(December 2015)

Title: The Curious Case of the Sasaeng Fan
Author: Hephaistos
Reviewer: eleutheromaniac

Note: I lost interest in your story during the third or fourth chapter, so I opted to read only the first ten. Even though this is roughly less than a quarter of your story, there are a lot of things that I noticed needed some work, so I feel that you’re still getting a lot of thorough feedback
 

Title: (4)/5
The title is definitely enough to get my attention and I believe that its simplicity works nicely for it. My only concern would be that the story seems to be more split between the Kwon case and the Sasaeng case rather than just the latter, so I think that you could’ve picked something that encompassed your fic better as a whole.

Description/Foreword: (3)/10
Seeing the length of your description/foreword was instantly off-putting to me and the feelings grew when I realized that you included a lot of extraneous information that didn’t really pertain to your story in the slightest. I’ve never really understood the point of character profiles, especially in an epically lengthy story like this one. With thirty-three chapters, there’s a serious problem if you don’t think that you’ll be able to develop your characters thoroughly and have to resort to listing their roles before your story even starts. It doesn’t add anything to your story in the slightest. On a similar note, I don’t understand what listing songs adds either. Is it supposed to be some sort of soundtrack? Is it a list of songs that you drew inspiration from? I mean, I listen to music when I write as well, but I never feel the need to list every single track with my readers. I don’t understand what it adds and it seems like it’s just there to occupy space. While it’s nice that you’ve credited all of your reviewers nicely, it takes up a lot of space and there are more efficient ways through which you could’ve listed the same information.

The description itself doesn’t do much to catch my attention, all of that aside. In stories that are centered around crime, there’s something unique about the case that is presented right away in order to catch people’s attention—without that, it’s just another crime and at this point in human history, such violence isn’t particularly shocking. At the same time, there were some elements of your description’s grammar that seemed off (comma usage and different dashes).

All in all, nothing about your description/foreword really caught my interest. Crime stories excite me when the case excites me and there isn’t much excitement in your introduction.

Plot: (10)/30
While the concept of your story originally struck me as unique, the entirety of it ultimately fell short. In terms of flow and believability, I had no idea what it was that you were trying to accomplish.

I’ll start with flow. It seemed incredibly strange to me that we go from focus of a murder case, to that of a drug syndicate, to interactions of two side characters, and then to the perspective of two criminals. It doesn’t feel cohesive at all. I think that this strategy may have worked if there was some suspense being built, but that wasn’t what was happening here; it felt more like you were just listing events and expecting us to become enthralled.

Not only does the story as a whole have an irregular flow, but the chapters itself have an odd chain of events as well. For example, in Chapter Eight, we go from Jongdae and Su-Jin agreeing to go on a date (which I will rant about more later) to some research about the sasaeng fan’s life, to Minseok’s life story, to Minho being lazy, all within the short span of roughly 1k. There was so much jumping around that it was difficult to become interested in any of the listed events and I ended up becoming bored. Bad flow like this had super negative effects on the overall development of your story, especially in regards to the relationship development between Jongdae and Su-Jin.

In my opinion, a lot of the problems that have to do with your flow probably stem from the possibility that there are multiple cases intertwined with another. I didn’t finish your story so I’m not sure if this is actually happening, but if it is, then the execution is poor and way too sporadic. In the best detective story I’ve read, when two separate crimes were discovered to be related, the detectives found out because other people that worked in their department were finding evidence that correlated with theirs versus one set of detectives working on multiple cases at the same time. An approach like that could’ve possibly worked better for your story since your approach here seemed highly unrealistic and superficial.

There were also some weird choices in regards to the believability of your story. Himchan is described as being a footsoldier, so why in the world does he know that GD’s going to be in the Philippines? I didn’t continue your story so I’m not sure if this information was even accurate or not, but the fact that Jongdae was so ready to believe whatever he said was incredibly surprising for me. Organized crime syndicates like this typically have a standard protocol to feed their captors, so even if Himchan is described as being not that smart, it isn’t that hard to follow instructions that were given to you. Jongdae should be aware of this as well, so he should at least be a little suspicious of how much Himchan claims to know. It was also odd to me that Himchan was able to use a cell phone despite being in a jail cell. Like, how did he even get access to that? If he’s being treated like a criminal, why would they allow him possession of a phone in the first place?

