— SuperSecretive762
☀ sun & rain ☂ review shop ― thank you (closed).
SuperSecretive762's The Brightest Star Reviewed by : Finally_Home title [3/5] while i'm sure it's relevant to the story, though i haven't gotten that far (i can sort of tell, though lol), it's not a very unique title. if i saw this story in a list of stories, judging by title alone, i probably wouldn't click on it first. description [7/10] the little snippets are really nice, and i enjoyed reading the character descriptions. though i will say, from the ten chapters i've read, i should think that all the characters would be introduced, seeing as we're a fourth through the story already. so it threw me off a bit (and cost you a point) that we didn't even see taeyeon's name mentioned.
i'm also slightly put off by the fact that some people have korean names and other people only have english names. i know the story takes place at an international school, but i'd have thought that people like irene, who don't even go to the school, would have korean names. but ah well. plot [17/30] i think it's a pretty good start to the story, though it's a bit fast. i do have quite a few questions but i'll try to shorten the list for the review.
1. when the story starts, is it the beginning of the school year or not? usually, seating charts are only present at the beginning of the school year, but every other context you provided made it seem like jessica and donghae are known, though it seems like it's only jessica's first day.
2. what age are they, and what grade are they in? you call them 'woman' and 'man' but also sometimes 'boy' and 'girl' and nowhere in the story do you actually mention their age or years. for the record, i thought they were in university instead of high school, so you might want to make that a bit more clear.
3. crenation - this is a pet peeve of mine (science student lol) but when you said it takes place in 'a thicker solution' that's not necessarily true. what is true is that the solution is hypertonic, which i'm sure you know what that means but if not, it's when the solution is more concentrated than the cell itself. i would have liked it if yoona, being the model student she is, said smth like 'crenation happens when a cell is submerged in a hypertonic solution, which causes water to flow out of the cell by osmosis.'
4. why are the seed pots in the park instead of in the school? i may have missed something but it seems like they're just... in a public park? i'm not saying that's not possible but that's a little too casual for an experiment, especially when the school's rich and private. they should have space in their fancy labs for students to put the pots.
5. yoona and irene's backstory - there's so much i could say about this lol. why didn't the driver get jail time? why didn't yoona and irene accept the money? why are they renting an apartment as high schoolers? is that even legal? why is it so bad that the driver offered money as compensation?
i know the point is that the driver was rich and thought money could solve everything, but what else are you supposed to offer in return for a life? in real life, judges will definitely make you pay money if you killed someone lol. also, i think it's just unrealistic for them to not accept the money. like, i get that they don't want money from someone like that, but realistically? i would love for someone to sponsor me through school.
and the whole thing with the aunt is weird too like, i'm not saying i would be comfortable living with my aunt if my parents died, but realistically, the aunt is probably their legal guardian and would have to take care of them even if she didn't want to, which you didn't mention if she did or not. knowing asian aunties, if i tried to rent an apartment after my parents died, my aunt would be like GURL NO YOU'RE LIVING WITH ME.
6. ginseng soup - it was in chapter 10, after donghae and jessica left. i really... don't have any words for this. ginseng is really, really expensive. normal people couldn't even sustainably have ginseng soup everyday, much less people who are so poor they're literally selling bread on the streets. i'd get if it was a special occasion and they meant for donghae and jessica to have it, but if it's like that, you should mention that and how rare it is for them to have such treats.
i'm sure there are more things like this but ngl i'm doing this late at night and these are just the main things that i caught. it'd be nice if you could either add more stuff (and thereby lengthen the story even more) to clarify these plot holes, or just change some stuff (like putting the pots in the lab instead of the park).
characterization [15/30] of course, this is all based on me reading ten chapters, so if you developed everyone afterwards, i wouldn't know. based on what i read, though, i have to conclude that the characters are 1. static and 2. inconsistent. i'll analyze them one by one.
