(January 2016)

Title: Hyung, I Shrunk the Kids!
Author: SrtaTacoMal
Reviewer: eleutheromaniac

Title: (5)/5

There are obvious ties to the story itself within the title, and I personally thought that it was very cute. The title fits well in the “crack” genre, and I especially liked its allusion to the TV show, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!

Description/Foreword: (9)/10

You have a nice, simple description that promises a cute and quirky story about Tao’s personal growth—so I’m definitely interested. My only concern is that the phrasing “one- to five- year olds” sounds a bit awkward, and I believe that just referring to them as “young children” would make things flow better.

It shouldn’t be necessary for you to give us the ages of the children in the story, since it’s something that should be shown to readers rather than told to them. For example, by description alone, readers should be able to easily identify as Xiumin as the youngest of the bunch and Chanyeol/Sehun as the oldest. Typically when information like this is included in a description/foreword, it implies that such information would be difficult to acquire when reading the only story alone, so I would refrain from doing so unless absolutely necessary.

I was asked in your request form to comment on the legibility poster, so I suppose I’ll do that in this section of the review. While it’s easy for me to read the “Hyung I” part of the title, the latter half of the title is a little more difficult for me to read.

Plot: (13)/30

The idea for this plot is definitely one of the most unique ones that I’ve seen in a long time. I don’t come across many fics in which the Exo members have control over their powers, and the idea that they can lose control of them so easily makes it all the more interesting! However, in terms of flow and believability, I felt that the story was lacking. Since this is character-driven, I'll discuss this in more detail during the Characterization portion of this review.

As I mentioned in the previous section, the story looks as though it'll be centered around Tao’s personal growth, but this doesn't end up being the case. For the most part, we don't see how he reacts to anything at all (which would be a reflection on how the situation is gradually changing his perspective on things) and instead it feels like he's just running around after the kids since that's literally all he's doing. The lack of development for his character makes the storyline run dry, and—I’ll talk about this in later detail—when we do get to see some of Tao’s reactions to things, they seem very random and out of the blue, leading to bad flow. The biggest example of this is the rush by which Tao forces himself to mature and be the adult in this situation. At the beginning of the story, Tao’s basically a man-child who refuses to take care of others or himself and likes to be babied. When the other members turn to children, we see Tao getting kind of annoyed but he goes to the grocery store anyway to run errands without too much trouble. This didn't really make sense to me since the exposition showed that Tao was basically unwilling to do anything by himself, so it would've made more sense if he had dragged at least some of the children along with him, even if it was against their will, since that's the character he's set up to be—and I think that would have been hilarious. Another example of this is in Chapter Three when he comes back to a huge mess and doesn't even get upset that he has to be the one to clean it up. This is unbelievably fast character development that rushed the story and made its events seem falsified and unrealistic. If this is a story that's supposed to be about his personal growth, then he needs to be an extreme version of this character; he needs to be as immature as the physical children around him so that he finally realizes that he needs to grow up and be helpful to s. You have a really original concept here, but if you don't use it to its full rhetoric potential, then the story falls flat and feels undeveloped.

The unbelievable nature of the plot goes alongside the unrealistic characters and fast pace. Due to the lack of development, it often seems as though events in the story only occur because you need them to, rather than because of the characters making decisions. I think that I mentioned this in the previous review I wrote for you (and I'll probably talk about it more in the next section), but it was as though all of the characters were puppets playing roles against their will, and you were the puppet master just stringing them along. While most of this was due to lack of character development, there were moments when the plot itself didn't make any sense. The best example of this was the claim that the children would go somewhere and fans would begin speculating that the Exo boys transformed into little kids. That's way out there, especially when the Exo boys have been placing such a high emphasis on keeping their powers a secret. This story technically takes place in the real world (I mean, who knows if they actually have superpowers or not, I guess?) and I doubt that anyone would jump to the conclusion that the Exo boys would have transformed. The assumption would just be that the kids are really good lookalikes and that would be that.

