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here it is! slightly longer than the last one
all art is by me!
Juniper Castel Has Guests Over For Tea / Discussion
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Juniper continues to unsettle me in a good way. +1, can't wait for part 3!
Slightly longer. Nice one.
Not to say this didn’t earn its length though. What a fun read. I love your character work — Juniper is amazing and realistic, to say nothing of the rest of the squad — and I’m already excited about where you’ll take this.
I really liked Juniper in this, and the descriptions of reality bending were great. I might take a few cues from this when writing about reality benders in the future, I'm a big fan of what you did with the "Cut-Strings" stuff and the puppet imagery. Juniper having been pupping herself was a great twist. Despite the length of the tale, it never dragged, and the pictures were a nice touch.
I didn't feel like the other characters were quite as developed (aside from maybe Kyoko), but that's mostly since they didn't really have as much screentime. Beyond that the only thing I'd say would be that the kids didn't quite act their age very much, at least in their dialogue, though the dialogue itself wasn't bad.
Overall, I really enjoyed it. Looking forward to the next tale, if there is going to be one.
thank you!! i'm definitely planning on continuing this for at least a few more articles and fleshing out the other characters some more! (particularly the other two kids, although i do wanna bring the White Rabbits back in at some point too, vincent was fun). hopefully ill be able to find some opportunities for the kids to be kids, also ^^; i feel like the lack of acting their age was cause of being swept up in this whole operation (plus juniper putting on her best tea-party-haver voice)
This is some of the best characterwork i’ve seen. Making kids with superpowers act realistically when interfacing with the foundation is a hard thing to do. There’s not exactly a lot of real life equivalents. This might be the first article on here i’ve read that does it this well. As some have said, the kids seem to be acting very mature, which is true. However, as they say, trauma builds character.
I believe that the foundation should at this point be very competent at rehabilitating, mentoring, and manipulating their human resources, whether those have anomalous powers or not, as long as their psyche is still human. It therefore makes a lot of sense to me that characters who have been in the care of the foundation are more resourceful than the average at their age. Their adolescense shines through anyway, especially in Moons case.
This is why i found it weird how quickly Juniper returned to her senses after cutting her own strings. She seems very cogent after thae fact. Given the fact that her real childhood was not great at best, and that her most formative years were mostly a construct, i wouldn’t expect her to be great at any form of communication. In addition, it doesn’t seem like she’s as affected by the “cut-strings” syndrome. you could argue that this is because it’s her own strings, and she’s familiar with them, but i’d argue that being the puppet is not at all similar to being the puppeteer. Either way, her apparent clarity lifts some of the gravity of her situation. If she’s doing fine so soon after breaking free, how bad could it have been, you know?
Despite the criticism, this is some of the finest work i’ve seen on the site.
thank you!! this is such a nice comment :3
something to keep in mind about Juniper is we see a lot of her inner thoughts after the string cutting, and i think that gives a kind of flattering impression of how cogent she is. from an external perspective she spends most of the time after that point crying, following adults, and talking out loud to voices in her head.
that said, you're probably right that i didn't quite capture the right level of distress ^^; thank you for the crit and i'll do my best to make sure that my child characters don't end up feeling like small adults going forward! in future tales i'll be showing them more in off-duty situations so hopefully that'll make it easier.
you've got a point about cut-strings syndrome that i maybe hadn't thought about enough, also. currently thinking about going back and editing some bits to make it clearly what kind of affect this has on Juniper, since she has been partially mind-controlling herself for a while, and its understandable to expect breaking that would affect her more strongly considering how her family just collapsed in the previous story. hmmm
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06