Grotesquery

That's fine, and I appreciate your admiration for a source like that. I'd just say that a situation like this may not be the best to apply to a Kingdom Heart short story. I can't rescind any of my complaints about the depth of the story just because you plan on expanding it. I have to look at the story itself as if there will never be anything more or anything less, and its when I adapt that viewpoint that I start seeing the problems I mentioned. At the very least, I'm glad you can take constructive criticism. I hope my words will help you grow as a writer, in even the smallest of ways.

ARCMIN REVIEWS…. *THE ALCHEMYST*…… BY RIDLEY MICHAEL SCOTT Warning: The following review will contain huge spoilers because I simply do not care enough. The Alchemyst has made me realize two very important things. The first is that Teenagers you can’t see tend to be boring. The second is that strange French men that listen to Pink Floyd probably hold the secret to eternal life. So, what *is* the Alchemyst? Well, aside from being a word too sophisticated for me to question whether or not it’s spelled right, The Alchemyst is a book about the Alchemyst! Nicholas Flamel, (alongside his non-Alchemyst wife Perenele) is an immortal master of transmutation and trickery. The chosen guardians of the Book of Abraham the Mage, Flamel and his wife have dedicated centuries to protecting its secrets from the forces of darkness. Not the least among those secrets being the recipe for Eternal Life. It’s now the 21st century, and the Flamels find themselves employing Sophie and Josh Newman, blonde haired twins that work just across the road from each other (darn I couldn’t get more generic than that if I tried). Life seems to be well, with neither of the twins ever questioning the strange couple who start looking older every month before somehow turning back into strapping young cowfolk the next. But, surprise! Some weird bloke named John Dee’s got immortality, too! And it just so happens he wants that there book that the Flamels got in their mitts. What a calamity! Put simply, things go sour pretty quick. Perenele is kidnapped, Dee nabs Abraham’s jazz, the mud guys make a mess in the book shop, and I think there were eggs involved somewhere? Yeah, definitely eggs. Fortunately, in all the confusion plucky young Josh manages to swipe 2 pages from the book before Dee high-tails it. Through a pretty stupid stroke of good luck, they also happen to be the most important pages in the entire freaking thing. (Wow, not bad, huh? I mean, we literally would not have a story if this didn’t happen.) Thus, it becomes a race to protect the pages from Dee, before he can use their terrible power to wreck havoc upon the human world. And just when all hope seems lost, salvation may come from a very unexpected source. Alright, I may have made it sound a little more generic than it actually is, but that really is the gist. The rest of the book is all about trying to dodge Dee, while also making funny little quips about the past and the present society. So, what’s the good stuff here? Where’s the BEEF??? Well, I’ll put it bluntly: this story is just a ton of fun. It might not be the most original, but it takes its concept and it takes it far. As far as it can go and probably even farther, even though that’s not possible (ha, get used to those words). Everything from the villains to the locales just scream classic fiction. Dee is delightfully terrible in both his motivations and personality. He doesn’t take anyone’s crap, and he’s certainly a slave to no one (even though it’s revealed he actually is working for bigger bads). Nicholas and Perry (Perenele) are equally fun characters. They have a bunch of dated culture references, and I love them for it. There’s also tons of magic mumbo-jumbo flying around, mostly on Perry’s end, which I appreciate. While they make her a damsel, she’s a good Damsel. Literally every chapter with her is her trying new ways to escape and contact the others, with a surprising amount of them actually being successful. I love her backstory as well as her husband’s, but I wish they had a little more interaction. Of course, it’s understandable why they don’t, but it’s still something I have to mention. The Morrigan is also a treat. She has a very menacing vibe, and really feels like she’s a league above everyone else. She’s cold and mysterious, which makes her all the more intimidating. Until we find out that she’s obsessed with online strategy games (I KID YOU NOT THIS IS CANON.) On the more “meh” side is her aunt (I think?), Bastet. She’s built up to be this super god of destruction that’s like, 5 levels higher than every other noob on the planet. When she finally gets her time in the spotlight, though… she’s actually kind of wimpy. First, she takes her sweet time killing Nicholas even though she really could have impaled him