Characterization: (1.5)/20

Due to the central theme of the plot being Tao’s growth as an individual, this story can be marked as character-driven, as opposed to plot-driven. In stories like this, it’s very important that the main cast of characters are three-dimensional and realistic because the characters of the story are more likely to be more memorable than the plot. This isn’t exactly the case here, since none of the characters have their own personalities that allow them to really “drive” the plot forward. At the same time, some of the actions that the characters carry out don’t really make any sense based on the stock personality they’ve been given, previously stated information, or just inaccurate body language.

Like the last story I reviewed for you, this story features a large cast that goes widely undeveloped. While it’s a noble venture attempting to create a story in which each Exo member plays a role, it’s difficult to do so well since it gives you a dozen people to craft personalities for. Since there are so many characters within this story, it would’ve made sense if only a few key characters had strong personalities at first and the others gradually developed them throughout the length of the story, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case here.

I had expected at least Tao to have a strong personality in the beginning chapters of the story due to how heavily his stock personality was emphasized: the overdramatic guy who cries when he doesn’t get what he wants even though he’s an adult and eventually learns a lesson that makes him want to change his ways. This personality doesn’t gain much development though, and in fact, it felt like Tao’s character was undeveloping as the story went on. At the beginning, he at least had his stock to fall back onto, but when the story continues, he begins to go against his stock, making me confused as to what his actual personality was. I talked about this a little bit in the Plot portion of this review, but the way he flips from being dependent on everyone to becoming a makeshift leader was so sudden of a switch that it felt like his entire personality was being shifted instead of gradually developing. I think that this is because it was missing a crucial step: a phase during which Tao struggled against his new duty of being the adult in the situation. There is a brief period during which he complains about it, but it’s too short and lacks strong insight into the inner workings of Tao’s mind to truly be effective.

There were a few other stocks that were prevalent from the very beginning, most notably Suho as the “mother” role within the group, Kai and Sehun as the mischievous maknaes, and Lay as being super genuine and caring. Since these roles were drawn out at the very beginning, I had assumed that these characters would be the ones to develop more three-dimensional personalities before the others, but they remained exclusively within the boundaries of their stock. Chanyeol, Baekhyun, and Chen as the “Beagle line” also maintained the trickster-like personalities that they’re known for, and the only vague development they get is Chanyeol being a little more stubborn than everyone else.

I mentioned previously that there were moments during which characters went against their stock personality in their actions, making said actions seem a little unrealistic. While there’s nothing wrong with going “against” a stock personality since it could help to flesh out characters, it’s important that you do so in a way that seems like a developed action instead of just mentioning things in passing. The biggest example of this is Lay’s character, who in the first chapter seems to be the kind one who seems to take a little bit of pity on Tao, but in the next chapter he states that he was part of a plan to prank Tao that didn’t go through. This shift in character came out of nowhere, and I was shocked by how quick the turnaround was for him. Later in that second chapter, he also calls himself passive aggressive even though he was the only one to show Tao kindness in the first chapter, so I was ultimately left with no real clue about what Lay’s personality truly was.

There are moments when the actions of characters contradict information that the narrator had given the readers. The biggest example of this is when everyone is said to be annoyed with Tao, but it’s ultimately Suho who does all of the work without getting any help.

Let’s apply this to a real-life scenario to see why this doesn’t make much sense: you’re in an apartment with four people, and one of your roommates doesn’t do any dishes. This is annoying to you, but at the same time, since you’re living with them, you don’t know whether it’s appropriate to make a big deal out of it or not since unnecessary drama would be bad for the apartment dynamic. However, one of the other roommates mentions to you that they and the third roommate are also annoyed, and so there’s a strengthening in group dynamic between the three clean roommates while the fourth is left out. But because the three know that being messy will result in the other members of the group talking about them, they take it upon themselves to make sure that they’re exceptionally clean so that the others won’t have anything to talk about.

It’s a similar case to the dynamic between Tao and the other Exo members: the bond between the other boys should be strong while Tao is left out, and the other boys should be making sure that they’re not doing anything similar to Tao so that they’re not grouped together with him and therefore excluded from the majority group. Having it seem as though Suho has to take care of everyone by himself is his stock character, but not having the others help at all makes the situation seem kind of unrealistic in the “us versus him” scheme of things. In order to fix this, it would make sense if, in the first chapter, when Suho is doing everything by himself, a couple of the other members offer their assistance. Suho could then refuse (emphasizing his mother role in the group) and then they could share a short conversation about how unfair Tao is being. Excluding little bits of information like this makes the group’s annoyance with Tao seem superficial.

