Request for (short) feedback: Why did this need to be downgraded from "Hot"?

[StillStunned]

Dark Encounters, the first in a series of sword & sorcery adventures (SF/F).

 

[Comentarista82]

Okay, I just left you a review on part one of your rival series.. I hope you're not disappointed with me not leaving the score, but rather than rehash what I said, you can go read it for yourself. I will go ahead and reach chapter 2 and then return with a score on that as well as chapter 1 once I complete chapter 2.
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Edit: finished, left another comment and you have another follower. And I hope you find the feedback helpful.

 

[StillStunned]

Okay, I just left you a review on part one of your rival series.. I hope you're not disappointed with me not leaving the score, but rather than rehash what I said, you can go read it for yourself. I will go ahead and reach chapter 2 and then return with a score on that as well as chapter 1 once I complete chapter 2.
***
Edit: finished, left another comment and you have another follower. And I hope you find the feedback helpful.

Thanks, much appreciated! I'm glad you enjoyed the stories, and I like to think it's easy to tell how much I enjoyed writing them. If and when you read the third chapter, you'll find one of my all-time favourite sex scenes.

"Indiana Jones meets Xena", I like it!

 

[Comentarista82]

Thanks, much appreciated! I'm glad you enjoyed the stories, and I like to think it's easy to tell how much I enjoyed writing them. If and when you read the third chapter, you'll find one of my all-time favourite sex scenes.

"Indiana Jones meets Xena", I like it!

Worry not, as I will be reading the remaining installments of the Rivals series, and it's really obvious that your female character is teasing the male one mercilessly.., and there's no way that there wasn't going to be some huge explosion of emotions and physical reactions taking place because of how they're going back and forth, needling each other, and sneaking furtive and clandestine glances at each other... and sometimes not so furtively either! So yes, once I get some more time I will be reading the rest, and it is nice to know that you enjoyed riding that series so much.

 

[WeShallUnclench]

With 36 votes, you can expect random "noise" to account for about +/- 0.1 in your score, so the difference between 4.47 and 4.50 isn't very meaningful.

I read your story and that borderline H is about what I'd expect. A few considerations:

The technical side is overall good but there are a few glitches like this:

"Ironically, it were her skill and her ambition that ultimately got in her way." - should be "it was", since "it" is singular.
"Even if with a head as red as a beet." - if we're describing embarrassment, we'd normally talk about the face being red, not the entire head.

He refers to her as "master", which is usually a specifically male honorific; "mistress" would be normal here. Especially if you're gendering things like "giantess" - it's not wrong but that gendered form is kind of old-fashioned, most people would just use "giant" these days.

Speech punctuation: you have dashes before some but not all of your dialogue, e.g.:



I couldn't get a good feel for the setting. Some aspects of the story feel like you're aiming for somewhere around the 18th century or even earlier: "aristocrats dressed in silk", "tea from a far-away land", and of course guillotines. But then she's wearing zippers, which only appeared around the 1920s.

Similarly, some of the dialogue is jarringly modern: "bummer" in the sense used here first appeared around 1968; "chickened out" and "comes with the territory" somewhere around 1945. "Butt" as slang for the human buttocks seems to be from about the 1860s and primarily American English for a while after that.

I presume it's a fictional place, but even so, it's helpful to set some consistent tone, especially in a short story where you don't have enough space for world-building.

Similarly, Ruthe's character felt inconsistent. She's introduced as tough and fearless:

"Ruthe never once raised her voice or used gross insults. And yet, when she wanted to, she found she could discipline or even humiliate people without mercy... No one else dared to challenge her. ... That imperial caterpillar could have her executed at the drop of a hat, if her teaching methods displeased him. Still, Ruthe decided that she would work on him as mercilessly as she had on all of her other students, and if that got her killed, she would die as a martyr."

But through most of the scene with the Emperor, and the follow-up scene with the Empress, she feels a lot softer and more vulnerable, e.g.:

"She absolutely hated how small she felt. The Empress, to put it mildly, never made her feel like a giantess."

There are a couple of mentions of her ruthlessness in conversation with the Emperor, but it felt more like teasing than serious.

And then right at the end... maybe she returns to man-eater? It's not clear whether she's an instigator of the revolution or just there to get one last look before the execution.

Of course, a character can have more than one side to them, and the contrasts between those sides can be great material for a story. But they didn't feel like they hung together here.

