Dancer - Comments

I love it, I love it, I love it.
That's all I have to say. :)

:cheese: EMILY.

WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME YOU WRITE SO SUPER AMAZINGLY?! :grr:

kso, this isn't a story I'd usually read 'cause it's about dancing and stuff. But I was just snooping around Meebs and I stumbled across this story and figured I'd give it a go 'cause you've been terribly kind and reviewed my story. And I found that I really like it! :brightside:

I like the description, and how it's split by the girl dancing. It's just lovely the way you've written it. :tehe: ...And I'm such a dodgy reviewer.

And so her mother danced the world and her father monopolised the planet, art and business coming together in one charming relationship, where both could manipulate and neither could win.

I really like that sentence. Just..I don't know how to describe why I like it. But it's good, and I like how you've used the words "world" and "planet" to mean the same thing..but different. :shifty Like, they mean the same thing but each word expresses a different concept of that meaning. ..If that makes sense. :shifty

Anyhoo, GOOD JOB. KEEP IT UP! ~~

Although I'm really bad at writing reviews, and the long ones scared me ever so slightly, I just have to say that was amazing. It really was original and truely brilliant! =] Well done.

all those long, amazing reviews are slightly intimidating.

but i just wanted to say
that this was incredibly brilliant.

I think you were being modest. This was really good. :mrgreen:

I don't know anything about dancing, but I really love the plot.

Wtf. I need to persuade people like Zero and Sheepy and Sueno to review my stories. :cheese:

I rated this in the "Rate the Story" thread, and I have to say, the snippet that you posted was so attractive that a couple of hours after I read it, I still wanted to come back and read the whole thing.
I'm impressed - it was even better than I thought it would be. I loved how the story was punctuated with these "dancing" sentence, it really flowed and there was a rhythm in the story, which I loved.
And as the people said above, the ending was perfect. Tinged with sadness, but graceful, and very poignant.
Overall, I liked this one shot a lot. Well written, lots of emotion.. good job. (y)

>>;; I'm so afraid to post a comment here because :cheese: look at those enormously long reviews!

And look; I suck in giving reviews. :coffee:

You know, I just noticed, most of your one shots are life stories and you could... fit all the important details in just one chapter. It's amazing, you know? :cute:

And yeah, those kinds of endings. :XD I love endings like that.
omgno: I couldn't ask for more!

One shot = I've seen everything.
It's... complete. I don't know how could you possibly do that. >_>

Anyway, I dig it. :yah

I want to start this by saying I'm not going to read the other reviews, because they'll be much better than mine. I just wanted to do this.

No. It wasn’t right. Start again.
Pretty much story of my life at the moment. This review included. Stop, rewind, and go back to the beginning. It's irritating and pointless, but she wants it to be perfect.

Still not good enough. Start again.
AGAIN. She's probably done this hundreds of times in the last twenty minutes.

She’d shown him the day before
Very determined set to it. She will beat him. She will show him. And I don't even know who he is yet.

Her eyes glared at him, her own penetrating stare every bit as strong as his. They stood, father daughter,
So that's who he is. Hmm. Maybe she won't win? A father is a hard opponent.

Competition. Everything was a competition.
It seems even their relationship is a competition. Her against him. Him against her. Her against her own imperfections

She was a winner by blood.So she doesn't think she's won properly? No, she seems to wish that wasn't a winner by blood. If she wasn't a winner by blood, her father wouldn't expect this of her.

She kept the same indifferent expression as he told her it wasn’t good enough, held her head high as her heart was broken into a million tiny pieces, like the shattering of a stained glass window, breaking the peace of the chapel as she was broken inside.
It's so heartless. Why can't he see what he's doing to her? Because she doesn't want him to, of course, but he should know these things.

1, 2, 3, 4. Jumptwistland. Attitude leap, arched back, arms in second position.
the repetition to remind you of the routine of competition, of victory.

Of course, all of his business trips were undoubtedly not as innocent as he proclaimed.
So not only is their marriage tragic, it's also flawed. How cruel.

That last paragraph is just :cheese:. No words for it.

She danced for perfection, a perfection she would never reach.
So how can she win then? How can she win if she can never be perfect?


Pirouette.

That was so sad. She'll never win but she'll keep on trying. In that way, it's very inspiring. But I don't think she'll ever win her father's approval. The only way she can win is to see that her father doesn't need to approve.

That was fucking incredible.
I will not post a review because those 3 up there said it all.
But that was amazing. I felt her anguish, understood her plight, and I sympathized because she seemed real.
Solid.
And the ending, fuck me.