You mentioned to me before that you didn’t like stories that elaborated on too many things and it sometimes resulted in you writing in the opposite extreme. When trying to find balance, I think that it would be a good idea to put yourselves in the characters’ situations, and then have them act in the simplest form of how you’d react. It isn’t necessarily essential that you bring readers through every step of a character’s thought process as they make a decision, but if you simplify the thought process, then it’ll become easier for readers to follow a character’s train of thought and hopefully relate to what the character is going through.

At the same time, some of the characters’ body language doesn’t match up with their intentions. An example of this is in Chapter One when “[Xiumin] raised his eyebrows and looked away, making it obvious that that was not at all the reason they’d snubbed him.” What I get from this sentence is that Xiumin raising his eyebrows equates him lying to Tao, but that’s incorrect body language. According to this guide, raising eyebrows indicates surprise, a demand for attention, submissiveness, attraction, or relief.

While I definitely felt that the characterization of the story was incredibly lacking, by the eighth chapter, the character development began to show some signs of improvement which is always a good thing. However, I want to emphasize the importance that the beginning chapters hold when it comes to attracting readers. In most cases, if the first seven chapters of a story aren’t all that impressive, then people won’t stick around for the eighth installment.

Grammar: (7)/15

While most of the grammar within the story was okay for the most part, there were multiple errors in terms of punctuation and tense issues.

I’ll start by addressing some of the simpler punctuation mistakes. It’s important to properly distinguish between the en dash (-) and the em dash (-- or —) when you’re writing; try not to mix the two up since it changes the way a sentence is read. The interrobang (!?) is a nonstandard punctuation mark and technically isn’t a part of grammatical conventions. In many cases throughout the story, apostrophes are used in lieu of quotation marks. I’m not quite sure if this is a stylistic thing or not, but such a change is grammatically incorrect. A few examples of this being used are “‘throes of death’” and “‘you never lift a finger…’” from the first chapter. While this isn’t exactly a punctuation error, it’s a simple mistake so I’ll correct it here: when using numbers within text (like “30” in chapter five), it’s improper to use the digits and the numbers should instead be spelled out. Therefore, the correction would be “thirty” rather than “30”. While the rules vary from guide to guide, it’s generally agreed that all numbers under one hundred should be spelled out unless the piece is technical.

There was also an odd capitalization error in Chapter Five, when Suho is addressed as “Dear Leader”. I’m assuming that this was done as some form of emphasis or verbal irony, but if that’s your rhetoric purpose, then the execution was done through an incorrect method. Italicizing the address would be the most appropriate way.

Semicolons are probably one of my favorite marks of punctuation, so I was incredibly disappointed to see how incorrectly they were used within this story.

“He’s right; where is D.O.?”

What you’re probably meaning to use here is an em dash or a colon, depending on how you want the sentence to be read. A semicolon is typically used to separate two clauses that are each independent, but at the same time have two thoughts that are intertwined with one another. While I suppose you could argue that the two clauses in this excerpt have to do with one another, their connection is weak and so a semicolon shouldn’t be used. I’d personally separate the two sentences through the utilization of an ellipse, but again, it depends entirely on how you imaged the line to be spoken.

 

Chanyeol gasped. “You can’t tell me to shut up, I’m your hyung!” No response from Sehun. “Fine,” Chanyeol said curtly, “you poopy-heads don’t have to eat; I’m gonna go make food, and I’ll make enough for just US FOUR!”

I originally pulled out this example for the semicolon error, but there’s a lot going on here that can be fixed so I’ll go ahead and talk about all of it.

This excerpt is all over the place, and it can be formatted appropriately in order to elicit a better response out of readers. As you may know, each time a new person speaks, a new paragraph should be started. Although Sehun doesn’t speak in this excerpt, his silence could be emphasized by saying the same sentence in a new paragraph; it would be like saying that his response is the lack thereof. Not only would this increase the dramatic effect of the situation, but it would make the excerpt look nicer.

