Webnovel Feedback Roasts For the Fearless

[Fairemont]

"H. R. M. Fairemont" Blud thinks she is HER... (just a joke)

Idk what that means.

 

[Gallahart]

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

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

 

[nyankat]

I’m ready to get rekt tbh

Fell from the Crow’s Nest

Fell from the Crow’s Nest is a grand Age of Sail adventure that follows the hodgepodge crew of the pirate ship Kalida as it sails across Thulathiun: a priest who tried to escape oppression only to be saved from certain death by becoming a pirate, a doctor seeking freedom...

www.scribblehub.com

NB: I don’t even use stuff like grammarly so no butlers in sight if it reads like that it’s just my writing being bad ?

 

[Tempokai]

Do I dare toss my half-baked story into the frying pan mid-rewrite? Sure, the flames might be hellfire—but maybe, just maybe, it’ll rise from the ashes even greater than before. Like a phoenix. A sarcastic, plot-twisted phoenix… lit by the divine stove of Tempokai.

I read two chapters and that’s it. That’s all I could stomach, not because they were the worst things I’ve read—no, I’ve read worse LitRPG and military sci-fi where the author clearly thought “dialogue” meant “grunting between gunshots.” Yours has a special flavor. The best approximation I can think of is the literary equivalent of hospital oatmeal: uniform in texture, aggressively bland, and served with a spoonful of someone else’s trauma. You didn’t write a story, you birthed a corpse and asked the Butler to powder its cheeks.

Ah, yes, the butler. The fingerprints of the language model you shackled to your keyboard are all over this thing. The one-word sentences. The adjective dumps at the end of otherwise limp clauses. The absolute orgy of “then” as a sentence-starter, a mid-sentence crutch, a paragraph reset button, a transitional band-aid when you didn’t know what came next. You didn’t write with voice; you wrote with autocomplete that was already roasted in this thread so much I don't have any hate towards it. And what’s worse—you edited afterward and still left the butler's voice in. This is no longer an authorship issue, this is an epistemological crisis. How do you know that it's desirable to read for ordinary readers? Do you feel like it does? Or are you just giving the butler the keys to the house, and forcing him to clean your prose like some poor intern in a haunted word processor without knowing what it stole inside of it?

The problem, my friend, is you think minimalism is just about cutting out verbs and throwing in hard stops. Minimalism isn't just shortness. It’s clarity. It’s intent. Hemingway didn’t write like a Twitter bot because he liked brevity—he did it to purge the fat. You? You’re writing lean because you forgot where the meat went in the first place. And what’s left? Phrases chopped up into TikTok-sized bites. Paragraphs that read like dramatic texts from a teenager who just discovered sentence fragments.

The sky tore. Then it waited. Then came the beast. Then—

Then I stopped caring.

Stylistic minimalism is about precision. You gave the reader a shallow pool and pretended it was a lake because you painted ripples on top. Cormac McCarthy—rest his punctuation-deprived soul—would’ve looked at this and muttered, “This doesn’t tell me anything”, and he’d be right. You’re not carving meaning into lean prose, you’re just dumping sentence fragments like spare parts and hoping someone else assembles the vehicle.

This is where your ethos dies. Once I can’t trust your form, I won’t trust anything else. Not your vision. Not your structure. Not even your dramatic moments, which you clearly think are profound because someone gets nosebleeds when plot says so.

While reading, I kept asking, “What is this story about?” Not what happens in it. We know what happens. A battle, then a curse, then a trauma I don't care about. Then another vague hint at danger. That’s not a story. That’s a montage, stapled together with monologues from emotionally constipated NPCs.

Let’s talk structure. You’ve violated the sacred sequential triad: context, character, content. You mush context and content into one big apocalyptic blob and forget to give us someone to care about. I don’t care about the people fighting the monster in the prologue, because I don’t know who they are. I don’t care about the monster, because it’s introduced like a video game boss with no buildup. I don’t even care about the city, because your worldbuilding is stitched together from I Am Legend, Attack on Titan, and every grimdark LitRPG that ever dribbled out of Royal Road after midnight.

This is where your pathos dies. You want me to feel something for Ashe. But Ashe is just a haunted waifu with anime hair and a burden she doesn’t understand. You threw her into the meat grinder before giving me one reason to believe she matters. Her only defining trait is “I have trauma and want to survive,” which makes her indistinguishable from every other grimy post-apoc scavenger protégé with a tragic backstory and no planning.

You even gave her a curse that lets her experience other people’s deaths. Great. More pain. You know what’s missing? Her. Her thoughts. Her needs. Her agency. If your protagonist is just a screen for watching others suffer, they’re not a character—they’re yet another lens instead, a foggy one at that.

Worldbuilding here is mashed together from cliché parts: trauma dumps because it’s supposed to be gritty. System drops because it’s LitRPG, right? A mysterious curse because we need intrigue, I guess. You don’t earn any of it. You just slot it in because that’s what other stories do. The plot? The pants are showing. This is full seat-of-the-pants writing, and I can see the sweat stains. You don’t know where this is going, so you shovel action and wait for the muse to call back. Spoiler alert: she’s not calling, she’s too busy working on a story that has a proper theme. This is where your logos dies unceremoniously because no one reading it cares.

At some point, you need to stop blaming “early draft energy” and own the fact that your writing choices matter. When your sentence structure makes me feel like I’m watching a trailer for a game that doesn’t exist, I’m not immersed. I’m exhausted. When every emotion is buried under so much genre dressing it chokes, I can’t feel anything. And when I, someone who reads too many of these webnovels out of curiosity and spite, find myself genuinely bored despite monsters and blood and curses and nano-runes glowing in the dirt—you’ve lost.

You’ve written a story where I can’t trust the prose, can’t feel the characters, and can’t believe in the world. That's the one of the worst rhetorical collapse of the opening chapters I ever saw in this roasting thread.

Do better.

You can do better, by the way. Somewhere under the butler’s overly polite syntax and the genre’s tired bones, I think you wanted to tell something honest. Right now, you’re not writing a story. You’re trying to hide behind a format. You’re outsourcing your instincts to the algorithm and praying the genre props you up. Stop letting the butler write your drafts, because he’s not your friend. He sure as hell isn’t your voice. Dao Of Efficiency kills the story while trying to make it more informationally efficient. Dao of Storytelling isn't made up of one to five sentence words, unless you're Dr. Seuss, which you aren't.

 

[Anonjohn20]

Somewhere under the butler’s overly polite syntax

letting the butler write your drafts

NOOOOOOOOOO, AI story strikes again! Those bots are taking over the site.

 

[TachimeSan]

Out of the frying pan and into the fire: https://www.scribblehub.com/series/475678/the-rise-of-raruk-warwulf/

Do your worst, beast! (just a joke btw, and thank you ehehe~)

 

[Tempokai]

Dear Tempokai of the mighty and rusty spork, ruin my first chapter for me because it's my favorite story, and also because it gets no attention compared to the others.

I need to feel the burn to work up the motivation to rewrite it.

Miss Liminal - 01 A nightmare named ‘reality…’ | Scribble Hub

www.scribblehub.com

Edit because I found interest in working on the story again, feel free to tear into it all the same!

I read two chapters. Two. Let me tell you, that was two chapters more than I had any business surviving with my frontal lobe intact, again. Somewhere around the fourth paragraph, where Amanda was locked in mortal combat with a pair of boots like she was auditioning for America’s Next Top PTSD Survivor, I had the sickening realization: this wasn’t a webnovel. It was a cry for help dressed up as genre pastiche. Something that Kubrick wrote half asleep, on meth, and then burned away because he saw the monstrocity being incoherent for him.