Pirouette.

Perfect. I think everyone on the fucking planet should read this.
Read and feel the jealousy.
Fucking incredible.

-Looks at thread- :shifty I'm scared now. I don't even dare to post my silly-little-rambly review next to Zero and Sheep's. XD Lets pretend I didn't notice those, I recced this story so it only seems logic that I also comment on it. XD Or you could just read their reviews and skip mine.

Dancer. dancer. dance. A dancer is meant to dance. You remind me of Degas. Now the question is what Degas painting. There must be hundreds of them. Degas painted mainly dancers/ballerina. They were his obsession you see. Not because they were pretty but because they were alive. A ballerina could be alive, she could be sad and happy, she could smile or cry, she could be born or die. She could dance. She could not dance. As long as her part required her to do so. Ballerinas are not real people but they're alive.
It's the perfect subject.

Perfect.
Don't we all want a small piece of perfection? Something you're perfect at. Not talented, no there's a huge difference between being good at something and being perfect. Perfect is just perfect.
Nowadays everyone seems to have a different kind of perfection-obsession. -rolls eyes- Most forget what perfection is actually about. How would you define something perfect?
I want it to be perfect! You want what, how, when? Perfection is a state of being, a status, you're either perfect in all aspects of your life or you're not. That's why people can't be perfect, but ballerinas can. Because they're not people but they're alive.
Just like Degas' paintings.
I still haven't found the perfect Degas painting for this story. I don't know.
I like the late paintings, when his eyesight was really bad and he could barely see. Then he used such beautiful surrealistic colors. In those the dancers are not even dancers, they're just ghosts. No, not ghosts dreams. Dreams.
Still haven't found the perfect one, but I found one that I like. It's not as surrealist as I'd want it to, but it's nice here. There's this other one, I can't find it or remember the exact title of it, but there's this small one with green/yellow-ish colors and two dancers practicing next to a mirror/wall. You can't see their faces but their bodies are somehow deformed. I think. You can see them struggling with the dance. Not like in the other paintings when they seem to master it.
I've only been to a ballet show once, no wait twice. Yes. I've seem Swan Lake and this modern play that was weird... It was German I believe, something that had to do with the meaning of life and stuff. It was outdoors actually, in a public piazza and they had pyrotechnics and cool stuff. And the subject seemed deep. And they had girls with gas masks who looked just like Mother War, I remember now. That's a silly thing to mention.
But if I think about it, as ''cool'' as that play was, Swan Lake was better. Because you could see the dancers dancing their souls away, dancing for perfection.
Just like your dancer. I hope she finds peace, or at least perfection.

Yay for persuasive powers :tehe:
Sorry I took so long to get around to this; procrastination and all that jazz :crazy:
Anyway:

1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4.

Chaines turn, chaines plie. Attitude leap, turn out.

No. It wasn’t right. Start again.

The repetition of the numbers instantly throws you into the idea of a routine, almost like an endless loop of routine. And I have no idea what all those ballet moves are, but they sound complicated. It gives your average knows-nothing-about-ballet the idea that she has been doing this for a long time. And then you've got the flat 'No.' which almost burst the bubble of grace and professionalism. And how that entire sentence is just short, unemotive, even. As if whoever it is is being really harsh and impatient with her.

Routine took over her body as she threw herself through the oh so familiar steps. Faster, harder. Twist here, turn there. She’d done this a million times over, never reaching perfection, never getting it exactly right. She would keep trying until she did.

It's like she's already admitted to herself that she's fighting a losing battle. Perfection is impossible; no matter how much you try and reach it, it's just that one alluring...unattainability. She's got this routine, she knows it so well, but it's still not perfect. it's like she's pushing herself to try and reach the impossible, and yet deep down she must know that it never can be perfect. Or, at least, not perfect enough.

She’d shown him the day before. Danced her unfinished dance, let the music flow through her, arms and legs flying in a display of delicacy and grace. It was as close to perfect as she’d ever been.

He stared at her, cold blue eyes unblinking, an almost contemptuous look on his face.

I like the way you italicise 'him' here...gives us the idea that of all the people she's trying to impress, it's him. To get him to say it's perfect would mean it was perfect to her. And pshawww at the description of her dancing. A display of delicacy and grace really stuck out for me on this. And then you've still got him; contemptuous, seemingly utterly...unimpressed. She's impressed herself, but still failed to impress him.

Everything could be won or lost, people split into winners and losers. The winners, the elite, the achievers. The perfect. She was a winner by blood.

