Author Topic: December 28 - LongTimeUnderdog - The Name of God, Jin'Cathul 1:2  (Read 1289 times)

LongTimeUnderdog

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December 28 - LongTimeUnderdog - The Name of God, Jin'Cathul 1:2
« on: December 28, 2009, 09:50:08 PM »
Yes it's technically a rewrite . . .well . . .not really.  I went back and started adding chapters in, to better build to important things that are happening later.  That and I need to keep all the characters together chronologically.

Anyway, was meeting my wife's cousin so I did not have the depth of time I wanted this weekend to fix up some of the dumb mistakes I've been berated for since day one.

Anyway, so new comers don't feel totally out of the loop.

Anaiah 1:1:  Anaiah is discovered by the side of a man made crater and rescued before falling in and dying.  because she has white skin the people in the crater want to kill her but Caramoth, the man who found her, says that the Gods (the suns) kept him from killing her, so she has to live.  He becomes her foster father.

Guli 1:1:  Guli is discovered by a tribe of pygmies  who take him in.  Guli, with his strange ability to make rocks dance when he sings and his herculean strength scare the pygmies but they take him in because of his abilities to help them in their mines (by moving rocks and digging with his super strength).

Zulbane 1:1:  Zulbane is discovered by a tribe of women who live near a volcano and as such have very fertile ground on which a small jungle oasis grows.  They are ultra feminist and so they take Zulbane to their scribe to have his name removed, thus making him a dumb slave.  The scribes assistant, oddly enough purchases him from the women.  learns she is his sister, and that his name was changed from Traxix to Zulbane.

Jin'Cathul 1:1:  Jin'Cathul and his father go to a temple for Lyrists (magic users) who have discovered the first ever hole in the Shroud.  Talven, Jin's father, is a respected researcher of the Shroud, because of his son's ability to control it (though not to any great extent).  Jin, while helping his father, encounters a dagger made of a weird metal called Orcan.  aThe orcan dagger make's Jin's magic hurt him.  When touches the dagger he all but explodes.

Jin'Cathul 1:2:  In which Jin survived the ordeal . . . and stuff happens to him.

lethalfalcon

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Re: December 28 - LongTimeUnderdog - The Name of God, Jin'Cathul 1:2
« Reply #1 on: January 04, 2010, 01:26:27 PM »
... and no one's responded to this one, yet? Hrm, perhaps that's not a good sign.

Alright... well, I suppose I could sum this up easily. I could have liked this chapter a lot... but I didn't.

But I doubt you'd let me make such an accusation without evidence. Darn.

The thing that bothered me the most is that a lot of time passed (months), and a lot of stuff happened (apparently they had to pay to leave?), but I have no clue what that stuff was, or why. That really irks me, because it's like you just threw out a huge chunk of the story in order to get Jin to a place where you can torture him. I already hate time lapses, especially large ones, but if there are crucial things that happen in that time lapse? Ugh, bad mojo.

Outside of that, there's another issue that I had: too much happened to Jin in a very short amount of time. He arrived in town, sold the skins, got sold himself, got taken to the pits (which took a long time, according to the writing), worked for "a full rotation of the suns" (however long that is... I need to know your time frame, but that seems long), sleeps (for an undetermined amount of time), then trains (for quite some time, I assume). And he's eight years old.

I call BS. You take an 8-year-old who has lived a sedentary life, and make them do that much work, and they'll either be dead, or immovable the next day. I don't care how much energy a little kid has. He's malnourished and lazy. He is not going to be running back and forth for "a full rotation of the suns", unless that's an hour. You take any person who isn't in shape and put them through a grueling exercise regiment, and they're useless the next day, and if you continue to make muscles work past their limits, you end up pulling tendons, pinching nerves, and so on (personal experience: I started exercising awhile back and ended up pinching a nerve in my shoulder; my left arm was practically useless for a week, and the numbness took forever to go away). This isn't DBZ where you train every day for 16 hours in 10G environments and magically get better. :P

Now, contrary to Hollywood's belief, slaves were not usually treated very harshly. An abused slave is not a productive slave. Whipping a little child is going to make him very unproductive, when he starts suffering from blood loss on top of his normal malnourishment.  Yes, there are the (mostly true) stories of horrible slave drivers who constantly abused them, but they usually didn't have slaves very long, because they died. Even a small whip gash can fester, and I want to see how much money Jalean can get from a kid with gangrene.

So what I end up with is a chapter I just can't believe. I have no problem with Talven being a deadbeat dad, nor with the concept of Jin working in the pits or his inherent loss of pretty much everything in his life. Them's the breaks, as they say. But making a little kid perform outside of the human limits just triggers my WTF alarm. Unless he's really some sort of super human... but then, I would have expected you to inform me of that before this.
I don't have good days. I have great days, where I'm a magician ridding the world of all evil, or at least everything I don't like. And then I wake up, and it's back to work for me.