Truth be told, I don’t like how it’s written. And by “don’t like,” I mean it made me question whether language is even a worthwhile pursuit for the species. You’ve somehow crafted a narrative voice so disjointed and self-involved it reads like a BuzzFeed quiz on acid, and then expected readers to willingly choke it down like it was literature, and I must say it isn’t. It’s noise, pretty noise, sometimes. Occasionally clever, but fundamentally, structurally, spiritually—nonsense.

First: punctuation, because Jesus, your ellipses. You use them like a toddler uses glitter glue—excessively, without discretion, and in all the wrong places. A full sentence? Slap three dots at the end. Someone breathing? Ellipses. Looking at a wall? Ellipses. Tying their boots? You bet your ass: ellipses. I haven’t seen this much dot abuse since Morse code got discontinued. And don’t get me started on the exclamation points. You’re not creating urgency—you’re faking it. Like those godawful Chinese webnovels that scream “HE WAS SHOCKED!” every five sentences because they can’t show emotion, only simulate it.

Pacing? Shot to hell. You take what could’ve been a scene—a simple, coherent moment of action or emotion—and you smother it under a duvet of tryhard narration, endless asides, and prose that thinks it’s being clever when really, it’s doing cartwheels into a pile of its own self-importance. Every paragraph is a detour. Every sentence a hostage situation. The worst part is, you’re trying so hard. I can see you trying. Trying to sound unique, trying to be quirky, trying to blend madness with meaning. Instead of style, what you’ve created is a liability. The more voice you inject, the less trustworthy you become as a storyteller.

Sure, you can write. I don’t doubt it. There’s a certain craftsmanship buried under this pile of sacrificed brain cells—turns of phrase that almost work, descriptions that flirt with being poetic. But style without clarity is just ego dressed up as art. And you, my dear author, are drowning in your ego. Not a character in sight I care about. Not a world I can believe in. Just a girl, a gun, and a grocery list of trauma symptoms masquerading as narrative depth.

But you know what? Even before I got to the chapters, I was already gone. Disengaged. Checked out. Because the synopsis—dear God, that synopsis—is where your entire house of cards already collapsed.

“Fascism.” Really?

You dropped that word in like it’s supposed to mean something, as though it’s still functioning language instead of the internet’s favorite catch-all insult. You wrote a webnovel and decided to wedge in a term so mangled by modern discourse that it now means nothing but “person I don’t like.” I mean, was that really the hook you wanted to lead with? “Hey reader, here’s a post-apocalyptic super-powered fever dream, now with bonus discourse!” Who’s the audience for this, exactly? People trying to escape the existential nightmare of modern life, only to read about… the exact same thing? Even if that "fascism" is chapters deeper down the plot.

In a synopsis, you’re supposed to seduce the reader. You’re supposed to show the mask of the author—not the face. The implied author, as Wayne Booth would remind you with a sighing from the grave yet again. But no, you went full mask-off. You didn’t just let us peek behind the curtain—you threw it open and did a monologue about your personal politics in front of a collapsing world made of cardboard.

But hey. That’s not even the worst part. Because the real cardinal sin is that I didn’t understand a goddamn thing that happened in those chapters. I mean, yeah, technically I read them. There was a girl. There were zombies, or ghouls or ghosts or hallucinations—maybe all three together. There was a time power? Or she just has really vivid trauma-fueled visions of herself doing a tactical gear swap in multiversal Walmart? She shoots people. She dances. She yells. Sometimes she strips naked and smiles in the sun like a radioactive Ren Faire princess.

I could feel scenes trying to happen, but they kept sliding off the page like oil on glass. No sequence, no causality, just the thing called "mood". And not even a good mood—just intensity, like you were afraid the reader might look away unless the emotional volume was cranked to 11 and the plot stayed drunk.

This brings us back to Goodman. Yes, Nelson bloody Goodman, who warned us that worlds are not found, but made. That coherence is not a given—it must be constructed, rule by rule, tone by tone. But what do you do? You throw every trope and fragment at the page and hope something sticks. The world isn’t built, it’s instead gestured at. It’s implied with the enthusiasm of a slam poet and the follow-through of a fish out of the water.

You’ve got every trope in the story—superpowers, apocalypse, horror, edgy trauma, masks, multiverse, pony guns—but you never decompose them. You just stack them like Lego bricks and hope the reader sees a spaceship. But I don’t see a spaceship. I see a plastic mess glued together with desperation and punctuation weird enough to took notice of and be suspicious.

And the worst WORST part? I get the distinct, sinking feeling this isn’t even your best work. This feels like a throwaway idea, the half-baked cousin of whatever competent stories you’ve buried elsewhere in your profile. This is the loud one, the messy one. The one that shows up drunk to Thanksgiving and screams about how meta it is. This is the one you gave me? This is the hill you chose to be roasted on?

Bruh, this hill is already on fire. I’m just here with marshmallows.

So if you want my advice—and you probably don’t, but here it is anyway—go back to the beginning. Delete the hell out the ellipses. Shoot the exclamation marks and actually add subtextual emotion the reader can infer from context. Cut Amanda in half and give the reader one version of her that isn’t a meme with trauma. And for the love of Dao Of Storytelling, build a world that doesn’t feel like it was written by a postmodernist who forgot what value is.

I don't even want to know why that story is even written, and has 67k words spent on it. It feels like just a giant waste of time, and I don't want to find the straw in the needlestack to justify that it worth reading and roasting further.

 

[Madmcgee]

I read two chapters. Two. Let me tell you, that was two chapters more than I had any business surviving with my frontal lobe intact, again. Somewhere around the fourth paragraph, where Amanda was locked in mortal combat with a pair of boots like she was auditioning for America’s Next Top PTSD Survivor, I had the sickening realization: this wasn’t a webnovel. It was a cry for help dressed up as genre pastiche. Something that Kubrick wrote half asleep, on meth, and then burned away because he saw the monstrocity being incoherent for him.

Truth be told, I don’t like how it’s written. And by “don’t like,” I mean it made me question whether language is even a worthwhile pursuit for the species. You’ve somehow crafted a narrative voice so disjointed and self-involved it reads like a BuzzFeed quiz on acid, and then expected readers to willingly choke it down like it was literature, and I must say it isn’t. It’s noise, pretty noise, sometimes. Occasionally clever, but fundamentally, structurally, spiritually—nonsense.

First: punctuation, because Jesus, your ellipses. You use them like a toddler uses glitter glue—excessively, without discretion, and in all the wrong places. A full sentence? Slap three dots at the end. Someone breathing? Ellipses. Looking at a wall? Ellipses. Tying their boots? You bet your ass: ellipses. I haven’t seen this much dot abuse since Morse code got discontinued. And don’t get me started on the exclamation points. You’re not creating urgency—you’re faking it. Like those godawful Chinese webnovels that scream “HE WAS SHOCKED!” every five sentences because they can’t show emotion, only simulate it.

Pacing? Shot to hell. You take what could’ve been a scene—a simple, coherent moment of action or emotion—and you smother it under a duvet of tryhard narration, endless asides, and prose that thinks it’s being clever when really, it’s doing cartwheels into a pile of its own self-importance. Every paragraph is a detour. Every sentence a hostage situation. The worst part is, you’re trying so hard. I can see you trying. Trying to sound unique, trying to be quirky, trying to blend madness with meaning. Instead of style, what you’ve created is a liability. The more voice you inject, the less trustworthy you become as a storyteller.

Sure, you can write. I don’t doubt it. There’s a certain craftsmanship buried under this pile of sacrificed brain cells—turns of phrase that almost work, descriptions that flirt with being poetic. But style without clarity is just ego dressed up as art. And you, my dear author, are drowning in your ego. Not a character in sight I care about. Not a world I can believe in. Just a girl, a gun, and a grocery list of trauma symptoms masquerading as narrative depth.

But you know what? Even before I got to the chapters, I was already gone. Disengaged. Checked out. Because the synopsis—dear God, that synopsis—is where your entire house of cards already collapsed.

“Fascism.” Really?

