THeats frost

• Equestria Girls
• ATLA
• Romance
• Adventure
• Tragedy

Your just a no body a little boy afraid of showing his power. Nothing like the great avatars.

• Narcotics
• Violence
• Suicide / Self Harm
• Death
• Profanity
• Human
• Second Person
• Alt. Universe
• Derpy
• OC
• Vice-Principal Luna
• Anon
• Main 7 (EqG)

Applejackisbest · 1.7k words  ·  22  6 · 845 views

Alright so I confess I’m not all that interested nor familiar with Avatar the Last Airbender and was looking for a shorter story to round out my queue, but I don’t think familiarity is necessary with this story because the first chapter is mostly establishing groundwork rather than telling a story. That being said, I think that the first chapter leaves a bit to be desired. Let’s hit it.

The plot of the story follows Anon, who is secretly a waterbender attending school. He has traumatic flashbacks to when he killed a man with his power and struggles with it. At night he goes to a fight club and spars with an opponent.

There’s a bit I want to cover here. First of all, second-person is, to me anyways, a method of getting into a character’s shoes and seeing the story as it unfolds through their eyes. It’s meant to directly insert you into the action. However, I don’t think this story really capitalizes on the benefits of second person.

I’ll get into this later, but it ties in with the pacing of the story. Things move very quickly and there is almost no scenic building or character development. For example, let’s have a look at this excerpt.

“Mr. Anon. Are you feeling quite alright you seem very pale” Your teacher asks you, her voice soft and laced with worry. You look into the window and see your face. Your usual tanned skin is very pale and you are sweating. You get out of your seat and walk up front and whisper something into her ear. She looks at you and nods with a kind and understanding smile. You walk out of the classroom and spot a trash can. You run-up to it as you empty what was your lunch into the contents. You can feel tears falling down your face as you walk into the bathroom.

You feel a calming sensation rush over your body as the water hit’s your skin. You quickly splash some on your face before drying off and exiting the bathroom. As you walk down the hall you can’t help but wonder why you feel like you do. You aren’t supposed to feel like this. You’re better than this. As you walk by a student a water fountain you look over and see it freeze.

You’re feet leave marks of frost and ice on the marble floor of the hallway. You cover your ears as the pipes burst from the pressure of the ice. You fall to the floor as you begin to lose control of your ice. You look over and see people are watching. Before anyone can see you quickly put on your mask. You run out of the school, leaving a trail of ice on the floor.

To me this reads as almost a laundry list of actions. ‘You do this, then you do this, then you do this. You feel like this, and then you go here and do this.’ Beyond that, there really isn’t much that keeps me interested or invested in the story. Because of the sparse scenery details, I can’t picture this character at all or where he even is. 

On another note, I believe that anon characters also allow the reader to visualize themselves in the story, and I find it odd that the author gives details about skin color, as this seems to alienate a portion of the total audience and again subtract from the usual benefits of an anon story.

Going back to pacing, the story moves very fast and we don’t spend very long in one place. This further adds to the almost chaotic nature of this story as we shift scenes many times and it’s hard to picture where all of this is happening or what world we’re living in.

There is also a fight scene at the bottom of the chapter that speeds right by. I think the author may want to look up or ask about the art of writing fight scenes and take advice from authors more qualified to write them than I am. That being said, I’m of the opinion that this fight scene moves a little too quickly. It’s not overloaded with details, but again, we don’t seem to be in this character’s head at all, and it kind of detracts quite a bit from the scene as a whole.

There’s really only one character in the first chapter, and that’s Anon. And we know pretty much nothing about him. Again, this is a point to anon stories but I again find it so odd that we remain so detached from this character’s head. There’s even a part where Anon speaks to their teacher, yet we don’t even know what they said. Why then is the story written in second person, if we don’t even get the chance to see the world through the eyes of this character?

To me this reads almost like a Dungeons and Dragons story where the Dungeonmaster is telling us what our characters are doing, yet this does not work because there isn’t any choice we can make in this story. So instead it feels like we’re sitting here while the author tells us everything we’re doing in an almost mechanical way.

So yeah. I can’t really make a comment on the character development of this story or even the character themselves because we know nothing at all. I think we could probably swap Anon for virtually any other MLP character and it would still work because there’s nothing that makes Anon pop as a character, even with his water bending powers. It just falls flat to me. 

There were quite a few prose and grammatical issues I found. There were quite a few typos in the story, some more amusing than others (for example the word ‘mussels’ being used in place of ‘muscles’). I won’t point them out here, but if the author wants to see them I will gladly share my notes.

Beyond that there were quite a few missing punctuation marks, the most prevalent being an apostrophe. Really quickly: if an object is said to be in possession of someone or something, an apostrophe is added before the ‘s’ to signify it belongs to them. So, it would be “Twilight’s castle” or “the door’s handle.” If we’re referring to a plural noun that ends in ‘s’ then we add an apostrophe to the end without the ‘s’. So: “her parents’ decision” or “the dogs’ bones”. Note that in this case, the subjects of parents and dogs are referring to more than one parent or dog. If we were referring to only one parent or dog, we’d say “her parent’s decision” or “the dog’s bones.” English is fun!

The one last thing I could perhaps point out is the use of title case since it does recur throughout the story. Title case refers to the true title or name of a place, person, or in the case of this story, a special move.

The protagonist’s special move is named ‘death’s drink,’ so let’s put it in title case. In the typical rules of title case, every first letter in the title except for prepositions or minor words like ‘a’ or ‘the’ are capitalized. So we’d have ‘Death’s Drink’ as the name of his signature move.

Overall, it’s hard to make a solid conclusion about this story because it is so incomplete. The author made some interesting stylistic decisions in terms of the nature of the story, but I don’t feel like they’re capitalizing on the benefits as well as they can be. This leads for a frantic and somewhat dry story that sadly didn’t hold my attention for very long. 

Perhaps my thoughts will change as the story develops, but as it stands I don’t have much to draw from this story other than it has the potential to go somewhere in the future.

On deck is Silent Whisper’s To Those Who Didn’t. See you there.

Deuces.

If you’re a fan of Avatar, you may want to put this story on its radar, but keep in mind as of now there’s only one chapter in which not a whole lot happens. Readers looking for a complete story may want to look elsewhere. 

I don’t have much else to add other than I recommend you look for an editor if you don’t already have one to help out with some of the grammatical stuff I pointed out. Other than that, keep it up! 

I do have my reading notes for your fic, if you would like to see them let me know.

Plot: 4
Characterization: 3
Grammar: 5

Average: 4