at any time in the second to last fight. That’s not so bad, but then she gets scared off by a little girl whipping her minions. Uh, okay. I guess I can see BUT THEN SHE GET’S DEFEATED BY SOME BUGS. I’m dead serious. I mean, honestly, she should be better than that. Just flex your Anubis muscles and walk it off, Mary Sue. Also, there’s Scathach. There’s… not much to say about Scathach. She’s what she’s meant to be, the warrior lady that kicks butt. I’ve gotta say, though, I’m SO happy Scott didn’t make her an emotionless machine of destruction that so many people think makes a woman cool, especially when she has a legitimate reason to be that. Scatty has an actual personality, one that can actually get a chuckle out of me, every now and again (I also can’t help but smile every time she draws her swords. You KNOW that things are about to get real when you make the woman pull out her bronze.) On the little MORE “meh” side, we have the TWINS. Scott, can I talk to you for a second? I need you to listen to me. I love ya, and I know what you’re doing here. But please. Compared to everything else that’s going on, the twins feel completely impassive. Their shock to the initial reveal of the Flamels’ origins can literally be summed up with: “Wow, I can’t believe this.” That’s it. Individually, Josh seems to just exist for the sole purpose of having an angsty teenager blaming the no-good adults for getting him and his sister involved in their war games. In addition, he makes a ton of dated references to games like Quake 3 and Doom, and I think maybe some movies? I don’t know. My point is that seems to be all he’s good for. He also has a painfully forced “Final Temptation” moment at the end of the book, which is where I practically gave up all hope for his character (I literally said “he better be on magic or drugs cause there’s no other excuse that can get him out of this one”). Fortunately, he makes up for it by driving a freaking hummer through Dee and his skeleton army. You’re on thin ice, mister. I’ve got my eyes on you. Sophie has it better, but she still suffers from a lot of downtime where she could be developing her character more. By the end of the book, she’s overall more interesting than Josh because she’s lived through a pretty hellish experience, but I found it hard to sympathize with her through it because I didn’t really know enough about her to care as much as I probably should have. Oh, and also, there’s a prophecy about both of them. Are you even surprised? Want to guess the next part? Yep, one’s gonna be good and the other’s gonna be evil. Golly, I wonder who’s who. But, wait… maybe this is all a trick??? Maybe Scott’s going to fwop the tables in Empire Strikes back and it turns out that SOPHIE is Darth Vader??? I take it back! I take it ALL back! THIS MAN’S A GENIUS! “… AHEAD of his time. Truly a masterpiece of fiction.” ~Time Magazine “A legend in the making. Something for the whole family and also a blast.” ~Joe “50 BILLION STARS… out of 5 stars!!!” ~Me? “A fair and humble look at the clear superiority of women.” ~Tumblr “Not all stories have a satisfying conclusion… at least, not the ones that are only BEGINNING! HUE HUE HUE” ~I told you to stop calling me. All jokes aside, there is actually something here that kind of bothers me on a different level. This book, front to back, is 100% FEM-DOM. Literally every major female character is some kind of elder god. That wouldn’t be so bad, if the guys actually got a represent. All we have in terms of dynamic male characters are Dee and Nicholas, neither of whom can really hold a candle to all the ladies flying around and shooting lasers. I mean, Sophie was really the only normal girl in the bunch, that is until she gets an uber haxic god tier power boost half-way through the story, leaving her poor bro in the dust. It also doesn’t help that Josh, the only male character with any real development, spends most of his time complaining about it all. What a kill-joy. Think I’m being a little un-fair? Trust me, the same holds true for me when I watch Male-Power fantasies, like Naruto and the live-action Transformers movies. In those cases, women are rarely more than sexual objects or pointless characters that can’t even succeed at providing emotional support, which is usually their only goal in stories like those. Put simply? It bothers me there, too. I’m all for all of these characters (except maybe Bastet), but I just want some more interesting guys to even it out. It doesn’t really even have to be guys who can shoot lava from their mouths, just guys that are important and have actual character arcs. (Balance CAN be found. Avatar and its follow up series Korra did it to nigh-perfection.) In the end, our heroes escape, Josh looks stupidly into a mirror, Sophie gets even MORE superpower, and Magic is still awesome. Final Thoughts? Someone get me a table.

