★ A Protector Of Light [24%]

[On Glory's Edge] The Archives
FICTION BIO
A Protector Of Light
by Imlucifer
 
Featuring: EXO, SNSD
Type: Chaptered (12 chapters reviewed)
Genre: Dark, Drama, Fantasy, Fluff, Friendship, Romance
Main Characters: Sunny, EXO, 2NE1, Kim Hyoyeon
Status: Ongoing
Rated: None
Warnings: Slight Gore
 
Note: Poster cropped to fit.
DESCRIPTION
The Exo Kings have been ruling together in EXO Kingdom for over 99 years, or more. These Kings had everyone rapped around their finger. Once, the kings have been informed of having a future Queen, a girl, less like these powerful kings, is to rule beside them. Only one queen. 
 
The Kings rightfully refused, but destiny is not to be taken as a joke. They all had been sent to Korea to find their future Queen. The Kings had certainly found the search ridiculous and "Out Of Order". That was, until 6 years of searching were over, and they found her. What they thought was going to be the mistake of the prophesy, was turned into Love at first sight.
EXCERPT
She was radiatingly, breathtakingly, and heavenly beautiful. But once gone away with the Kings, she didn't want them as much as they wanted her. It was all beautiful and everyone was kind, but she wanted to go home. The Kings ruler had thought of the kings as nothing more then kidnappers. They didn't want her to go, they wanted her to stay with them, because they loved her, irrevocably.
Story Review by Quicksand (71/300 - 24%)
Title (11/20)
Now, 'A Protector of Light' is not only a clumsy title but it bears no actual connection to your story. For one, the title in itself makes little sense, both after having read the story as well as on first glance. What is the light meant to be? What does it symbolise? Why does it need to be protected? The only thing it really led to me asking was who this protector was going to be, but even then, considering how many other questions this title raises, this one question is lost among them. If I had seen this title while scrolling through stories, I would likely have not clicked on it; it's not just how it confuses the reader but also the fact that it's quite clumsy as a title. It absolutely lacks flow or rhythm and after reading it aloud, it really doesn't seem ... attractive. Long titles can quite easily end up clumsy or flat because they're not nearly concise or rhythmic enough. That being said, that's not always the case with long titles, but just that it happens less frequently with short ones.
In terms of originality, I wouldn't say it's the most cliche title I've come across, though light-themed ones are quite frequent. It's clumsiness as a title is one reason it might not attract too many people but it doesn't particularly stand out either. As I said, one reason for this is because light-themed titles are so common. Perhaps you could use the word radiance or incandescence in its place? Perhaps play around with those words, if you're determined to use something related to 'light'? 
After having read 12 chapters of your story, I don't see the connection between your title and the story. The only reference to light is the fact that the 'queen' will have a brilliant aura around her, which really brings into question what (or rather who) the protector is or why a protector is needed. In 12 chapters this has not become apparent to me which makes one question if that really is the best title for this story. If you've used some means of explaining the significance of the title then it just isn't discernibile. In addition, there's nobody in your story who plays the role of a protector; Sunny is just your average teenage girl (with a brilliant aura) and the twelve brothers (i.e. EXO) are kings ... who is protecting what?
Foreword and Description (9/40)
You don't have an actual description, or rather, you don't have a foreword and you've included what should be in your description in the foreword area. Now there's usually a lot of flexibility in how you design the foreword and description of your story--it's fine if you mess aorund a little, have the foreword and description swap places, etc; I'm not reviewing you on how you've arranged it but what you've got there and how that affects a reader. Your description is really cluttered and dsitracting.You more or less just include author's notes and credits there and I know these need to be added, but please make them less obvious.
Moving on to your foreword ... not only is it bland, but it absolutely defeats the point of a foreword and description. You lay out your entire story there which you really don't need to do. A brief description that generates reader curiosity should suffice, but you've got more than that there. There's absolutely no need for the third paragraph of your foreword to even exist, that can very well be explained and explored through the course of your story. In essence, you shouldn't lay out the plot of your story in your foreword and description, or else what's the point of reading the story? As readers we don't come to read summaries of stories and then delve into said story--that just takes away the surprise factor of the story and ruins it for the reader because they already know what's about to happen.
Secondly, the way you've presented your foreword really doesn't garner reader interest. Like your title it's clumsy, cluttered and is simply too ... bland and factual to hook someone on. Your writing also reflects on you as a reader; if it's chock full of grammatical and spelling errors and generally dull lanaguage, then your readers will assume the rest of the story is the same and leave. For instance "These Kings had everyone rapped around their finger. Once, the kings have been informed of having a future Queen, a girl, less like these powerful kings, is to rule beside them. Only one queen." This should be "these kings had everyone wrapped around their finger and they had been informed of having a future queen." There's no need to say "a girl" as that's redunant (queen implies female) and the term queen also implies that she will be ruling beside them. This is what I meant by cluttered; aside from all the gramamtical and spelling errors in your story, your sentence structure is often redundant and filled with words that make it all the harder to comprehend. To overcome this, writing your story in Word could remove some of the major errors though the most effective way would be to have a beta reader or a friend read through your work and point out these mistakes to you.
Thirdly, show, don't tell! The art of storytelling isn't all about giving facts and numbers, it's about weaving something beautiful and breathtaking. Include descriptive language and imagery and maybe more poetic sentence structures to show your work to your readers instead of telling them. For example "The Exo Kings have been ruling together in EXO Kingdom for over 99 years, or more." This is an example of telling (also, the or more at the end is unnecessary--have they been ruling for 99 year or more than that? Pick one.) and you could 'show' this by saying something like "The EXO kings have been the proud, joint rulers of the EXO kingdom for time immemorial ... "