1. jessica
i think jessica, by far, was the most consistent character in the chapters i read. true to her main character status, she's given a lot of POV and lines. but... that was it. we briefly delved into her backstory with mr jung at the beginning of the story, but afterwards, it was just 'oh she's rich'. there's nothing wrong with that, but i do think you have to do a lot more explaining as to why she's so socially inept. even a few lines from donghae (maybe during his first scene with yoona during gym class) explaining 'well, there was no one to talk back to her ever' would do.
i also think you could introduce some backstory later. like, it's very clear that she's rich and always been homeschooled, but i think it would be interesting if we introduced, say, her uality a bit later. or at least, don't just say 'oh she's lesbian'. let the readers figure it out from how she always hangs around yoona and thinks she's beautiful, or whatever.
also (this is more of a plot issue but whatever), what's wrong with being lesbian in this world? if you held off telling the readers about her uality, there could be a scene later where someone's getting beat up for being gay, or whatever, and jessica has a very adverse reaction. that raises the stakes immediately and brings minor conflicts into the story for spice.
i find it odd that the only flaw jessica seems to have is being rich and insensitive to social cues. like, yeah we know that her being rich explains a lot of things, but she's... perfect. she gets slightly pissed when she's not paired with donghae, but that's the only negative thing i can find about her that's not 'she's rich' or 'she's blunt'. characters are humans, bro, give them bad traits. with jessica's personality, i feel like she could very well be a bratty spoiled child, or have a super short temper, or something.
in the beginning, you said that her upbringing taught her that all poor people were garbage, but i don't see that being reflected in her actions. maybe for one or two chapters at most. it seemed like she went from 'yoona's trash' to 'omg i love yoona' really quickly. realistically, if someone was brought up with such a belief all their life, they wouldn't be so quick to change their mind, not even in the face of love. in fact, they'd be extremely conflicted ('i love them but they're poor and poor people !').
it also really bothered me that jessica couldn't walk like 20 meters without dying. like... i doubt she'd be THAT weak. going on a mountain hike impromptu, yeah she'd die, i think most ppl would. but walking a few blocks, that's a little too much. even with the whole flea market scene preceding, i think she'd be at most tired or dehydrated, but not to the point of dying.
2. yoona
despite being the second lead and also having a lot of appearances, yoona wasn't as developed as i would have liked. first things first, she's quite inconsistent, going from hating jessica to thinking she's not so bad. dude, if someone made a dig at my socioeconomic status on the first day i met them, i would straight up hate them forever. at the very least, it'll take a VERY important event for me to change my mind on that. yoona's dirt poor, my dude, and you've implied that she's quite sensitive about it (if she won't let irene sell bread, she must be wanting to save face). she should realistically be furious at jessica (tbh this story would fare better as an enemies-to-lovers fic imo).
other than that, same as with jessica above, it's weird to me that yoona's only negative trait is being poor. it's like she's belle from beauty and the beast, gentle and book-loving and all-around perfect. real life isn't a fairytale, yoona should have some things that make her human. one thing that i'd love for you to capitalize on is her shame of being poor (ofc, that brings up the question of why, then, wouldn't she take the money... unless she was too prideful, in which case that's a nice negative trait too!).
it'd also be nice if she was more 'nerdy' in the traditional sense, like always studying. i know you've made her always reading, but reading novels doesn't make anyone a good student. it makes them a good reader. if yoona got in by a scholarship (and presumably wants to keep said scholarship), she needs to be studying like every free moment she has. that's not just reading textbooks either, that includes doing homework, memorizing vocab, etc.
3. donghae
at this point, i don't think i can call donghae a minor character, though really, he should be. his characterization is even more inconsistent than yoona in the sense that at first, it seemed like he actually had a crush on yoona, but suddenly he hated her. he did have a reason, but i feel like you should have given us a warning or something, like maybe him ranting 'i thought she was pretty! but she was mean to jess!' idk.
that's really all i have to say for him because despite his status as a major character, i don't know anything about him other than his family's rich and he's very protective over jessica. give us some more details bro!
4. irene
i don't know if i can say anything about irene because we also don't know anything about her. i think there probably will be more if i read on, but i think at the moment, for the amount of characterization she has, irene shouldn't have gotten to many POVs.