You dropped that word in like it’s supposed to mean something, as though it’s still functioning language instead of the internet’s favorite catch-all insult. You wrote a webnovel and decided to wedge in a term so mangled by modern discourse that it now means nothing but “person I don’t like.” I mean, was that really the hook you wanted to lead with? “Hey reader, here’s a post-apocalyptic super-powered fever dream, now with bonus discourse!” Who’s the audience for this, exactly? People trying to escape the existential nightmare of modern life, only to read about… the exact same thing? Even if that "fascism" is chapters deeper down the plot.

In a synopsis, you’re supposed to seduce the reader. You’re supposed to show the mask of the author—not the face. The implied author, as Wayne Booth would remind you with a sighing from the grave yet again. But no, you went full mask-off. You didn’t just let us peek behind the curtain—you threw it open and did a monologue about your personal politics in front of a collapsing world made of cardboard.

But hey. That’s not even the worst part. Because the real cardinal sin is that I didn’t understand a goddamn thing that happened in those chapters. I mean, yeah, technically I read them. There was a girl. There were zombies, or ghouls or ghosts or hallucinations—maybe all three together. There was a time power? Or she just has really vivid trauma-fueled visions of herself doing a tactical gear swap in multiversal Walmart? She shoots people. She dances. She yells. Sometimes she strips naked and smiles in the sun like a radioactive Ren Faire princess.

I could feel scenes trying to happen, but they kept sliding off the page like oil on glass. No sequence, no causality, just the thing called "mood". And not even a good mood—just intensity, like you were afraid the reader might look away unless the emotional volume was cranked to 11 and the plot stayed drunk.

This brings us back to Goodman. Yes, Nelson bloody Goodman, who warned us that worlds are not found, but made. That coherence is not a given—it must be constructed, rule by rule, tone by tone. But what do you do? You throw every trope and fragment at the page and hope something sticks. The world isn’t built, it’s instead gestured at. It’s implied with the enthusiasm of a slam poet and the follow-through of a fish out of the water.

You’ve got every trope in the story—superpowers, apocalypse, horror, edgy trauma, masks, multiverse, pony guns—but you never decompose them. You just stack them like Lego bricks and hope the reader sees a spaceship. But I don’t see a spaceship. I see a plastic mess glued together with desperation and punctuation weird enough to took notice of and be suspicious.

And the worst WORST part? I get the distinct, sinking feeling this isn’t even your best work. This feels like a throwaway idea, the half-baked cousin of whatever competent stories you’ve buried elsewhere in your profile. This is the loud one, the messy one. The one that shows up drunk to Thanksgiving and screams about how meta it is. This is the one you gave me? This is the hill you chose to be roasted on?

Bruh, this hill is already on fire. I’m just here with marshmallows.

So if you want my advice—and you probably don’t, but here it is anyway—go back to the beginning. Delete the hell out the ellipses. Shoot the exclamation marks and actually add subtextual emotion the reader can infer from context. Cut Amanda in half and give the reader one version of her that isn’t a meme with trauma. And for the love of Dao Of Storytelling, build a world that doesn’t feel like it was written by a postmodernist who forgot what value is.

I don't even want to know why that story is even written, and has 67k words spent on it. It feels like just a giant waste of time, and I don't want to find the straw in the needlestack to justify that it worth reading and roasting further.

Oh, sweet, lovely burn...

Yup, I feel properly called out lol

I've never known what to do with this one... my favorite black sheep. I don't know how many times (3) that I've tried to make the beginning work and it just never manages to come out the way I want it.

Good feedback for it from a perspective I don't usually get, and I suppose it's back to the drawing board!

 

[Tempokai]

roast me naked please! https://www.scribblehub.com/series/...-dice-and-now-the-hero-wont-stop-throwing-me/

I read three chapters. Yes, just three. Not "six" like you said to wait for, not a twenty one, not enough to call it a journey—just three. I couldn’t go any further. Not because the content was bad, and not because the jokes didn’t land or the grammar was off or the worldbuilding was a steaming pile of incoherence. No, far from it. It wasn’t even the story that broke me, it was the presence behind the story—the gloved, ever-efficient hand of the Butler.

Imagine this: you’re walking through the Webnovel Realm, passing through its many alleys and neon-lit corners, until you arrive at the more polished part of town. You know the place. Where the storefronts look designed by fantasy architects who charge per flourish. Where the story titles don’t scream at you in full caps, and the covers don’t feature a shirtless protagonist biting a rose while wielding three swords. You’re in the respectable district. And in that district, you stumble upon a cozy, charming-looking café nestled between a fourth-wall-breaking villainess show and a slow-burn magical romance.

You pause. You’ve read a few reviews, it’s been talked about before. There’s local buzz even you, half bored had heard of. You’re no fool; you know hype is a liar and hope is a loan shark. But still—you’re hungry, so you step inside knowing what to expect.

You're expecting something real. Maybe not life-changing, but a good dish cooked with effort, soul, and just a hint of madness. Something human. Something flawed but beating, a story with a pulse loud enough to know that amateurs still have talent.

Instead, who greets you at the door? The Butler.

You know the one—faceless, stainless, inoffensive enough to make everyone "happy". The kind of presence that exists only to function. It bows, guides you to a table with an average looking butler-ese grace, and wipes the seat clean with a precision that could only come from something that doesn’t sweat or doubt or dream.

The Butler is everywhere. It smiles without a mouth, it speaks without voice, and it moves itself like a mimic playing at personhood. You see it mop up some narrative bile left by another patron—maybe someone who got sick of the fourth fragmented joke in five pages. But, knowing that other reviewers knew, you give it a chance. You think, “Alright. Maybe the author’s just shy. Maybe they’re in the kitchen. Maybe this whole place is still theirs, and the Butler is just the hired help.”

You sit. You try not to gag at the faint aftertaste of processed phrases and synthetic cadence that clings to the air. You order the butler, “Give me your best.” The Butler nods, vanishes into the kitchen.

As the door swings left and right, you see it: another Butler. This one’s wearing a chef’s hat, and something in your stomach starts to churn.

But maybe—just maybe—the author’s still back there. Maybe the recipe is theirs. Maybe this Butler is just assembling the meal like a ghost sous-chef guided by human genius, as some people you've knew who could do just that.

Finally, a minute later, the food comes. It looks good. Hell, it looks better than it has any right to. Presentation’s on point. You even see a little note next to the plate, something humble like, “I’m just like you! I work full-time but I’m here to make something fun!” And you think, maybe the stories were true, maybe this place truly has heart.

You take a bite.

You were promised a hamburger as an appetizer. You got something with the shape of a burger. The weight of one. But the moment it touches your tongue, the taste gives it away, not meat, and not even that stinking tofu. Just a gray slop made from text prediction and optimism, compressed into a patty-shaped lie.

You chew twice and feel the hollowness. No flavor to distinguish, even though those folks said "it has one". No soul, because you already tasted exactly such a burger in the darkest stall of the Webnovel Realm. Just the sterile taste of sentences stitched together by something that doesn’t understand hunger. Something that doesn’t even eat them.

You swallow nothing and you gag, not from disgust, but from betrayal strong enough to for a gag reflex to work. You were prepared for a story, a silly one, about the mascot called Dice. Maybe flawed, unbalanced, weird, made by a person. You were ready to forgive a human. What you cannot forgive is the lie.

You quietly leave your table. You slip past the dining room, push into the kitchen, and you see the truth. There were no cooks. No scribbled notebooks to see that author clearly cared. No human looking fingerprints on flour bags . Just Butlers.

Butlers stirring pots of adjectives. Butlers sautéing punchlines. Butlers seasoning everything with the same three metaphors they found on Reddit. There was never a chef. There was never an author behind the curtain.