Lastly, it would not hurt to include an excerpt from your story in your foreword; it would give readers a sneak-peak of your story and allow them to judge if they’d like to continue reading or not and if done well, this generates a lot of curiosity and interest in readers.

Readability (18/40)

Alright, to begin with, this entire story was incredibly hard to make any sense of for a variety of reasons. To begin with, the whole story was very patchy and you had all these events taking place that seemingly had no relation or didn’t make sense to me; first EXO are kings and then they have to set out on a search throughout Korea to find a queen that they’ve never seen before and their only means of identifying her is an aura, then they do find her and her cousin becomes their rival? Why would such a time consuming method be picked to find a future queen? Why do all twelve of them have to go on this journey, why can’t one or two of them just go whilst the rest of them rule the kingdom? What if they fail? Where do they get the money for this expedition? These details (or lack thereof) make the story quite hard to follow and at every turn, I kept questioning the events that took place. In addition, everything in the story happened so quickly that I struggled to make any sense of it (I’ll explain this in more detail in the plot section).

Another thing that made this story quite hard to understand was the character reactions, all of which were rather abnormal and very rehearsed and cliché. I’ll expand on this in the characterisation section, though briefly what I mean is that the characters just behave so … oddly that it’s hard for me to understand the story because it just seems unrealistic and hard to wrap my mind around.

On to the biggest contributor to your low score in this area—many, many spelling and a few grammatical errors littered your work. I’ll quote an example that includes both, but I’d strongly advise you to use a word processing program (like Word) or to get a beta reader—it’s not one or two instances in your work, there are consistent, repeated errors and these are quite annoying for a reader. Readers shouldn’t have to pause every couple of minutes to decipher what you’re saying; there’s no way they’ll be able to enjoy a story if they have to stop ever few minutes, correct what they writer is saying in their heads so it makes sense to them. In addition, there are times when it’s hard to decipher what you’re saying which means the possibility that your story is being misunderstood is quite high. To quote an example, “She was definatly going to make the kings happier then they have ever been, much better then those other four girls back at the kingdom whome they weren't looking forward to see when they returned” made me wonder if she was definitely going to do something or defiantly going to do it; it should also have been “much more than those four other girls” and “whom they weren’t looking forward to seeing/meeting when they returned”.  There are also instances of homophone mix-ups in your work—things like there, they’re and their, you’re and your, then and than, etc. Your best bet would be putting your work through Word (as I mentioned before) and having someone read over it to pick up on these errors.

The way you form sentences is both awkward and redundant; you have an issue with the order of adjectives (as I quoted earlier—‘other four’ should be ‘four other’) as well as creating incredibly cluttered and clumsy sentences with unnecessary words and phrases that make it hard to understand. One example of this is the sentence from your foreword that I quoted earlier—please refer to that to understand what I mean. Of course, these sentences aren’t grammatically incorrect, however they do hinder one’s understanding of the text because it’s such a roundabout way to say something. To counter these, there’s Word, which really is a writer’s best friend, and of course a beta reader. You could also try reading it out loud yourself and picking up on awkward-seeming sentences and phrases—the instant something seems ‘off’ to your ears, scrap it.

