Title: Runes of Despair

Reviewed by: exoexoexolellel

First impression

Your foreword definitely got me engaged and I was left eager to read your story. Your poster was beautiful and sparked an interest in me. I'm a big er for graphics :P The only thing missing is a background and font, which I will talk a little about later.

Story title

The title is eye capturing and I'm sure it would attract many readers. I can easily see the relevance of the title and the story. I think it's a lovely title and it's really well thought of. It is currently the only fanfic that posseses that name so that's a plus in terms of uniqueness.

Graphics

Aesthetically, the poster is superb. I personally like black and white and yours really appeal to me. I see the tunnel and I think that holds a great piece of symbolism but I don't know what the flowers are doing there. Is it just a prop to make the poster look good? Maybe you should attatch it to the story. Also, I'm not sure why they are wearing sunglasses...

I think backgrounds play an important role in giving off the genre vibe. This is because people can backgrounds through their peripheral vision while reading the story and it will give them the full effect of the emotion you want to portray to them. If it's too late to go back to your graphic artist and request for a background - it should be similar to the background of the poster - then just leave it.

Description and foreword

This part was definitely well done. You really know how to hit the right spots. Shortening your sentences are great effects for descriptions and the content is really draws the reader in. It's actually informal to use as many lines as you have entered but it looks better like that and just for the sake of engaging the reader, keep it there.

You should also play around with fonts rather than using the original one. You'd be surprised at how interested readers would become just by the appearance of the content.

Plot / flow / originality

The plot I'm guessing has been thought up of by many daydreamers but only a few can write it down in a talented manner. Overall, it's a little dramatic but it's a parallel futuristic universe so that's okay. You have made what the is clearly in your most recent chapter and have cleared up any fuzzy predictions.

Although you have jumped back from the present to the past and vice versa, I found your flow pretty connective. It's the way you linked all your passages with one another, bonding each new idea with the previous one. To be honest, when I was reading the flashbacks on how the family had started, I was thinking, "Oh no. She's going through each one, the story will definitely be dragging on for too long." But no, you kept it pretty short and detailed.

I have never come across a story where children whose parents were slaughtered were kept in one camp, all bundled up together. The most exaggerated thing I found in your story was the ultimate punishment for the children - two hundred pushups while being whipped. My jaw literally dropped. I have been swimming for ten years and I can only manage ten pushups, that is, before I started working out. Plus the fact that I rely on my legs more than my arms. So unless these kids are SuperChildren, I doubt they can even go pass one hundred...

But it's a parallel universe, parallel universe...

Still a little hard to believe.

Another thing, the emotions vibrating out from Eunkyung... it's a bit too mature for a twelve years old. I think you should shove in a chapter where it shows just how young the characters are.

Grammar

Note; the sentences in italics are quotes from your story. The words in bold are the corrections I've made. {{Braces}} indicate paragraphs that I have rephrased.

"I’ll send you two to the same place, that way; you two pathetic betrayers would never be apart."

Semicolons should only be used to connect two indepedent clauses with conjuctive adverbs or transitional phrases. This error did not happen again so I'm guessing you are quite familiar with this use of punctuation.

"I’ll send you two to the same place; you two pat