You, Me and Him

Story by: babyshawol96

Reviewer: TheDividingTree

 

Title [1/5]

When I first saw your title, I basically got the gist of the story. There’s a love triangle and the main somehow gets tangled between two guys. To be honest, if I saw your story in the updated fanfiction, I would just scroll past it because this title gives me a sense of a typical, clichéd plot. A title usually tells implicates something from the plot or the character relations, so your title was quite bland for me.

Then there’s the grammar part. The general convention is to put the first person pronoun last, which would make it “You, Him and Me” (Microsoft Word detects this as well). However, using “You, Me and Him” is not wrong; it is just more informal and may not rub off well on some grammar-attentive readers.

 

Foreword/Description [1.5/5]

Your description is supposed to give insight on what your story is going to be about and what the situation is near the beginning, before the first conflict. In my opinion, the last two sentences, especially the last one, disclose too much about the plot. Instead, you could elaborate more on the first sentence and hint on the second sentence, while maybe introducing a bit about the third character that she gets pushed into. For example, you could show readers what he’s done to come off as a notorious rebel, or why he’s still a public figure even though he’s notorious. This would definitely be effective since you’re using first person. You could twist her thoughts a bit with the wording near the end of the description to hint at her growing feelings, and maybe mention the third person somehow.

This, of course, is a suggestion.

The second thing is that there are a few grammar slip-ups here.  You start off in a present tense, but you slowly switch to a past tense. This is confusing, so try to keep it to one. I’m not quite sure which tense you want to go for since your chapters are in different tenses as well, but pick one and stick with it.

In the first sentence of the description, it says “he comes across as vain and thinks of himself as a public figure”. I would suggest writing “he comes across as vain and I can tell that he thinks of himself as a public figure” because this sentence is Hoeji’s perspective, and it wouldn’t make sense that she knows him so well when she first meets him. He could give off that impression, but unless she’s a mind reader, she can’t know for sure whether or not he really thinks that about himself when they first meet.

The information about Woo Lan Academy could also be put in your description. If I were you, I would put that in the description, and then introduce Hoeji afterwards. But since that would change many things in your foreword and description, I think this is fine. Just one thing though: you get a scholarship ‘to’ a place, or ‘towards’ something, but we generally don’t get scholarships ‘into’ places.

 

Visual Appearance [5/5]

Your story looks thoroughly organized, which is something I really like. The small credits to the shop that made your poster is something that adds to this as well.

 

Plot/Storyline [11.5/20]

This plot is quite clichéd with Hoeji being the new student that somehow gets mixed up with the popular guys in the school. The whole plot makes sense, and it’s understandable, but it just wasn’t that original, which took away from some of its captivity.

[Sorry this section is really short; the plot things I would like to touch upon fit more in the other sections, especially the 'flow section'.]

 

Characters [14/20]

Hoeji didn’t really stand out to me. If someone asked me to describe Hoeji, or to tell him/her something interesting about her, I wouldn’t know what to say. The only thing I could say is that she does horseback riding (I’m glad you didn’t pick something like dancing, singing, or acting), and that she has an interest in becoming ‘popular’ through Im Da’s methods, thus also making her quite gullible. The problem is that we know nothing about Hoeji herself. We only know that she has a best friend named Allison. I suggest you try to interject as many things as possible about her past from now on. Things like family background, reputation at her regular school, work ethics, etc. In the future you could do this by having a family visit during a break or something.

On the other hand, I found Junhong’s character quite interesting. He’s not an idol or anything, yet he was already giving signatures and acting like some big shot, and that was really a first for me. But then he later comes out with a sort of suave yet arrogant nature, which I love. Full marks for Junhong.

Then there’s Minho, who’s repulsively arrogant. He seems really straightforward to the point where he’s a real during their meeting, but I really like how you emphasize that he chased after her. It triggers questions about if genuine feelings fueled that action, or if it was guilt from a past experience or natural guilt. Even though he was recently introduced, he seems like an interesting character. Full marks for him too!

Yongguk seems like the least developed character. I don’t think he’s as important as Junhong or Minho (since he isn’t in your poster), but I still think you could add a bit more to him. Right now he’s just the person that leads Hoeji around so she doesn’t get lost. But he’s also a friend of Junhong, so it might be better if you establish a friendship between Yongguk and Hoeji so that she has a link to the school community other than Im Da (who seems like quite the cunning character right now—marks for that).

 

Flow [6/10]

I feel that you’re rushing this a bit too much. Don’t get too excited and slow down. There are many emotions that can be shown here. Establish what you want their initial impressions to be and reinforce them. Then as the story goes along, we’ll be able to see the progression of feelings and opinions instead of one day having her have all her opinions changed.

You say that when Hoeji first meets Junhong, he has a sort of vain atmosphere. It makes sense because of what he did to her upon their first meeting, but I really thought that she was going to have lunch with Yongguk—not Junhong—because—I don’t know about you, but—I would definitely not eat lunch with someone like that without any objections after what he had done.

But what I’m trying to say is that the relationship between Hoeji and Junhong accelerates way too quickly. We barely know anything about either and they’re already putting up a dating act. My suggestion would be to establish the characters and relations of Yongguk and Junhong. Then when they’re well established with a few meetings, readers can make more sense out of why Hoeji felt so attached to Junhong.

 

Writing [15/25]

Please proofread your work. You have a lot of missing punctuation that I had to take marks off for, especially right before quotations. I can tell you have all the conventions down because you’ve demonstrated it well in some places, but proofreading is essential. Proofread, proofread, proofread (:

Also, don’t switch tenses in the middle of a story unless you’re doing something where the present is in one tense, and the past of the characters is in another. It just makes everything very confusing for people who are reading it in one shot, and it doesn’t really rub off well on people.

There were a few weird things with your word choice. For example, some words were not used properly. In chapter 5, how do Im Da’s eyes “beam with personality”? What kind of personality? You may be trying to describe Im Da a bit more, but that doesn’t explain anything about her at all.

I noticed that you used the word ‘vain’ in your description of Junhong quite a bit. Try to use other words, like ‘arrogant’ so there’s more variation. I haven’t seen ‘vain’ used like that in a story on this site before, so it stood out more than other words that may have been repeated. It’s not a bad thing that you’re using an uncommon word, but just remember that if something is uncommon, people will notice it more. Also try to use words other than ‘said’. You can always replace it with an action to show readers how the character is feeling.

I could tell that you put effort in describing new scenes, and you didn’t overdo it, which is good. I would suggest for you to maybe break up the description a bit, if you get what I mean. For example, when she’s describing the stable, try including more senses other than visuals, and maybe put a few actions in between the descriptions to give it more variety. Sometimes it seems like it’s this huge amazing scenery and then she goes back to doing whatever she was doing, which makes her actions seem a bit plain.

 

Personal enjoyment/Bonus [5+1/10]

I’m not really into these kinds of school-setting stories because I’ve seen them a bit too much, but I really liked Junhong’s character. Bonus for making me amused whenever Junhong appeared. He is a very interesting character for sure.

 

TOTAL: [60/100]

 

Hey (: I’m really sorry this review is a few days late; I’ve been really caught up with school. Good luck with the rest of your story, and be sure to rate my review out of 10 in the comments (: