Gabriel Blessing's Fiction aka The Boxing Ring

[Fafnir]

But it would allow easier interfacing with badfics.

[Arashi_Leonhart]

Spinecrushing goes better with Mad Enhancement. Mental Pollution is more of a THIS IS KUUUUUURUUUUUUU.

[Kotonoha]

From now on every time someone says "spinecrushing" or any variant of the phrase they have to put a quarter in this jar.

[Arashi_Leonhart]

But I need those for laundry.

[Kyte]

Sure it is, posted it weeks ago remember?

...you did? Shit I don't even reme- OH THAT ENDING.

- - - Updated - - -

From now on every time someone says "spinecrushing" or any variant of the phrase they have to put a quarter in this jar.

Whoever gets the money from that jar will end up rich.

[Seika]

Virtue is British, Rivers wasn't ESL.

I think at least.

ESL, bad enough to be ESL, comes out as the same thing in terms of requiring corrections.

Just got to the revelation, and if there's no further development on it, I'm going to say that not only is it worse than everyone reporting on it has so far made it seem, it is actively worse than if Blessing hadn't tried to give an explanation at all. I would honestly have preferred Shirō to have randomly become a psychopath than for this to be the reasoning. (And, of course, the revelation is only about a third of the way through this chapter. Bugger me sideways with a rusty pitchfork).

[Techlet]

(And, of course, the revelation is only about a third of the way through this chapter. Bugger me sideways with a rusty pitchfork).

Narrative pacing has not been counted among GB's forte.

[Seika]

Narrative pacing has not been counted among GB's forte.

You could have a chapter where you built up to have a revelation and then dealt with it (though it would take a lot of skill and I agree that Blessing could do with just chopping his chapters up into vastly smaller pieces). I'm mostly just moaning at how much more I have to wade through.

[I3uster]

From now on every time someone says "spinecrushing" or any variant of the phrase they have to put a quarter in this jar.

It's a perfectly fine word.
For its intended use of ending a discussion with untranslated material.

[terraablaze]

Does Seika pay food royalties?

So hey guys, what's going on in this thread? You guys seem upset.

[I3uster]

Somebody wrote fanfiction for a shitty harem show nobody would ever pay attention to if it wasn't for this fanfiction.
And he got Shirou wrong, and the reason for that is because he got Rin wrong.

Now everybody is mad.

[Knick]

Now everybody is mad.

Well madder. The SoL and infodumps where the target out of hate before.

[I3uster]

I'm trying to stay concise!

[oblueknighto]

It seems everybody is upset after an update.
It also seems that this thread gets a lot of activity, all thanks to that update.
A very interesting thread to follow I must admit.

Bad english, cant help it, just read the new update.

[Techlet]

Does Seika pay food royalties?

So hey guys, what's going on in this thread? You guys seem upset.

Breaking news, terra finally(?) has a face.

[Leftovers]

Well, you convinced me to pick it back up. And I can't even calculate the amount of WRONG in this chapter. It really is like he just took every character, scrapped every single characteristic and nuance that made it unique, jammed in his own ideas and bashed them together real hard until they sort-of stuck. Even fucking Homura.

I also find it extremely amusing that Blessing kinda acknowledges his fuck-up, but still implies that he doesn't really care if people drop his fic like a bag of shit. I mean, has he ever actually responded to constructive criticism? I don't remember him ever addressing the technical points people brought up. Here's hoping Seika's impending monolith of a review somehow gets through to his ego, if not his common sense.

[Pata Hikari]

Well madder. The SoL and infodumps where the target out of hate before.

I dunno that makes it sound pretty accurate to Fate Stay Night.

[Arashi_Leonhart]

I think it isn't the actual SoL or infodump so much as SoL that is paced horribly and infodump out of the blue from someone who might not even have valid reasons to know said info and for not really much purpose other than to say Nasu mechanics are awesomer than your world mechanics.

[RadiantBeam]

I think it isn't the actual SoL or infodump so much as SoL that is paced horribly and infodump out of the blue from someone who might not even have valid reasons to know said info and for not really much purpose other than to say Nasu mechanics are awesomer than your world mechanics.

Basically my problem with IF.