You also tend to use the narrative tone in contexts where it’s awkward or inappropriate; it doesn’t fit with the rest of your writing which is in third person, so absolutely remove all mentions of ‘I guess’ or ‘You could say’ which clash with the omniscient third-person voice you employ otherwise. What I mean is when you say “the sun shone brilliantly over the members of EXO”, you can’t continue with “I guess they’ll end up sunburnt soon” because that’s jarring and distracts the reader.

Finally (I’m so sorry for the giant walls of text you’ve had to sit through), beware of your layout—it’s not just your sentences that are cluttered, but also the way you’ve set out paragraphs. Remember that you start a new paragraph when you discuss a new idea and when another character starts speaking; you have to put the dialogue and the speech tag in a separate line to make it easier for the readers to read and understand what you’re saying. For instance:

“Can I please get a soda?” Sehun asked.

“We’re out, sorry,” the cashier apologised.

The above is the correct way to do it.

Characterization (5/50)
My first impression of your story after seeing the large character chart in the foreword was that there was no 'real' characterisation in the story and after having read it, I really don't feel like there is to be honest. You simply sort your characters into tropes or stereotypes and never really expand on them beyond that. You need to realise that Chanyeol is more than just 'the quiet' or Suho is more than just 'the depressing'; it's incredibly boring for readers to see one adjective describe the characters and that the characters never leave said adjective. In addition, the feelings and thoughts people experience are far more complex for them to be characterised by one adjective--it's very unrealistic and quite frankly rather unfair to your characters to more or less stuff them into boxes to describe their personalities. Take the time to explore them and their traits; hash out details about them and think about quirks or habits or opinions you could give them to make them yours and essentially to make them unique and more than just one adjective.
Moving on, how you depict your characters is another concerning factor. As I mentioned above, you sort your characters into tropes which is quite bad. However even if you were to hash out details and quirks, it's very important to include these in your work stylistically so that your readers can connect and respect your characters--I found that you barely talk about the reasoning or thought processes or feelings. Expand on how nervous the boys feels when they see SUnny, maybe talk about what they imagine could happen. Mention their fears--what if Sunny rejects them? What if they mess up? The inclusion of these thought processes makes your characters so much more real and human which is very appealing to readers. Another thing I'd like to mention is that I found many of the characters' actions to be rather ... unrealistic. For instance, when Sunny is approached by Xiumin, she automatically responds. Why isn't she nervous or apprehensive or even uncertain about being talked to by a random boy or when he offers to introduce her to his eleven brothers? When readers see a character doing this, they just can't understand why s/he'd do that and that detaches them from the character. Including their rationalisation and thought processes would maybe justify their actions and help readers empathise with them better.

 To move on, sorting your characters into tropes is not only lazy but also unoriginal. By sorting them into tropes you're asking your readers to imagine X character as 'the typical sad guy' from most films or Y character as a the drama-queen type. Now some readers may enjoy that and enjoy the harmony of characters fitting into various tropes interacting with each other but other readers might find that cliche and stereotypical. When it comes to this it really wouldn't hurt, as I said above, to give your characters more quirks or habits--just little things to make them more unique and distinguish them from the boxes they've been put into. Now this brings me to Lee Sunny who is quite the Mary-Sue. Well, perhaps that's a little unfair to say, she's more bland than she is an actual Mary-Sue, but this has a different impact on the reader than the boys because she's not sorted into a trope; we just see the bare bones of the good side of her personality and that's just unrealistic and unbelievable. We can't connect with Sunny  because just showing her good traits makes her seem inhuman, to be honest. My advice would be the same as the advice I had for characterising the boys.

And finally, no actual character development occurs in the 12 chapters of this story--it's as if the characters don't react to the events taking place in their lives, really. Don't the boys feel at all discouraged after being unable to find their queen? Do they become more hopeful when they find Sunny? If they aren't changing in the course of the story then they seem all the more bland and unrealistic because people are affected by their lives and the events in their lives. I think the reason for the lack of emotional development in the characters is because you have so many characters--13 to be exact and 14 if you add Hyun Woo, who isn't really needed to be honest. It's very irksome to see so mny characters in a story because they're all being handled roughly and being denied the attention and development they deserve. Let's face it, it's hard to realistically and artistically develop a story with 13 characters--maybe try to make it a Sunny/one EXO member story instead with the same theme? Or maybe centring the story around one EXO member and Sunny would help, though that doesn't mean you should exclude the others. Conversely you could still try to develop all 13 at once though it would take a lot of effort on your part to keep up with all of them.

