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The Battle Frontier of the Bands!

Negrek

Lost but Seeking
So, here's your review (late in coming, as always). Keep in mind that, because I have limited internet time, I was only able to read all of the chapters after keeping them up offline--therefore, I wasn't able to listen to any of the actual music that went with them.

Since this story is quite long, I'm not going to really go through it in search of mistakes. In general, you grammar, punctuation, and spelling was all right, though I did see some evidence of lack of spellchecking, which makes me an unhappy slug.

However, one major problem that continued to occur is the fact that you don't punctuate dialogue correctly. Some examples:

"Well..." Hiro paused to set the platter on the table, then continued. "Judging from all the harmonicas I kept hearing as I walked around listening to the other bands, I believe you'll be singing the blues today..."


"I wanted to write some stuff showcasing the guitar, the saxophone, and the keyboards..." Brock explained as he practiced a rhythm. "plus Max had to beg for a drum solo... but I kept it low key, and not very loud."

"I'm just worried about the remaining competitions and the semis..." Ash assured Misty. "so I thought I'd just play something relaxing to calm down..."

Now, whenever you have a break in dialogue like that, where a character begins to say something, the phrase is interrupted by a description of some sort, and then picked up again, you always need to end the non-quoted part in a comma, not a period. In addition, you keep the first letter of the next part of the dialogue in lower case when you start it up again. You did that in some instances, but skipped out on it in others. Thus, the three quotes above should be:

"Well..." Hiro paused to set the platter on the table, then continued, "judging from all the harmonicas I kept hearing as I walked around listening to the other bands, I believe you'll be singing the blues today..."

"I wanted to write some stuff showcasing the guitar, the saxophone, and the keyboards..." Brock explained as he practiced a rhythm, "plus Max had to beg for a drum solo... but I kept it low key, and not very loud."

"I'm just worried about the remaining competitions and the semis..." Ash assured Misty, "so I thought I'd just play something relaxing to calm down..."

In addition, you seemed rather overly fond of elipses. There's nothing particularly wrong with them, but you use them nearly as often as you use a period, and it gets rather tedious. The elipses lose impact through overuse; while they're a good way to trail off and inticate a transition into another thought, they shouldn't be used universally for all pauses of varying lengths in character speech. In addition, you sometimes went a bit overboard with exclamation points. One or two in a row to show emphasis is fine, but heading into three or four instead is getting a bit extreme. The extra exclamation points don't add anything to the emphasis of the sentence and just look silly.

Now, on to the actual story itself. The musical 'fic is a very rarely-seen genre, with most songfics being confined to one-shot status or a single chapter in a larger work. It's nice to see a different take on normal, prose-heavy fanfics now and then.

However, while it's a nice idea, I think that you could have done much more with it than you did. The most effective songfics manage to weave the music and/or lyrics throughout the entire piece and use it to enhance the tone, mood, and message of the writing itself. In most of your chapters, on the other hand, the song lyrics make up the brunt of the chapter's length, with only a few short lines of your own writing interspersed between and more substantial bits at beginning and end. It's not bad to add lyrics to the middle of a 'fic, but when they heavily outweigh your own writing, it's not really that satisfying. Without any music to accompany them, they're not that exciting to read and don't really do much for me. I think that you're leaning too heavily upon the music to carry the piece; the story reads more like a collection of songs with Ash and company thrown in to provide intros than it does an actual story being supported by music.

In addition, your characters seem rather weak and colorless, or at least in general. You lavish most of your attention on Ash, Misty, and Brock, with a decent amount going to Max and May. The rest of the cast, however, is rarely ever seen or heard--they're just there, pretty much. I actually forgot that Kamon was in the band until a little later on in the story. I'm not asking that you try to handle a large, unwieldy cast of characters, but that you give them each an important role so that they don't appear just thrown in in order to cover all of the musical instruments--a good supporting character is memorable not because a great deal of time went into describing them or their actions, but because they add something to the text (just think of Harry Potter. How many different teachers can you name running around that building that get barely any time at all, and yet you can visualize as being there?). Even your main characters seem a bit glossed-over. You rely a little too heavily on canon to tell people how these characters look, act, and think--you're not adding much to them in terms of development at all. Part of the problem may be that almost all characterization is carried by dialogue and not by actions or thoughts. I'll have a look at that next.

Your prose moves along at a very quick pace, which isn't really a problem, as this is intended to be more lighthearted reading that should naturally skip along pretty smoothly. However, it seems rather sparse in many places, almost like a 'fic longing to be written in script but which is not. You have almost entirely action or dialogue, without very much environmental or introspective description. It leaves the reader to fill in a great deal of the context for the piece by themselves and doesn't have much weight to it. While dialogue and action are important, you need to have a bit of other description as well (well, I shouldn't really say need, but in almost all cases it's pretty necessary). Providing additional description not only adds context to the characters but also influences the mood and the tone of the piece. Done well, it doesn't slow the pace and as a whole makes for a more immersive and satisfying read, imo. As it is, you've got only sketchy lines drawn between the different characters, provided by their interactions with one another through dialogue, as well as a hazy picture of the band as a whole, the stage, etc.

In addition, the plot, despite its obvious direction (win way up through contest in order to win pass to battle frontier), doesn't really seem to be moving anywhere. There's no real indication of rising action, nor any great generation of tension or feeling of conflict. Each chapter follows the other in much the same format, but there's not really any feeling of movement or of progression, just sing another song, get some more applause. This is probably in part due to the fact that very little is shown about the Blue Rivals, who play a quick tune before Ash and company come on and then disappear. Aside from the initial meeting between the bands there is no confrontation between the two bands and throughout no clear desire to defeat the others, no real fears about future rounds or anything like that. The Red Masters really just seem to be cruising along effortlessly, perhaps because we are shown so little about the scoring and the competition. And what about all of the other bands? Surely, more than just the Blue Rivals must have made it this far into the battle. Overall, the plot seems to stall and no real character development is in evidence, leaving the story kind of stagnant.

The chapters themselves are rather choppy, too. There's a scant few paragraphs, mostly dialogue, between one scene change and the next, leading to small thirty-second segments that don't really have a sense of cohesion or of a common goal. The action jumps back and forth from place to place, keeping the breakneck pace of the story going through a series of short blurbs. The story just doesn't feel very connected, and each scene in itself doesn't seem very satisfying, as it just feels too short to convey much of anything and adds little to overall story development.

Overall, it's a quick, pleasant read, but I think you're only just scratching the surface of what could be done with this idea. Consider taking it slower and fleshing out your scenes and characters more, and perhaps adding an element of real suspense or tension to keep things interesting. As it is, looking back what I've read it feels like a great deal of song and not very much 'fic.
 
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