[Seika]

Instalment 1! More than 3k words to get to the second scene break of this dreck! Huzzah! (If you wish merely to see my reaction to the revelation, you may search the term 'spectacularly dumb' to find it).

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Saber takes on Carnival Phantasm characterisation. If this scene is anything approaching serious, that's a very risky move to make.

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I forgot how bloody tired I was of a load of characters just being called 'my flock'. It trivialises and degrades them on so many levels. Consider this objection to be lodged any time you do this, because I won't fill out space repeating it again and again. (A contrast with a certain someone's writing style might be drawn here if one were possessed of uncharitable feelings).

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Shirō calls something a 'doohickey', which evokes the wretched mess we've had earlier about him supposedly being ignorant of technology. Yet he soon after calls it a tablet. So why bother with the Luddite silliness in the first place? Evidently he knows the term, so it's just stupid to have him use something which points in entirely the opposite direction – a moronic direction, what's more.

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Rin begins a biological interrogation during a meal. While we do get some lectures in the dining room in F/SN, she's normally polite enough to at least wait for people to be done with their food as I recall. Also, there's nothing really to provoke it, she just starts in on 'tell me about your internal organs' and everyone indulges her.

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fishing for as much information about her species as possible, though why the hacker had a reason for indulging the other girl.
Fail. And I would always be uncertain about wrapping two 'name-euphemisms' together like that, all the more so when the narrator cares about one of them and is still made to refer to her as 'the other girl'.

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Both seemed to be smart enough to know that a little give and take would get both of them a wellspring of information that they were curious about.
Hello, run-on sentence, how are you today? Also overlapping with the previous sentence to create redundancy.

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most of the house seemed to have settled down to something resembling normality. Most of my flock had settled down
Speaking of redundancy …

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easing some of their worries regarding what my two past lovers were planning.
Over-written, cut at 'worries'.

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faux passé
Ahahahahaha. How do you even mess up like that? Just bloody check if you don't know the spellings. Or are we in real Dunning-Kruger territory?

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If anything, it almost felt
Mr. Blessing attempts to work as much useless narrative uncertainty into five words as possible.

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If anything … if [] was anything to go by.
Just bad writing.

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I wasn't sure if this was just another aspect of the species as a whole, considering that there was always the potential chance that just by having their Ashikabi wing them it increased the Ashikabi's chance of attracting more partners, or if my flock in particular was just used to having more people added, seeing as I had gathered quite a number of the species rather quickly.
Oh, bugger me. I thought the last sentence I picked up for being run-on was bad. And where was “show, don't tell” during any of this, pray? Or even a modicum of respect for your readers' memories?

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having succeeding in ensuring
1) grammar fail; 2) triple-chained participles, ugh.

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Cliché but halfway amusing interlude with yet more over-writing but nothing serious. This might pass for a somewhat acceptable piece of fanfic for a paragraph or so. Oh, except for the masses of unnecessary honorifics. Those are bad.

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Sa-nee-chan.
And, speaking of … but it's worse because there's no way that セイ is going to end up as 'Sa', whichever way you spin it. Being weeaboo is bad, but at least some of them have the courtesy to understand what they're doing.

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the King's dishes
This should not be capitalised.

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Tousaka
There are many ways to romanise 遠坂, and this is one of the worst. A simple explanation is to be found here.

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Rin gave an apologetic smile to the landlady, one that twitched ever so slightly as she did so.
Poor subordinate clause placement, because the natural inclination is to infer 'the landlady' as 'one' and this is only cleared up at the end of the sentence. Do not make your readers recheck a sentence without purpose.

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Getting Hannya-ed twice in rapid succession already definitely had put Rin on edge around the landlady.
Bugger me, this is still in here? Ugh.

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her eyes
Two girls have just been mentioned who could plausibly be casting a look at Shirō, so why be so uselessly unspecific? Again, be helpful to your reader.

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We return to inoffensive cliché for a few lines.

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though she had a pretty good reason with that, what with once having been a man and then having to keep her slow change of gender a secret.
Show/tell, over-writing, cut your bloody sentences, etc.

