I am unfamiliar with the stories of the Shinsengumi myself, so I do not know if this was based on an actual historical occurrence or not. However, for the components you chose, this was excellently written. It was a story of its own, showing off the determination of the Samurai and all other things that is associated with that era. Your text shows off the aura of the time very accurately, and the actions of the people inside it are understandable. The story itself is a little dated (ha-ha), but you pulled it off well enough to arouse emotions within me. Well done, writer.
Hm. A depressing little tale. Also with characters from the past whose names I recognize but I do not know much about if this is actual history or not. In any case. The writing is pretty good. However, the story was so dark and depressing that I felt no room for anything else. I was practically sighing throughout the entire text. The end didn’t help. I realize this is the purpose of the text, and history usually isn’t very bright at times regardless, but eh… The aura didn’t appeal to me. Of course, I can’t vote based on that… but eh… Yeah, that’s about that.
Woooooooooow. So… much… text… And it is all spent on description, pretty much. The text is quite beautiful really. If this is a competition on simply the pure beauty of a person’s writing, you’ve won so far. Buuuuuut… I end up wondering about the content. You wrote… so much. I… sincerely got bored. Nothing was happening. There were simply… tons upon tons of descriptive text. I get it. It is pretty. You wrote about the things in detail. But I was always wondering, is anything going to actually happen? And… so it did. Your take on history. At first I thought it was going to be a detective-drama about the murder of Alexander, but it would seem I was incorrect. But, um… as it is, I am not impressed by the story at all. Plenty beautiful writing, but no real hook, nothing much loads of (beautiful) text stacked on top of one another to paint a picture before finally… … … Oh, well.
I must admit. At first I was quite taken by this piece. It gave a nice rhythm, and I quite liked the content. However… somehow something in it felt like it wasn’t quite finished. Some of the lines don’t feel like they complete the sentence or meaning properly. A few words were misspelled, at least one or two, which is of critical importance in a piece like this and overall made the whole feel slightly unpolished. So, good job on the effort. But it could be better.
Hm. Your writing is certainly on the right level. The story didn’t particularly touch me, but it was well enough written. You did consider things that needed to be written and took the efforts you wanted to do. I didn’t really get much of an impression reading this, but suffice to say that I find it well enough written and well enough pulled off, nothing particularly negative, but it still didn’t touch my soul the way to make me find it a masterpiece. And… that’s that.
In the end, I voted for Entry #1 because I feel it is the one which was pulled through its intended task the best. The others did fine, but the first one did exactly what it was supposed to do. The others all made me feel there was something which could have been improved on them, while that on I was simply satisfied after I had finished it. That’s about it.
And now, let me tell you a story of my own entry.
Very early, I got this idea for my entry. A fun idea, which my mind entertained which I thought was worth spending my time writing. However, I was held off. Different circumstances resulted in that I had to focus on other things, and my planning and writing for the idea was delayed. Eventually, there was no more time. I could not do my idea justice in the time I had left. I had to do something, or I would never be able to enter the WOTM in time. But this idea could hardly ever be remade for another theme. What to do then? Abandon it and go for something simpler? … I decided that “no, I’ll write my idea with what I have”.
So I simply speed-wrote a simple basis for the idea which I had. I knew it was but a shadow of what I had originally wanted, but it had all the basis which my idea had surrounded. The little fairy helping the History Guardian defend history, the plot being shown in time-segments rather than the order they actually went to places… In the end, the different segments of times they went to were more split up than I wanted them to, but I wanted to introduce an alternative way of reading the tale. Which I might have. Or it all just became confused. The original plot which is now only hinted at in the year 10 000 BCE was left behind because it would take too much text. So… yeah. I sent it in without being really proud of it, just… happy to show this badly written preview of my idea that will never come to pass. Hahaha. I apologize to those who was pained to read it, but I wanted it in. No matter its state. Hahaha.
Now, then. Replies, replies…
Ahhhhhh I’m a sucker for time travel. I’d just like to get that out of the way.
Secondly, I will say I enjoyed the idea of time guardians specifically meant to protect their own time period from time travelers that could change things in their histories. However, It made me wonder just how there can be so many other time travelers, though, and why, if time machines are popularized sometime in the future, they aren’t better regulated to prevent people randomly popping back in time just to talk to a historical figure in the first place. Just a little confusing. The other confusing thing were those last couple of scenes with Calan and Miliana back in 2014; the first one I initially assumed was how they first met, but then it was implied that it wasn’t. So… what was the point of it being there, towards the end of the story? It adds almost no new reveal that needed to be put in the end, and instead just re-establishes things we’ve already figured out, giving us exposition that… really should’ve been at the beginning of a story. I mean, I understand it’s a time travel story, but you still need more than that in order to have a good excuse for telling a story out-of-order. This isn’t one of them.
