(August 2015)

Title: My BFF
Author: janeloveexo

Reviewer: eleutheromaniac

Title: (1)/5
While it’s very obvious how your title relates to your story, it feels very generic and isn’t something that immediately interests me. Since this is a story about three best friends, I also think that it would make sense for your title to be “My BFFs”—plural, rather than singular.

Description/Foreword: (2)/10

I have to say that I was immediately put-off by the multiple fonts and colors that you had here and had to switch to readability mode almost instantaneously. I’m not sure why you chose to use tildes instead of quotation marks, but it didn’t really do much other than make me question what was going on, to be honest. I can also understand that you’re trying to make the description/foreword seem upbeat and silly because you’re writing a story that’s meant to be upbeat and silly, but I think that there’s a better way of doing it than using multi-colored font and redundancy (I’m still kind of surprised by how many times you managed to use the word “friend” in such a small amount of space). Mixed together, they really just turned me off from reading your story.

Plot: (4)/30

There doesn’t really seem to be much of a plot going on here at all, so scoring you for storyline is a bit difficult. From what I’m able to gather though, I think that a majority of the story is going to be happening when the trio is partying at Kyungsoo’s villa? Not sure. In any case, assuming that your first six chapters make up the exposition of your story, you don’t have much of a solid foundation to build any sort of coherent story.

A lot of this stems from your habit of utilizing plot convenience in order to hurry your story along. The most obvious example is the parents of the trio agreeing to pretend that their children got kidnapped in order to cover up their kids going on a vacation for two months. That’s probably one of the most outlandish things I’ve ever come across AFF—which really says something, I think, because I’ve come across some really weird stuff. Even if Kris’ parents are very strict about his grades, making them willing to lie to the police and to the people around them is a really big stretch. Sure, you can say that they have a friend in the department who’s willing to lie for them, but honestly, who’s willing to risk their entire livelihood just because their friend’s son didn’t want to do his project?  Even then, you say that there were innocent passerby who saw them get kidnapped, so why was no one worried enough to take a picture of the van’s license plate as is usually the protocol?

Them getting to the villa is what I assume is going to start some of the rising action of the story and it kind of annoys me that you’re building up to it in such an unrealistic way.

Other moments that seem kind of unreal include the high school students meeting up in a bar to talk to one another and Kris getting assigned to work with Chanyeol and Kyungsoo right after befriending them. Having plot points that are difficult to believe hamper not only the reality of your story, but also its flow since it can rush the plot forward in a matter that seems too fast. In my opinion, a lack of believability within the story is what made me not not enjoy it. Things can be outrageous and crazy while still maintaining a sense of believability. And in all honesty, I felt that a lot of the humor in this story was really forced and I didn’t laugh at all.

Characterization: (1)/20

The characters introduced themselves to us by calling themselves idiots and I couldn’t think of a better way to describe them. I get that this is supposed to be an upbeat story about three best friends doing random things and enjoying their bonds of friendship. I don’t get, however, why you have to make their characters do nothing but laugh and come up with ridiculous, unrealistic schemes that are only successful because the plot needs them to be successful.

Kris, Kyungsoo, and Chanyeol are so flat that they all seem like they’re the same person with three different names. There’s no individuality between them at all. The only characterization that we’re exposed to is that Chanyeol is supposed to be the craziest one, Kris is really smart and for some reason is dragged down into becoming a delinquent, and Kyungsoo feels embarrassed about a project that he and Chanyeol did once That’s literally all we’re exposed to. Beyond that, they’re just three high school students that laugh at basically nothing—which I found disappointing given that some of these minimalistic “unique” traits don’t even feel very believable.

For example, Kris’ intelligence is mentioned multiple times throughout the story, yet it took him half an hour in order to find his first class upon entering the new school? Not only are new students typically offered a tour when they first pick up their schedules, but if a campus is huge, there are always teachers/staff members running around because they have different planning/break periods from one another, so running into someone and asking for help shouldn’t be that hard. And with all the emphasis on his smarts, I don’t really understand why he can’t just turn around, walk back into the office, and ask for directions to his first period. At the beginning of the story, he hasn’t met Chanyeol or Kyungsoo yet, so I’m assuming that he still cares about his studies. Him choosing to remain lost rather than seeking help conflicts with his trait about being focused on academics.

