I am simultaneously impressed and amazingly disappointed. This author has written over 900, 000 words on this site alone, has multiple published stories, has been writing for a fairly long time, and has somehow- in all those words, stories, and years of writing- somehow not only managed to not just fail to improve on their writing, but in some ways regress. That’s a f**king achievement. I’m not clapping, don’t start. 

Hi, I’m Crazy Minh. Nerd, indie author, voracious reader, university student, semi-professional critic of online literature (especially of the painfully bad variety- I have a blog where I specifically MST bad fanfiction), general-purpose snarker, and I just wrote a review of another one of this author’s stories, which I thought was probably just kinda sh*t due to the author being much less well written at the time. I was willing to give it a break because at least the author may have improved since then, right? I mean, everyone does, that’s a safe assumption to make.

Right?

Ooh boi, that was a assumption that proved to be wrong. So very, very, wrong. 

So, first off, the author has regressed in two key areas. Firstly, they seem to have forgotten how to structure their story so that it is, well, a story. In the first chapter, I was having to read paragraphs like they were written on jigsaw pieces. The author jumps around so much that it feels less like he’s writing and more like he’s attached a keyboard to a pogo stick. 

I exaggerate, but I am making a valid point. The story does not flow well, and I cannot understand how someone can spent so long writing and actually end up worse at it than when they started.

The second key area where things have gotten worse is in the actual storywriting. I have no f**king clue what is going on in this story. I read it all the way through, and all I managed to gather was that there was something about flames, some generic power fantasy stuff that seems to be this author’s bread and butter, and some casual s*xism every time a female character appears. I’m not even going to try critiquing the gender politics here, I have since discovered that the author has a not insignificant amount of transphobia going on, and to be honest, I have better things to do than engage with that sh*t.

To be honest, there is really nothing I can actually critique about this story. It is such a massive non-entity of fiction that does nothing particularly amazing, nor does anything notably bad. And that’s somehow incredible. I have seen a lot of poor writing working the bad fanfiction beat. Authors like the one behind this are a dime a dozen in the festering halls of Fanfiction. Net, and they’re even more common in the digital clusterf**k that is Wattpad. But it is insanely unique for someone to write as much as this and absolutely fail to improve their craft.

I realise this review is less a review than a commentary on how mindboggling I find this author and their work. You might even call it an attack, although I will stress that everything I say is coming from a critical perspective, not a malicious one. The author is an anonymous online denzien, I don’t really give a sh*t about them in any way. I just cannot comprehend how you can spent so long writing, and just not actually get better at it.

Like, seriously, this is spooky. I thought I had to worry about improving my craft, but apparently it’s possible to write for years and never get better. 

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