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then me a slow look, before nodding slowly. ... "Matsu will help too," she finally declared, nodding firmly
Is there an extraordinary amount of nodding going on in this little period of time, or did the author forget that Matsu had already nodded? Use what you have already written, and point out that her final nod is at last assertive and declarative rather than musing. Or just have her nod once like a normal person instead of giving her a weird executive toy for head and neck.

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A part of me wondered if it would really be safe for me to give Rin a chance to plot without me knowing
I can't work out which of two bad options we're seeing here. Is Shirō such a suspicious control-freak that Rin talking alone (to the lover that didn't bugger off) makes him fearful about … something? Or are his notions much less serious than that, as if they might plan the sort of dumb harem humour rampant in this 'fic and its source material - in which case why has the scene dropped into a much graver tone?

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A legacy of the time we had spent together master and apprentice, maybe? Or maybe the time as lovers?
Oh, be serious! That's how little their relationship meant to him? I'm a big advocate for the theory that Rin and Shirō are mostly hormone-addled teenagers caught up in a life-and-death situation and there's not a massive weight of real romantic attachment between the two. I would expect them to eventually end up as friends after UBW instead of maturing into life partners. But firstly, there has been no good hint of an actual break-up in this 'fic, merely circumstances forcing them physically away from each other. And secondly, there would still have been a time when they properly thought they were in love. That doesn't just thrown away like this, made secondary to a pretty informal teaching relationship which was created only because they wanted to be closer to each other in the first place. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

You know, I haven't seen any behaviour (different from the narrator just saying something and expecting it to be taken for granted) which hints at Shirō or Rin actually bloody loving each other yet in this chapter. At all. It's like you've sucked all the deeper emotion out of the relationship and just turned Shirō into a robot.

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*Scene Break*
Even with fanfic.net having its absurd restrictions, there are better ways to do this. Come on.

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Even though so much time had passed, even as tense and dangerous the situation was, and that was including both the mounting Sekirei Plan and Saber and Rin's appearance,
First layer, second layer … parenthetical explanation? Avoiding tricolon is fine, but don't set it up to cut its feet back out from under it – all the more so because even just having a different piece of punctuation like a bracket or a dash would help it feel less like you've switched rhetorical tack mid-sentence. Anyway, this is all a rhetorical exercise, because the explanation should just be scrubbed for being useless and redundant.

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With this many people living in one place alone time was hard to come by on occasion
For once a comma is missing from where it should be, rather than the other way around. This one does affect the reading quality of the sentence fairly substantially, so I thought I'd pick it up.

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seemed inclined to decline.
No.

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before slowly turning more of my attention towards the snow woman. It had been a while since she had called me that, and the fact that she had now made me pay closer attention to her demeanor
Repetition, over-writing, etc.

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But Ashikabi were human, and now two people that I had already admitted to loving, who had been my lovers for years, which were also human, well, had been human in Saber's case, had shown up.
Run-on sentence; hugely over-written; 'which' is unnatural as a way to refer to them (especially have just called them 'who'); poor use of punctuation which really screws up the comprehensibility of the last section … many bad things.

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Rin and Saber being here… I had no idea what to do. I had managed to bull through so far, to keep things from getting violent, but those two being here…
A sudden outbreak of ellipsisitis to go with repetition.

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And then we get another dozen paragraphs of thought-monologue on Shirō's emotional state, which is just such terrible writing. Even apart from the dullness of it, the lack of imagination shown by using it, the upshot in the story is presumably to have Shirō staring off into space while mumbling to himself and vaguely hugging this girl who would probably rather like him to let go now. And to stop being quite so insane.

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I also felt like one of those annoying harem anime protagonists, the wimpy indecisive kind that always ends up leading on like a dozen different girls.
Ah! The character is achieving sentience and noticing the role he has been shoe-horned into! Go, boy, go! Break free of the crap writer's tyranny!

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Well, at least it wasn't likely that this would head toward erogame protagonist ground, the part where the protagonist ends up sleeping with all the girls, sometimes simultaneously. That had to count for something.
Oh, bugger me, there's more of this? As a rule – though not quite ironclad - self-reference works only as humour or deprecation, and is still damn hard to do well for either. (One tenet would be to keep it brief instead of digging your hole deeper). You do not get to insert it into your protagonist's moment of emotional crisis without rhyme, reason or pay-off. This is so bad.