Also, I do love Miliana’s design – upon first meeting her I couldn’t help but imagine her as some sort of combination of Tinker Bell and Navi. And if you want to establish a sort of romance between them, that’s fine, but maybe you don’t need to specifically address how it could be seen as weird? Up until that point, I really hadn’t thought about it – mentioning the bizarreness of the relationship not only brought it to mind for the first time, but also interrupted the flow of the story. It just seemed all-around unnecessary.
Ah well, still a nice time travel story regardless. It just could’ve been better with a lot of things towards the end cut out, maybe replaced with something more interesting to use as an ending, or a better climax since, now that I think of it, it seems kind of void of one.
Thanks for liking my idea. It really was the only thing that I contributed here that I liked. The text itself is improper. Hahaha. No, that isn’t how they first met. Maybe it would have been better to write that story, but I decided to just show a regular day at work for a History Guardian. I mean, I had to show a historical figure, right? And I wanted a few random scenes, so I did that. Them falling in love was also a story which could have been told, but it was something I imagined would happen along the time so I simply threw it in because I wanted to. Honestly, the story was already messed up at the time so I likely didn’t care very much. Hahahaha. Yes, it could have been a lot better, and when I finished it was, like, 4 AM, so for the ending… I just threw in something there too. I thought it might be interesting. I know there isn’t a climax, I thought of sending him into the future to confront some Time-Fairy queen but… eh… not enough words… and I was really tired. Hahahah. Thanks for complimenting it. Haha.
A chipper little story, with a contrasting main duo and an interesting concept. However, I'm not as big a fan of happy entries as some of my fellow regulars, and this entry was as happy-go-lucky as the fairy within it.
The characters felt rather childish, the time-travelers accepting chastise grudgingly as if from a parent and the protagonists turning out rather randomly to be lovers halfway through the story. There weren't really any well-defined motives I could see behind why each character acted the way they did.
In addition, plot points were either cliché (particularly the Hitler one) or abandoned prematurely (the time-travelers saving humanity).
I like my happiness. Hahahaha. I’ve complained multiple times about the darkness that seem to somehow surround the WOTM, and my own response is… well… Hahahaha. Motives for each character (primarily the main ones) I have in by back-pocket, actually. I just… didn’t write them. I couldn’t fit them in along with the ocean of other things I wanted in which also didn’t get in. As for the characters feeling childish, I don’t really see that as a bad thing. In fact, the three largest characters ARE kids, albeit older ones. Calan, Nyssa and Miliana. The other people may or may not have accepted but were outmatched, both in physical capability and plot-importance. As for the cliché plot points, I felt they were necessary. As for the one abandoned prematurely, that was the actual plot I had in mind. Thing is, I couldn’t fit both that and the History Guardian job into a single entry. So, yeah. Haha. Thanks for thinking the concept was interesting. It was what I valued the most, after all.
It's chipper and light-hearted, and a little contrived but that's okay. Actually you went further into character than most people this month -- so what if you were having fun doing it? I thought the disorganized time-jumpy narrative was a pretty clever approach -- confusing, a bit, but hey, it's a confusing subject. None of that bothered me. I think the romantic aspect was sorta shoehorned in, and it's a little hard to take it seriously ("That's right.... we're lovers." When did this happen? OKAY BAD QUESTION, time travel, just... huh?). Anyway the whole thing was playful and fun and I think that's just fine and dandy, and I really don't want to ruin it by going into some quasi-deep self-serving analysis, so I guess just a tip of the hat and a 'keep it up.' Writing is supposed to be fun. Enjoy it!
Haha. Yeah, I was having fun writing it. I knew it wasn’t going to become very good, so I just went with it, and yeah, I believe I had a great deal of fun imagining events and writing situations. Hahaha. I had this idea that there would be a whole crowd of samurai-nerds that had taken a bus-time machine for the sole purpose of watching the duel between Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojirou. Didn’t fit in eventually, but would have been fun. Thanks for recognizing that aspect, and for thinking it clever. I’m smiling rather stupidly right now. Hahaha. Thank you.
Your hook is kind of weird, but I guess it works. Materializing on a hill in 10,000 BCE seems weird and I want to know more about it, but then it's hurt a bit by the following confusing things. The perspective character has his eyes closed, but he's looking out over the surroundings? Also, he puts his hands "into" in sides, and that sounds awkward. The beginning of a story is crucial to getting a reader's interest, so having oddities and mistakes here tends to be worse than having them in the middle of a story.
… OK, he was to open his eyes, there… and hands ONTO his sides… Haha. I didn’t have the time to do proper proofreading at roughly 4 AM after having written all night. Hahahaha. I’ll accept that. But I DID think that would be an amusing twist.