That’s when the entire illusion collapses, because you realize what this place is. It’s not a café. It’s a vending machine wearing a tablecloth. It’s a jukebox on autoplay with a waiter costume duct-taped to the front. It’s not built to feed you, it’s built to keep you from noticing you were never served at all.

You look back at the reviews, the stars, the fawning comments. You feel like a fool. Because you trusted the ones who said this place had flavor. And maybe they liked it—maybe they can’t tell the difference anymore, but you can. You tasted the metal in the soup, you smelled the factory in the bread, and nothing substantial behind the kitchen.

And you, author—yes, you—invited me here.

You set the table with self-deprecating charm and warm disclaimers. You promised depth beneath the chaos. You told me to wait, to stick around, to trust that it gets good. And maybe, in some buried place inside you, you meant it. But you lied. Not overtly, and sure, not maliciously. But through omission of intent, through abdication in editing the butler out properly.

You let the Butler write the story, dress it, perform it, deliver it. Maybe you added a garnish here or there, a clever joke, a heartfelt line, a glimpse of voice. When I peeled back the layers, what I found was structure without soul. Form without presence. Content without author.

When the prose no longer carries a human fingerprint, the ethos dissolves. It doesn’t matter how good the jokes are or how polished the paragraphs read. If I can't feel you, the one who dares to create, then I have no reason to be here. I’m not a consumer of function—I’m a seeker of Dao Of Storytelling.

So no, I’m not writing this roast because the food was bad. I’m leaving it because the kitchen was empty enough, and the implied author was nowhere to be seen besides the butlers. I can only think that the implied author is in administration, ordering butlers what to do. Too bad that it's a place where no sane reader goes to, to eat their burgers.

 

[Anonjohn20]

I read two chapters. Two. Let me tell you, that was two chapters more than I had any business surviving with my frontal lobe intact, again. Somewhere around the fourth paragraph, where Amanda was locked in mortal combat with a pair of boots like she was auditioning for America’s Next Top PTSD Survivor, I had the sickening realization: this wasn’t a webnovel. It was a cry for help dressed up as genre pastiche. Something that Kubrick wrote half asleep, on meth, and then burned away because he saw the monstrocity being incoherent for him.

Truth be told, I don’t like how it’s written. And by “don’t like,” I mean it made me question whether language is even a worthwhile pursuit for the species. You’ve somehow crafted a narrative voice so disjointed and self-involved it reads like a BuzzFeed quiz on acid, and then expected readers to willingly choke it down like it was literature, and I must say it isn’t. It’s noise, pretty noise, sometimes. Occasionally clever, but fundamentally, structurally, spiritually—nonsense.

First: punctuation, because Jesus, your ellipses. You use them like a toddler uses glitter glue—excessively, without discretion, and in all the wrong places. A full sentence? Slap three dots at the end. Someone breathing? Ellipses. Looking at a wall? Ellipses. Tying their boots? You bet your ass: ellipses. I haven’t seen this much dot abuse since Morse code got discontinued. And don’t get me started on the exclamation points. You’re not creating urgency—you’re faking it. Like those godawful Chinese webnovels that scream “HE WAS SHOCKED!” every five sentences because they can’t show emotion, only simulate it.

Pacing? Shot to hell. You take what could’ve been a scene—a simple, coherent moment of action or emotion—and you smother it under a duvet of tryhard narration, endless asides, and prose that thinks it’s being clever when really, it’s doing cartwheels into a pile of its own self-importance. Every paragraph is a detour. Every sentence a hostage situation. The worst part is, you’re trying so hard. I can see you trying. Trying to sound unique, trying to be quirky, trying to blend madness with meaning. Instead of style, what you’ve created is a liability. The more voice you inject, the less trustworthy you become as a storyteller.

Sure, you can write. I don’t doubt it. There’s a certain craftsmanship buried under this pile of sacrificed brain cells—turns of phrase that almost work, descriptions that flirt with being poetic. But style without clarity is just ego dressed up as art. And you, my dear author, are drowning in your ego. Not a character in sight I care about. Not a world I can believe in. Just a girl, a gun, and a grocery list of trauma symptoms masquerading as narrative depth.

But you know what? Even before I got to the chapters, I was already gone. Disengaged. Checked out. Because the synopsis—dear God, that synopsis—is where your entire house of cards already collapsed.

“Fascism.” Really?

You dropped that word in like it’s supposed to mean something, as though it’s still functioning language instead of the internet’s favorite catch-all insult. You wrote a webnovel and decided to wedge in a term so mangled by modern discourse that it now means nothing but “person I don’t like.” I mean, was that really the hook you wanted to lead with? “Hey reader, here’s a post-apocalyptic super-powered fever dream, now with bonus discourse!” Who’s the audience for this, exactly? People trying to escape the existential nightmare of modern life, only to read about… the exact same thing? Even if that "fascism" is chapters deeper down the plot.

In a synopsis, you’re supposed to seduce the reader. You’re supposed to show the mask of the author—not the face. The implied author, as Wayne Booth would remind you with a sighing from the grave yet again. But no, you went full mask-off. You didn’t just let us peek behind the curtain—you threw it open and did a monologue about your personal politics in front of a collapsing world made of cardboard.

But hey. That’s not even the worst part. Because the real cardinal sin is that I didn’t understand a goddamn thing that happened in those chapters. I mean, yeah, technically I read them. There was a girl. There were zombies, or ghouls or ghosts or hallucinations—maybe all three together. There was a time power? Or she just has really vivid trauma-fueled visions of herself doing a tactical gear swap in multiversal Walmart? She shoots people. She dances. She yells. Sometimes she strips naked and smiles in the sun like a radioactive Ren Faire princess.

I could feel scenes trying to happen, but they kept sliding off the page like oil on glass. No sequence, no causality, just the thing called "mood". And not even a good mood—just intensity, like you were afraid the reader might look away unless the emotional volume was cranked to 11 and the plot stayed drunk.

This brings us back to Goodman. Yes, Nelson bloody Goodman, who warned us that worlds are not found, but made. That coherence is not a given—it must be constructed, rule by rule, tone by tone. But what do you do? You throw every trope and fragment at the page and hope something sticks. The world isn’t built, it’s instead gestured at. It’s implied with the enthusiasm of a slam poet and the follow-through of a fish out of the water.

You’ve got every trope in the story—superpowers, apocalypse, horror, edgy trauma, masks, multiverse, pony guns—but you never decompose them. You just stack them like Lego bricks and hope the reader sees a spaceship. But I don’t see a spaceship. I see a plastic mess glued together with desperation and punctuation weird enough to took notice of and be suspicious.

And the worst WORST part? I get the distinct, sinking feeling this isn’t even your best work. This feels like a throwaway idea, the half-baked cousin of whatever competent stories you’ve buried elsewhere in your profile. This is the loud one, the messy one. The one that shows up drunk to Thanksgiving and screams about how meta it is. This is the one you gave me? This is the hill you chose to be roasted on?

Bruh, this hill is already on fire. I’m just here with marshmallows.

So if you want my advice—and you probably don’t, but here it is anyway—go back to the beginning. Delete the hell out the ellipses. Shoot the exclamation marks and actually add subtextual emotion the reader can infer from context. Cut Amanda in half and give the reader one version of her that isn’t a meme with trauma. And for the love of Dao Of Storytelling, build a world that doesn’t feel like it was written by a postmodernist who forgot what value is.

I don't even want to know why that story is even written, and has 67k words spent on it. It feels like just a giant waste of time, and I don't want to find the straw in the needlestack to justify that it worth reading and roasting further.

No mention of the butler! Congratulations @Madmcgee for being among the few writers who actually write around here. 10/10

 

[Tempokai]

I'm going to regret this. I'm brand new, and I've never attempted writing whatsoever. I've been plotting and writing the story in my head that I enjoy. I've been enjoying writing SO much, but I don't know if I'm any good at it.