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A paragraph on our genderbent harem member having disappeared at some point, instead of going to bathe with the rest. Except that 'Homura disappeared at some point – I didn't notice when – instead of going to bathe with the rest' is how all the meaning of that paragraph could and probably should have been conveyed, instead of continually telling the reader stuff they already knew over and over and over.

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my eyes crinkled
This is for laughter, not … whatever emotion is supposed to be coming across here.

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Close repetition of 'skip the bath'. Business as usual in this prose, I'm not even sure if it's worth picking up this kind of error since it appears so often.

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Vaguely unobjectionable dialogue for a bit. Yay.

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the Green Girl
Really? My eyes are rolling.

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know a little too much about what was going on in Izumo House
Cut it here. What needs to be said has been said. Just learn to stop.

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lavenderette
No. Continually referring to everyone by their hair colour has been a bad habit in fanfiction for a good decade now, there's no excuse. Also worse when it's not a human hair colour, because that's poking at your readers' suspension of disbelief, and definitely worse when you're straight-up inventing a word just to write badly.

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I imagined my words as invisible arrows, and the way Miya flinched at having been compared to the perverted hacker indicated that those arrows had struck home.
'I imagined my words as invisible arrows, and Miya's flinch showed they'd struck home.' Imagine if we did this to all your sentences. The world would be a happier place by far.

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It looked like Miya might have a bit of a guilty conscience, knowing deep in her heart that I spoke only the unvarnished truth of her dirty habit.
Adjective overdose in an inappropriate place. Cut them back.

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brow beating
brow-beating

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non-glasses mode
You are trying to be serious (as your character is trying to be serious). Do not bring up gimmicks in the middle of that, or at least be much more circumspect about it. Whilst we're on the subject, describing a person as being in X or Y mode is almost always going to sound gimmicky, no matter whether the change of personality is itself a gimmick or not.

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sword fighting
On the same note as previously, sword-fighting.

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in lethal risk
at lethal risk, but even that's not really right. 'In mortal peril' sounds a bit like what you're searching for, but is really purple.

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he payed them no mind
Paid. Payed is only appropriate for paying out a rope in the past tense.

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Actually, this little speech isn't bad (bearing in mind that I say this having picked out three incontrovertible errors and one subjective error in it because that's how you've lowered my standards). The sentences are relatively constrained, the listing is appropriate, and it actually hits a decent ending note.

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Okay, okay, you're very proud of your term for your screwed-up way to make Shirō behave. Stop shoving it in our faces every time a character speaks. It's not only bad writing, it's very obviously egotistical.

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"I said that I was the one who set him on that path," Rin admitted freely, tone still clinical. "Mostly through minor suggestions, offhand comments, occasionally by just pointing things out, but eventually, I was able to get him to follow that way of thinking."
Riiiight. I was spoiled on this revelation, but even so this is coming off as spectacularly dumb. I ranted before about how UBW Good was the worst possible choice for a Kiritsugu-esque Shirō. Now you propose that the mechanism to effect this most extraordinary change was … off-hand comments and minor suggestions. Has your brain recently been soaked in acid?

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"Frankly, anything was better than the way he used to think!"
This seems oddly like you decided to develop a scenario with Rin and Shirō who never actually went through the last two days of UBW, didn't recognise Shirō's broken attitude, didn't go through brutal and bloody battles which existed as much on a philosophical plane as a physical one, and didn't tie this whole bloody thing up already in the most definitive way possible. Except that you keep referencing those last two days so I really don't know what you've done except that it's mad and stupid.

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Rin's examination of Shirō's former problem is fine, at least, mostly unmarred even by the ubiquitous technical issues.

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Sod, we're back to modes for everyone now, are we? Please don't, there are enough psychological issues in the cast without trying to make them all dissociative as well.

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Shirō doesn't feel guilt? Wrong, re-read the orphan basement scene. Choice quotes:
I had to remember every single bit of it.
It's only natural.
That many people wanted to be helped, and not one of them had their wish granted.
So --- since my wish was granted, I thought it was only natural for me to take on their deaths.