Originality (0/30)
I really could find nothing original about your story; in fact, you seem to combine many incredibly cliche concepts and your story becomes quite unenjoyable because of the fact that you don't add your own twist to any of these ideas. There's the reverse harem idea where all of EXO fall in love with this Mary-Sue protagonist as well as their rival suddenly entering the picture as if it wasn't bad enough that twelve of them already were vying the same girl. In addition, there's the fantasy-royalty twist and the idea of love at first sight, all of which have been done to death before and thus are really not very intriguing to read about. That being said, cliches can be enjoyable if done right and this usually includes putting a twist of your own on them, but you haven't done that; if you've implemented a twist somewhere after chapter 12 then it's a little too late seeing as readers after having read 12 chapters of your story will be bored to death by the unoriginality and the incredibly overused ideas that constitute your story. I'm sorry to have been so harsh but ... there legitimately is nothing original; even excluding your plot, your writing style uses a lot of bland and cliche means of describing anything (and you do this quite minimally as well) and your characters are barely characterised, let alone original.
Plotline (18/90)
Alright, so the reasons for your low score in the section include a lot of things, the first being how unoriginal your plot is. As I mentioned under the originality section, it encompasses a lot of cliche and overused plot ideas and that is one thing that makes your plot hard to enjoy. I'm not going to repeat myself about the lack of originality of your plot, though if you'd like to improve on that aspect of your writing then all I can suggest is brainstorming--spend time thinking about your plot, about what's wrong with it and what you'd like to see in it; what do you think is wrong with it? What is too cliche? And when you've come up with enough questions, take them to someone else and brainstorm with them about your idea.
The second issue was the terrible pacing--your story is much, much too rushed. Suddenly EXO have to find a queen, they start in Incheon then four years later they're in Seoul and suddenly Xiumin finds this girl and all of them fall in love with her? The biggest reason your plot seems rushed is because you have more or less no emotional development in your characters--time skips are fine, though to allow them to be fine you need to show your characters moving through time and space, adapting and reacting to processes in their lives and eventually growing accustomed to the changes. You need to bridge the gap between their former and present selves with their thoughts; only YOU as a writer can do that for them and not make them seem deranged or the plot seem patchy and difficult to comprehend. So to summarise this bit, your plot jumps around a lot from one point to another but to combat this, you should have your characters develop more emotionally and maybe take it a little slower; instead of just narrating the events, show how your characters react to them, approach them and overcome them.
Your plot is also both unrealistic and predictable. I'm going to repeat myself by saying that there are elements of your story that I simply don't understand ... for instance, Why would such a time consuming method be picked to find a future queen? Why do all twelve of them have to go on this journey, why can’t one or two of them just go whilst the rest of them rule the kingdom? What if they fail? Where do they get the money for this expedition? To me these make little sense because in the real world (I know this isn't in the real world, but as government figures in a fictitious world) such things could never happen. It's too impractical. And this automatically turns a reader off because they can't connect with the story anymore, nor can they take it seriously because it seems so incredulous. As unrealistic as it is however, as soon as Xiumin noted the aura around the girl, I could tell all of them would fall in love with her but a rival would come along ... so essentially, along wtih being unrealistic it's also predictable, likely a result of the cocktail of cliches you used to create a plot.
Finally, the last thing about your plot that made it hard to enjoy was the inclusion of insiginifant plot devices; I'd like to ask you if there really was any need for there to be a love rival? There's so much you could have worked with without including Hyun Woo or his disappearance to be honest and by doing so, you could have made your story decidedly less cliche. For one, would about playing on Sunny's feelings about being loved by 12 males at once? What about her falling in love with one of them? What about the EXO members slowly developing a rivalry between themselves over this girl? What about there being a time limit for them to make this girl their queen and then they have to make sacrifices and compromises to let one of them woo the girl? So yeah, as I said, there were a lot of insigificant and unneeded plot devices you used (did the setting have to be a school?) that also made your story less enjoyable than it could have been. In addition having too many things happen at once without connecting them seamlessly or fitting them into a natural flow can both clutter your story and confuse your readers.
Structure / Mechanics (10/30)