“You” in this sentence should have the first letter capitalized since Chanyeol is beginning a new sentence. In  my opinion, the comma after “curtly” should be changed to a period since a continuation of the dialogue would mean that Chanyeol isn’t saying something curtly.

The semicolon here is inappropriate because the second clause has nothing to do with the first. Chanyeol making food doesn’t directly correspond with him telling Sehun and the others that they don’t have to eat—they’re two separate things. In my opinion, Chanyeol’s entire sentence itself is structure poorly and should be changed.

Emphasizing “us four” is unnecessary since only the “four” part is the important section. An “us versus them” conflict isn’t really present here: Chanyeol’s just angry at the fact that Sehun is being rude. The idea here should be that he’s only making four people food and Sehun isn’t one of them; exclusion in the singular sense, not the plural.

Here’s what I would recommend the excerpt to be fixed to:

Chanyeol gasped. “You can’t tell me to shut up, I’m your hyung!”

 

No response from Sehun.

 

 “Fine,” Chanyeol said curtly. “You poopy-heads don’t have to eat, but I’m gonna go make food, and I’m going to make enough for just the four of us!”

The following is an example of really bad syntax in the form of a run-on sentence with incorrect punctuation.

“Lay and Suho rushed into the room the exact instant Baekhyun’s foot lost traction on the slippery countertop, causing him and Chen, who was sitting on his shoulders, to topple onto Chanyeol, who knocked over D.O., who narrowly missed crushing Xiumin, who didn’t notice the entire event, on account of the fact that it wasn’t as loud at his bawling at having been cut by flying glass when the bowl fell to the floor and shattered as it fell out of Chanyeol and D.O.’s grip.”

Having a lot going on in one sentence isn’t a bad thing, as long as the purpose behind it is rhetorical and the execution is proper. While there’s rhetorical reasoning in having a loaded sentence such as this one, the punctuation is all over the place. There are only commas used in this sentence, which is likely why it reads so poorly. At the same time, a lot of the information in the final portion of the sentence is redundant/unnecessary and can therefore be cut out. Here’s a corrected version:

Lay and Suho rushed into the room the exact instant Baekhyun’s foot lost traction on the slippery countertop, causing him and Chen—who was sitting on his shoulders—to topple onto Chanyeol, who knocked over D.O., who narrowly missed crushing Xiumin—who only missed the event due to the fact that he was already bawling at being cut by glass when the bowl fell to floor.

Tense issues were also occasionally prominent within the story and I began to notice them more and more in the later chapters. The story is written in the past-tense, so make sure that you stay in that tense instead of switching to present. An example of a tense error is here:

Tao groaned, reached toward his nightstand, grabbing what was once a box of cold medicine, but was now empty.

I chose this example since it seems as though the tense issue occurs primarily because of faulted syntax. If the sentence is modified slightly, fixing the tense issue becomes a lot easier.

Tao groaned and reached toward his nightstand to grab a now-empty box of cold medicine.

The sentence becomes more concise in this correction and the tense error is gone.

Writing Style: (1)/15

I get that this is a crack fic, but that doesn’t mean that you should resort to a childish writing style in an attempt to get your readers to laugh. In the best crack fics I read, the writing style was mature but the events were incredibly silly, so it didn’t turn off any potential readers. I would suggest that you do the same.

Stylistically, there’s a lot of areas for improvement, so I’m not quite sure how I should order this section. I’ve decided to focus on the more general aspects of this story’s writing style before getting into the more specific areas.

The story recommendation that you linked to within your review request warns against a lot of words in all-caps, and yeah, they weren’t kidding. I’d suggest that you try to use italics instead of utilizing all-caps or repeating letters (like “hungryyy” in chapter three). As I mentioned earlier, it’s possible to write humor without having to degrade your own writing style. A really good example of this is in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews. In professionally published books, all-caps, boldings, underlines, and the repetition of letters are hardly used for emphasis, and that serves as proof that it can be done successfully. A weird example of underlining being used within your text was in Chapter Five: “probably.” Italicizing “pro” is emphasis enough, so I don’t understand why it needed to be underlined as well.