5. other people
i made this section specifically for the lady whose child jessica calls poor in the flea market. it was super unrealistic for her to just say one line and stalk off angrily. if some richass high school girl implied that i should have abandoned my child because i'm poor, i would have thrown hands, regardless of age. in accordance with that, i think it would have been a nice point to establish jessica's personality and actual thoughts on poor people. in addition, it would have given you a chance to bring yoona into the situation and depending on situation, either feel more positive towards jessica or hate her even more.
if you wanted to write this event, it would be what i was talking about before, the major event where yoona sees that jessica's not as bad a person as she thought and begins to hate her less. but since it already seems like she doesn't hate her so much, idk if it would do anything to help that situation.
flow [10/25] i'll be honest, i almost didn't finish the ten chapters because of the things i'm mentioning here. let's go for a list again:
1. romanized korean
this is a pet peeve of mine. i cannot stand it when people put romanized korean ('annyeong, oppa!') into their stories. i don't think there's much point when you could just say it in english. i get that you want to, what, stay with the culture? since there's no word for 'oppa' in english. but in that case, it'd be fine if you said smth like 'hi, oppa!' because the italicization gives it away that oppa is not an english word. so yeah it really annoyed me whenever i read 'mianhae'.
2. format of text
it's been a long time since i've read anything that's not left-align. i do understand that sometimes people mess with the format of the text for experimental purposes, or because they're writing a text-fic, or a poem, or something. but this story is none of those - it's just normal prose. i'm no one to tell you any different, but typically, prose is written left-align. that's not to say you have to change it, i just wanted to point that out.
3. parentheses
this is one thing that, like the romanized korean, really bothered me to no extent. in the very beginning of the story, when you mentioned the name of the school, it went smth like this: 'they go to KIS (korean international school)' and that's not it, dude. typically, you never want to have parentheses explaining a term. a much better way to phrase the sentence would be: 'they go to the korean international school, or KIS for short.'
4. grammar
i am totally aware that not everyone speaks english perfectly (i'm not a native speaker either) but there were a few things that i noticed in this story that i wanted to address. first off, there were a lot of times when you used 'are' or 'were' when the only subject of the sentence was one person. in that case, you should use 'is' or 'was'. second, you have a tendency to use comma splices, which is when you join two full sentences with a comma instead of a period/semicolon. here's an article on comma splices if you want to know more.
i also noticed that sometimes you put dialogue by two different people in one paragraph. it was confusing to read since i didn't know who was talking. in general, you start a few paragraph/line whenever someone new talks. that's to say, if jessica talks, then yoona talks, then jessica talks again, there should be three different paragraphs. you seem to avoid having one-liners but it's totally okay to, especially with dialogue! here's an article on paragraph breaks if you want to know more.
5. epithets
epithets are phrases that describe a character, like 'the man' or 'the blonde' or 'the short girl'. you use epithets a LOT but usually we try to avoid them while writing. the main reason is becausethey sound cringey if you can describe someone using an epithet, you can 100% describe them in a better way (they do sound cringey tho). a lot of people are taught that it's awkward to say the character's name too much, or having too many pronouns isn't good, but honestly, use the names, use the pronounds. i'd much rather read 'jessica' or 'she' a million times than 'the woman' or 'the girl'.
the main reason that fanfic writers use epithets (other than what i just said) is i think because they write gay characters, and it's hella awkward saying 'she' a bunch of times when both characters are 'she'. but in that case, i'd say just use names, or if you're using 'she' for one character, call the other character by their name. it'll avoid the awkwardness of double pronouns and not sound as weird as using an epithet.
6. POV switch
this, by far, annoyed me the most. technically, it seems like you were trying to write third person omniscient (in the case that you don't know, it's when the readers are allowed to see into the thought process of every single character, like a god). while that works for some stories, i don't think it works here. i know that you're trying to let the readers into every character's life and explain why they act like they do, but there are a few reasons why i wouldn't.
1. it's really confusing. if i'm reading in one character's perspective, i don't want to suddenly change to another character. like, when i'm reading about jessica, i'm trying to imagine how she feels. if the POV switches to yoona suddenly, it leaves me not knowing what to feel.
2. you can change POVs, but try to do it at chapter/section breaks. like, physically type out a *** or --- and then break. when you do that, the story suddenly changes to being third person limited, where the story focuses on just one character and their thoughts. now ofc you can incorporate many third person limited POVs in the story, like have one section focusing on jessica and the next one on yoona, etc.