In many times and places it wouldn't be at all unusual for an emperor to have a mistress, especially one without the kind of noble origins that might give her political power. If the Empress is aware of Ruthe's drive as described in the opening of the story, it's plausible that she might still see her as a threat and want to remove the possibility of Ruthe influencing her son. But when she's pregnant with his child? ("Somehow, the Empress always found out.") The Emperor's oldest child, even if female and illegitimate? There are many ways somebody in the Empress's position might deal with that situation, but it seems unlikely that she'd just leave that child in the care of a ruthless woman who has reason to resent her.

In terms of the voting, though, I think the major issues are likely to be that it's a fairly short story (as already mentioned, long stories tend to score higher, all else being equal) and that it doesn't fit category expectations. First Time stories don't usually end with one of the lovers getting executed; I'd guess most readers in that category are looking for a happier ending.

Thank you! What is especially useful to me here is that you really pointed out aspects I had not considered. It's like making a sculpture and only looking at it from certain angles, but when you flip it around (or someone else flips it around for you, in this case) you realize which parts don't entirely add up. From yours and other helpful feedback I can tell I got some of the major ideas and feelings across, but since I let myself "pull" through the story by these things alone, I neglected some of the construction. So again, thank you!

Regarding the way I do dialogue, I have made a habit of either combining it with some sentence that refers to the character who is speaking OR using the dash so the line wouldn't hang in the air by itself.
I got to ask - is that a stylistic/punctuation error (or at least too jarring) or can I keep that habit as part of my writing flow?

 

[Bramblethorn]

Thank you! What is especially useful to me here is that you really pointed out aspects I had not considered. It's like making a sculpture and only looking at it from certain angles, but when you flip it around (or someone else flips it around for you, in this case) you realize which parts don't entirely add up. From yours and other helpful feedback I can tell I got some of the major ideas and feelings across, but since I let myself "pull" through the story by these things alone, I neglected some of the construction. So again, thank you!

No worries, glad I could help!

Regarding the way I do dialogue, I have made a habit of either combining it with some sentence that refers to the character who is speaking OR using the dash so the line wouldn't hang in the air by itself.
I got to ask - is that a stylistic/punctuation error (or at least too jarring) or can I keep that habit as part of my writing flow?

It's not a standard style. Usual English style is to let such lines hang by themselves. For instance, picking an example I happened to have open on my reader:


(Ursula Vernon, "Paladin's Grace")

I am aware of one style that uses dashes in punctuation. It's not identical to yours, since it uses dashes any time the line begins with speech, and it doesn't use quotes at all:



("Cry, the Beloved Country", Alan Paton - 1950s reprint of 1948 original)

It's not at all common, though, and even if there's a style guide somewhere which accepts it, I suspect a lot of readers would complain about it.

My general rule of thumb with such things is to follow the standard usage unless there's a good reason why the exception would improve the story. I don't want my readers asking "why did they punctuate it that way?" instead of thinking about the story I'm telling.

In a long story, it's not quite as much of an issue, because readers have a chance to get used to the convention. When I read the example above, I found it off-putting for a couple of chapters, then stopped noticing it. But for a short story it's quite likely to be taken for a typo rather than a deliberate style, and even if it's still a deliberate style it can trip up some people.

 

[8letters]

First off, I want to congratulate on writing a very different story. I enjoyed that it was a completely different setting and a very different kind of relationship than I typically see on Literotica.

I'll restrict my feedback to three points.

#1 - The narrative summary at the beginning
If I made this cut in the story:

Ruthe studied her pupil from head to toe while he was pouring himself a glass of water, after their dance lesson.

She thought that the young Emperor had grown into a fine young man. Ruthe had been training him ever since he had been a teenager.

[snip]
[insert] But with him being officially crowned Emperor on his upcoming birthday, [/insert] [t]hey had been seeing each other less and less frequently, anyway. His military and political training had to take priority. The transition of power was in full swing.

Still, leading up to the ceremony, the Imperial family had asked Ruthe to give him one last refresher course.

how much do I lose? To me, all that narrative summary providing Ruthe's background isn't necessary to the story.

#2 - What are the motives of the two main characters?
I didn't get a feeling for why Ruthe wanted to give the emperor this one last lesson. As for the emperor, my impression was that he was just following Ruthe's instructions just like he always had. I didn't feel that either character had a deep longing that their making love satisfied.

#3 - To me, Ruthe and the emperor aren't apprehensive enough
Your story had decent plot points, but the characters are so blase as they cross lines. "Emperor, get naked!" "Yes, Master." That should be a huge event. Ruthe should know she's taking a massive risk to do so. If the Empress finds out, it could be her death. As they approach crossing a line, to me, the characters should be apprehensive about doing so, but, eventually, they talk themselves into doing it. They shouldn't do it casually.