Ellipses. So many ellipses. They're supposed to be used sparingly for very long pauses or for speech or a thought trailing off, not for every tiny pause. I wasn't the one to approve this entry and I haven't checked the WOTM inbox to see if I'm right, but I'm certain I know who wrote this entry just because of the abuse of ellipses.
Ellipses are awesome. They allow me to indicate pauses which take place in a consistent manner, are good for showing when a person is nervous or hesitant, take a little while to answer or something for some reason or another, and a whole lot of other things. I use them in mostly every text I ever write. They cannot be replaced.
This Nyssa lady's personality seems very inconsistent. She's determined and angry and has a cause she's fighting for, but then the History Guardian says "no, don't care, go home" in not so many words and she suddenly concedes and becomes flirtatious. This is not how real people behave.
That’s not what he says. He says that he is doing his job, and why he’s doing it. To save those he cares about from being erased from history because history was suddenly changed and a whole lot of other things. After he does so, Nyssa starts to understand his position and understand that they’re both good people, and therefor she cannot be angry at him anymore. Instead of going with the rage approach of “I am right”, she decides to invite him home to her with a silent warning that she’ll be coming back if he doesn’t. It would have worked, too. She hasn’t given up. She has just… decided to play a trick on him, so to say. Proper explanation could happen after they have a discussion.
The Macedonia events being given out of the History Guardian's chronological order seems backwards, especially since the last thing said before jumping to the earlier thing is that they're going to 1504. Jumping around in time is fine, but in time travel stories there needs to be a thread of consistency to keep one cohesive timeline going for the reader to follow. Doctor Who works because you have the Doctor and his companions as anchors for the timeline, where you see events in order of them experiencing them, which allows for a logical plot even though time travel is in play. Doing the Macedonia segment this way for the sake of making the event slightly more interesting breaks that thread of consistency and, in my opinion, does more harm to your story than good.
I decided to do everything in the order which it actually happened, and as such when he goes fifteen minutes back in time the time fifteen minutes before must be shown first. It was simply my decision, and it was a core idea that I had to have a REALLY short example of such in there somewhere. Here it was. Of course, it suffered along with everything else on the lack of quality of the entire thing, but eh. I’ve never watched Doctor Who, but you could say I screwed that up on purpose. It was an experiment too, after all. Hahaha.
I'm noticing a bit of a problem with this whole History Guardian idea. So, there are people who go back in time and change things either through malice or naivety. The History Guardian's job is to stop them and send them back to their own time (speaking of which, it's odd that he should know what time they came from to be able to send them back to). What exactly prevents them from doing it again? If someone is determined enough to do something, they'll keep on trying and trying no matter how many times they're stopped. If enough people do that, one guy would never be able to stop it all. There has been no mention of ways to prevent people from travelling back in time again, and in fact Nyssa made it evident that she was confident she could do so many times, so it seems like the History Guardian thing shouldn't even work because there would be too many people meddling with the past for him to stop it. Additionally there are all the general time travel paradox problems, but those are par for the course so I won't list them. There ought to be something by the end of the story that explains how people can be kept from jumping back in time though, else the whole premise falls apart after a little critical thought.
He doesn’t know what times they come from, Miliana’s magic handles that. Hahahaha. Every person and object has some internal clock which tells what their real time is. Even if you’ve lost it yourself, the magic can take the person back to the time where they belong. And that’s about that.
There are more than one History Guardian, and they’re divided into two groups. One which corrects history, like Calan, and one which destroys time-machines and all plans to invent time-machines which they find. Unfortunately, they can only sense where time machines are when feeling the time distortions of one being used, and come the 5th millennia time-travel can be invented in particularly technology-savvy geniuses’ backyards, not even mentioning the real labs. Hence, for each time distortion two History Guardians are sent: One to send the time-traveler back, and one to destroy the time-machine. Like partners, except on a LONG distance. It is a mission that never truly ends. What happened to Nyssa in the end was that she somehow became a History Guardian with her own fairy, except she’s… yeah.
Alright, so the skipping around time with no anchor of an individual's chronological order thing is more than just an isolated incident. That's unfortunate. This undermines a lot of the apparent consistency the plot had, and it adds nothing positive to the story.
It was the whole basis of the story and my idea. Hahaha. I couldn’t possibly leave it behind, even if I had nothing good to show with it. I thought it would be fun if people attempted reading it first in one way and then in another. I actually underlined “our starting point at 2014” to make it evident that this was not the start of the story, so just maybe people would scroll down to 2014. Unfortunately, all my underlines (I underlined all the years too, to make them stand out more) disappeared by some reason. Eh. In any case, you say it not adds anything to the story. But… it IS the story, so that’s unfortunate. We simply don’t have the x-axis in time to follow such events like the Time-Fairies do. Hahahahahahaha.
