Talk:Come Together! Marines Gone Mad!/@comment-4080028-20160617094110

Finally! Finally got around to reading someone else's work on this wiki for a change! Now that I have, time to lay my flat out honest opinion onto this comment for the world to see.

I have to be frank here, the opening narration started off awesome for me. Seeing Luffy play up the same role of Pirate King as Roger did before his death, I loved it and it made me excited to keep reading. ...Until he actually died and things went south. The general tone of how people became discouraged and a Great Pirate Purge began as the sense of order and law went mad across the world likewise filled me with great discouragement too. As someone who absolutely loves One Piece, Roger and Luffy, seeing everything the two worked for result in this doesn't bode well with me. So basically, this story has left me with a very bad first impression from the start. But I kept reading regardess.

As for the story itself, it is indeed well written and thought out, albeit a bit short for my tastes. Although, considering the first chapter of One Dream on Ship of Fools wasn't exactly a mile long either has me biting my tongue now, so whatever. Aside from skilled writing, I was left with a general sense of being left empty-handed at the end. Again, I'm a huge supporter of One Piece, including its wackiness and larger than life atmosphere. I know beginning chapters are never that amazing right off the bat, as the better stuff is saved for later, and I know everyone is going to have their own spin on things and their own preferential taste in how they write, but this still left me feeling... what's the word? ...Unsatisfied I suppose. Things felt way down to earth for me, as if this were a real location coming under real siege from real law enforcement. And honestly, I'm not looking for reality, but a fantasy I can dump my mind into so I can get away from reality for a while. So it's really, really hard for me to get excited or invested in something like this right now. Which reminds me...

The pacing is something else I wanted, but forgot, to bring up. The way the events went rom a festive party to straight up conflict in the making made me feel like the story was progressing too fast, and that's never really a good thing for me. I like to think I've honed my skills at pacing enough over my years of writing experience to know when to speed things up and when to slow them down, and I think this chapter needed to slow down and really immerse its reader in the environment and its characters. Taking its time to really discuss the location and its details nearby, what the protagonists look like, what they're feeling, thinking, and so on. Devil's in the details like that I'm afraid. It's the little things, the sum of the parts if you will, that can make the whole feel larger than it would on its own.

...But those are just my two cents on the matter. In the end, you write really well and have genuinely good ideas, but the execution feels a bit lackluster to me, and the premise of the story has me unsure if I want to continue or not.