narrative equivalent of white noise: forgettable, uninspired, and completely skippable.
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