It's the last line of this part that really gets me: She was a winner by blood. Being a winner by blood doesn't give her much scope for failure, does it? If you're in a competitive family, as it seems she is in, you gain the competitive mindset, and are almost forced to constantly try and better yourself, win more, become more perfect. It's an awful lot of pressure to put on her, especially if she never seems to attain perfection in the eyes of her father.

She kept the same indifferent expression as he told her it wasn’t good enough, held her head high as her heart was broken into a million tiny pieces, like the shattering of a stained glass window, breaking the peace of the chapel as she was broken inside.

I like the contrast between her external and internal being: outside, she is, bar perfect, everything her father would want her to be; that which is striving endlessly for perfection; a pillar of strength...and yet, on the inside, you see she is not completely her father's daughter. Even if she wants to find perfection, she is still hurt when her father knocks her down constantly. And the wording of this part was just exquisite.

Her death ever so unfortunate, their marriage perfect in everyone’s eyes but their own.

The way you added ever so sounds so, inevitably cynical. As if deep down, she knows it's not true. As if what the world saw and what occured were two concepts so different from eachother that bar the names they were all too different. Something which only someone on the inside, someone stuck in the middle of the deceit can fully appreciate.

And so her mother danced the world and her father monopolised the planet, art and business coming together in one charming relationship, where both could manipulate and neither could win.

And so you've got that idea of competition again. So maybe this idea of never reaching that perfection doesn't start and end just with her; it goes further and back to her parents, who too missed out on that illusive goal in their own lives. And they say parents live through their children, so perhaps that is why her father is even harsher on her, because his want to see perfection is made even more desperate by his own inevitable shortcomings.

She danced on the memory of her mother, throwing determination and willpower into a bowl. She danced for the approval of her father, tossing stubbornness and scepticism in there as well. She danced with all the skill she had accumulated, adding grace, elegance and delicacy.

You can practically feel the desperation in her to fulfil all these impossible expectations she's gained through her inheritance, just through this dancing. It's her be all and end all, it's as if it has been impressed on her, and has sunk in as such, that this is the only way she could ever even hope to win some kind of approval from her one surviving parent.

She danced for perfection, a perfection she would never reach.

Pirouette.

And there you have the horrid inevitability. Her goal is seemingly, always out of reach, because perfection, at least, not her father's perfection, could never be found. And so the dance ends. You can only hope her father realises that perfection isn't as absolute as he thinks.

Well, what can I say? I loved this. I'm so glad you decided to post it.

Awesome.:arms:

Okay, first of... HOORAY! for the one shot :cute:

So, I loved the summary, got me real interested to what I was going to read.

No. It wasn’t right. Start again. In the first few lines, especially this one, you've introduced to us your character. We can see that she's a perfectionist,for her dad. And that she's a dancer.

She’d shown him the day before. Danced her unfinished dance, let the music flow through her, arms and legs flying in a display of delicacy and grace. It was as close to perfect as she’d ever been. Emmy, your description of these things are amazing :yah :cheese:

Her eyes glared at him, her own penetrating stare every bit as strong as his. I like this line because she's like, trying to prove to her father that she can be one of the 'winners', the 'elites' :tehe: I really like that character you've built-up here.

This: She kept the same indifferent expression as he told her it wasn’t good enough, held her head high as her heart was broken into a million tiny pieces, like the shattering of a stained glass window, breaking the peace of the chapel as she was broken inside. was really heart breaking you can imagine what she must be feeling every time she dances the same routine over and over again.

I also love the fact that you're not mentioning any names here :XD I think that's something that only really good writers can do. Also that this is a relationship about a father and a daughter, and nobody else. Just the two of them, I haven't read one of these before :cute:

Her death ever so unfortunate, their marriage perfect in everyone’s eyes but their own. Oh?! omgno: *spead reads to see what happens next*

This better be a happy ending, Emmy

And now it was just her, the girl with the body of her mother and the mentality of her father, the girl who could easily hold her own. The girl determined to win, but more so the girl desperate to be perfect. God, sounds like the perfect daighter to me :file: Her mother, by the way, I hate and love that you didn't say how she died and it keep the reader curiousor wondering what might'v happened. I hate because of my own silly easons :lmfao

The Ending:

She danced for perfection, a perfection she would never reach.

Pirouette.

DID THAT MEAN THAT SHE FINALLY FINISHED THE DANCE?!
I hope she did She deserves it :yah

I loved that Emily, you're a wonderful writer :cute: :arms:

I really liked it. I think you should continue writing it.