Sunday, August 19, 2012

To Light a Candle: DJay's criticism

Ed. note: I was asked to give criticism on this blog for the author, so the "review" consists mostly of constructive criticism and is addressed to the author.

For reference, To Light a Candle was written by proxiehunter and can be found here.

During the first 'act,' your posts where you watched Candle Cove and described the episodes? The descriptions were laying it on a little thick. Very long text dumps that a lot of people out there just don't have the patience to read. This was the same problem I had with famous slenderblog The Tutorial; I just don't give a shit when I go to a new post and it's several paragraphs long, only to go to the next one and have that several paragraphs. One or two posts every now and then, like.. Wham Episodes and plot twists that come every now and then? Perfect as super long. But readers like little posts.

But readers don't like little boring posts, like during the Omega arc, when you'd leave a post saying "I'm gonna go do this thing now," and that's it. If you have anything important in those like.. place names or what you're actually doing, readers tend to skim over them because they're just filler to the common eye.

During the Beakman arc, which was admirably well done for the most part, all the posts with the codes were no doubt awesome at the time, but to the reader reading through-- that is, most of your readerbase? It's just more text that looks like filler. One of my biggest beefs with blog stories is that people tend to put info in the comments, and I don't really like that. If you're gonna put important info-- like the translations of the codes-- in the comments, put it on the actual blog again. "But wait, that defeats the purpose of the whole 'Doctor Beakman reads this blog and cannot know' aspect!" Yes. But that's where we reach the fork in the road of writing blogs: You come to a point eventually where it's choosing between immersion/realism and a balanced finished product with good flow. Look at, say, Marble Hornets. Look at "Entry 21," with the red tower. That was a terrifying entry when it first came out and all the suspense was placed greatly because it made it feel realistic, like Jay was just posting the contents of his video tape. But to an outsider, it's kinda suspenseful, but it's.. just.. boring for the most part. The same applies muchmore to, say, Dark Harvest or Tribe Twelve or any series that puts a focus on being "boring because it's realism."

Finally, it.. ah. I appreciate what you were trying to do with the whole "Hide the Wooden Girl until the end" bit, but it didn't really work. At least, you didn't built it up enough. You hid too much until the end, and then you didn't focus on all of it enough. The flow was pretty off. Like, the Screaming Tower. Great stuff in the final post, but then we see the Wooden Girl for the only time in the story and it's fascinating, but it's just.. it's all in the same post, as well as having the climax and the ending all in one post, and the flow is just way off.

SPECIFICALLY, you had a really good flow going for the first half of the story, building up on all the Candle Cove aspects and the Wooden Girl, and I really couldn't wait to see where those story parts went. But then you focused on Omega and kinda took the focus away-- that felt almost arbitrary-- and then you entered the.. really bizarre place. I loved the bizarre place, but there really was no build-up to it, and it wound up being a significant part of the story. But there was no build-up. And it lasted a long time! You introduced all-new elements like The Eye, which I did like, but it felt arbitrary, like you just pulled a way for Janice to be freed out of thin air, no build-up at all. You should have at least gone back to earlier posts and retconned in hints about it. And then we came to Doctor Beakman, and that part was brilliant, but it really didn't have much to do with the Candle Cove or really that much that had been built-up. You just seemed like you were adding whatever seemed scary. And then, after an extended time there, we finally saw hints of the Candle Cove arc and it looked like it was getting really good again! ....but then it all just hit the end like a brick wall. We needed more time to slip back into the Candle Cove arc, maybe some entries of reaching the Screaming Tower and sneaking around, trying to get to the recording room. Entries building on the Wooden Girl's presence being just around that corner, entries reminding us of everything Carlson set out to do, entries showing how the Screaming Tower was, like.. vitally connected to The Eye and Doctor Beakman and all this other insanity.

But there was none/little of that. It wound up feeling like reading one story-- the Candle Cove arc-- and then suddenly a different story starts halfway through starring the same protagonist, and we learn that one, and then that one just abruptly stops and we're thrown right at the end of the first story, feeling as if we missed some crucial rising action or climaxes.

No comments:

Post a Comment