I was looking forward to the rhetorical potential of having the victim of your story’s murder a sasaeng fan, but the interest ended up not really being there at all. I understand that you’re trying to portray the horrors of the sasaeng world and all, but the conversation that Genie had with the cops didn’t make sense to me at all. She’s aware that these guys are investigating a murder case, so even if she’s not guilty of anything, the natural response would be to speak with caution since anything that seems remotely wrong could mark you as a suspect.

Characterization: (1)/20
Your character development is very weak and after reading the first ten chapters of your story, I didn’t feel like I could pin any particular personality traits onto any of your characters. I noticed that in many cases (such as the first section of the fourth chapter) you just list information about a particular character, which is an example of “telling” rather than “showing”. This story is definitely on the lengthier side, so there isn’t really an excuse for why there’s an attempt to dump all of that information onto the reader at once instead of spending the length of the story fleshing out your characters in order to make them feel realistic. In my opinion, the characters all felt very two-dimensional and I developed no personal attachment to them.

Most of my notes for this section are complaints about your romantic sub-plot, but I’ll talk about that more at the end of this section. As I mentioned before, none of your characters really reach any sort of development, but as your OC, Su-Jin is the one who is suitable for the most criticism. Personality-wise, she seems pretty dry and seems to feel nothing but pity for people (including Jongdae, the dead sasaeng, and Jonghyun). While I suppose that there are probably some people who actually view the world through such a lens Su-Jin is the second-in-command for this detective unit, so her pity for everyone seems to be a really bad quality to have since it introduces subjectivity into a position that should maintain high levels of objectivity. Despite her position, Jongdae continues to refer to her as “rookie,” and I’m not quite sure why? It also bothered me that—despite her rank—she seems to be incapable of offering anything useful to the case. For example, during Himchan’s interrogation, all she really does is repeat what Jongdae’s already said:

“What do you think your boss is gonna think when I let you go then? Hmm? Do you reckon he’s gonna think that we let you go because you told us to? Or do you think he’s gonna kill you because he’s sure you talked?”

When Himchan looked to be on the verge of deciding, Su-jin chose to step in. “You've already been caught. Do you think anything will change if we let you go? Or better yet, do you think you'll have a better chance of protecting your group if we let you go?”

It honestly doesn’t seem as though she’s added anything of use to this conversation. Jongdae incites fear into Himchan by saying that it’s likely that “The Dragon” will either believe that Himchan managed to talk his way out of an encounter with cops or will simply kill him in the belief that Himchan had squealed. Su-Jin asks if anything positive will even happen if he’s let go. Jongdae’s already outlined the two possibilities for the situation—Himchan’s idealistic one and another that’s framed to be much more realistic—and Su-Jin’s words don’t seem to have much of an impact. Before her dialogue, there’s already the line, “...Himchan looked to be on the verge of deciding” which insinuates that his decision was already made before Su-Jin had even spoken. It would’ve been nice if we get to see firsthand what exactly makes Su-Jin qualified to be second-in-command within the early stages of your story, but unfortunately, we don’t.

(As a side note, even when she’s trying to console Jongdae over Youngwoo’s death, she doesn’t do a very good job? She tells Jongdae that it’s not his fault, but I mean, it is since Jongdae is the leader of the group. The proper, mature rationalization should have been that Youngwoo knew what he was signing up for when he agreed to infiltrate a gang and had been aware of all the risks. The dialogue exchange between Jongdae and Su-Jin there just kind of showed that Su-Jin has a faulty train of thought.)

The real turn-off to this whole story—for me, at least—was the romance between Jongdae and Su-Jin. After reading the first ten chapters of the story, I’m not quite sure if I should be calling it a sub-plot or just the plot itself because it seemed that there was more of an attempt to establish a relationship between those two characters than to develop the mystery surrounding the crime case that the story is named after. At the end of the first chapter alone, there are already heavy implications that Jongdae is harboring some feelings for his subordinate, which already made me feel kind of apprehensive about your story. I suppose that if there had been a balance between relationship development and mystery development I wouldn’t have seen their relationship to be so troublesome, but that wasn’t the case at all. Jongdae is literally juggling a drug cartel situation and a murder case, but instead, his focus is on getting Su-Jin to go on a date with him? People are literally dying and Su-Jin’s just casually inviting him back to her place? She literally just agreed to go on a date with him and in the next chapter, they’re already kissing?