*After getting a few different opinions, I feel it is important to clarify that my story IS meant as a traditional novel, not a webnovel. I just would like to share it with people, and this site is where I ended up!*

I read three chapters of your webnovel, and the nicest thing I can say is: it's not a disaster like the previous entrees. That’s only because disasters are interesting. Your story, on the other hand, is the literary equivalent of unsalted mashed potatoes with beans as a side—technically edible, thoroughly forgettable, and served in massive quantity to Kindle Unlimited subscribers who just want something vaguely comforting to chew on before bed. You didn’t write a webnovel, you wrote a template every Western writer follows at least once in their lives. A prefab, build-your-own-drama YA fantasy mold that I’ve seen copy-pasted so many times on Amazon Kindle that I think they now grow organically in the database. You fed your narrative into the fantasy molding machine, pressed the "Chosen One with Trauma" button, and hit print.

And look, you clearly aren’t a beginner, or at least English native. That’s the tragedy. You’re not throwing around adverb soup or dropping commas like they’re confetti, no, you’ve got the curse of the intermediate writer: too polished for beginner mistakes, too mired in structural rot to see where you went wrong. This is at least MFA-core. It has that scent—oh, you know the one. A little rosemary, a dash of emotionally drained protagonist, and the unmistakable aftertaste of stories written more to process feelings than to entertain.

Let’s start at the surface, the synopsis. Your supposed “hook.” I’ve seen broccoli descriptions with more drama. A sibling falls ill, a girl crosses a wall, something-something destiny. I’ve seen vending machine fortunes with more tension. If I take your tags—magic, darkness, romance, slow burn, enemies to lovers, coming-of-age, trauma, soft angst, whispery girls with dirt on their boots—and feed them into Amazon, I’ll get not ten, but dozens of nearly identical titles. There’s no Goodmanian deformation, no understanding or at least a middle finger to the genre. Just a solemn bow to narrative beats that were already ancient when Joseph Campbell was still diagramming his breakfast.

But even that, the bland synopsis, could’ve been tolerable if anything interesting happened in three chapters. Instead, what you give us is tone-poetry. Vibes. Prose. Oh, endless, well-constructed prose. You stretch out Leora’s daily routine like it's sacred ritual. Brush the hair. Bathe in emotional metaphor. Eat the damn pie. Argue with people who care about her. Repeat. There's a setting, characters. foreshadowing, but there’s no that unique spark that interesting stories have. I came looking for brooding heroine or doom or even a funny drunk. I got a cat in a window and a girl whispering to herbs.

Your main character Leora is... well. She’s you, isn’t she?

This is where things get interesting, because Wayne Booth was right when he said every story has an implied author, and instead of implied author, all I see is a real author leaning so hard into the prose I can practically smell the Bath & Body Works. You didn’t create a character, you uploaded your unresolved psychological profile into a vaguely medieval setting and gave her a trauma blade. She barks at people who are kind to her. Snaps at help. Sulks in corners. Is she grieving? Supposedly. But grief in fiction needs transformation. Not this bubbling stew of bitter stares and hostile eye-rolls. MC walks around like everyone’s one helpful suggestion away from getting stabbed with a garden trowel.

She doesn’t feel like a character forged by her world. She feels like a woman trying to dominate the world with her indignation. It’s not compelling, it’s exhausting enough for me to see the author breathing down my neck, basically whispering "don't you dare to insult me". And worse—it’s transparent. I don’t see a hero fighting the dark, all I see someone trying to relitigate real-life frustrations in cosplay.

You might think the side characters mitigate this. I suppose Corvin is meant to be the soft, loyal foil. He’s the equivalent of a golden retriever with a jawline. He’s sweet. He simps. He feels like a wish fulfillment instead of a proper ML. And how does your MC respond? She snaps, ignores him, then monologues about her suffering. Which, mind you, would hit harder if we hadn’t spent three chapters being told how tragic it all is instead of seeing Leora actually struggle with anything that doesn’t involve sighing into the middle distance.

That comes down to the setting. You say it’s fantasy. I say you’re lying to yourself. This isn’t a fantasy world, this is Allegorical Fantasy Midwest. There are chickens, council meetings, supportive dads, quietly competent moms, homegrown vegetables, emotional closure, and an entire town that smells like apple pie and unresolved tension. You’ve created not a place, but an impression of a place. It’s one that feels deeply rooted in your own memory, not in story, and that’s the issue. If I can tell where you’re from, but you say it’s not that place, then you haven’t worldbuilt—you’ve just thinly veiled.

And that veil is paper thin. I can see the real you. The one who wants to tell a story about womanhood, and pain, and self-possession. Fine, tell that story if you want to, but don’t insult fantasy by duct-taping it to your journaling session and calling it epic. Because it’s not epic. It’s small. It’s garden-scale. The darkness in your world is background aesthetic, and in real fantasies it's forefront, even when Frodo smokes with the Gandalf on the hill. Your setting never breathes, it never moves, and it never threatens your characters enough to force them to change. And when the setting doesn’t pressure the characters, the story doesn’t live.

Which brings us to the final death blow: Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad. The structure of every dramatic story, and the diagnostic tool that I love to use when I'm particularly bored.


Scene? Quiet town with slow death creeping in.

Agent? Angry woman who acts like she's just been bumped in line at the DMV few days ago and never recovered.

Act? She walks around and reacts. A lot of sighing. Some shoving. Maybe a tantrum.

Agency? Herbalism and side-eye.

Purpose? Supposedly save the brother. Actually? Project unresolved frustration with authority, expectation, and softness.


This isn’t woman vs. world. It’s woman vs. self. Not in the interesting, tragic arc kind of way—but in the unintentional, author-can’t-get-out-of-her-own-way kind of way. The purpose of your character should align with the world’s stakes, but here, it doesn’t. She’s fighting something we’re not allowed to see. She’s battling her own bitterness, not the monsters leaking out of the thing called "divide".

So yes, your prose is clean, but clean prose does not a story make. Beneath your beautiful sentences lies the skeleton of something broken. You’ve stuffed modern therapy-speak into medieval petticoats, and the seams are splitting. Your story is a hollow vessel dressed in meaningful words. It’s trying to be myth, but it’s too busy being a diary.

Do better. Either lean into the fantasy and let it breathe properly without inserting yourself as a person so hard it breaks the fourth wall, or write what you really want to write: the emotional reckoning of a woman trying to make sense of a world that stopped listening to her. But don’t pretend they’re the same thing. Fantasy is called fantasy because it's written to escape from the real life, not to reenact it again in the written word. Maybe you'll find someone that thinks like you, has the mindset like you, even maybe is like you, but that range is so narrow that I can't see it ever getting popular, even as a traditional novel in Kindle. The best author is the one with the thousand masks, and you've only got four of them.

 

[N.K.Watson]

I read three chapters of your webnovel, and the nicest thing I can say is: it's not a disaster like the previous entrees. That’s only because disasters are interesting. Your story, on the other hand, is the literary equivalent of unsalted mashed potatoes with beans as a side—technically edible, thoroughly forgettable, and served in massive quantity to Kindle Unlimited subscribers who just want something vaguely comforting to chew on before bed. You didn’t write a webnovel, you wrote a template every Western writer follows at least once in their lives. A prefab, build-your-own-drama YA fantasy mold that I’ve seen copy-pasted so many times on Amazon Kindle that I think they now grow organically in the database. You fed your narrative into the fantasy molding machine, pressed the "Chosen One with Trauma" button, and hit print.

And look, you clearly aren’t a beginner, or at least English native. That’s the tragedy. You’re not throwing around adverb soup or dropping commas like they’re confetti, no, you’ve got the curse of the intermediate writer: too polished for beginner mistakes, too mired in structural rot to see where you went wrong. This is at least MFA-core. It has that scent—oh, you know the one. A little rosemary, a dash of emotionally drained protagonist, and the unmistakable aftertaste of stories written more to process feelings than to entertain.