3. too much information is revealed too quickly + not enough emotions. i honestly didn't really need to know so much information in the beginning of the story. i didn't need donghae to tell me that he's protective over jessica; i could have realized that myself by the way you described it. i didn't need the narrator to tell me that jessica is rich every five lines; i realized that a long time ago.
i really wish you had stayed on one character's POV long enough for me to feel some sort of emotion. as it was, the POV switched so quickly that by the time i was starting to feel something (pity, sympathy, etc) for one character, the camera was on another character already. having a stable POV can help you develop the character more for the reader to relate to. right now it seems you're relying a lot on what we already know about the characters in real life (jessica is ice princess, yoona is really nice, etc).
7. show, don't tell.
while i did enjoy the way you described things as they were happening, it was way too much 'telling' for me to visualize anything. this also plays into why i didn't feel any emotions throughout the story. when you 'tell' me exactly what's going down in the story, i'm imagining a robot or a five-year-old kid doing the actions. there's not a lot of reader involvement, basically. you're giving me all the information i need in a systematic way, and i can't actually visualize what the characters are doing.
here's an example from chapter 4: 'yoona grabbed the paper and read it. they got a part to test the effect of light factors.' as a description, it works. it tells you what it's supposed to tell you. but it's not very interesting. it reads robotically and doesn't flow very well. here's how i would change it: 'yoona grabbed the paper, groaning as she scanned through it. all they have to do is test the effect of light on the growth of the sprouts.'
while it still seems like 'telling', there's a lot more descriptive factors to help you understand how yoona feels towards the experiment. she groaned, showing her dislike, and combined with the phrase 'all they have to do', it conjures up a feeling that yoona's not really excited for this experiment.
unfortunately, there's no easy way for me to explain how to 'show don't tell' especially this late at night, so i'm going to link you to a couple of articles. here, here, here, here
8. tense
you tended to mix the present and past tenses, and unfortunately there's no easy way to fix it without rewriting the entire thing, but here's a link that might be helpful for the future. i would just say choose a tense and stick with it, though here's a hint: if you 'show' more instead of 'telling', it'll help you be more consistent with tense.
personal enjoyment [3.5/5] despite what it may seem, i did enjoy reading this. i haven't read a high school au in a while (especially with rich kids) and it was refreshing to have a change in genre. the various things that i mentioned did throw me off, though, and i don't think i would finish the story if i read it on my own time. TOTAL : 52/100
i'm also slightly put off by the fact that some people have korean names and other people only have english names. i know the story takes place at an international school, but i'd have thought that people like irene, who don't even go to the school, would have korean names. but ah well. plot [17/30] i think it's a pretty good start to the story, though it's a bit fast. i do have quite a few questions but i'll try to shorten the list for the review.
1. when the story starts, is it the beginning of the school year or not? usually, seating charts are only present at the beginning of the school year, but every other context you provided made it seem like jessica and donghae are known, though it seems like it's only jessica's first day.
2. what age are they, and what grade are they in? you call them 'woman' and 'man' but also sometimes 'boy' and 'girl' and nowhere in the story do you actually mention their age or years. for the record, i thought they were in university instead of high school, so you might want to make that a bit more clear.
3. crenation - this is a pet peeve of mine (science student lol) but when you said it takes place in 'a thicker solution' that's not necessarily true. what is true is that the solution is hypertonic, which i'm sure you know what that means but if not, it's when the solution is more concentrated than the cell itself. i would have liked it if yoona, being the model student she is, said smth like 'crenation happens when a cell is submerged in a hypertonic solution, which causes water to flow out of the cell by osmosis.'
4. why are the seed pots in the park instead of in the school? i may have missed something but it seems like they're just... in a public park? i'm not saying that's not possible but that's a little too casual for an experiment, especially when the school's rich and private. they should have space in their fancy labs for students to put the pots.