It all just seems super unrealistic: there wasn’t any development in their relationship and there wasn’t even any tension evident from the nonexistent development. When I was reading your story, I honestly felt like the events were just happening because you needed them to happen; that the characters were puppets rather than actual people.

Grammar: (4)/15
You have a lot of minor issues in regards to grammar, but at the same time you have some really obvious ones that I felt strongly detracted from your story. Aside the punctuation issues, capitalization mistakes, and convention errors (remember to spell out numbers rather than using the digits; i.e., “four” instead of “4”), there were a lot of obvious diction problems. Normally this would fall into the “Writing Style” portion of the review, but the errors in your diction were so noticeable that it was negatively impacting the way I read your story.

Another thing I noticed was the spacing you create in order to add suspense in your dialogue. Doing this isn’t just wrong grammar wise due to the usage of the quotation marks, but it’s not typically effective in doing what you want it to do. When I read instances like this, I usually see it as more of immature writing than bubbling suspense.

There were also random pov changes that didn’t really make any sense to me. Most of the story seems to be in third-person, but there are random instances when you switch to second-person. Examples are “your window” in the first chapter and “your curiosity” in the seventh.

Writing Style: (1)/15
In my opinion, it’s pretty obvious that your writing style needs some work. The main articles for discussion in this section of the review are going to be the faulty word choice, redundancy, and image use within your story, but I’ll get some of the more minor elements of your writing style out of the way first.

Some of your imagery just didn’t quite cut it for me. For example, in chapter one you described Su-Jin’s hair as “tangled in a mess, though easily tamed” and it just sounded painfully awkward. This is the first time we’re introduced to Su-Jin’s character, so the imagery here has to have a big impact because it creates a foundation for how your readers will initially perceive her. In my opinion, you probably would’ve been better off by just stating that her hair was tangled. By doing this, it lets us know that she’s a busy person who probably doesn’t brush her hair before she goes to bed—she’s dedicated to her job and doesn’t care much for trivial things such as her appearance. Adding in that her hair is “easily tamed” doesn’t add much at all to her persona and just made the sentence kind of awkward (like a lot of your character dialogue).

There are some oddly structured sentences as well and I think that using a wider variety of punctuation could really help you out.

Moving on to the bigger issues: bad word choice is definitely a problem. I’ve never heard of leather jackets creaking (chapter six), so I think that you meant to say that they were squeaking? I’d also be cautious of using onomatopoeias in your text. I don’t think it occurred too frequently, but putting one in the very first line (“with a thwack) of your story didn’t really excite me and I think that you could’ve come up with a better hook.

Not quite sure where to put this, but CL’s most prominent line in these first ten chapters is “I don’t like fat”. I’m not really sure why this line was chosen for her since I’m pretty sure it’s not a grammatical error on your part? All of your characters have pretty solid dialogue, so why doesn’t she? Maybe this is somehow reflective of her character and I’m just not aware of it since I didn’t finish reading through your story, but it just seemed odd to me.

I think that you also have a problem with redundancy. An example of this is from Chapter One: “This is a murder case that we just got on our hands, and it’s fresh.” Stating that the murder case was just received kind of already alludes to the fact that it’s “fresh” or that it just happened. In smaller doses, redundancy isn’t that big of a deal, but a lot of it can be a big turn-off to readers, so I would just advise you to be careful with this. I’ll lump this together with repetitive diction since they’re kind of similar in concept. There are times during which you use the same word multiple times in a single sentence, which can be easily avoided, so I would try to be careful with that.

My biggest issue with your writing style was the random inclusion of images. Chapter Four is the only one with an opening gif, which is more of an inconsistency issue than a stylistic one. However, in Chapter Six, you chose to insert an image of CL in-line with the text? An author should never rely on pictures when they’re supposed to be creating them in the minds of their readers through their words.

Personal Enjoyment: (1)/5
As aforementioned, I didn’t really enjoy reading your story. The plot felt too sporadic (you called it “intricate” within your foreword, and I’d have to say that if it is intricate, then the execution is just awfully weak), the character development seemed nonsensical, and your grammar/writing style came off as incredibly off-putting.

Total Score: 26/100

Reviewer’s Comments: I apologize for how long it took me to complete this review. If you have any questions about anything that I’ve said, please don’t hesitate to ask! As a side note, part of this review was started in September, but it wasn’t completed entirely until this month (December), so if any edits were made during that span of time, they aren’t accounted for within this review.