Ha Ha, sick. Great review man, I love this stuff.

Ouch. Let me just say, judging this one is going to be really, really hard. (Let the records show that I am not actually a judge, just a concerned citizen.) First off, I absolutely love how this story started. Reading through the first few paragraphs, I was literally preparing myself to be blown away. Sora was portrayed so well in the first half; you managed to perfectly capture his energetic and loving nature as well as his innocence. In addition, the idea of Sora having a sister doesn’t actually bother me. In fact, I was excited to see where you would take her character. Unfortunately, she didn’t really have much to do throughout the story, which I think was a missed opportunity. I know she was introduced for a very specific purpose, but I still think she could have been a more dynamic character. While that’s a flaw I could easily overlook, I’m afraid the next one is simply too glaring to ignore. My God, what happened to this story mid-way? It started off SO well, but then just plummeted into a dark crypt of cliché and bad feelings. There’s literally an entire tone-shift from the first half to the second, and it really doesn’t make much sense. There’s an old saying I’ve heard recently, you should more or less sum up the meaning of your story within the first few paragraphs/sentences/chapters/whatever. The overall tone you want, your narrative style, all of it should be set in stone at the beginning. Of course, you want to keep some surprises in store for your readers, but that does NOT apply to Sora’s birthday. I mean, what? It’s Sora’s birthday? THAT’s what this story is about? Then why wasn’t it mentioned earlier, like when Sora was waiting for his sister on the swing set? Instead, we have the entire point of this story literally thrown up right in the middle, the most sensitive part of the whole thing. This throws everything out of wack and completely changes the tempo of the story. Sadly, this renders the first half of the kind of pointless, which was ironically the best part, in my opinion. And while we’re on the subject of tone-shifts, what was up with Sora? How did we go from an almost flawless characterization to something I literally almost can’t recognize? I understand your intention, but it just didn’t work out in my eyes. In fact, it actually makes me kind of frustrated seeing Sora portrayed in such a gullible light. For one, I don’t believe Sora is stupid. He’s naïve and maybe a little slow, but he has a great deal of faith in his friends, and he’d never go into such a dark place as he did in this story. If you want to show that though, that’s great! In fact, I encourage it. It makes Sora more of a dynamic character, but you just can’t resolve it in the way you did. Instead of just having Sora go through that dark moment, then having people pull him out and say “OH HEY WE ACTUALLY JUST TURNED OFF THE LIGHTS SORRY FOR PUTTING YOU THROUGH EMOTIONAL TORMENT WE’RE CHILL RIGHT”, let him reach that conclusion himself. Let him doubt, but then find his faith again. Don’t just do it for the sake of something different. Aside from that, I think there are a lot of other missed opportunities here. For one, I feel Riku and Kairi could have played a bigger role (they are his best friends), but there’s nothing wrong with what you did with them, so I can’t complain there (even though they were both a little bland). But the biggest loss, in my opinion, was the fact that you really didn’t go much in depth with many of the characters aside from Sora. Like, take Sora’s sister for example. Her brother was gone for an entire year with literally nothing to go on. Then he just shows up out of nowhere. And now, it’s his first birthday since that’s happened and she’s just skipping along like no one’s business? I understand what you were trying to go for, but I honestly just feel like there was so much missed potential here. Overall, the story itself is just okay. I don’t particularly dislike it, there’s just so many things about it that rustle me up. If this was your vision, then that’s great. Like I said, it’s not a bad story. I just hope that you can take something away from everything I’ve said here. Your grammar’s fine, you described everything in a wonderful way and it really suits the story. Just make sure to proof-read before you submit, I saw a few misplaced words here and there. Overall, a solid entry. I wish you the best of luck in the competition, and for all your days to follow. Chin up, Arcmin

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Taurus has left the metaphorical warehouse of obscurity. And it only took him two seasons.

I'll make this short, as I have relatively little to say. I'll get the obvious one out of the way first, your grammar and syntax require a lot of work. That's nothing that can't be improved with practice and dedication though, so I'm not going to go much deeper than that. However, I noticed many areas where it was blatantly obvious you intended to use a word but accidentally skipped it (i.e, Roxas then started to walk towards the still sleeping Sora...). This problem can easily be fixed by proof-reading your story before submitting it and using a decent spell-checker. Heck, a word processor should correct a lot of those mistakes for you(if you don't have one, there's a few free ones out there that are a decent substitute for Microsoft Word(check out Google Docs if you have the chance)). Aside from that, I can't really even defend the story itself. It doesn't seem particularly engaging and overall has very little purpose behind it. The characters are fine and are accurate representations of their in-game selves, but that doesn't mean much if they don't have anything interesting to do. On top of all that, the story itself doesn't really even have an overall meaning. Of course, it doesn't have to, but I don't think that it's good enough on its own to justify turning into an emotional fan-fic having no real purpose. I know this sounds harsh, but believe me when I say that this story did have potential. When I managed to shut my critical eye off and envision everything happening in my head, it actually wasn't bad. But it's held back significantly by poor grammar, punctuation and sentence structure, as well as a lack of overall meaning. I hope my comments have helped you, even though my input has very little overall significance in the grand scheme of this whole shindig. That being said, I wish you luck for the competition and all your days to come! Keep trucking, ~Arcmin

At the very least, I'm not convinced she possesses the same level of importance as Sora, Riku, Mickey, or Xehanort.

It doesn't matter how many times they say that, they'll need to show it before it can convince anyone. Or, at least, before it can convince me.

Hornswaggle. There is clearly a little plastic man in the caboose over there. I demand my munies back.

It's probably just because people consider 16 to be such a bigger number than 15. For example, the difference between the numbers 14 and 15 is immeasurable compared to the difference between the numbers 15 and 16. This doesn't make any sense, but it still happens anyways.

It's been so long since Kingdom Hearts 2, they may as well call it Kingdom Hearts 15 now too.

Beg your pardon Ma'am, but is your name Kairi? Cause you just made me stab myself in the chest releasing the hearts of seven princesses thereby transforming me into a small shadow thingy after-which I run around a castle full of Final Fantasy characters before you hug me and I turn back into a kid with clown shoes. That reminds me, have you ever heard of Kingdom Hearts?

Another episode of RWBY that doesn't screw with the head-cannon is a success in my book.

I think this was how the sweetstack keyblade was created. Xehanort hoarded all the food in the universe then crafted it into a keyblade in a failed attempt at opening Kingdom Hearts. I mean, can you think of any other explanation? FORGE THE FOOD CHAIN

To be fair, I think there was a lot more effort put into Origins because it was a much shorter series.

Well, that kind of sucks. It's a shame, they really added a lot of replay-ability to the game,

Yeah. Each one should only last you a few hours, with the exception of the Lunarian tale, which I swear goes by almost instantly. There are optional challenge dungeons to complete in each tale, which I recommend at least trying, since I personally found them to be a lot of fun. They reward you with materials that you use later on in the final tale to create the best items in the game. If that's not your cup of tea, then I'd guess you could complete every tale in about 20 hours or so, minimum. The final tale really isn't that long, but since the last dungeon is so ridiculously inflated, it feels like it lasts for an eternity.

We need a kickstarter. "HAIKU: THE MOVIE"(2017)- by Squirting Demyx

Yeah. I mean, come on, I want to settle the whole shtick with Azshara already. But yeah, if World of Warcraft ever ends, we can all count on Sargeras probably being the final boss. Either that or another Old God, who have been a stable recently(Except N'Zoth. What happened with that guy anyways?)

Holding out for Sargeras/Super Kil'jaeden as the end of expansion raid boss. Gul'dan can come too.

Yeah, he was just a bit extreme in his thinking. "We die, bloody and thrashing, on the field of battle. Like true Orcs SHOULD." I suppose deep down he wasn't really that different from the Orcs of the old horde, but after Thrall became Warchief and started emphasizing more peaceful goals, the Orcs became something else entirely. I suppose that's what Draenor's here for, to show us how things used to be when the Orcs were still at war and under the command of Blackhand.

Agreed. I was actually surprised when Garrosh picked up Gorehowl and willingly threw it to his father. I like to think that takes some humility and honor I don't think we've really seen from him so far.

And hey, Garrosh looked slightly less garish than usual. *Two thumbs up.*