So in general, your word choice was rather poor and limited and this is excluding all the spelling errors you have running through your story. You tend to repeat words a lot and well, overall your vocabulary is really simple and though simple isn't necessarily bad, in your case it isn't giving your story flair that would help it stand out more and captivate its readers better, you know? I'd suggest maybe trying to play around with words and using a wide variety of them, just to make your writing more interesting. Don't jump to a thesaurus, having to look up every third word can really turn readers off but just remember to include more variety. This also extends to your setence structure--you don't need to express your ideas in bland, cliche and simple sentences. It won't hurt to experiment a little with your structure and word choice and spice it up, so to speak. For example, something like "it was like her heart was made of glass and shattered at his words" is quite a cliche way of conveying heartbreak however you could play around with that a little to make it more itneresting and unique a sentence, like "her frail, glass heart was damaged seeminlgy beyond repair as she digested his words".  
Moing on to another nitpick of mine, you have tense changes in your story, usually between the past and present tenses and sometimes even to the future tense ("The boys exchanged some glances. It would be nice to keep it to themsleves for while, just to get to know Sunny a little more. Then when the time comes, they'll be able to tell the Great's and her, and she'll be able to come with them to the kingdom. It will be a good plan."). I assume you want to write your story in the past tense, so keep and eye out for errors of this sort and consciously keep reminding yourself to write in the past tense. Tense changes can be quite irritating for readers and makes you story that much harder to enjoy.
I believe I've covered both of these points already, but your poor word choice and generally rather bland writing leads to two things; one, it's difficult to understand and empathise with your characters. Your words are a means for you to portray them--through their dialogue and their actions and the way they're described. You barely describe them, however, and if you do, they're very generic descriptions and as a reader I'm left confused and blank about your characters. My suggestion? Talk about them more. Expand on their feelings, their dilemmas, their opnions ... describe them physically as well; what sort of clothes are they wearing? Do they prefer hot or cold days? You could include their thoughts in your writing as well--not only does that help your readers imagine your character's general tone and demeanour but it can also be quite stylistic and an intriguing way to getting a message across. Similiarly there were several disruptions in flow, not all of them caused by your word choice--I think I mentioned under the plot section that your story tends to jump around a lot. I'd like to add here that it doesn't help your messy and rushed plotline to not link words and sentences poorly either; that makes your work seem even more rushed and consequently harder to enjoy. So yeah, take it slow and include more detail and description.
Which brings me to my next point, the lack of detail--it's not just characters that seem to lack detail, it's the story itself. You could decribe settings and situations more--as opposed to saying "the grass was green", you could talk about the contrast of the bright sky with the dark grass and so on and so forth. You could also try adding a few, brief 'filler' moments that aren't overly significant to the plot but add extra layers of intrigue to the characters and maybe also contain some mild symbolism. It's really just a way of ensuring the story flows a little more smoothly and doesn't become 'a collection of key events'.
And lastly, stylistic features. I cannot stress on how important these are. They are what truly make your writing stand out and this is so much more than rich vocabulary or better sentence structure or more detail; go wild with repetition, catchphrases, symbolism, metaphors ... these are devices that will add to your message and help you deliver said message/ideas in an artistic manner that doesn't detract from your story. I find that your story lacks these altogether which is somewhat of a shame because your story has so much potential for these--for instance, you could have various imageries of light come up, which would be a motif for light (your story seems to revolve aorund auras and light) or maybe you could include a metaphor for light as well. Really these devices allow you to express more than one thing in an artistic way (granted these things are related) and when done well, they can truly amaze people. It would really be in your best interest to make full use of these. 
Bonus (+0)
I'm sorry, I legitimately cannot think of anything to give you bonus points for.
Reader's View
As a reader, I really cannot say I enjoyed this story; it was far, far too cliche and plotless for my tastes and you made no attempts to have it stand out in comparison to the numerous other stories of the same kind on AFF. Everything seemed to unbelievable and unrealistic. I absolutely could not understand the characters, let alone empathise with them and overall, I'm sorry to say I was incredibly put off by this story. I would also strongly advise against you using chapters for author's notes/random things that are not related to your story; they are both irrelevant and distracting and disrupt the flow of your story.
Additional Comments / Final Score (71/300 - 24%)
Please don't be too discouraged by the score--it simply means you have a lot to improve on and I'm sure you can do it ;).
Credit
Don't forget to credit back to our shop, link required!

 

 

 

Like this story? Give it an Upvote!
Thank you!

Comments

You must be logged in to comment
peanutoast
#1
Chapter 77: Thanks for your reviwe of Lacrimosa! I just subscribed to it and thanks to you I´ll read very carefully <3
informantxgirl
#2
Chapter 35: I just read glitz. It was lovely, thanks for the rec! :D