Another example would be Chanyeol creating the inequality in Chapter Five. It’s been heavily implied throughout the story that he’s not the brightest kid and that he usually sleeps during class, so how is he able to create a multi-variable math problem (something that he admits his teacher has yet to teach) on the spot? It seems very out of the blue and for the sake of an attempt at humor and does nothing for his character. The decision to include this scene contradicts the idea that he’s the biggest idiot of the three.

While no member of your main cast really does anything, this statement is most true for Kyungsoo. He doesn’t get much time to shine at all and it honestly seems that you could take him out of the story he hasn’t contributed anything to the plot.

Their friendship developed so fast that your characters became the friendship; it feels like Kris, Chanyeol, and Kyungsoo each lost their individuality as soon as they were introduced to one another which is a real shame since the best sort of friendships are the ones in which each person is allowed to shine even brighter than they do when they’re on their own.

Grammar: (8)/15

Your biggest issues concerning grammar would have to do with your word choice within sentences. There are certain moments when your sentences don’t even make sense. An example of this would be in Chapter Four: “And if that still didn’t work, well then, I would pretend a scene when Chanyeol and Kyungsoo suddenly fell so sick and our project accidentally got vomited.” The word choice here makes it difficult to understand what you’re even meaning. I would definitely be careful in regards to moments like this and you have multiple instances of them throughout your story. At other times, it seems as though you’ve spelled the word you intend to use wrong. For example, in Chapter Five, you keep saying “shoed” or  “shoe” when it’s clear that you actually mean “shooed” and “shoo”.

Other grammatical errors I noticed that were on more of the minor side include mistakes in regards to both your punctuation and capitalization. I also suggest that you take care to spell out your numbers rather than just using the digits (i.e., “three” rather than “3”) as doing otherwise is considered a convention error.

Writing Style: (1)/15

It’s difficult for me to clearly identify a writing style within this story because it’s hard enough to simply sift through the forced humor. I think that some of this could be fixed if you stopped repeating “hahahahahahaha” so many times in your text or used less exclamation points. It feels very awkward when you’re throwing around a lot of excitement and characters laughing at one another when I don’t really see anything particularly comical in the situations that are occurring within the story; in all reality, the “forced” nature of it all feels very tryhard and makes me less inclined to want to continue reading your story.

I also think that it’s inappropriate for your characters to use text-speak (“LOL”) in their actual dialogue (Chanyeol’s “That’s so LOL!” made me cringe) and it’s important that if you’re going to type out an acronym, that you type it out correctly (you don’t laugh your out, you laugh it off).

Be careful with your word choice because sometimes it doesn’t make sense (as mentioned in the previous section), but other times, I’m not even sure that what you’re trying to describe is even realistic. For example, how do you ily sling an arm around someone? I’ve been mulling it over and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what exactly that’s supposed to mean. It’s immature for you to continue to repeat words like “” all the time while characterizing every female within this story as a mindless girl who only cares about boys with looks. Okay, we get it: Kris isn’t interested in talking to any girls or getting into any romantic relationships. You putting down every woman in this story disturbed me when you could’ve just stated that Kris wasn’t interested in them but a few liked to flirt with him. There’s no reason to create a harem-like setting where all the girls are throwing themselves at the same guy because he’s cute and are willing to fight each other in order to get his attention.

But I digress.

Other matters that I think you should look into in regards to your writing style are the following: repetitive diction, nonsensical syntax, and random bolded text.

Personal Enjoyment: (1)/5

I think that the reason why I didn’t enjoy this story is because it was hard to feel a connection to the characters due to their one-dimensional nature and the lack of believability within the plot. I will say that I was happy to be able to read your story since it was nice to read a story that was meant to be on the more lighthearted side.

Total Score: 18/100

Reviewer’s Comments: I think that in moving forward, the most important thing for you to do is work on developing each of your characters individually. Right now, none of them has a distinct personality that they can call their own, and I think that it might be one of the reasons why your story felt dragging. It’s hard to properly write about a relationship between characters when you haven’t properly written about said characters, so please keep their development in mind. I think that AFF needs more stories that focus on strong friendship rather than romance, so I hope that you consider my critiques as you continue to write your story in order to make it even better than it is now. c: