Beyond by KangminBread

VᴇʀꜱᴀEᴍᴇʀɢᴇ ʀᴇᴠɪᴇᴡ ꜱʜᴏᴘ Archive。
auMhf5C.png
REVIEWER'S CORNER
Sorry for the later review, I wasn't home on the weekend and AFF is being the horrible website it is and not doing what it's supposed to (and my laptop is shutting off by itself) but I finally managed to get it done! 
LINK
BY Kangminbread


Title:
I mentioned this below but the title, in my opinion, is quite clever because of the chapter names relating to the title. I've said this in other reviews as well but whether or not it's eyecatching as a title is up to who is reading. Personally, I do like short titles and I do like titles that can tie into the story or something and it does here considering the chapter names so I think it's a pretty good title.

Description/Foreword:
The first thing I noticed was that this has quite the fancy appearance to it. I feel like it's a bit over the top for a story, since they're usually more plain looking, but I think the text being grey (...though it looks like some kind of blue to me) is what is putting me off since I think having a black background with any color (besides maybe white) isn't attractive most of the time for these kind of 'story' layouts.

Moving on to the description, I don't really feel like I get it to put it that way, there's nothing to really base it off of if that makes sense (it probably doesn't). It's not a bad description but I feel like I don't know what the story's about because of it which is why the foreword is there, I'm supposing. I noticed the list of chapter names and that was clever too and it makes me kind of see the relevance of the list since some of the words used in the chapter names are also in the description.

Though, after reading the foreword, I still feel as I don't really know what's going on either. I kind of got that one of them is a webtoon artist but I don't really understand what the plot is from reading these two things. Maybe I'm just slow or maybe it's not really there, I guess I'll really only know after reading the story itself at this point. After reading some parts of the story, I do feel like the foreword is very appropriate for this story since it does make more sense when you start reading which is good since sometimes if people have questions about the description/foreword, there's always a good chance people will read more to find out.

Anyways, as for grammar - there were a few mistakes in the foreword that I could catch but I'll be putting that in the writing style section.


Plot:
This doesn't relate to the plot but as I said before, I really like the chapter names because of how they all start with "Beyond the [...]" but anyways, the story was a lot different than I had originally imagined, which is a very good thing, and I was surprised to actually enjoy what I read. The questions I had about the whole foreword thing were easily answered in the first three chapters and I feel like I can actually understand what's going on. 

I've actually never read a plot like this one and I truthfully wasn't expecting to read the whole thing since I'm supposed to be catching up on stuff since class starts tomorrow but I enjoyed the plot a lot more than I thought I would. I guess I thought it was going to be a different thing so I'm glad it came out the way it did; you can clearly see the plot's conflict with what's happening and it was kind of hard to predict the ending which is also good.

I was hoping it wouldn't be extremely cliché since cliché endings can most definitely ruin a good story but I'm not concerned about this one since it was fairly planned out, it seemed.


Writing Style/Flow:
So there were a few weird things here and there, such as in the foreword, so I pointed a few out.

1. Weird word usage
The first sentence uses the word 'received' but that sounds kind of odd in this sentence.
E.G.: When Youngwoon got home from the grocery store, he was received with a cushion hitting his face, hard.
Fixed: When Youngwoon got home from the grocery store, he was greeted with a cushion hitting his face hard.
> The reason I used the word greeting is because he got home from being out and he was greeted with the pillow to his face. It's like greeting someone when they get home, using the word received doesn't make much sense in the context you wanted to use it in. I also took the comma out from after the word 'face' because it's not really needed in this sentence.

2. Repeating of words (this happens once, I'm pretty sure but since it's in the foreword, I will point it out)
E.G.: Moist eyes glued back on on the screen reading the text, fully engrossed and oblivious.
Fixed: Moist eyes glued back on the screen reading the text, fully engrossed and oblivious.

Overall though, I was surprised to see a good amount of detail attached to the story and it made it better and easier to read. There really weren't many grammatical errors that I could notice either so there's not much else to say in this section besides the flow's pacing which was also fairly decent. The story followed a specific timeline and that was that, it ended at a perfect time and didn't draw on.


Characterization:
The characters were fairly decent I'd say, they resembled real people and weren't overly cliché as characters. I think they had a good amount of life to them, per se. They didn't seem flat either which is a good thing. Starting with Youngwoon, he had a good character since you could really tell from beginning to end that he loved Sungmin, not only that but you coul really feel that he was mourning in the beginning when Sungmin died which shows that he did have a bit of character to him since he didn't just move on which tends to happen in a lot of stories. Kyuhyun was a fairly good supporting character since he progressed the plot quite a bit and Sungmin obviously wasn't physically there since he was dead but I love how you made the two interact in a sense even if Sungmin couldn't be seen.

Overall, the characters are very good and not at all flat or cliché compared to what I usually see at least.


Personal Enjoyment:
I enjoyed it more than I thought I would trutfully. Hopefully this review makes sense since I am lowkey half asleep (it's only 7pm why life) but I do think the story is a good one even though I'm not as big on SUJU as I was back in 2012. Either way, I think the story has it's potential and there's really not much to complain or criticize (though I think the layout made me more sleepy since it wasn't as bright lol oops). If I forgot to say anything, which - knowing me - I did, or if you have any questions, just ask - I'm always around one way or another.

Also, don't forget to credit the review shop and I hope this helped.

Like this story? Give it an Upvote!
Thank you!

Comments

You must be logged in to comment
No comments yet