Onomatopoeias are also used a lot in this, which surprised me because I haven’t seen onomatopoeias used like this in written works for the longest time, and I think that it’s because in more mature works, they’re used without the asterisks. I think that my favorite example of onomatopoeia usage from this story was:

“TAO, WHAT ARE YOU- *SLAP* OH GOD, YOU CAN’T *FWOP* SPANK ME, I’M YOUR *BWAP* HYUNG TAO *SMACK* STOOOP I PROMISE I’LL *WHAP* BE GOOD. I- *FWISH* PROMIIIIIIIISE *SWITCH* OH GOD!!!”

The best suggestion I can offer up is that you frame the sentence with interjections from the dialogue in order to actually state what’s happening. I actually think that doing this would come off as funnier than resorting to sound effects.

“T-Tao, what are you—”

 

A slap to the face.

 

“Oh God, you can’t—”

 

Tao suddenly has a belt in his hand and the other children can’t help but be mystified since he obviously made it appear by magic.

 

“You can’t spank me, I’m your—”

 

The belt is snapped.

I’ll stop there, but I think the point is clear.

There were moments during which the narrator’s voice seemed odd to me. At times, the narrator seemed omnipotent and was simply stating events, but at other times it seemed as though the narrator was trying to speak directly to the reader. Similarly, the overall writing style of the piece was really inconsistent (for example, Chapter Four was ridiculously dialogue-heavy). It’s important that you try to maintain consistency in regards to the big stylistic elements of the story, because if not, it seems like there’s a different person writing each time, which disrupts the flow of the story.

Repetitive diction is kind of frequent throughout the story, so I would do my best to try and avoid it. An example of this is in Chapter One:

He demanded all of his meals to be in bed (usually brought by Suho,) couldn’t be bothered to leave bed for anything but the restroom, not even to take the four steps from his bed to his desk to reach his laptop charger (again, he called Suho for this,) and required his back massaged at least every other day (this he called Chanyeol or Chen for, reasoning that Suho’s “lady-hands” were too delicate to deliver the required force.)

This is one sentence, but the word “bed” is repeated multiple times. There are also a number of grammatical errors that I noticed, so I went ahead and underlined them for you. Most of them have to do with punctuation errors (these are discussed in the Grammar section of this review), though “lady-hands” should be corrected to just “lady hands”.

When writing, it’s always important that you keep your target audience in mind. Since this is a story of the crack genre, the language used should be more mundane and less sophisticated so that it’s easier for people to understand; in crack fics like this, being profound shouldn’t be one of your goals. Using words like “lethargic,” “voraciously,” and “forwent” are incredibly random and disturb the tone of the story.

I’ve talked about syntax a lot in other section of this review, so I’ll be a little more brief here. Generally speaking, a lot of your syntax errors come about due to the fact that your word choice isn’t concise. The Hemingway App focuses on editing written pieces to make sentences more concise, so I think that using this could help you a lot.

Some of your figurative language was kind of weak, simply because the imagery didn’t make much sense. For example, in Chapter Two, you say that the “floodgates burst, to describe multiple people talking at once. This imagery, however, usually suggests that people have burst into tears.

Random side-note: I was really confused in Chapter Eight when they kept saying that “freaking” was a bad word but? It’s not?

Personal Enjoyment: (1)/5

I didn’t really find myself enjoying this when I read it. This was marked as a crack fic, but it was difficult for me to laugh at anything because of the writing style and how unrealistic the story came off to me. It’s alright for stories to come off as kind of fantastical as long as it’s easy to follow along with said fantastical events, but when they’re just being thrown at you, it begins to feel more like you’re being dragged along, rather than joining a crazy adventure.

Total Score: 37.5/100

Reviewer’s Comments: It’s difficult to explain a lot of mistakes in regards to your writing style since they have to do with flawed rhetorical strategies that only make sense when someone goes into very careful detail. If you need an elective, I would definitely recommend a rhetoric class, but I understand that you’re already busy with grad school, so just looking up some thorough online guides would help! I want to emphasize that even if this isn’t a “serious” fic, rhetorical strategies can be used in all types of writing, so they’re definitely worth looking into. In regard to your characters, I would suggest focusing on smaller groups at a time so that it’s more likely to see development  for each individual before moving on to the next group.

I believe that I addressed everything that was written in the story recommendation you linked within your request form, but if I missed anything, do let me know!