dandelion_26 : A Beautiful Tragedy

Characters. Kim Jongin, OCs

Status. Completed

Description. Kim Jongin, a man with a huge ambition to become a singer, unfortunately happens to be blind. His personal assistant, Kim Min Ja helps him walk his journey to his dreams. But one day, just as beautiful as any other, a beautiful tragedy happened...
 

STORY LINK

Story title. 1/5
It title itself is very pretty, in my opinion, but however I don’t think it’s the best title for your story. While your story is a tragedy, it isn’t to the point where it can be called a beautiful one. I don’t know how to word it exactly, but the title somehow doesn’t fit the story. Perhaps the title holds so much emotion in those words, but your storyline isn’t really up to par with the title (which I will talk about later in this review). Also, the title is very common - people do tend to put these two words together a lot, and this doesn’t help with engraving your story as an unique one in your readers’ minds. Perhaps you should come up with a more original one that fits your story like a glove.


Description, foreword & tags. 5/10
Your description is quite short, but it does the job of intriguing your readers well. While you’re not giving away too much of the storyline, you’re giving enough to keep your readers wanting to read. For me, I was interested in the story after reading your description because I wanted to find out what happened. However, I would say your description is quite plain - it lacks some ‘wow’ and impact that will really your readers pumped up and geared up for reading.

Your tags are a little messy. I think the tags ‘tragedy00angst’ and ‘kai00exo’ shouldn’t be there at all - they don’t serve a lot of purpose. Instead of them, you should have ‘tragedy’, ‘exo’ and ‘kai’ as these tags will make it much, much easier for people to find your story under.


Appearance: graphics. 0/5, layout. 4/5
Honestly speaking, I don’t think the poster suits your story at all. Other than the title, the poster doesn’t have anything to do with the story - it doesn’t have the main characters, nor does it have the theme. Unfortunately, I cannot grant you a score for the poster as it is simple unrelated to the story.

On the other hand, the general display of your story is rather clean and simple, but I would discourage the use of those grey boxes, because they stand out like a sore thumb too much. Also, you have posted the story twice in the same chapter - you should really fix that.


Characterisation. 4/10
Jongin is a blind person who aspires to become a singer, even though he has a family business that he can takeover. From that, I did expect him to be very strong and adamant about his dreams, but after reading the story, I feel that he’s a rather weak person, who doesn’t have confidence in himself. I think you’re trying to show how he’s still going strong despite being disabled, but somehow you haven’t really brought out the strongness within him.

Kim Min Ja, a.k.a Kim Ja, is quite a hard one to analyse, in my opinion. While I think she’s also the strong type, because of her circumstances, at the end of the story you have written her as someone who is weak. I can’t really see much into this character - the way you’ve written about her is rather messy and it’s the same with Jongin - although you have given us some background information about the characters, there wasn’t anything that told us how and why they have become the person they are now.

You have left a lot of room for your characters to develop. Strictly speaking, you have done very little character development throughout the story. Your characters are rather vague and it’s hard to categorise them into groups like hardworking or friendly - you will need to develop your characters a lot more and give them more depth.


Plot. 5/20
I think the plot is the weakest point of your story. You have a great starting point - Jongin being blind but there’s someone to help him with his dreams - but it all goes downhill after reading the first part of your story. For Jongin to have a tragic past is understandable, since he is blind and you’d expect something sad happening to him in the past, but the past of Kim Ja is simply too dramatic and unrealistic. First, she comes from a single-parent family, then her mother dies, then she finds a good friend and everything goes back to normal, but her friend is suddenly very sick and she now has the burden of all the fees plus her college loans - all of this is really too much for one person. While I do understand that you want to portray Kim Ja as someone who is strong despite her harsh situation, but I do think you’ve done too much to her past to the point it’s not really believable anymore.

When Jongin goes to audition, half of me expected him to get rejected, because it’s really not an easy thing to become a singer, especially since he has a disability. However, when you revealed that he did get accepted, I started having expectations of how things will play out from that point. Then, Kim Ja’s friend is suddenly discharged from the hospital - how? From what you have said before, she was still waiting for a lung transplant in the hospital! Putting that detail aside, it seemed as if things were going well after this point. However, the car crash ruins it all, well not really in the case of Jongin, since he gets the chance of getting his sight back, but then Kim Ja is in critical condition - which I find, is too misfortunate for her. What I don’t understand is why doesn’t she want Jongin to know who she is? It’s kind of obvious even if he couldn’t see her before.

I think the ending of the story is all too rushed and there are too many subplots all over the place. There are so many questions and plot points that you have left unanswered and unattended. Also, I can’t quite see the point of the second chapter - I think rather than writing a chapter that’s in someone else’s point of view, you should somehow incorporate into the main chapter of your story. While I think it’s great that you have completed the story, but there are just simply too many things you haven’t completed within the story - too many explanations are needed. I finished reading the story with a massive question mark on the top of my head and it was hard to say I understood the story at all. In order for you to develop this story further (which you can do, as the starting point of this story is a very good one with a lot of potential), you will need further planning, and in much more detail. You will have to explain the things that you have left unexplained, and you have to fill the plot holes within the story. What I would say is, try and come back and read the story in a couple of days/weeks time in a reader’s mindset and see if you can understand it. That way, you should be able to see the difference between what you see and what your readers see.


Consistency/flow. 8/10
I would say the flow of the story is quite okay. The car crash happens after Jongin’s audition, which is all within the same day, and that seems plausible, though I do think the ending of your story is quite rushed.


Grammar, spelling & punctuation. 10/15
There aren’t major issues in this department, but there are things that are spread out all over the story. For example, there are times when you don’t have any punctuation before the closing speech mark, which you will have to fix. Also, there are multiple times when you don’t finish off the sentence properly with an appropriate punctuation - you will need to fix this as well. I think you will really benefit from getting a beta-reader to read through your work and to correct those mistakes.


Structure. 3/5
There isn’t a lot I can say regarding the structure of your story - almost 90% of the text is dialogue, and there really isn’t enough to put into a paragraph. However, there are times when you have started a new line with no reason, such as in the middle of a speech. Also, I think some of those page dividers aren’t needed because you should connect the two sections with a sentence or two instead of relying on those dividers.


Readers' response. 5/5
Unfortunately, your statistics are very low - perhaps it’s because of your tags and the fact that your story hasn’t been up on the site for a long time. However, the ratio of upvotes to subscribers is quite good, and you do have a few encouraging comments from your readers, though you have only replied to one of them. I’d say give it more time and people will slowly start to notice your story.


Overall enjoyment. 3/10
Unfortunately, this story didn’t really live up to the expectation I had from reading the description. I am a Kai fan, so I am not biased in the sense that “since he’s not my bias therefore I don’t like the story”, but like I said before, I finished reading the story with a thought of “what actually happened in the story?” There were a lot that I couldn’t understand and a lot that made me think I wasn’t reading the story properly. Despite that, I think the story really does have the potential to be further developed, since the starting point is unique and different (especially since a lot of authors tend to portray Jongin as the perfect human being). Don’t lose heart and keep trying!
 

total grade : 45/100

Notes