User blog comment:KidVegeta/KidVegeta's reviews/@comment-1668079-20110501081515

That was a very nice review. Thank you for your mark, it was exactly as I'd hoped. Rest assured, that wasn't Porunga. Anyway, my rebuttals:


 * There are numerous grammatical oddities and errors that hindered me reading through this story. Occasionally, you forgot words or misspelled them, but this wasn’t a very big con, as it‘s almost impossible to get. I can give examples, if the author wants it.

I completely understand this. Everyone gets them, I'm not going to try to refute this. I'll probably end up going through and fixing what's been messed up.


 * The story does not flow well, grammatically, therefore.

Understandable. I was writing in a style that was rather foreign to me, an attempt to amalgamate and then emulate a few different styles of writing into one.


 * The names of your four captains are confusing.

I can understand this as well, they were difficult for me to name. But they were at least less confusing than Bardock and Vegeta.


 * Dialogue can get boring/clichéd/awkward/terrible, like when Serroli blew up the Acrotian guy, and all the captain said was “"Perhaps that's what's keeping Serroli".

I did actually have a couple of thoughts about this. I was unsure about what the characters should say in some parts, and so a lot are cliched/poorly worded/boring. A lot of the time I was just trying to get something that would work.


 * The entire second act of chapter five is written so poorly that it’s hard for me to distinguish what happened at all.

I get that. That's probably in need of a rewrite, as it was for the most part unchanged. I added in a few new lines and that sort of thing, but nothing that would really lift up the overall standard.


 * I don’t understand why Serroli destroyed his own scouter.

Serroli used that as a test to see if his signal would work. He already knew (or thought he knew) the highest power levels of the Namekians, and didn't want the other Saiyans to know, so they would go into battle assuming they would win.


 * You write far too many of your sentences in this form, like when you use it here 5 times in a row, “Waiting until the Namek attempted to finish him, he released a kiai, and took out the ray that was coming his way. Leaping upwards, he palmed the Namek in the face, then released another energy ball into his head. Waiting until the corpse hit the ground, Serroli then stamped on the creature's throat. Laughing, he advanced towards the other Namekians. Stopping short a metre, Serroli grinned and vanished, leaving a thin apparition of his previous position."

Nothing to say here other than my writing skills. I can see how this would be tiresome.


 * Your four Saiyan captains could have used a little more character development before you killed them. I’m still failing to see their relevance.

I suppose I was a bit ambiguos with them. The first two, Kabu and Horenso were supposed to portray the disgruntlement at Akuno and his regime, whereas Fuwara and Bonosai were intended to show Akuno's brainwashing, making them void of their Saiyan nature.


 * Wish you would call them Namekians, not Nameks, as that is what they are.

I'm incredibly lazy.


 * I felt the OSS by Serroli was lackluster and that he was underpowered in his transformation (being overwhelmed by a bunch of Namekians, seriously). There was nothing originally legendary about it, IMO.

Underpowered? A word I thought would never be used to describe my stories... Anyway, I see where you're coming from, and I kind of agree, but in my defense, he was unaware that he had gained this transformation, until the last second, and even if he had known about it he wouldn't have been able to utilise it properly. And even if you disagree with both of those two points, he was attacked by pretty much every capable Namekian, after they had dispatched of their challengers.

Of course he wouldn’t have been. He was just created…
 * "During all this, high up on the cliffside, Serroli watched. He had never been in a situation like this, where there could be retaliation."

I was trying to show how he was confused, and really just a toddler experiencing new things. But I still understand where you're coming from.


 * Namekian dialogue/speech/thingy at the end of chapter 12 is pretty bad. I would suggest a major revamp of it.

I was trying to use one of my earliest concept ideas there; to modify the lyrics of a song I really like (the main theme, which I think really go well with the story) into some sort of speech. Obviously it didn't go as well as I'd hoped.


 * Everyone is laughing too much. That’s like all they do. I’m talking mainly about the last few chapters (such as 13), but it’s present in the entire story.

They're all very happy people.


 * Minor con, but I think you should have had at least one more Akuno flashback in between the finale and the first one. There was just too much of a gap.

I really did think about that for a long time. The main reason I didn't was because I didn't know what I could use there. I think I developed his character enough in the three chapters he's in, so anything more may have just appeared as irrelevant/filler.

Well, that was a very nice review there. I must say, you gave me pros that I didn't even think about. The cons, I kind of knew what would be there, but it was still some good advice.

I spent a lot of time on the epilogue. I knew how I wanted it to end, but I was really unsure about how to word what happened after Aratame's attack, and so I'm glad it worked so well. And to be honest, I had no thoughts about the build-up of the story. I just wrote what I needed to to develop the characters and give good explanations.

This was essentially a practice for me. Now that I know my methods work and are better than what they used to be, I'll improve them and use them in the revamped ST.

A couple of questions:

What was it about Aratame that you liked so much? He's my favourite too, but I want to know what you enjoyed so much about him.

Did you understand the reason for Akuno's insanity? Did it make sense?

What was the chapter about Serroli's creation like? That was the part I was most worried about, due to it having a lot of the elements from the original ST in it.