Recovering_Cynic

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Re: December 28 - LongTimeUnderdog - The Name of God, Jin'Cathul 1:2
« Reply #2 on: January 14, 2010, 03:57:21 AM »
Okay, I really liked the re-write.  This is all stuff we needed to know from the beginning, although I must say a few plot points were confusing.  Before I get to those, I'll have to say that this is the best chapter you've written to date.  I enjoyed it.

Okay, now to the confusion:

1) It really did seem that Jin and his father had a good relationship, and the change was confusing, for multiple reasons.  We go for some time in this chapter without finding out why the two are now poor and destitute.  We don't need to know immediately, but sooner than it was revealed.  I scratched my head for way too long.  Next, there needs to be a better explanation for the change in relationship.  There is nothing in the first chapter to show that Jin's dad is so uncaring.  There needs to be some sort of foreshadowing, or there needs to be more grief on the dad's part when they are separated.  It didn't fit the way it's written.

2) Okay, so this isn't so much confusion as it is a missed opportunity: show us the warriors fighting on stage!  I've been dying to see the weapons they use.  Jin is unfamiliar, so he is the perfect tool to use to describe your exotic weapons and fighting (incidentally, I loved that he was able to explain the naked women.  You did that really well.).

3) And yes, I'll have to agree with lethal that there was too much overworking for a small child.  There can be overworkign, but not to the extent you pulled here (unless Jin has some magical ability to survive what an in-shape high school athlete couldn't)

Other than those small complaints, this really was a good chapter, well written, and with a much improved setting.
this is the way the world ends,
not with a bang, but a whimper
~T.S. Eliot

LongTimeUnderdog

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Re: December 28 - LongTimeUnderdog - The Name of God, Jin'Cathul 1:2
« Reply #3 on: January 14, 2010, 04:29:16 AM »
Quote
1) It really did seem that Jin and his father had a good relationship, and the change was confusing, for multiple reasons.  We go for some time in this chapter without finding out why the two are now poor and destitute.  We don't need to know immediately, but sooner than it was revealed.  I scratched my head for way too long.  Next, there needs to be a better explanation for the change in relationship.  There is nothing in the first chapter to show that Jin's dad is so uncaring.  There needs to be some sort of foreshadowing, or there needs to be more grief on the dad's part when they are separated.  It didn't fit the way it's written.

So Talven burning Jin supposedly to death wasn't a big enough indicator . . . drat.  But seriously that was what I was hoping for, to give the audience a glimpse of Talven's true relationship, not just the one Jin essentially makes up .  Sadly my big reveal doesn't happen until around chapter 9 or 10 of Jin'Cathul (when Lady Maz buys him up).  Think that's too far away?

Quote
2) Okay, so this isn't so much confusion as it is a missed opportunity: show us the warriors fighting on stage!  I've been dying to see the weapons they use.  Jin is unfamiliar, so he is the perfect tool to use to describe your exotic weapons and fighting (incidentally, I loved that he was able to explain the naked women.  You did that really well).

So good on the sex, now add the violence?  And here I thought I had enough head's getting smashed in ( think I have a string of three chapters or close to a string of three where people are getting baked).  I suppose tossing in more face-kicking shouldn't be too hard.  Plus I've always lived by the motto, "If it can be hit, that's probably the best answer."
« Last Edit: January 14, 2010, 05:06:49 AM by LongTimeUnderdog »

Recovering_Cynic

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Re: December 28 - LongTimeUnderdog - The Name of God, Jin'Cathul 1:2
« Reply #4 on: January 14, 2010, 06:11:21 AM »
No, the burning didn't cue me in, but maybe I was slow on that one.  Wait 'til there's a bit more feedback before you change that one.  As to the late reveal that Talv is not the father, I'm not saying it won't work.  I'd have to read it again, and at this point my brain is fading into never-never land.

As to what I wanted to see on stage, it wasn't so much the fighting as the weapons.  You have some bizarrely named weapons that most of the world knows nothing about.  We need a distinct description of some of them, and the part on stage is an opportunity for some of that.
this is the way the world ends,
not with a bang, but a whimper
~T.S. Eliot

Asmodemon

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Re: December 28 - LongTimeUnderdog - The Name of God, Jin'Cathul 1:2
« Reply #5 on: January 16, 2010, 06:35:20 PM »
Quote
So Talven burning Jin supposedly to death wasn't a big enough indicator . . . drat.  But seriously that was what I was hoping for, to give the audience a glimpse of Talven's true relationship, not just the one Jin essentially makes up .

I did notice that in the first chapter Talven treats Jin like a research tool and not like a son. Otherwise he would have let him stop as soon as creating the sparks started to hurt. Now that his tool is more trouble than he's worth I didn't find it surprising he would sell him.