5. yoona and irene's backstory - there's so much i could say about this lol. why didn't the driver get jail time? why didn't yoona and irene accept the money? why are they renting an apartment as high schoolers? is that even legal? why is it so bad that the driver offered money as compensation?
i know the point is that the driver was rich and thought money could solve everything, but what else are you supposed to offer in return for a life? in real life, judges will definitely make you pay money if you killed someone lol. also, i think it's just unrealistic for them to not accept the money. like, i get that they don't want money from someone like that, but realistically? i would love for someone to sponsor me through school.
and the whole thing with the aunt is weird too like, i'm not saying i would be comfortable living with my aunt if my parents died, but realistically, the aunt is probably their legal guardian and would have to take care of them even if she didn't want to, which you didn't mention if she did or not. knowing asian aunties, if i tried to rent an apartment after my parents died, my aunt would be like GURL NO YOU'RE LIVING WITH ME.
6. ginseng soup - it was in chapter 10, after donghae and jessica left. i really... don't have any words for this. ginseng is really, really expensive. normal people couldn't even sustainably have ginseng soup everyday, much less people who are so poor they're literally selling bread on the streets. i'd get if it was a special occasion and they meant for donghae and jessica to have it, but if it's like that, you should mention that and how rare it is for them to have such treats.
i'm sure there are more things like this but ngl i'm doing this late at night and these are just the main things that i caught. it'd be nice if you could either add more stuff (and thereby lengthen the story even more) to clarify these plot holes, or just change some stuff (like putting the pots in the lab instead of the park).
characterization [15/30] of course, this is all based on me reading ten chapters, so if you developed everyone afterwards, i wouldn't know. based on what i read, though, i have to conclude that the characters are 1. static and 2. inconsistent. i'll analyze them one by one.
1. jessica
i think jessica, by far, was the most consistent character in the chapters i read. true to her main character status, she's given a lot of POV and lines. but... that was it. we briefly delved into her backstory with mr jung at the beginning of the story, but afterwards, it was just 'oh she's rich'. there's nothing wrong with that, but i do think you have to do a lot more explaining as to why she's so socially inept. even a few lines from donghae (maybe during his first scene with yoona during gym class) explaining 'well, there was no one to talk back to her ever' would do.
i also think you could introduce some backstory later. like, it's very clear that she's rich and always been homeschooled, but i think it would be interesting if we introduced, say, her uality a bit later. or at least, don't just say 'oh she's lesbian'. let the readers figure it out from how she always hangs around yoona and thinks she's beautiful, or whatever.
also (this is more of a plot issue but whatever), what's wrong with being lesbian in this world? if you held off telling the readers about her uality, there could be a scene later where someone's getting beat up for being gay, or whatever, and jessica has a very adverse reaction. that raises the stakes immediately and brings minor conflicts into the story for spice.
i find it odd that the only flaw jessica seems to have is being rich and insensitive to social cues. like, yeah we know that her being rich explains a lot of things, but she's... perfect. she gets slightly pissed when she's not paired with donghae, but that's the only negative thing i can find about her that's not 'she's rich' or 'she's blunt'. characters are humans, bro, give them bad traits. with jessica's personality, i feel like she could very well be a bratty spoiled child, or have a super short temper, or something.
in the beginning, you said that her upbringing taught her that all poor people were garbage, but i don't see that being reflected in her actions. maybe for one or two chapters at most. it seemed like she went from 'yoona's trash' to 'omg i love yoona' really quickly. realistically, if someone was brought up with such a belief all their life, they wouldn't be so quick to change their mind, not even in the face of love. in fact, they'd be extremely conflicted ('i love them but they're poor and poor people !').
it also really bothered me that jessica couldn't walk like 20 meters without dying. like... i doubt she'd be THAT weak. going on a mountain hike impromptu, yeah she'd die, i think most ppl would. but walking a few blocks, that's a little too much. even with the whole flea market scene preceding, i think she'd be at most tired or dehydrated, but not to the point of dying.
