(August 2015)

Title: The One
Author: tattoo_wallflower

Reviewer: eleutheromaniac

Title: (1)/5

While it’s very obvious as to how this title relates to your story, it doesn’t really stand out to me as opposed to other potential titles on this website. It comes off as quite generic.

Description/Foreword: (5.5)/10

I’ve always been a fan of short and simple descriptions; however, it’s always important that if you choose to go this route, you make sure that your grammar is spot-on because it can otherwise be seen as off-putting. “Where” should actually be replaced with “in which,” and the lack of punctuation at the end of the sentence really does annoy me. The actual content of the description though left me at least somewhat curious in regards to what your story would be about.

Plot: (6)/30

While there’s a bit of a glimmer of originality that shines through the piece in the form of Yoongi’s “loophole” to Jimin’s dilemma, the piece as a whole felt kind of clichèd. It was hard to develop any real attachment to the characters because they didn’t feel three-dimensional and lifelike, and none of the actual events that happened within the plot were truly unique to the story. A bad boy is in love with an “innocent” character, the latter feels apprehensive about the relationship, and the former says something nice to ease his worries. Killing Jimin off at the end came out of nowhere and didn’t really contribute anything to the story. It feels more like you killed him off just for the sake of killing someone off, which is always the worst thing to do.

“The Theory” chapter seemed unnecessary and pretty redundant in my eyes since you literally just repeated Yoongi’s explanation to Jimin but in real-life terms.

Characterization: (2)/20

The issue with Jimin and Yoongi’s characters are that they’re stocks: Jimin’s the innocent lover and Yoongi’s the bad boy. You emphasize this pretty heavily in the beginning, so it’s pretty hard to miss. While the stocks used suit your story well, it’s never good to use stocks as your main characters—you should always flesh them out more so that they come off as more realistic. Sometimes it’s hard to truly enjoy a story when the characters within it don’t feel relatable, and that was the case here.

Grammar: (6)/15

Tense issues are a definite problem within the text. For example: “Yoongi liked being alone while Jimin craves being around people.” The underlined portion of the text should’ve been written in the past-tense, so it should have been “craved”.

There also seems to be an occasional issue during which you mix up your singular and plural vocabulary.

“The pink-haired boy furrows his eyebrows at his boyfriend’s actions which was a stark contrast to the usual…”

“Was” is referring to Jimin’s actions, and because “actions” is a plural word, “was” should actually be written as “were”.

Word choice, overall, is where the most mistakes in the text appear to be. Not only are wrong tenses and singular/plurals used, but there are also times when said word choice doesn’t even really make any sense. There are multiple examples of this, but in my opinion, the following stood out the most:

“He had lived quite a sheltered life since young and even after getting into the underground scene to form a group called BTS, no one had ever laid a hand on Jimin or any of the younger member and Jin, knowing the wrath of Namjoon, Yoongi and Hoseok or better known as Rap Monster, Suga and J-Hope.”

I’m honestly not even sure what you’re trying to say here: okay, so Jimin is really innocent even though he joined the underground and he has friends? I’m not too sure. Be very careful with this because you don’t want to alienate your readers.

Writing Style: (2)/15

It’s near impossible to have a unique writing style without a true understanding of the mechanics of the English language, and that’s probably the case here. Your syntax comes off as kind of immature and your diction felt very repetitive at times. In particular, striking through words in the text of a story has always seemed kind of childish and it’s better to italicize text for emphasis rather than to bold them. I also think that you overdid it when it came to listing Yoongi and Jimin’s differences near the beginning of the story, and this led to some of the differences coming off as forced. In order to fix this, I would pick just a few of the differences that are more specific to their relationship and only include those.

Personal Enjoyment: (1)/5

I wasn’t able to really attach myself to anything that you had written—whether it be the characters or the plot itself—so I wasn’t really able to enjoy this piece.

Total Score: 23.5/100

Reviewer’s Comments: You mentioned that you were planning to release a companion story to this one from Jimin’s perspective. As you prepare to do this, I advise you to try and make Jimin and Yoongi more lifelike by adding unique quirks to their personalities in order to get them out of the “stock character” zone. Once you do that, I think that your plot will start to feel a little more realistic. Looking up some grammar tutorials online would also be to your advantage as well, so if you have some free time, I suggest that you pursue this.