Reconciliation - (a Hanako bad-end story)

[epicmuffin18]

Right in the FEELS, and I LOVED IT!

[Markus Ramikin]

Very good story. I took like two attempts to get seriously started on it for some reason - I think mostly because I could see from twenty kilometers away that this Sho fellow was going to end up with Hanako (or at least I thought I could), and I didn't care about him. But then I forced myself to stop being stupid. And... yeah. That was a good read, in a style I enjoy.

As for the stilted sentences, [...] I purposely wrote them that way. It's a stylistic decision that I'm actually rather fond of

I'll throw in my two cents to say I liked the way you wrote them, probably for the same reasons. Sometimes a simple list of things that happened, in order, can be effective, and I think that was one of those times, given Hanako's state of mind.

I could [...] care less

I cringed.

With regards to Sho's little outburst, I sort of wanted it to be less obvious that it was him. The idea I was going for was that it was so unexpected, especially for Hanako, that she herself wasn't entirely sure who said it at first.

That just... doesn't work. It's an unrealistic "story-thing", on par with things like, say, people not realizing they said their embrassing thoughts out loud - it doesn't really happen. There's no way to buy that Hanako couldn't tell apart their voices and the directions they were coming from.

It's not safe to expect readers to interpret confusion the way you wanted it (without reading your outside-the-story explanation), because the simplest - and therefore default - explanation for unclear dialogue attribution is always "bad writing".

“What…” he still seems confused, “you mean within hugging distance?”

She likes 'em dense.

lol, I'm liking Sho's character more just for the way he responded right there. I don't think he's dense at all, just lying to himself.

Hah, am I the only one who thought Sho was being clever there, acting like that on purpose?

She continues with her story – Their story

Why a capitalised Their?

I really, really liked the way you have Lilly not say anything while people are giving their funeral speeches. That made even more an impression on me than the spasms later.

“I’m an orphan, you know.”

The unexpected break in silence is jarring. What’s even more jarring is that I’m not the one who spoke.

Is this another one of those "I meant to confuse the reader for a second" things? Because it's not clever - all it does is brings me out of the story. There's hardly ever a good reason to be unclear about dialogue attribution. Or more generally: to, at any point in time, have the reader be less informed or more confused as to what physically just happened than the POV character is. The meaning of what is being said can be unclear, motivations and intentions of actors can be unclear, but the actual sensory input the POV char is getting should not be presented deliberately unclearly (if the POV character themselves isn't having perception problems).

Or so I believe. Disregard as you see fit.

we each bust out laughing again.

burst?

While Meyer is an easy target and I approve of making fun of her in principle, I'm gonna stick my neck out and say I didn't buy that part. "didn't get it", would she actually say that? No. Was bringing up that tired sparkling comment, which Meyer must have heard a million times by then, clever enough to, realistically, have Sho and Hanako laughing about it afterwards? To me that bit is just that "like humor, only without the humor" kind of thing that just relies on the audience hating the same target. Real humor is hard - I know, I suck at it terribly.

I liked the part about board games: how, instead of it just being something they happen to have in common, you actually identify "what about it", what they both found in board games that had the same meaning for them.

Glad you you wrote the epilogue. You may not feel that way, thinking the story complete, but, as I see it, it's an integral part. Without it Sho would have been a bit of a waste of all that space he'd been given in the story. Though I wish Sho used "shit" and "fuck" less (16 times in 3k words?), as it seemed a bit OOC - his nervousness could have been presented differently. But, all in all, a satisfying conclusion.

Overall - kudos for the story. It was good.

[Oddball]

This is a nice sweet story. Despite it being fairly light, it still managed to pack an emotional punch to it.

Sho was a bit lacking in personality and a bit too perfect at times though.