2. yoona
despite being the second lead and also having a lot of appearances, yoona wasn't as developed as i would have liked. first things first, she's quite inconsistent, going from hating jessica to thinking she's not so bad. dude, if someone made a dig at my socioeconomic status on the first day i met them, i would straight up hate them forever. at the very least, it'll take a VERY important event for me to change my mind on that. yoona's dirt poor, my dude, and you've implied that she's quite sensitive about it (if she won't let irene sell bread, she must be wanting to save face). she should realistically be furious at jessica (tbh this story would fare better as an enemies-to-lovers fic imo).
other than that, same as with jessica above, it's weird to me that yoona's only negative trait is being poor. it's like she's belle from beauty and the beast, gentle and book-loving and all-around perfect. real life isn't a fairytale, yoona should have some things that make her human. one thing that i'd love for you to capitalize on is her shame of being poor (ofc, that brings up the question of why, then, wouldn't she take the money... unless she was too prideful, in which case that's a nice negative trait too!).
it'd also be nice if she was more 'nerdy' in the traditional sense, like always studying. i know you've made her always reading, but reading novels doesn't make anyone a good student. it makes them a good reader. if yoona got in by a scholarship (and presumably wants to keep said scholarship), she needs to be studying like every free moment she has. that's not just reading textbooks either, that includes doing homework, memorizing vocab, etc.
3. donghae
at this point, i don't think i can call donghae a minor character, though really, he should be. his characterization is even more inconsistent than yoona in the sense that at first, it seemed like he actually had a crush on yoona, but suddenly he hated her. he did have a reason, but i feel like you should have given us a warning or something, like maybe him ranting 'i thought she was pretty! but she was mean to jess!' idk.
that's really all i have to say for him because despite his status as a major character, i don't know anything about him other than his family's rich and he's very protective over jessica. give us some more details bro!
4. irene
i don't know if i can say anything about irene because we also don't know anything about her. i think there probably will be more if i read on, but i think at the moment, for the amount of characterization she has, irene shouldn't have gotten to many POVs.
5. other people
i made this section specifically for the lady whose child jessica calls poor in the flea market. it was super unrealistic for her to just say one line and stalk off angrily. if some richass high school girl implied that i should have abandoned my child because i'm poor, i would have thrown hands, regardless of age. in accordance with that, i think it would have been a nice point to establish jessica's personality and actual thoughts on poor people. in addition, it would have given you a chance to bring yoona into the situation and depending on situation, either feel more positive towards jessica or hate her even more.
if you wanted to write this event, it would be what i was talking about before, the major event where yoona sees that jessica's not as bad a person as she thought and begins to hate her less. but since it already seems like she doesn't hate her so much, idk if it would do anything to help that situation.
flow [10/25] i'll be honest, i almost didn't finish the ten chapters because of the things i'm mentioning here. let's go for a list again:
1. romanized korean
this is a pet peeve of mine. i cannot stand it when people put romanized korean ('annyeong, oppa!') into their stories. i don't think there's much point when you could just say it in english. i get that you want to, what, stay with the culture? since there's no word for 'oppa' in english. but in that case, it'd be fine if you said smth like 'hi, oppa!' because the italicization gives it away that oppa is not an english word. so yeah it really annoyed me whenever i read 'mianhae'.
2. format of text
it's been a long time since i've read anything that's not left-align. i do understand that sometimes people mess with the format of the text for experimental purposes, or because they're writing a text-fic, or a poem, or something. but this story is none of those - it's just normal prose. i'm no one to tell you any different, but typically, prose is written left-align. that's not to say you have to change it, i just wanted to point that out.
3. parentheses
this is one thing that, like the romanized korean, really bothered me to no extent. in the very beginning of the story, when you mentioned the name of the school, it went smth like this: 'they go to KIS (korean international school)' and that's not it, dude. typically, you never want to have parentheses explaining a term. a much better way to phrase the sentence would be: 'they go to the korean international school, or KIS for short.'
4. grammar
i am totally aware that not everyone speaks english perfectly (i'm not a native speaker either) but there were a few things that i noticed in this story that i wanted to address. first off, there were a lot of times when you used 'are' or 'were' when the only subject of the sentence was one person. in that case, you should use 'is' or 'was'. second, you have a tendency to use comma splices, which is when you join two full sentences with a comma instead of a period/semicolon. here's an article on comma splices if you want to know more.
i also noticed that sometimes you put dialogue by two different people in one paragraph. it was confusing to read since i didn't know who was talking. in general, you start a few paragraph/line whenever someone new talks. that's to say, if jessica talks, then yoona talks, then jessica talks again, there should be three different paragraphs. you seem to avoid having one-liners but it's totally okay to, especially with dialogue! here's an article on paragraph breaks if you want to know more.
