(August 2015)

Title: Let’s Be Friends Again
Author: XiaoDae

Reviewer: eleutheromaniac

Title: (3.5)/5
While the title doesn’t really stand out to me, I feel that it really captures the essence of your story in terms of both content and simplicity.

Description/Foreword: (9)/10

Simple descriptions are always the best kind, in my opinion, but I would be careful with your punctuation. Omitting punctuation in crucial areas is something that happens a lot throughout your actual story as well despite it being a very simple fix. Since your description is so short, you want to make sure that you eliminate all possible mistakes in order to make the cleanest expression.

(This is also more of a side-note thing, but at first I was super nervous when it came to taking on your request because I’m not very familiar with Seventeen, but after seeing your foreword I feel a lot better, haha.)

Plot: (27)/30

To be honest, at first I was totally rooting for a story about strong platonic love, but I ended up really liking what you did here: a friendship that was ruined because of homophobia. A lot of stories on this website seem to act as though homophobia is a thing that doesn’t exist despite its strong prevalence in the world, and your decision to touch on such a sensitive subject made it feel incredibly realistic to me. I also like that it originally seemed as though Woozi had been in love with Hoshi at one point (with him admitting to the latter that he never confessed to his first crush because his mother didn’t approve of it), but it turns out that Hoshi was the one who ended up ruining their friendship by admitting to his feelings for Woozi. Choosing to write this unrequited love was a nice touch, and I love how the scene in which Woozi talks about his first crush plays a double purpose within the story: tricking the readers into thinking that he had feelings for Hoshi when it was actually the other way around while also strengthening Hoshi’s character and his belief for always confessing feelings to someone despite his shy nature.

There are only a few moments in which I felt that your flashbacks disrupted the flow of your story, though these instances were mostly in the beginning. I think that it’s because the first two “present” scenes that we’re exposed to are very similar in their content and are very short in compared to the flashbacks that followed them. As I got more into the story, however, the flow seemed to even itself out a lot better.

I was also originally bothered by the fact that all of your flashbacks have been presented to us in a chronological order, save for the final one about the Iron Man toy. After thinking about it more, I can understand the decision to include this scene in this particular spot since it’s a part of the big turnaround in the story (Woozi wanting to rekindle his friendship with Hoshi as well), but there wasn’t anything about it in particular that made the scene stand out with particular importance. I also kind of wish that we had a better explanation for how Hoshi stumbled upon Woozi’s message. I like that it’s through one of his old email accounts, but we don’t get a good reason for why he bothered to check the account, so the behavior seems odd. Especially when you say that it was an account that he “had long since stopped checking”.

(This is also a side note, but you don’t “score goals” in basketball, you score baskets.)

Characterization: (17.5)/20

I’ve been reading a lot of stories that are character-driven lately, so reading a plot-driven story felt like a breath of fresh air that I genuinely appreciated. When I was more active on AFF as a writer on my old account, plot-driven stories were the ones that I was always attracted to, and nowadays, it’s so difficult to find stories like that. I’m about to start rambling, so I’ll stop myself here, haha.

The characterization that you included here fit your story perfectly. Your characters felt like real people and I could understand their motives and thoughts without necessarily agreeing with them. There were only a few moments during which I saw signs of weak characterization. At the very beginning of the story, in the first two “present” scenes that we see, you keep repeating that Hoshi feels out of place at the concert and it comes off as redundant, so I had wished that you would describe something else. Some of the moments in the flashbacks were a little difficult to understand as well, particularly the scenes about the death in Hoshi’s family and how he deals with the grief. I assume that it’s his mother that’s passed away, but it’s never stated clearly and some of the scenes during this time in his life could’ve been written a bit better in order to reveal more of his emotions and thoughts. Overall, however, these particular scenes didn’t hamper my enjoyment of the story, so I suppose that they’re fine.

Grammar: (8)/15

The only downside I could find within your story was your grammar, which made me pretty sad since a lot of your mistakes here were glaringly obvious but also fairly simple fixes. There were multiple occasions during which you forgot to capitalize certain things or forgot to include punctuation in noticeable places (such as the end of a sentence). The latter issue was especially prevalent throughout your text to the point that I wasn’t even sure if I could still consider it a recurring typo. Here’s a pretty helpful guide for understanding the differences between punctuation marks and where you should include them within your text.

Make sure that you always spell out the number rather than using the digits (i.e. “five” rather than “5”), as doing otherwise is considered a convention error.

(I also think that there were a few mistakes in your paragraphing at the beginning of your story? In the first flashback it looks as though there are single line breaks when there should be paragraph breaks. It doesn’t occur anywhere else in your story though.)

I think that a lot of your grammar mistakes could easily be fixed by reading through your story in its entirety before you publish it in order to get rid of basic errors and typos, so I highly recommend that you choose to do this in the future.

Writing Style: (9)/15

I can identify the makings of a writing style here, but it still needs to be refined; this will probably occur naturally once you read up on some of your grammar mechanics, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. The biggest errors that I noted were oddly placed fragments and badly structured run-on sentences. An example of this would be in the paragraph that begins with “Hearing his friend sing live…”

Personal Enjoyment: (5)/5

At first I wasn’t really sure how much I would enjoy reading this story simply because I thought it might be difficult to visualize the characters and all of their actions—thankfully you proved me wrong. I wrote a story with a similar theme years ago, so reading this brought me back to that time and I’m very thankful to you for that. I really enjoyed reading this and would recommend it to others even if they weren’t familiar with Seventeen.

Total Score: 80/100

Reviewer’s Comments: You have the makings of a really awesome story here with the realistic nature of your plot. My only advice to you would be to focus on your grammar. There are a lot of little mistakes that you made within this story in terms of grammar mechanics, but they’re all easy fixes. Once you develop a better understanding of the English language, your writing style will straighten itself out and you’ll be much better off. I’m really excited to see what other stories you have to offer the AFF community. c: