Survival Of The Fittest

I haven't been able to coordinate very well for the Two Grumpy Men critiques so I may just open a separate one that's like 'Ricky holds nothing back and might be kind of a rude dick if your character isn't great, so only apply if you're ready for that'

Wherein Ricky reads your shit, and tells you if it's shit.

Honestly if it's good, he's still going to make fun of it wherever possible.

This ain't yo momma's critique thread! Only apply to the queue if you're interested in having me tell you EXACTLY what I think of some of your writing, with me holding nothing back, and you're not gonna get too mad about that. Also only apply your own stuff. I'll take any version including V7, but I'd prefer finished characters if possible.

methodical slackerToday at 2:44 PM
Are Mini characters eligible?

No.

Queue:

1. Kimiko Kao
2. Nate Turner (to be changed)
3. Brandon Murphy
4. Hel Fury
5. Aleksandra Prudius (to be changed)
5.5. Axel

Kimiko Kao please

Nate Turner cause I asked you already and you graciously accepted please.

Serena Waters please.

Let's get Ty in here sure

She may not exactly be finished yet, but since she won't be on the island, I'd like to hear your take on Aleksandra Prudius' pregame story.

hello i was given permission to be here i swear

i was gonna be a dick and say ivy but uhh axel i guess

Okay, Axel it is.

Queue is now closed for the time being.

[quote]KilmarnockToday at 2:14 PM
Alllllright let's go
“ It's all about the game, G047, and how you play it. All about respect and if you can take it. There's nobody holding you back - you can't be driven by feelings, only by anger. On the other hand, it'd be a shameful thing if you lost your head, a careless student who wound up dead…” - Dennis Lourvey


Okay, let’s try this again.

It’s the age old story: Boy meets critique forum, boy neglects critique forum for well over a year, boy realizes the critique is woefully out of date anyway. That’s what I get for not reading shit, so this is sort of an apology review for never getting around to reviewing all of Deamon’s Kimiko in V6. But then again, as we know, this critique thread is dedicated to being an asshole and ripping characters apart where I can and there just wasn’t much to make fun of with Kimiko so, really, I think we can all agree it was really Deamon’s fault.
^I have a foreword pre-written but then realized I don't like typing out full reviews
Ahem, moving on.

Like before, I start with reading Aliya’s pregame but I’m not going to be dedicating as much to the critique of it as last time. It’s not the ‘meat’ of the character but a pregame can be important to understanding the character’s decisions and behavior, provided there’s one in the first place (as we can sometimes get characters with very little or no pregame and these characters can still be good).

So anyway, Aliya. Aliya Kimia Nemati (I for the life of me cannot remember her full name and will never refer to her as such again) is one of Deamon’s four entries into V7. I’d generally say she’s the sportiest of the four but she’s competing against the crux of George Hunter’s football team defense in Bret Carter and arguably THE star of the girl’s basketball team in Arizona Butler. So you can basically pick out any of these three to decide who’s the sportiest. Interestingly enough, Aliya shares her interest in amateur wrestling with Bret, her love of rap and hip hop with Arizona, and all three have a love of fitness/working out mentioned in one form or another so it’s kind of a… we’ll say cohesive group. I’m not saying Deamon has a type, but yeah he totally has a type and he won’t often deviate from it. To his credit Forrest IS the odd one out and from what I’ve seen he’s done well with her so I’m not saying he’s a one-trick pony or anything. The man knows at least two.
So, pregame notes while reading Aliya, her oneshots are fantastic. Her race comes up in a pretty cool way that is seldom tackled on SotF and even rarer taken on in a sensible or even-handed way, and there's this tension conveyed with that pickup truck group staring at her and her sister to the point where I'm worried for her safety, more than I would for somebody on the island because it's just so real.
Like oh shit, are those dudes skinheads and are they about to attack her?
And they don't even do anything overtly racist, they're just coldly staring so your imagination runs wild and I think the scene's better for that.
It means there's always that kind of nervousness in her life, something she just has to deal with sometimes.
Wrestling's fairly central to the character too and there's more than a single thread spent on it, but Aliya doesn't feel like just a one-off. She's still a character without her proclivity for wrassles. So good job there too.
You're one of the better natural dialog writers. I don't have any examples up so it's just a general note; Aliya speech sounds like an actual human would sound. And that's pretty much all I had for her pregame; I really thought 'is the shits' was a Britishism because I've never heard any American say that but I googled that shit and I guess it isn't, because I couldn't find anything for it?
Right, so game proper, and I've already read Aliya's first thread. I mean, I was in it. We can draw a few qualities from her right away: She's level-headed, she prefers to try and talk through her problems if she thinks it's possible, and she intends to keep the peace. She's physically and mentally pretty well-equipped to survive - she assesses the situation and determines that if push came to shove, she could take Justin down and she's 100% right, but understands it's also really risky and there's an alternative in simply talking him down, which she's a skilled-enough talker to do.
There are a lot of characters who THINK they're diplomatic and suave but every time they open their mouth they just kinda piss everybody around them off. Aliya is the pair of scissors to the bomb's fuse for real, though.
She even manages to pull that off with Tony and Michael nearby, both of whom are far more aggressive about the situation (Tony softens up pretty quickly though, Michael does not)
Moving on to her next thread, I enjoyed the dream sequence because it catches the natural flow of dreams, e.g. not always making sense and featuring realistic imagery.
Dreaming about a day at school and mundane events before waking up: Broke.
Dreaming about a giant boot stepping on people and making them look like wads of maggot-infested chewing gum: Woke
It's short and might uncharitably read as filler but it's HIGHLY entertaining. The nightmare is only the first part of the scene, too, and while it's not particularly eventful, I'm down to see the anxieties of she who takes it upon herself to keep night watch.
Really nothing to say about the next thread.
Moss and Bones is... probably the least enjoyable part of the read but it's nothing on Aliya's part. The scene works with Paloma, Aliya, Tony and to some extent Amber but I felt like nobody else really contributes in a meaningful way to the main events of the plot of this thread, which is the fight between the aforementioned four that culminates in Tony's horrific injury that sets up the next thread. The injury Aliya suffers here is a huge deal, too, and we're left to feel the pain with her. Oh, my aching knees.
The sendoff Aliya gives Tony after his passing was very sweet. His death is made that much better by her presence for sure.
"Hey," She started. "You killed someone and you've gotta carry that now. You made the choice to shoot that gun and tomorrow they're gonna tell you the name of who it was and you need to carry that too." Aliya looked at the boy in front of her and all she saw was someone who was scared and trying to make the best decisions he could. She had seen the exact same look before, back when it was the early days on the island. When she spoke again she kept her voice level and soft.
FUN FACT I TOTALLY MISSED THIS LINE ON MY FIRST READ OF THIS THREAD AND IT'S FUCKING GREAT
I was in the death thread (as an aside to not!Deamon folks, I took on the assignment of Aliya before she was slated to die as an apology for half-assing Kimiko in my desires to move my critiques to V7 in order to be current) so I didn't want to spend too much time on it but Aliya's story has lots of callbacks in its bookends and it wasn't a central or heavily dealt with theme, but there's some guilt she attributes in her failure to reign in Justin so the way the story starts and ends really helps to seal the deal on a complete story with no real loose threads hanging.
And that's my review on Aliya. Like with Kimiko, I'd really like to make fun of her as THAT'S THE POINT OF MY CRITIQUE THREAD but you keep giving me good shit.