July 2nd, 2017 at 08:15am
Comment swap
For one, I really enjoy this theme and it's not something you often see on this kind of websites. In all honesty, most people on the fanfiction community usually tend to romanticise all aspects of Japanese culture and history and ignore the negative things, which is why stories like this are important.
Your writing is absolutely amazing, it captures the reader, you use words very wisely. Your descritions and attention to detail are amazing.
Very good, you got yet another subscriber!
Please stop watching too many World War II documentaries, dear jesus. The entire prologue made me feel so creeped out that I was mildly nauseous. The horrified screams, the wide eyes, the cold and creeping sensation when the narrator did The Reveal that he was the cause of all of this horror. I mean, of course, I had already known that, but you delivered it in such a dramatic and blunt way that literally everything about it set me on edge immediately, more so than I already was knowing what the story was about. It was creepy and just plain sickening, I’m not even going to try and sugarcoat that. The vibe you set with those specific scenes were so awful.
Then you turned around and started writing about him looking back on his life. You made him human, you gave me his backstory and his family—that entire ‘seen and not heard’ moment with his mother, like damn, and the sibling rivalry thing—and you basically tore me down. You built me up for this monster in the prologue but then you tore Sieko down into this painfully human character that actually made my heart hurt a little. It’s all foreshadowing something so brutal and grotesque and I don’t want to see it, but I know it’s coming.
And once again, like with What It Is to Wonder, your attention to detail is impeccable. Those moments you put into Sieko’s emotions about the entire thing—like the nervousness, his stomach turning, knowing that the war would steal even more away from him and others, and that dread. God, that dread when he arrived at Unit 731. All of it made me feel sick with nerves and that crawling sensation under my skin. You’re absolutely fantastic at setting these ominous and cold atmospheres, it’s eerie. You submerge me into these disturbing scenarios that I can’t actually get out of until I’ve read to the end, and even then I’m still not completely out of it.
That paragraph thing I mentioned was here too, if not a little bit more highlighted in this one because you’re delivering a lot of information and description (sometimes both) in huge blocks of text. A few times, I would kind of drift off and start skimming. Not in the way where I was skipping chunks of content, but in the sense that the words weren’t sinking in so I had to reread them. This wasn’t because of your writing style or anything at all; just simply because something about huge paragraphs is diverting from the story itself.
So once again, I love everything about this. But I still stand by my statement that you need to take it easy with the documentaries. This cannot be good for your mental health, dude.