That's why I frantically chased after Kiritsugu.
For those I couldn't save.


Shirō doesn't feel happiness for helping people? Wrong, re-read … well, a lot of the novel. For a quick reference, let's invade some dreams.
But he would accomplish it in the end, and I think he changed a lot of people's lives.
I'm sure his life was a happy one.

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We return to Rin's bizarre interpretation of Shirō where she forgot the last two days of UBW. Which is interesting, really, because then they never had sex and there's no reason for them to be lovers.

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Magus-like and Rin-like are quite definitely not the same thing. Rin strives for it but continually messes up because she lets compassion intrude. She goes after Shirō properly two or three times that I remember in the entire VN (and on the occasion that I remember more clearly, still contrives to have him live), in contrast to her conspicuously failing to backstab him when she has great shots at it and a Servant urging her on.

Meanwhile, let's address the hilarious caricature of Tokiomi included in the introduction. He had no bloody clue about Zōken's plans for Sakura and I have no difficulty believing he'd have burnt down the entire Matō mansion if he'd found out. He wanted his daughters to each have the chance to prove themselves and would rather Sakura didn't get hunted down and pickled for Clock Tower magi to study. He has plenty of flaws – he still thinks that fighting to the death wouldn't be a bad turn out for Rin and Sakura, he's too cocksure and too trusting, but (like his daughter) he is not actually the ideal magus because he still has some traces of kindliness in him.

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Why is Shirou still so obsessed with the Path of the Shura.
Question mark.

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when his minds made up
when his mind's made up.

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when Rin spoke again he voice
when Rin spoke again, her voice. We had a little break from technical issues, now they return in a rush.

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Hacking exploits are filled with redundancy and stuff people already knew again. And manipulating someone you're in love with to try to understand them is not that heinous a betrayal, nor do I know why you've painted such an idealistic picture of love that you expect utter honesty and clarity.

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Seem seem seem seem seem, all over the bloody place. I can let it off in dribs and drabs because this is being heard second-hand, but when it just piles up this badly, it is not acceptable. Use seem when there is real doubt in the picture, not just to pad out a sentence.

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"Why, it's almost like you're admitting that we can do more for our man than you can."
It was obviously a dig at Rin's femininity.
Oh, sod off, you prat. You can get away with some bits because Sekirei's set-up is disgustingly sexist in the first place (if this chapter were original fiction I would be trying to verbally eviscerate you by now on that count alone), but there's nothing about supporting your lover which is inherently female. This is a dig at Rin's value in a relationship, not anything to do with her gender. 'Obviously a dig at her femininity' my tiny, bony arse.

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Laughter was addressed earlier in the thread, so we'll just refer you back to what I said about guilt and joy. Namely 'wrong'.

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Yes, please compound the error. It's fascinating to watch the hole get deeper. Sheesh.

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And here we see harem logic and a creepy misogynistic series collide with … something vaguely approaching normal relationship values and a slightly less misogynistic series. And it's a right cluster. Wonderful.

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Jiiii
Please don't, no.

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To follow the Japanese item which doesn't belong in that context, we find an non-Japanese item which doesn't belong in this context. Hurrah. Seriously, no. A generic English proverb would be fine, because that runs by the “let's not think too hard about this” language convention that needs to be going on here. I'd even hazard that would be better than something Buddhist or Shinto, because those would still briefly draw our attention to that convention. But such a specifically non-Japanese cultural reference stinks of either laziness or parochialism, and a brief mental aside of “Oh, that's an odd quote to have to mind” makes it no better. It makes it rather worse, in fact, because you keep calling attention to your mistake. Stop it.

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Oh, we're back to 'Shirō is uncaring about the fire and emotionally unaffected' rubbish again, are we? Back to the orphans for me then!
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
Stop, stop, stop, stop, stopstopstopstopstopstopstopstop…!!!!
A calm and rational reaction to remembering that time, I'm sure you'll agree.

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Kissing, sexual confusion, the eternal frustration of the watching bisexual who doesn't quite get the whole 'problem with another gender' thing. Well, there's no horrific errors for a bit at least, I can give you that.