Responding in order!
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Me? Well right now I'm trying to wrap up something off-site.
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Ooh! Good luck with this if you haven’t already!
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I'm also probably gonna revise and post my ORAS contest entry soon.
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Aaaaand good luck with this, but I’ll get to this in a sec. ;D
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Plus, I'm working on an extensive plot-and-character outline for*Heroes After All, because I know from experience my chances of success with a big project are higher if I have as much of an*actually coherent*plan as possible.
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WOO, ACTUALLY COHERENT PLOTS! \o/
With that said...!
Re, your entire second VM: I’ll be completely honest with you. You’ve mentioned that you don’t like dark fics, and … it’s kinda dark. Like, not the darkest on the forum probably, but in the current version, there’s character death both on and off screen (nothing too violent), plus a bunch of people having breakdowns. If fics with downer notes and non-endings aren’t your cuppa, then I can totally understand you wanting to skip it.
And that aside, I’m not sure what I can tell you about characterization and body language because it’s kinda a big topic. Not so much broad as it is it would probably take a lot of pages in Word to describe different methods of approaching it. I suppose one way of hopefully answering your question is to hear you out and then figure out what’s up specifically. I mean, having read your earlier work and the judges’ comments, I can kinda sorta get an idea of what to tell you, but you’d probably find it more helpful if I talk specifics, right? Or would you like me to go right ahead and offer up as much general advice as I can think of? Because I could do that too if you’d like.