The Five Stages of Loss completed The Five Stages of Loss AUTHOR: Illicits
LEAD: Sehun
GENRE; SETTING: romance; angst
CHAPTERS: 5
READER INFORMATION: None  

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.

In which a girl consoles her neighbour after he loses the love of his life.

thoughts PLOT: The chapters in this story are all very short, and the plot is more or less what it says on the tin – Sehun grieving his way through the five stages of loss (I remember hearing somewhere that these were officially accepted psychological stages not just of loss, but also of not getting your way, perhaps more as well), and the girl who's been crushing on him consoles him through it. It's beautiful in its simplicity, and could easily have fit into the Exodus theme of my competition just as much as the Silent Love theme (in fact, it might even have been better suited to Exodus). It would have been nicer if it was longer or more fleshed out, or potentially not quite as fast paced as it was, but given that the focus was on the five stages of loss, it works.

CHARACTERISATION: It's actually very difficult to set up a character and then put that character through five radically different emotions in a short space of time without it feeling like whiplash or out of character, but the author here has managed it. I guess it's more because the story is structured as kind of snapshots from particular