Let’s start at the surface, the synopsis. Your supposed “hook.” I’ve seen broccoli descriptions with more drama. A sibling falls ill, a girl crosses a wall, something-something destiny. I’ve seen vending machine fortunes with more tension. If I take your tags—magic, darkness, romance, slow burn, enemies to lovers, coming-of-age, trauma, soft angst, whispery girls with dirt on their boots—and feed them into Amazon, I’ll get not ten, but dozens of nearly identical titles. There’s no Goodmanian deformation, no understanding or at least a middle finger to the genre. Just a solemn bow to narrative beats that were already ancient when Joseph Campbell was still diagramming his breakfast.

But even that, the bland synopsis, could’ve been tolerable if anything interesting happened in three chapters. Instead, what you give us is tone-poetry. Vibes. Prose. Oh, endless, well-constructed prose. You stretch out Leora’s daily routine like it's sacred ritual. Brush the hair. Bathe in emotional metaphor. Eat the damn pie. Argue with people who care about her. Repeat. There's a setting, characters. foreshadowing, but there’s no that unique spark that interesting stories have. I came looking for brooding heroine or doom or even a funny drunk. I got a cat in a window and a girl whispering to herbs.

Your main character Leora is... well. She’s you, isn’t she?

This is where things get interesting, because Wayne Booth was right when he said every story has an implied author, and instead of implied author, all I see is a real author leaning so hard into the prose I can practically smell the Bath & Body Works. You didn’t create a character, you uploaded your unresolved psychological profile into a vaguely medieval setting and gave her a trauma blade. She barks at people who are kind to her. Snaps at help. Sulks in corners. Is she grieving? Supposedly. But grief in fiction needs transformation. Not this bubbling stew of bitter stares and hostile eye-rolls. MC walks around like everyone’s one helpful suggestion away from getting stabbed with a garden trowel.

She doesn’t feel like a character forged by her world. She feels like a woman trying to dominate the world with her indignation. It’s not compelling, it’s exhausting enough for me to see the author breathing down my neck, basically whispering "don't you dare to insult me". And worse—it’s transparent. I don’t see a hero fighting the dark, all I see someone trying to relitigate real-life frustrations in cosplay.

You might think the side characters mitigate this. I suppose Corvin is meant to be the soft, loyal foil. He’s the equivalent of a golden retriever with a jawline. He’s sweet. He simps. He feels like a wish fulfillment instead of a proper ML. And how does your MC respond? She snaps, ignores him, then monologues about her suffering. Which, mind you, would hit harder if we hadn’t spent three chapters being told how tragic it all is instead of seeing Leora actually struggle with anything that doesn’t involve sighing into the middle distance.

That comes down to the setting. You say it’s fantasy. I say you’re lying to yourself. This isn’t a fantasy world, this is Allegorical Fantasy Midwest. There are chickens, council meetings, supportive dads, quietly competent moms, homegrown vegetables, emotional closure, and an entire town that smells like apple pie and unresolved tension. You’ve created not a place, but an impression of a place. It’s one that feels deeply rooted in your own memory, not in story, and that’s the issue. If I can tell where you’re from, but you say it’s not that place, then you haven’t worldbuilt—you’ve just thinly veiled.

And that veil is paper thin. I can see the real you. The one who wants to tell a story about womanhood, and pain, and self-possession. Fine, tell that story if you want to, but don’t insult fantasy by duct-taping it to your journaling session and calling it epic. Because it’s not epic. It’s small. It’s garden-scale. The darkness in your world is background aesthetic, and in real fantasies it's forefront, even when Frodo smokes with the Gandalf on the hill. Your setting never breathes, it never moves, and it never threatens your characters enough to force them to change. And when the setting doesn’t pressure the characters, the story doesn’t live.

Which brings us to the final death blow: Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad. The structure of every dramatic story, and the diagnostic tool that I love to use when I'm particularly bored.


Scene? Quiet town with slow death creeping in.

Agent? Angry woman who acts like she's just been bumped in line at the DMV few days ago and never recovered.

Act? She walks around and reacts. A lot of sighing. Some shoving. Maybe a tantrum.

Agency? Herbalism and side-eye.

Purpose? Supposedly save the brother. Actually? Project unresolved frustration with authority, expectation, and softness.


This isn’t woman vs. world. It’s woman vs. self. Not in the interesting, tragic arc kind of way—but in the unintentional, author-can’t-get-out-of-her-own-way kind of way. The purpose of your character should align with the world’s stakes, but here, it doesn’t. She’s fighting something we’re not allowed to see. She’s battling her own bitterness, not the monsters leaking out of the thing called "divide".

So yes, your prose is clean, but clean prose does not a story make. Beneath your beautiful sentences lies the skeleton of something broken. You’ve stuffed modern therapy-speak into medieval petticoats, and the seams are splitting. Your story is a hollow vessel dressed in meaningful words. It’s trying to be myth, but it’s too busy being a diary.

Do better. Either lean into the fantasy and let it breathe properly without inserting yourself as a person so hard it breaks the fourth wall, or write what you really want to write: the emotional reckoning of a woman trying to make sense of a world that stopped listening to her. But don’t pretend they’re the same thing. Fantasy is called fantasy because it's written to escape from the real life, not to reenact it again in the written word. Maybe you'll find someone that thinks like you, has the mindset like you, even maybe is like you, but that range is so narrow that I can't see it ever getting popular, even as a traditional novel in Kindle. The best author is the one with the thousand masks, and you've only got four of them.

Excuse my language but,
Holy shit.
Damn, i was not prepared in any way for that, nailed me to the wall for all to see.

I expected more about my writing in general, and the fact that you called me an intermediate writer is actually flattering. So I will take that as a compliment on its own! I feel this was a successful roast for me.

It was my own fault that you claimed it isn't fantasy. You are correct; right now, it definitely is an Allegorical Fantasy Midwest. It is based in another world we have seen very little of in the first three chapters—hell, we see little of it in the first half of the story, even in my plotting. I've definitely built a slower story regarding that, and the real "epic" won't begin realistically until much later. That was the plan to begin with, though, very much a drab world without its magical elements while they are locked away (for now).

I will be leaning more into the fantasy here soon; I'm just getting to those parts in the story.

Leora, well, yes. She's me, she's my daughter, she's also a bit made up. A combination of the three. I did feel like she might be a bit over the top. But my goal was to make her issues pretty apparent. She's bored (unknowingly) and unhappy with the small town. She finds love and purpose, and that emotional drama slows as the story progresses, and she finds happiness, while also finding more problems as the story progresses, and the real fantasy story begins.

This is me slightly defending myself, but also fully agreeing with you, lol.

Totally cliché, correct!

On that last comment, the author with a thousand masks,
How does one ACHIEVE that? I felt like throwing a bit of myself into the story would help my writing feel more authentic, would make my characters better. Since it seems to have the opposite effect, what would you suggest doing to counteract that, great roaster?

Sincerely, thank you.

 

[Macha]

How does one ACHIEVE that?

Carefully.

 

[Edenc2708]

Just a gray slop made from text prediction and optimism, compressed into a patty-shaped lie.

Thank you for reading and taking the time to write such a thoughtful review. While we clearly see the story differently, I respect your passion for writing and storytelling. Not every reader will connect with my work, and that’s okay. I’ll continue doing my best, for those who stay and for myself and yes I should be optimistic
But the slop thing was such a great praise, great delivery
That line hit hard, definitely the headline here.
Also patty-shaped lie (not gonna lie, I did feel that on)
I never lie, I even posted in a few forum blatantly saying I was using AI, but here got roasted saying I lie about it
But thanks again for the kind feedback~

 

[LuciferVermillion]

A second attempt. Only rewrote five chapters, please roast me.

https://www.scribblehub.com/read/21...leads-to-a-god-of-a-new-world/chapter/211238/

 

[LuoirM]

I'm not fearless but fuck it!