5. epithets
epithets are phrases that describe a character, like 'the man' or 'the blonde' or 'the short girl'. you use epithets a LOT but usually we try to avoid them while writing. the main reason is because
the main reason that fanfic writers use epithets (other than what i just said) is i think because they write gay characters, and it's hella awkward saying 'she' a bunch of times when both characters are 'she'. but in that case, i'd say just use names, or if you're using 'she' for one character, call the other character by their name. it'll avoid the awkwardness of double pronouns and not sound as weird as using an epithet.
6. POV switch
this, by far, annoyed me the most. technically, it seems like you were trying to write third person omniscient (in the case that you don't know, it's when the readers are allowed to see into the thought process of every single character, like a god). while that works for some stories, i don't think it works here. i know that you're trying to let the readers into every character's life and explain why they act like they do, but there are a few reasons why i wouldn't.
1. it's really confusing. if i'm reading in one character's perspective, i don't want to suddenly change to another character. like, when i'm reading about jessica, i'm trying to imagine how she feels. if the POV switches to yoona suddenly, it leaves me not knowing what to feel.
2. you can change POVs, but try to do it at chapter/section breaks. like, physically type out a *** or --- and then break. when you do that, the story suddenly changes to being third person limited, where the story focuses on just one character and their thoughts. now ofc you can incorporate many third person limited POVs in the story, like have one section focusing on jessica and the next one on yoona, etc.
3. too much information is revealed too quickly + not enough emotions. i honestly didn't really need to know so much information in the beginning of the story. i didn't need donghae to tell me that he's protective over jessica; i could have realized that myself by the way you described it. i didn't need the narrator to tell me that jessica is rich every five lines; i realized that a long time ago.
i really wish you had stayed on one character's POV long enough for me to feel some sort of emotion. as it was, the POV switched so quickly that by the time i was starting to feel something (pity, sympathy, etc) for one character, the camera was on another character already. having a stable POV can help you develop the character more for the reader to relate to. right now it seems you're relying a lot on what we already know about the characters in real life (jessica is ice princess, yoona is really nice, etc).
7. show, don't tell.
while i did enjoy the way you described things as they were happening, it was way too much 'telling' for me to visualize anything. this also plays into why i didn't feel any emotions throughout the story. when you 'tell' me exactly what's going down in the story, i'm imagining a robot or a five-year-old kid doing the actions. there's not a lot of reader involvement, basically. you're giving me all the information i need in a systematic way, and i can't actually visualize what the characters are doing.
here's an example from chapter 4: 'yoona grabbed the paper and read it. they got a part to test the effect of light factors.' as a description, it works. it tells you what it's supposed to tell you. but it's not very interesting. it reads robotically and doesn't flow very well. here's how i would change it: 'yoona grabbed the paper, groaning as she scanned through it. all they have to do is test the effect of light on the growth of the sprouts.'
while it still seems like 'telling', there's a lot more descriptive factors to help you understand how yoona feels towards the experiment. she groaned, showing her dislike, and combined with the phrase 'all they have to do', it conjures up a feeling that yoona's not really excited for this experiment.
unfortunately, there's no easy way for me to explain how to 'show don't tell' especially this late at night, so i'm going to link you to a couple of articles. here, here, here, here
8. tense
you tended to mix the present and past tenses, and unfortunately there's no easy way to fix it without rewriting the entire thing, but here's a link that might be helpful for the future. i would just say choose a tense and stick with it, though here's a hint: if you 'show' more instead of 'telling', it'll help you be more consistent with tense.
personal enjoyment [3.5/5] despite what it may seem, i did enjoy reading this. i haven't read a high school au in a while (especially with rich kids) and it was refreshing to have a change in genre. the various things that i mentioned did throw me off, though, and i don't think i would finish the story if i read it on my own time. TOTAL : 52/100
Note
if i came off harsh, i apologize. my opinions are my own, but you know your story best. you can now put subs-only back onto your story. remember to credit this shop in the foreword of your story.
if i came off harsh, i apologize. my opinions are my own, but you know your story best. you can now put subs-only back onto your story. remember to credit this shop in the foreword of your story.
Comments