The History Guardian dude doesn't have much of a personality, and what I've seen so far isn't very engaging. He's apparently all about doing his job, blah blah blah, but then when you finally show something more than the dude on the job the first thing shown is him being a dick and whining to Miliana about saving history being her job. Then, in another show of inconsistent personalities, she just says "that's unfair" and he concedes and becomes flirty. This kind of turn on a dime tsundere nonsense is really bad even in the anime and manga I'm sure you learned it from, so try to avoid it like the plague when writing stories else you'll end up with these unrealistic and unsympathetic characters you have in the persons of Nyssa and Calan.
Of course he has to do his job. If he doesn’t, time will be changed and all his family, friends, his entire LIFE will disappear because none of them were ever born. I’m pretty sure you’d do your job too if that was what was at stake. The whining was, well, him being stupid. She invaded at a slightly bad time. And what Miliana did was not being a tsundere. A tsundere would have… eh, I’m not going to describe it. In either case, of course the naïve and innocent Miliana is going to say he’s being unfair when he’s saying such cruel things. However, being the childish thing she is, she instantly softens up when he turns around to be nice again. It was Calan teasing, not anything alike to being tsundere. [edit]
A tsundere reacts badly to positive things, not the other way around. My definition of a tsundere is bad and I should feel bad.[/edit] I think I’m trailing off the proper argument, but Miliana simply isn’t one. She loves happiness and kindness and is very honest in what she likes and always wants Calan to be the kindest he can be, so of course she becomes happy when he turns around. I think you misunderstood my characters a bit, but that may be my fault since the quality of this entire entry is somewhat lacking. Hahahaha. Oh, well.
A full grown dude and a 12 inch tall fairy being lovers? Oooookay then, if you say so. Also, that phrasing of "that's right, we're lovers" makes it sound like the guy is talking to someone directly, but it's in first person present tense so that makes no sense.
Yes, he was. The audience. Well, the reader. I was a bit tired when I wrote that, probably, and saw nothing wrong with it. Oh, wait, I still don’t. Hahahahahaha.
So the fairy lays on his hand and he closes his fingers over her, leaving only her head and the bottom of her legs visible. This dude must have gigantic hands for that to work, probably 10 inches wide. This is the kind of weird inconsistency that totally breaks immersion if the reader takes a second to think about it.
Not bottom of her legs, all of her legs. He only had enough hands to cover a part of her torso. Um, what did I write? Oh. Hahahahahahaha. My fault.
The end of the story is bad, to put it bluntly, but the entire plot of the entry itself is a problem that only becomes fully evident at the end. You set forth this interesting plot point at the start, the end of humanity in the future and a woman determined to fix it being stopped by the History Guardian, and you proceed to go nowhere with it. Instead you give three irrelevant vignettes to show what this guy does to guard history, then a little bit of him off the job that's mixed with really awkward romance stuff. You should have stuck with just the Italy or France part to show the day-to-day work of the job and dropped the unnecessary romance entirely, and then you should have filled out the rest of the entry by actually continuing the plot you set up at the beginning and coming to some kind of conclusion or hint of a conclusion (by indicating whether the guy would try to save humanity or just keep doing his job, no need to actually show it happening). As written, what little plot there is is entirely unsatisfactory.
Except that wasn’t the start. It was actually rather close to the end, actually. Hahahaha. I didn’t have the time to do justice to the plot which I originally had in mind, which is the one referenced there, and so. Point is, I didn’t even try to save it. I wrote those parts for the sheer pleasure of writing them, because I felt it needed the extra examples of what a History Guardian did. That’s what this entry is, really. A show of what a History Guardian does. Hahahaha. The actual plot I had in mind would have taken… far longer, and would have… eh, I don’t even want to think about it. I wouldn’t have had the room for a single example of what a History Guardian did, not to mention any of the other… Eh. Going with the plot on this one was simply impossible within the time-frame I had. So I went around and had fun instead. Of course, the actual COMPLETE story would have to include how Calan became a History Guardian, still include Nyssa’s little scene, include the entire friggin’ rebellion against the Time Queen, properly develop the romance between Calan and Miliana and include how she was torn when eventually he decided to save humanity, and then the final climax and this other Time Fairy which I had plans for would be all wicked and stuff and subdued Nyssa, and… *gasp* Way, way more. Hahahahaha. I realized I couldn’t do that, and… Hahaha.
Overall, I did not like this entry. The writing wasn't bad aside from the abuse of ellipses, and Miliana was an amusing character. Other than that, well, the criticisms above should have been enough to show my opinion on this entry.
Hahahahaha. Now let me pray Brovo didn’t spend too long picking it apart at the core when it wasn’t something that was finished anyway. Thanks for reviewing~
