There was a Ninja, some woman with green hair named Gertrude, probably my sister Vengeance, and Lord Skywalker. You know. The one that likes to snorkle.) colabed on a story! Is this the end of Threadbare?! My review blogs on it, I mean… Like… it’s just chapter 7 so I’m sure he lives. Patreon reward for A.P.O.N.I. · 10:39pm Sep 10th, 2018
Heya, readers!
Once again I find myself firing up my kindle copy of Threadbare: Stuff and Nonsense for A.P.O.N.I.’s patron sponsored blog content. However, given my last meltdown over the author being able to come up with good ideas but not execute them well, especially in pertaining to sapient, semi-literate raccoon people, A.P.O.N.I. has offered to let me wander onto other projects. If only because the book was starting to win me over before the author decided to take a hard-left into ‘explode your suspension of disbelief town’, I’mma give it one last shot.
That being said, I reserve the right to jump ship mid-chapter and do more of a high-level analysis of what I’ve read. So, lets see if this battle royal between a stuffed bear, a little girl, and some raccoons can hold my interest.
For starters, this chapter is called “RANDAHM ENCOUNTAHS”
The “Raccants”… okay, horrible name for starter. Just by ending the species name with a ‘t’ you’ve given the entire species an excuse to answer the question of ‘Are you a Rac-CAN or a RacCANT?!’ with ‘I’m a RacCANT’ with a comedic response of raccant 2 taking a nap in garbage, or whatever… but I digress.
The Raccants are chasing Celia and Threadbare around the woods, but don’t worry! A whole bunch of exposition informs us that the Raccants are just scaring her off from their territory and that she just keeps wandering back into it to be scared again and apparently there’s actually no dramatic tension in this opening!
Eventually, Threadbare points Celia in the direction of another valley that apparently is even MORE dangerous and the Raccants stop pursuing, and—
The hell was the point of spending pages explain the Raccants and setting up a war party to chase our characters around just to get them lost in the woods that we already knew Celia was unfamiliar with?! I mean, I can see maybe just beyond getting lost, the author wanted to throw her into an even more dangerous situation then being swarmed and stabbed, but anything could have gotten her to run off that. A wildcat, an actual bear, she loses her footing and slides down a hill! And since this is an electronic copy, I can confirm that this is the last we hear from the raccants in this book! All that backstory for basically nothing. And… and that exposition.
Ugh… Okay, I’mma see if the mysteries of this new even-more-perilous-than-that-other-valley valley can hold my interest.
Okay, now they’re in a graveyard. Unsurprisingly, Celia runs into some nastiness… Somewhat surprisingly, it’s a girl her age who like to create tombstones with puns. Before she can devour Celia, an arrow flies out and evil-little girl basically has a quick exchange with Mordechai, who literally spells out ‘YES’ with arrows that Celia is with him and that she’s not to be brutally murdered.
Thank God, I was afraid this chapter might actually contain some real tension.
I mean, it was fairly obvious that Mordechai would be keeping an eye on Celia during the trial so that she wasn’t under any real threat, but of course you’re not supposed to flat out SAY that otherwise everything Celia does is just roughing it and we understand that neither she nor Threadbare are in any real danger.
Celia gets away because, again, she’s not in any danger, she eventually gets a shelter and fire going while Threadbare stands guard and the little girl from before approaches Threadbare and then dumps a whole lot of world-building exposition on a character who won’t understand it or ask questions.
Enjoy this completely unrelated vintage K.C. Green comic! Oh, except I’m Green in the last three panels and the door is this book.
Next Threadbare and Celia continue their BOLD HEAVY and exposition deluge lives for over another 100 pages and some stuff happens and then more books, but I don’t care.
Okay, first off… What the heck was that?! Just… the end of last chapter and most of what I can get through on this one… I mean, aside from a very lengthy and convoluted method for inserting more world building while sabotaging its own dramatic tension? I get that there’s a lot going on here, but don’t really need a deluge of how dungeons work and various races invented for this world unless they serve a purpose.
Next off, the stat increase/quest bold thing bludgeons the flow whenever it comes up. Again, italics would have worked better and just… a lot less of it. Sure, it was cutting back, but it was still disruptive every time it manifested.
On the note of world-building, I thought the basic idea was quite clever, but the author seems way too eager to give us every little detail of the world and even go so far as to explain that there’s a mystery behind the stats and RPG like system. Offering up world info as it becomes actually relevant is fine. It’s not always easy to do naturally, but it’s at least more forgivable than dumping irrelevant information on the reader for no other reason to establish that the world has a rich and interesting history. Furthermore, if you want a setting to run on video game logic, fine! It does. The end. Scott Pilgrim has power-ups, extra-lives, and super-moves and no one in the world questions it… Why? Because it’s always been like that and the ‘why’ is completely irrelevant to the actual plot.
Now, this story wasn’t all bad. Again, I enjoyed the concept. I was interested enough in the characters and what was going on with their lives. Each character seemed real enough. Celia even had enough of a personality and was believable enough that she completely avoided the Mary Sue disease plaguing many modern heroines. Descriptions and dialogue also worked well enough, but clearly there are some storytelling elements that go beyond good grammar and engaging sentences that were missed time and time again.
Finally, the biggest screw-up… Why is there cussing and graphic descriptions of viscera in a story where the main characters are an animated stuffed bear and his owner who is an eleven-year-old girl? I mean… maybe the author wanted to establish that this was a grim-and-gritty Whinny the Poo delivered via video games…
… But by making it for more mature readers you’re basically limiting your market share to teens and adults who want to enrich themselves in a fantasy RPG world (that presumably won’t be abandoned right before it’s conclusion) but also are big fans of stuffed bears and little-girl protagonists. On the surface, the plot is kinda a high-concept excuse to print money. A little girl who seeks adventure with her stuffed bear companion communicated through the language of video games? Slap a young reader sticker on that and watch the money roll in!
Except you can’t because the big, fat cat drops eff bombs and tears out the occasional throat! I mean… does it really hurt the story if the cat says rude, but PG-rated stuff and every monster is either KO'd, fades away, or is even killed without the gory detail? And, I don’t feel like tracking down the exact South Park the Movie song and dance routine to explain this, but there are plenty of alternatives to cussing if it’s best they’re left out of a story, Mmmmm ‘kay?
The above is what’s bumped me the most about the execution… I mean, clearly I’m okay with enjoying stuff not intended for my age group, as I’m sure anyone reading this is, and furthermore that’s proof that you can forego certain ‘story enhancers’ to write something that has wider appeal, but no… The story just wouldn’t be complete without the odd character dropping an eff bomb
Okay, no more of that for a while… Possibly ever! As mentioned next Patreon reward in this vein will be for The Wandering Inn, but we’ve got plenty more topics to cover before then!
Catch you in the comments!
The Wandering Inn! Let me know if it's good or not!
Ooooh, the Wandering Inn, that'll be an interesting jump from this one.
Also, I can see you pitching this book out the window with astounding clarity. Followed very shortly by, "Oh no! MY E-READER! CURSE YOU THREADBARE!"
After you mentioned it, I felt compelled to provide it.
Hey, man, it's not about the tension, it's about the journey, man. But seriously. If you read the adventure books from the 19th and early 20th century, a lot of them read as rambling travelogues wherein moderately interesting things happen. That's probably an artifact of them originally being published serially, but it also means that, through my familiarity with the form, I don't tend to notice it happening. Just like I didn't notice the swearing, that you felt was jarring.