SSS-Rank Flame Brat Dominates The Academy With A System

'I will be the strongest sorcerer in the world!' Ash said, with her mom chasing right behind trying to spank her for not finishing the vegetables. In a world of 8 different elemental attributes, a girl was born with a humble and basic [Fire] attribute, yet she grew up to...

www.scribblehub.com

 

[Tripleblack]

Hey. A bit weird since I already asked you for a review before, but I kind of wanted a second look at how my rewrite was going so far. I've reworked up to chapter 4 of the novel, and before I continue, I wanted to see if it was any good. Also, if my first three chapters aren't so bad that you stop reading, I wanted a second opinion as to what the fifth chapter should be.

My original idea was to rework the old fourth chapter, but split it in half. So chapter five would be an extended version of the first half of the old chapter. It's basically a flash forward to Magic Order officers investigating. In the reworked version, it would end on a cliffhanger of the two named officers finding a crater that Cacophony made the night before. Then the next chapter would be a flashback to that night.

Honestly, I feel like that might just be a bit too much for this early on. I makes sense to me, but a reader might actually get confused.

The old chapter is still up if you want a peek at what it might look like.

Anyway, as usual, tell me what I got right or wrong and don't hold make. Also, as you said in your last review, Veri is a messy protagonist. Even as the author, I struggle with how he'd react or feel in every given situation.

Sorry for using you as my editor ?

The Revival of The Vampire Empress!

Crimson-haired, ancient, and terrifyingly beautiful, the renowned Vampire Empress had been sealed away for hundreds of years. The one to set her was Veri, a high school boy filled with delusions. Caught in the aftermath of her awakening, Veri is dragged into a hidden world of bloodlines...

www.scribblehub.com

 

[Tempokai]

Alright. Jumping in. Brand new author, shit writing skills and style. Not even a native English-speaker... And still not mentally prepared to get roasted but better now than late in my work.
What could go wrong ?

I guess that since I'm still early on in my novel so it I wouldn't have too much to adjust.

Right ? https://www.scribblehub.com/series/1289558/hateful-world-and-burning-memories/

I read three chapters, and I’ve got to say, if you’re going for the “OP gender-bender protag doing stuff” template, then congrats, you’ve got something. If by "something," you mean yet another dragon girl story with a side of "what did I just read?" I mean, sure, you’ve got all the pieces in place: the confused reincarnated soul, the tragic backstory, the all-consuming wrath. Throw in some poorly-timed puberty jokes and lizard tits, and there you go. But hey, at least it’s “passable” in that it’s got a pulse. It’s not dead in the water like some of the truly tragic stuff out there, so let's give credit where credit’s due. There’s just a lot of room to sharpen the edges, and when I say a lot, I mean you could park a bus that I take everyday in the gaps between your ideas and execution.

First, synopsis. Ah, the synopsis. The first impression. It's fine, I guess. It tells me what to expect, but then again, so do 70% of all the other synopses on this website. You communicate the tropes decently, but that’s not exactly setting the world on fire. You’ve got your basic "guy gets reincarnated as a monster girl" schtick, and the setup is as familiar as the inside of my grandma’s kitchen. “Oh, the MC is a lizard with boobs now? Hilarious and totally unique.” If I had a nickel for every reincarnated boy who suddenly has a tail, claws, and an existential crisis about not having genitals anymore, I could actually buy a salamander. Not a metaphorical one, a real, live salamander. I could go to that canyon two hundred kilometers away, catch it, and I wouldn’t have to read about another shocking twist where the MC is now some wyvern who has to deal with the burdens of existence as a glorified biology lesson. Sure, it's on-brand for the genre, but nothing is pulling me out of the abyss of oh, I’ve seen this before. So, kudos for being passable—but not much else.

Now, let’s talk about the pacing. It’s bad, and I don’t mean that in a fun, charming, “it’s so bad, it’s good” way. This pacing is like trying to outrun an avalanche—every time you think you’ve got a second to breathe, the plot kicks you in the face. Things happen so fast that I don’t even have time to think “Oh, hey, that’s kind of tragic,” before the next disaster is slapping me across the face. One minute, the MC is experiencing some deep trauma over the death of their tribe, the next minute, they’re taking down an entire city because they couldn’t control their Wrath. Could you slow down for five seconds? I get that this is supposed to be the backstory of the MC and you want to skip to the academy arc, but the way the plot barrels through these moments is like watching that gif where the a train slams the into a small tunnel over and over again, until it finally enters inside. Yes, it’s dramatic—but it doesn’t feel earned because readers are barely allowed to feel the impact of any of it. Kenneth Burke would've had an absolute field day here with his idea of “guilt” in the process of redemption, but in this case, I’d argue there’s no guilt. There’s no emotional weight because we don’t have time to feel. The pace is a constant downhill slope.

The tragedy you're trying to build? It falls flat. You show the MC’s loss, the deaths, the grief. You show them experiencing wrath—but because we’re rushing so much, it all becomes background noise. I get that there’s supposed to be a buildup to the MC’s full-blown wrath transformation, but it’s all happening so fast that none of the tragedy feels real. It’s like reading a bullet point list of emotions rather than experiencing them. If you’d just slowed down the chapters where the MC interacts with their tribe, where they reflect on what was lost, you could’ve actually made the MC’s wrath feel more meaningful, more tragic. But instead, you just pile on one incident after another without letting any of it settle. This isn’t a river where a reader could've swimmed in its own pace, it’s a waterfall, and the plot keeps breaking the reader's interest each time the transition happens.

You should have let the pacing breathe. Let the MC feel the weight of their family’s death, let us sit with the loss of their people. Let them dwell in that guilt that actually makes readers symphatize more. Maybe even let the reader feel some of that rage coming through—not just tell us the MC is angry, but show us that they can’t escape it. You know what? I’m not even asking for that much. Just a couple more paragraphs of reflection here and there would’ve made all the difference. But instead, it’s like we’re speedrunning through the narrative, like we’re rushing to get to the part where the MC burns everything to the ground. If you don’t take a breath once in a while, your emotional stakes get watered down, and that’s what’s happening here. The wrath doesn’t feel earned—it feels like a firecracker going off every chapter, with no one caring about the consequences.

And speaking of emotional whiplash, the tone’s got some serious bipolar disorder. In one paragraph, I’m supposed to be mourning the loss of the MC’s tribe, and then the next, the MC is joking about not having a dick and how they’re so mad about it. I get it, you want to inject humor into a dark story, but the humor here isn’t comic relief. It’s like slapping me across the face with a wet fish after I’ve just been told my family’s dead. It’s an identity crisis, sure, but this isn't funny. It’s jarring. When your plot doesn't even have a coherent tone, it’s hard to even care about what’s happening. You’re trying to build a classic isekai tragedy, but the tone keeps flickering between “I’m a badass monster now” and “I miss my old life as a human” in ways that feel as if you’re not sure which one you want to write.

I could almost overlook all of that—maybe with the right editor, those things could be smoothed out—but the foreshadowing of the MC becoming the wrath? Oof. That was handled worse than a Minecraft tutorial on lava pits. It feels rushed, forced, and worse—it's predictable. You make it so obvious that the MC is going to be the Wrath that I’m almost yawning by the time it happens. The prophecy’s foreshadowing isn't subtle. MC referencing the character and supposed disapapeared kingdom? It's sure as hell not subtle at all. It's laid out on the table like the most obvious thing in the world, and by the time it happens, you’ve killed any emotional tension that could’ve come with it. Don’t drop a huge reveal like that and just hope it sticks. Give it some finesse, give the audience a reason to be shocked when it finally happens. It should feel like an explosion that makes sense, not like a tired punchline telegraphed ages ago.

Finally, I’m going to say this with no sugar-coating—you need an editor. It’s a brutal truth, but it’s the only way this story is going to pop. The transition waterfalls need to be smoothed out. The info dumps need to be cut. The pacing needs to be regulated. Right now, this feels like a raw draft you decided to share with the world before it had a chance to become a story. Sure, it works—kind of. But every small cut in the narrative, every decision to slow down a moment of reflection, is going to save the reader from checking out halfway through. Take the time to make your world shine by adding depth to these moments. Otherwise, you’ll burn through your audience’s attention just as fast as your MC burns down cities.

So, in summary—this is okay. Right now, it’s just “passable” for an ordinary reader. But with some serious work, it could become something really good. Don’t rush towards the plot points. Don’t skip the emotional moments, even if they're hard to do, and expand on the actually important scenes for maximum emotional resonance.

 

[Anonjohn20]

I read three chapters, and I’ve got to say, if you’re going for the “OP gender-bender protag doing stuff” template, then congrats, you’ve got something. If by "something," you mean yet another dragon girl story with a side of "what did I just read?" I mean, sure, you’ve got all the pieces in place: the confused reincarnated soul, the tragic backstory, the all-consuming wrath. Throw in some poorly-timed puberty jokes and lizard tits, and there you go. But hey, at least it’s “passable” in that it’s got a pulse. It’s not dead in the water like some of the truly tragic stuff out there, so let's give credit where credit’s due. There’s just a lot of room to sharpen the edges, and when I say a lot, I mean you could park a bus that I take everyday in the gaps between your ideas and execution.

First, synopsis. Ah, the synopsis. The first impression. It's fine, I guess. It tells me what to expect, but then again, so do 70% of all the other synopses on this website. You communicate the tropes decently, but that’s not exactly setting the world on fire. You’ve got your basic "guy gets reincarnated as a monster girl" schtick, and the setup is as familiar as the inside of my grandma’s kitchen. “Oh, the MC is a lizard with boobs now? Hilarious and totally unique.” If I had a nickel for every reincarnated boy who suddenly has a tail, claws, and an existential crisis about not having genitals anymore, I could actually buy a salamander. Not a metaphorical one, a real, live salamander. I could go to that canyon two hundred kilometers away, catch it, and I wouldn’t have to read about another shocking twist where the MC is now some wyvern who has to deal with the burdens of existence as a glorified biology lesson. Sure, it's on-brand for the genre, but nothing is pulling me out of the abyss of oh, I’ve seen this before. So, kudos for being passable—but not much else.

Now, let’s talk about the pacing. It’s bad, and I don’t mean that in a fun, charming, “it’s so bad, it’s good” way. This pacing is like trying to outrun an avalanche—every time you think you’ve got a second to breathe, the plot kicks you in the face. Things happen so fast that I don’t even have time to think “Oh, hey, that’s kind of tragic,” before the next disaster is slapping me across the face. One minute, the MC is experiencing some deep trauma over the death of their tribe, the next minute, they’re taking down an entire city because they couldn’t control their Wrath. Could you slow down for five seconds? I get that this is supposed to be the backstory of the MC and you want to skip to the academy arc, but the way the plot barrels through these moments is like watching that gif where the a train slams the into a small tunnel over and over again, until it finally enters inside. Yes, it’s dramatic—but it doesn’t feel earned because readers are barely allowed to feel the impact of any of it. Kenneth Burke would've had an absolute field day here with his idea of “guilt” in the process of redemption, but in this case, I’d argue there’s no guilt. There’s no emotional weight because we don’t have time to feel. The pace is a constant downhill slope.

The tragedy you're trying to build? It falls flat. You show the MC’s loss, the deaths, the grief. You show them experiencing wrath—but because we’re rushing so much, it all becomes background noise. I get that there’s supposed to be a buildup to the MC’s full-blown wrath transformation, but it’s all happening so fast that none of the tragedy feels real. It’s like reading a bullet point list of emotions rather than experiencing them. If you’d just slowed down the chapters where the MC interacts with their tribe, where they reflect on what was lost, you could’ve actually made the MC’s wrath feel more meaningful, more tragic. But instead, you just pile on one incident after another without letting any of it settle. This isn’t a river where a reader could've swimmed in its own pace, it’s a waterfall, and the plot keeps breaking the reader's interest each time the transition happens.

You should have let the pacing breathe. Let the MC feel the weight of their family’s death, let us sit with the loss of their people. Let them dwell in that guilt that actually makes readers symphatize more. Maybe even let the reader feel some of that rage coming through—not just tell us the MC is angry, but show us that they can’t escape it. You know what? I’m not even asking for that much. Just a couple more paragraphs of reflection here and there would’ve made all the difference. But instead, it’s like we’re speedrunning through the narrative, like we’re rushing to get to the part where the MC burns everything to the ground. If you don’t take a breath once in a while, your emotional stakes get watered down, and that’s what’s happening here. The wrath doesn’t feel earned—it feels like a firecracker going off every chapter, with no one caring about the consequences.

And speaking of emotional whiplash, the tone’s got some serious bipolar disorder. In one paragraph, I’m supposed to be mourning the loss of the MC’s tribe, and then the next, the MC is joking about not having a dick and how they’re so mad about it. I get it, you want to inject humor into a dark story, but the humor here isn’t comic relief. It’s like slapping me across the face with a wet fish after I’ve just been told my family’s dead. It’s an identity crisis, sure, but this isn't funny. It’s jarring. When your plot doesn't even have a coherent tone, it’s hard to even care about what’s happening. You’re trying to build a classic isekai tragedy, but the tone keeps flickering between “I’m a badass monster now” and “I miss my old life as a human” in ways that feel as if you’re not sure which one you want to write.

I could almost overlook all of that—maybe with the right editor, those things could be smoothed out—but the foreshadowing of the MC becoming the wrath? Oof. That was handled worse than a Minecraft tutorial on lava pits. It feels rushed, forced, and worse—it's predictable. You make it so obvious that the MC is going to be the Wrath that I’m almost yawning by the time it happens. The prophecy’s foreshadowing isn't subtle. MC referencing the character and supposed disapapeared kingdom? It's sure as hell not subtle at all. It's laid out on the table like the most obvious thing in the world, and by the time it happens, you’ve killed any emotional tension that could’ve come with it. Don’t drop a huge reveal like that and just hope it sticks. Give it some finesse, give the audience a reason to be shocked when it finally happens. It should feel like an explosion that makes sense, not like a tired punchline telegraphed ages ago.

Finally, I’m going to say this with no sugar-coating—you need an editor. It’s a brutal truth, but it’s the only way this story is going to pop. The transition waterfalls need to be smoothed out. The info dumps need to be cut. The pacing needs to be regulated. Right now, this feels like a raw draft you decided to share with the world before it had a chance to become a story. Sure, it works—kind of. But every small cut in the narrative, every decision to slow down a moment of reflection, is going to save the reader from checking out halfway through. Take the time to make your world shine by adding depth to these moments. Otherwise, you’ll burn through your audience’s attention just as fast as your MC burns down cities.

So, in summary—this is okay. Right now, it’s just “passable” for an ordinary reader. But with some serious work, it could become something really good. Don’t rush towards the plot points. Don’t skip the emotional moments, even if they're hard to do, and expand on the actually important scenes for maximum emotional resonance.

No mention of the butler (AI)! Thank you, Naash, for holding yourself to a higher standard.

 

[Juan19977]

Alright. I'm throwing my hat in the ring. I'm a new writer. Rip me to shreds.

Heads up, chapter 3 was my first attempt at a lore drop. I think it's my toughest chapter to get through.

Fate is a Bit*h

James Von Berkshire was the sole survivor of one of the most prominent families that ruled his realm. The once-legendary family was among the first to discover the secrets of their world and amass an army of PLAYERS. But the mistake of one idiot destroyed the entire family; even exiled...

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